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S., 71 Kingsway, London, W\ C. 2, England. AST.— IB Editor JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR. SCIENCE FICTION *e«. U. S. Pat. OP. CONTENTS FEBRUARY, 1944 VOL. XXXII, NO. 6 NOVELETTES OFE' THE) BEAM, by Oeargc 0. Smith S PLAGUE, by Murray Leinster 52 THE ANARCH, by Malcolm Jameson 123 SHORT STORIES THOUGH DREAMERS DIE. by Lester del Rev . 34 TABOO, by Fritz Leiber, Jr 85 CATCH THAT RABBIT, by Isaac Asimov . . . 159 ARTICLES UNIVERSES TO ORDER, by J. J. Coupling . . 102 THB PLURALITY OF WORLDS, by Willy Ley 112 READERS’ DEPARTMENTS THE EDITOR’S PAGE 5 IN TIMES TO COME S3 BRASS TACKS 95 THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY ITS COVER BY TIMMINS Illustration* by Orban, Smith and Williams The editorial contents hate not been published before, are protected hf copyright and cannot be reprinted without publisher’s permission. All stork* in this magaalne are Action. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. Monthly publication issued by Street A Smith Publications, Incorporated, 122 East 42nd Street. New York 17, N. Y. Allen L. Crammer, President,; Gerald H. Smith. Vice President and Treasurer; Henry W. Ralston. Vice President and Secretary. Copyright, 1944. In U. S. A. and Great Britain by Street k Smith Publications. Inc. Reentered as Second-class Matter, February 7, 1934, at the Post Office at New York, under Act of Congress of March 3, 1879. Subscriptions to Countries in Pan American Union, $2.75 per year; elsewhere. $3.25 per year. We cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited maaeacripta or artwork. Any material submitted must include return postage. $2.50 per Year ia U. S. A. Printed in the U. S. A 25c per Copy NEXT ISSUE ON SALE FEBRUARY 11, 1941 Practically Nothing “Practically nothing is as expensive as practically nothing” is a nice, cockeyed- sounding way of stating that a near vacuum is an expensive industrial raw material. And, of course, like any other commodity, the nearer it approaches 100% purity, the nearer the cost ap- proaches infinity, particularly when you want to work in that medium. Consider the process of developing a new electronic tube. In this issue we carry an article on the design of electron multipliers, and of many electronic de- vices other than multipliers too, for that matter — the principle involved is fairly general. The theory is nice, and works well where secondary electrons are wanted, are the prime consideration. But in most vacuum tube amplifiers second- ary electrons are simply static in the works — everything possible is done to suppress them. But they still show up, and they make for troubles not easily predictable on the basis of rubber sheets and shaped supports. The number of secondary electrons, and the consequent behavior of the tube, can be determined only by trying out actual tube elements in a properly evacuated tube. But this properly evacuated tube con- sists of a glass or metal envelope, with the proposed electrodes mounted in place, and then subjected to a highly complex technique of evacuation. First, the loose gases must be pumped out to a hard vacuum. Then the envelope and inclosed electrodes must be degassed; all metals, all solids, soak up gas as a brick soaks up water, and to get that trapped gas out the material must be heated while the high-vacuum system pumps steadily. Proper, complete degassing takes time — a goodly number of hours. Usually a good bit of this can be skipped in test equipment, and the use of a chemical "getter” — a bit of metallic magnesium that will combine avidly with any of the ordinary gases to form solid compounds, perhaps — saves time and does a final clean-up job. Then the new tube is ready for testing. And perhaps half an hour of testing reveals that the electrode structure is wrong — this one should be shifted here. That, of course, is impossible ; a new tube is made, degassed, and tested. Hm-m-m — now the interaction is such that this other one should be over this way — In a laboratory established on the Moon, perhaps well up near the top of the crater walls of Tycho, to get above the lingering traces of lunar atmosphere, the laboratory worker, clad in an air- suit, could simply push the electrodes around in their completely degassed, but completely accessible environment of hard vacuum. A smaller body than the Moon would perhaps give a harder vacuum, but the presence of a gravitational field is helpful — men can work more efficiently. There’s a lot of chemical research, too, that needs a cheap, hard vacuum. Almost any organic substance is volatile in some degree before it breaks down — but usually the degree of volatility is so slight that only in a very hard vacuum can such sublimation be carried out. Whether chemist, physicist, or atomic researcher, any researcher would be im- measurably aided by a "vacuum pump” that could sweep the pressure down to practically nothing through a 36" vacuum main 1 It would require him to redesign his whole technique of operation — and he’d love it. It would mean as much to organic chemistry, I suspect, as the de- velopment of microchemical analysis did. Unlimited hard vacuum awaits, closer to New York than Melbourne is, but in the opposite direction. Melbourne’s a lot nearer these days — airplanes changed things. And there are rocket-assisted air- planes now that may shorten the distance the other way — The Editor. practtcat.lv nothing JS Off the Beam by GEORGE O. SMITH Illustrated by Orban Communication from ship to planet was a nice intellectual problem for Don Changing — till he was on the wrecked ship that had to call for help! Thirty hours out of Mars for Terra, the Solar Queen sped along her silent, invisible course. No longer was she completely severed from all connection with the plan- ets of the inner system ; the trick cams that controlled the beams at Venus Equilateral kept the ship centered by sheer mathematics. It was a poor communications sys- tem, however, since it was but a one-way job. Any message-an- swering would have to be done thirty hours later when the ship made planet fall, and the regular terminal office of Interplanetary Communications could be employed. In spite of her thirty hours at 6 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION 2-G, which brought her velocity to eleven hundred miles per sec- ond, the beam-director cams did their job well enough. It was only in extreme cases of course-chang- ing to dodge meteors that the beams lost the ship; since the cams were not clairvoyant, there was no way to know when the autopilot jug- gled the controls to miss a bit of cosmic dust. The cams continued to spear the space through which the ship was supposed to pass ac- cording to the course constants. What made this trip ironic was the fact that Don Channing was aboard. The beams had been bom- barding the Solar Queen continu- ally ever since she left Mars with messages for the Director of Com- munications. In one sense, it seemed funny that Channing w r as for once on the end of a communi- cations line where people could talk to him but upon which he could not talk back. On the other hand it was a blessing in disguise, for the Director of Communications was beginning to paper-talk himself into some means of contacting the Re- lay Station from a spaceship. A steward found Channing in the salon and handed him a ’gram. Channing smiled, and the steward returned the smile and added : “You’ll fix these ships to talk back one day. Wait until you read that one — you’ll burn from here to Terra !” “Reading my mail ?” asked Chan- ning cheerfully. The average spacegram was about as secret as a postcard, so Channing didn’t mind. He turned the page over and read: HOPE YOU’RE WELL FILLED WITH GRAVANOL AND ADHE- SIVE TAPE FOR YOUR JUMP FROM TERRA TO STATION. SHALL TAKE GREAT DELIGHT IN RIPPING ADHESIVE TAPE OFF YOUR MEASLY BODY. LOVE. ARDEN “She will, too,” grinned Don. “Well, I’d like to toss her one back, but she’s got me there. I’ll just fortify myself at the bar and think up a few choice ones for when we hit Mojave.” “Some day you’ll be able to an- swer those,” promised the stew- ard. “Mind telling me why it’s so tough ?” “Not at all,” smiled Channing. “The problem is about the same as encountered by the old-time cow- boy. It’s a lot easier to hit a man on a moving horse from a nice, solid rock than it is to hit a man on a nice, solid rock from a mov- ing horse. Venus Equilateral is quite solid as things go. But a spaceship’s course is fierce. We’re wabbling a few milliseconds here and a few there, and by the time you use that arc to swing a line of a hundred million miles, you’re squirting quite a bit of sky. We’re tinkering with it right now, but so far we have come up with noth- ing. Ah, well, since the human race got along without electric lights for a few million years, we can afford to tinker with an idea for a few months. Nobody is los- ing lives or sleep because we can’t talk to the boys back home.” OFF THE BEAM 7 “We’ve been hopping from planet to planet for quite a number of years too," said the steward. “Quite a lot of them went by be- fore it was even possible to con- tact a ship in space.” “And that was done because of an emergency. Probably tliis other thing will go on until we hit an emergency ; then we shall prove that old statement about a loaf of bread being the maternal parent of a lo- comotive.” Channing lit a ciga- rette, and puffed deeply. “Where do we stand?” “Thirty hours out,” answered the steward. “About ready for turn- over. I imagine that the poor en- gineer’s gang is changing cathodes about now.” “It’s a long drag," said Gun- ning. He addressed himself to his glass and began to think of a suit- able answer for his wife's latest thrust. Bill Hadley, of the power en- gineer’s gang, spoke to the pilot’s greenhouse below the ship. “Had- ley to pilot room : Cathodes 1 and 3 ready.” “Pilot Greenland to Engineer Hadley: Power fade-over from even to odd now under way. Tubes 2 and 4 now dead ; load on 1 and 3. You may enter 2 and 4.” "Check!” Hadley cracked an air valve be- side a circular air door. The hiss of entering air crescendoed and died, and then Hadley cracked the door that opened in upon the huge driver tube. With casual disregard for the annular electrodes that filled the tube and the sudden death that would come if the pilot sent the driving voltages surging into the electrodes, Hadley climbed to the top of the tube and used a spanner to remove four huge bolts. A handy differential pulley permitted him to lower the near-exhausted cathode from the girders to the air door where it was hauled to the deck. A fresh cathode was slung to the pulley and hoisted to place. Hadley bolted it tight and clam- bered back into the ship. He closed the air door and the valve, and then opened the valve that led from the tube to outer space. The tube evacuated, and Hadley spoke once more to the pilot room. “Hadley to Greenland: Tube 4 readv.” “Check.” The operation was repeated on Tube 2, and then Pilot Greenland said : “Fade-back beginning. Power diminishing on 1 and 3, increasing on 2 and 4. Power equalized, ac- celeration 2-G as before. Deviation from norm : two-tenths G.” Hadley grinned at the crew. “You’d think that Greenland did all that himself, the way he talks. If it weren’t for autopilots, we’d have been all over the sky.” Tom Bennington laughed. He was an old-timer, and he said in a reminiscent tone: “I remember when we used to do that on manual. There were as many cases of mal de void during cathode change as during turnover. Autopilots are the nuts — look! We’re about to 8 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION swing right now, and I’ll bet a fiver that the folks below won’t know a thing about it.” A coincidence of mammoth pro- portions occurred at precisely that instant. It was a probability that made the chance of drawing a royal flush look like the chances of to- morrow coming on time. It was, in fact, one of those things that they said couldn’t possibly happen, which went to prove only how wrong they were. It hadn’t hap- pened yet and probably wouldn’t happen again for a million million years, but it did happen once. Turnover was about to start. A relay circuit that coupled the meteor-spotter to the autopilot froze for a bare instant, and the coincidence happened between the freezing of the relay contacts and the closing of another relay whose purpose it was to shunt the coupler circuits through another line in case of relay failure. In the incon- ceivable short time between the failure and the device that cor- rected failure, the Solar Queen hit a meteor head on. It is of such coincidences that great tragedies and great victories are born. The meteor, a small one as cos- mic objects go, passed in through the broad observation dome at the top of the ship. Unhampered, it zipped through the central well of the Solar Queen and passed out through the pilot’s greenhouse at the bottom of the ship. Its speed was nothing worth noting; a scant twenty miles per second almost sun- ward. But the eleven hundred miles per second of the Solar Queen made the passage of the me- teor through the six hundred feet of the ship’s length of less dura- tion than the fastest camera shut- ter. In those microseconds, the me- teor did much damage. It passed through the main pilot- room cable and scrambled those cir- cuits which it did not break en- tirely. It tore the elevator system from its moorings. It entered as a small hole in the observation dome and left taking the entire pilot’s greenhouse and all of the complex paraphernalia with it. The lines to the driver tubes were scrambled, and the ship shud- dered and drove forward at 10-G. An inertia switch tried to function, but the resetting solenoid had be- come shorted across the main bat- tery and the weight could not drop. Air doors clanged shut, closing the central well from the rest of the ship and effectively sealing the well from the crew. The lights in the ship flickered and died. The cable’s shorted lines grew hot and fire crept along its length and threatened the conti- nuity. The heat opened fire- quenching vents and a cloud of CO z emerged together with some of the liquid gas itself. The gas quenched the fire and the cold liquid cooled the cable. Fuses blew in the shorted circuits — And the Solar Queen continued to plunge on and on at 10-G; the OFF THE BEAM 9 maximum possible out of her driv- ing: system. The only man who remained aware of himself aboard the Solar Queen was the man who was filled with gravanol and adhesive tape. No other person expected to be hammered down by high accelera- tion. Only Chauning, who was planning to leave Terra in his own little scooter, was prepared to with- stand high G. He, with his char- acteristic hate of doing anything slowly, was ready to make the Terra to Venus Equilateral passage at 5- or 6-G. It might as well have caught him, too. With all of the rest uncon- scious, hurt, or dead, he was alone and firmly fastened to the floor of the salon under eighteen hundred pounds of his own, helpless weight. And as the hours passed, the Solar Queen was driving farther and farther from the imaginary spot that was the focus of the com- municator beams from Venus Equi- lateral. The newly-replaced cathodes in the driving tubes were capable of driving the ship for about two hun- dred G-hours at 1-G, before ex- haustion to the point of necessary replacement for safety purposes. The proportion is not linear, nor is it a square-law, but roughly it lies in the region just above linear, so that the Solar Queen drove on and on through space for ten hours at 10-G before the cathodes died for want of emitting surface. They died, not at once, but in irregular succession so that when the last erg of power was gone from the ship it was zooming on a straight line tangent from its point of col- lision but rolling in a wild gyra- tion through the void. And twenty-five hundred miles per second added to her initial ve- locity of eleven hundred miles per second added up to thirty-six hun- dred miles per second. She should have had about seventy-five mil- lion miles to go at 2-G, to reach Terra in thirty hours from the half- way point where she turned ends to go into deceleration. Instead, the Solar Queen after ten hours of misdirected 10-G acceleration was thirty million miles on her way, or about halfway to Terra. Three hours later, driving free, the Solar Queen was passing Terra, having missed the planet by a few million miles. Back in space, at an imaginary junction between the beams from Venus Equilateral and the course registered for the Solar Queen, Arden Channing’s latest message was indicating all sorts of mild punishment for her husband when she got him home. By the time that the Solar Queen should have been dropping out of the sky at Mojave Spaceport, the ship would be one hundred and ninety million miles beyond Terra and flirting with the imaginary line that marked the orbit of Mars. That would be in seventeen hours. Weightless, Channing pursued a crazy course in the salon of the 10 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION spinning ship. He ached all over from the pressure, but the gravanol had kept his head clear and the ad- hesive tape had kept his body in- tact. He squirmed around in the dimness and could see the inert fig- ures of the rest of the people who had occupied the salon at the time of the mishap. He became sick. Violence was not a part of Chan- ning’s nature — at least he confined his violence to those against whom he required defense. But he knew that many of those people who pur- sued aimless orbits in the midair of the salon with him would never set foot on solidness again. He wondered how many broken bones there were among those who had lived through the ordeal. He wondered if the medical stalf of one doctor and two nurses could cope with it. Then he wondered what differ- ence it made if they were to go on and on, and from that thought came the one he should have thought of first: How were they to stop going on and on? Channing had a rough idea of what had happened. He knew something about the condi- tions under which they had been traveling, how long, and in which direction. It staggered him, the figures he calculated in his mind. It beho'oved him to do something. He bumped an inert figure, and grabbed. One hand took the back of the head and came away wet and sticky. Channing retched, and then threw the inert man from him. He coasted back against a wall, and caugbt a handrail. Hand-over-hand he went to the door and into the hall. Down the hall he went to the passengers’ elevator shaft and with no thought of what his ac- tion would have been on any planet, Channing opened the door and drove down the shaft for several decks. He emerged and headed for the sick ward. He found the doctor clinging to his operating table with his knees and applying a bandage to one of his nurses’ heads. “Hello, Doc,” said Channing. “Help?” “Grab Jen’s feet and hold her down,” snapped the doctor. “Bad?” asked Don as he caught the flailing feet. "Seven stitches, no fracture,” said the doctor. “How’s the other one?” “Unconscious, but unharmed. Both asleep in bed, thank God. So was I. Where were — ? You’re Channing and were all doped up with gravanol and adhesive. Thank yourself a god for that, too. I’m going to need both of my nurses and we’ll all need you.” “Hope I can do some good,” said Don. “You’d better. Or any good I can do will be wasted. Better start right now. Here,” the doctor pro- duced a set of keys, “these will un- lock anything in the ship but the purser’s safe. You’ll need ’em. Now get along and do something and leave the body-mending to me. Scram !” “Can you make out all right?” • “As best I can. But you’re OFF THE BEAM 11 needed to get us help. If you can’t, no man in the Solar System can. You’re in the position of a man who can not afford to help in succoring the wounded and dy- ing. It’ll be tough, but there it is. Get cutting. And for Heaven’s sake, get us two things: Light and a floor. I couldn’t do more than slap on tape whilst floating in air. See you later, Channing, and good luck.” The nurse squirmed, groaned, and opened her eyes. “What hap- pened?” she asked, blinking into the doctor’s flashlight. “Tell you later, Jen. Get Fern out of her coma in the ward and then w'e’ll map out a plan. Chan- ning, get out of here!” Channing got after borrowing a spare flashlight from the doctor. He found Hadley up in the in- strument room wdth a half dozen of his men. They were a mass of minor and major cuts and injuries, and were working under a single incandescent lamp that had been wired to the battery direct by means of spare cable. The wire went snaking through the air in a fool- ish, crooked line, suspended on nothing. Hadley’s gang were ap- plying first aid to one another and cursing the lack of gravity. “Help?” said Channing. “Need it or offer it?” asked Hadley with a smile. “Offer it. You’ll need it.” “You can say that again — and then pitch in. You’re Channing, of Communications, aren’t you? We’re going to have a mad scram- ble on the main circuits of this tub before we can unwind it. I don’t think there’s an instrument working in the whole ship." “You can’t unravel the whole works, can you?” “Won’t try. About all we can do is replace the lighting system and hang the dead cathodes in again. They’ll be all right to take us out of this cockeyed skew-curve and probably will last long enough to keep a half-G floor under us for tinkering, for maybe forty or fifty hours. Assistant Pilot Darlange will have to learn how to run a ship by the seat of his pants — as far as I can guess there isn’t even a splinter of glass left in the pilot room — so he’ll have to correct this flight by feel and by using a hay- wire panel.” “Darlange is a school-pilot,” grinned one of Hadley’s men. “I know, Jimmy, but I’ve seen him work on a bum autopilot, and he can handle haywire all right. It’ll be tough without Greenland, but Greenland — ” Hadley let the sentence fall ; there was no need to mention the fact that Greenland was probably back there with the rest of the wreckage torn from the Solar Queen. Jimmy nodded, and the action shook him from his position. He grabbed at a roll of tape that was floating near him and let it go with a laugh as he realized it was too light to do him any good. “Too bad that this gyration is not enough to make a decent grav- 12 ASTOUNDING SCTF.NCE-FICTION ity at the ends, at least,” snorted Hadley. He hooked Jimmy by an arm and hauled the man back to a place beside him. “Now look,” he said, “I can’t possibly guess how many people are still in working condition after this. Aside from our taped and doped friend here, the only ones I have are we who were snoozing in our beds when the crush came. I'll bet a cooky that the rest of the crowd are all nurs- ing busted ribs, and worse. Lucky that full G died slowly as the cath- odes went out ; otherwise we’d all have been tossed against the ceil- ings with bad effects. “Jimmy, you’re a committee of one to roam the crate and make a list of everyone who is still in the running and those who can be given minor repairs to make them fit for limited work. Doc has a pretty good supply of Stader splints ; in- form him that these are only to be used on men who can be useful with them. The rest will have to take to plaster casts and the old- fashioned kind of fracture-support. “Pete, you get to the executive deck and tell Captain Johannson that we’re on the job and about to make with repairs. As power en- gineer, I’ve control of the mainte- nance gang too, and we’ll collect the whole, hale, and hearty of Michaels’ crew on our merry way. "Tom, take three of your men and begin to unravel the mess with an eye toward getting us lights. “Tony, you can do this alone since we have no weight. You get the stale cathodes from the supply hold and hang ’em back in the tubes. “Channing, until we get a stable place, you couldn’t do a thing about trying to get help, so I suggest that you pitch in with Bennington, there, and help unscramble the wir- ing. You’re a circuit man, and though power-line stuff is not your forte, you’ll find that running a lighting circuit is a lot easier than neutralizing a microwave transmit- ter. Once we get light, you can help us haywire a control panel. Right?” “Right. And as far as contact- ing the folks back home goes, we couldn’t do a darned thing until the time comes when we should be dropping in on Mojave. They won’t be looking for anything from us until we’re reported missing ; then I imagine that Walt Franks will have everything from a spin- thariscope to a gold-foil electro- scope set up. Right now I’m stumped, but we have seventeen hours before we can start hoping to be detected. Tom, where do we begin?” Bennington smiled inwardly. To have Don Channing asking him for orders was like having Captain Johannson request the batteryman’s permission to change course. "If you can find and remove the place where the shorted line is, and then splice the lighting circuits again, we’ll have a big hunk of our work done. The rest of us will begin to take lines off of the pilot’s circuits right here in the instrument room so that our jury-controls can be OFF THE BEAM 13 hooked in. You’ll need a suit, I think, because I’ll bet a hat that the shorted line is in the well.” For the next five hours, the in- strument room became a beehive of activity. Men began coming in driblets, and were put to work as they catne. The weightlessness gave quite a bit of trouble ; had the instrument panels been electrically hot, it would have been downright dangerous since it was impossible to do any kind of work without periodically coming against bare connections. Tools floated around the room in profusion, and finally Hadley appointed one man to do nothing but roam the place to re- trieve “dropped” tools. The sol- dering operations were particularly vicious, since the instinctive act of flinging excess solder from the tip of an iron made droplets of hot solder go zipping around the room to splash against something, after which the splashes would continue to float. Men who came in seeking to give aid were handed tools and told to do this or that, and the problem of explaining how to free a frozen re- lay to unskilled help was terrific. Then at the end of five hours, Channing came floating in to the instrument room. He flipped off the helmet and said to Hadley : “Make with the main switch. I think I’ve got it.” Throughout the ship the lights blinked on. With the coming of light, there came hope also. Men took a figura- tive hitch in their belts and went to work with renewed vigor. It seemed as though everything came to a head at about this time, too. Hadley informed Darlange that his jury-control was rigged and ready for action, and about the same time, the galley crew came in with slen- der-necked bottles of coffee and rolls. “It was a job, making coffee,” grinned the steward. “The darned stuff wanted to get out of the can and go roaming all over the place. There isn’t a one of us that hasn’t got a hot coffee scar on us some- where. Now if he” — nodding at Darlange— “can get this thing straightened out, we’ll have a real dinner.” “Hear that, Al? All that stands between us and dinner is you. Make with the ship-straightening. Then we’ll all sit around and wait for Channing to think.” “Is the ship’s communicator in working order?” asked Darlange. “Sure. That went on with the lights.” Darlange called for everyone in the ship to hold himself down, and then he tied his belt to the frame in front of the haywired panel. He opened the power on drivers 1 and 2, and the ship’s floor surged ever so little. “How’re you going to know?” asked Hadley. “I’ve got one eye on the gyro- compass,” said Darlange. “When it stops turning, we’re going straight. Then all we have to do is to set our bottom end along the 14 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION line of flight ancl pack on the decel. Might as well do it that way since every MPS we can lose is to our advantage.” He snapped switches that added power to Driver 3. Gradually the gyro-compass changed from a com- plex rotation-progression to a sim- pler pattern, and eventually the simple pattern died, leaving but one freedom of rotation. “I’m sort of stumped,” grinned Darlange. “We’re now hopping along, but ro- tating on our long axis. How we stop axial rotation with drivers set parallel to that axis I’ll never guess.” “Is there a lifeship in working order?” asked Hadley. “Sure.” “Tom, turn it against the rota- tion and apply the drivers on that until we tell you to stop.” An hour later the ship had ceased to turn. Then Darlange jockeyed the big ship around so that the bottom was along the line of flight. Then he set the power for a half-G, and everyone relaxed. Ten minutes later Captain Jo- hann son came in. “You’ve done a fine job,” he told Hadley. “And now I declare an hour off for dinner. Dr. MacLain has got a working medical center with the aid a few people who un- derstand how such things work, and the percentage of broken bones, though terrific in number, is being taken care of. The passengers were pretty restive at first, but the coming of light seemed to work wonders. This first glimmer of power is another. About nine or ten who were able to do so were having severe cases of skysick- ness.” He smiled ruefully. “I’m not too sure that I like no-weight myself.” “Have you been in the observa- tion dome?” asked Don. “Yes. It’s pierced, you know.” “Did the meteor hit the tele- scope ?”. “No, why?” “Because I’m going to have to get a sight on Venus Equilateral before we can do anything. We’ll have to beam them something, but I don’t know what right now.” “Can we discuss that over a din- ner?” asked the captain. “I’m starved, and I think that the rest of this gang is also.” OFF THE BEAM 15 “You're a man after my own heart,’’ laughed Channing. “The bunch out at the Station wouldn’t believe me if I claimed to have done anything without drawing it up on a tablecloth.” “Now,” said Channing over his coffee. “What have we in the way of electronic equipment?” “One X-ray machine, a standard set of communicating equipment, one beam receiver with ’type ma- chine for collecting stuff from your Station, and so on.” “You wouldn’t have a betatron in the place ' somewhere ?” asked Don hopefully. “Nope. 1 Could we make one?" “Sure. Have you got about ten pounds of No. 18 wire?” “No.” ' “Then we can’t.” “Couldn’t you use a driver? Isn't that some kind of beam?” “Some kind,” admitted Chan- ning. “But it emits something that we’ve never been able to detect ex- cept in an atmosphere where it ionizes the air into a dull red glow.” “You should have been wrecked on the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” laughed Hadley. “They’re the guvs who have all that kind of stuff.” ' “Have they ?” asked Johannson. “The last time I heard, they were using a large hunk of their upper hull for a VanDerGraf gen- erator.” ’ “That would do it,” said Chan- ning thoughtfully. “But I don’t think I ! d know how to modulate a VanDerGraf. A betatron would be the thing. You can modulate that, sort of, by keying the input. She’d give out with hundred-and- fif tv-cycle stuff, but so what? We made the Empress of Kolaiti sit up and say uncle on hundred-cycle stuff. How much of a trick is it to clear the observation dome from the top?” “What do you intend to do?” “Well, we’ve got a long, hollow tube in this ship. Knock out the faceted dome above, and we can rig us up a huge electron gun. We’ll turn the ship to point at the Station and beam ’em a bouquet of electrons.” “How’re you going to do that?” “Not too tough, I don’t think. Down here,” and Channing began to trace on the tablecloth, “we’ll put us a hot cathode. About this level we’ll hang the first anode, and at this level we’ll put the second anode. Here’ll be an acceleration electrode, and up near the top we’ll put a series of focusing anodes. We’ll tap in to the driver-tube sup- ply and take off voltages to suit us. Might use a tube at that, but the conversion to make an honest electron gun out of it would disrupt our power, and then it would be im- possible to make a driver out of it again without recourse to a machine shop.” “How are you going to make electrodes?” “We’ll use the annular gratings that run around the central well at each level,” said Channing. “We’ll have a crew of men cut ’em free !6 ASTOUNDING SCIENCF.-FTCTTON and insulate the resulting rings with something. Got anything?” ‘‘There is a shipment of methyl- methacrylate rods for the Venus Power Co. in Hold 17,” said the cargo master. “Fine,” said Channing. “What size ?” “Three inches by six feet.” “It’ll be tricky work, and you’ll have to wait until your cut edge has cooled before you hook on the rods,” mused Don. "But that’s the ticket.” "Which floors do you want?” “Have you got a scale drawing of the Solar Queen?” “Sure.” “Then this is where my table- cloth artistry falls flat. The focus- ing of an electron beam depends upon the electrode spacing and the voltage. Since our voltage is fixed if we take it from the driver elec- trodes, we’ll have to do some mighty fine figuring. I’ll need that scale drawing.” Channing’s tablecloth engineer- ing was not completely wasted. By the time the scale drawing was placed before him, Channing had half of the table filled with equa- tions. He studied the drawing, and selected the levels which were to serve as electrodes. He handed the drawing to Hadley, and the power engineer began to issue in- structions to his gang. Then the central well began to swarm with spacesuited men who bore cutting torches. Hot sparks danced from the cut girders that held the floorings, and at the same time, a crew of men were running cables from the various levels to the instrument room. More hours passed while the circular sections were insulated with the plastic rods. The big dome above was cut in sections and removed, and then the sky could be seen all the way from the bottom of the ship where the pilot's greenhouse should have been. Channing looked it over and then remarked: “All we need now is an electron collector.” “I thought you wanted to shoot ’em off,” objected Hadley. “I do. But we’ve got to have a source of supply. You can’t toss baseballs off of the Transplanet Building in Northern Landing all afternoon, you know, without hav- ing a few brought to you now and then. Where do you think they come from?” “Hadn’t thought of it in that way. What’d happen?” “We’d get along for the first umpty-gillion electrons, and then all the soup we could pack on would be equalized by the positive charge on the ship and we couldn’t shoot out any more until we got bom- barded by the sun — and that bom- bardment is nothing to write home about as goes quantity. What we need is a selective solar intake plate of goodly proportions.” “We could use a mental telepa- thy expert, too. Or one of those new beams that Baler and Carroll dug up out of the Martian desert. I’ve heard that those things will OFF THE BEAM 17 actually suck power out of any source, and bend beams so as to en- ter the intake vent, or end.” “We haven’t one of those, either. Fact of the matter is,” grinned Channing ruefully, “we haven’t much of anything but our wits.” “Unarmed, practically,” laughed Hadley. “Half armed, at least. Ah, for something to soak up electrons. I’m now wondering if this electron gun is such a good idea." “Might squirt some protons out the other direction,” offered Had- ley. “That would leave us without either," said Don. “We’d be like the man who tossed baseballs off of one side and himself off the other— Hey! Of course we have some to spare. We can cram elec- trons out of the business end, thus stripping the planetary rings from the atoms in our cathode. From the far side we’ll shoot the canal rays, which in effect will be squirt- ing protons, or the nuclei. Since the planetaries have left for the front, it shouldn’t be hard to take the protons away, leaving nothing. At our present voltages, we might be able to do it." Channing began to figure again, and he came up with another set of anodes to be placed beyond the cathode. “We’ll ventilate the cathode and hang these negative electrodes on the far side. They will attract the protons, im- pelled also by the positive charge on the front end. We’ll maintain a balance that way, effectively throwing away the whole atomic structure of the cathode. The lat- ter will fade, just as the cathodes do in the driving tubes, only we'll be using electronic power instead of sub-electronic. Y’know, Had- ley, some day someone is going to find a way to detect the — we’ll call it radiation for want of anything better — of the driver. And then there will open an entirely new field of energy. I don’t think that anybody has done more about the so-called sub-electronic field than to make a nice, efficient driving de- vice out of it. “Well, let’s get our canal-ray electrodes in place. We’ve got about two hours before they real- ize that we aren’t going to come in at Mojave. Then another two hours worth of wild messages be- tween the Relay Station and Mo- jave. Then we can expect some- one to be on the lookout. I hope to be there when they begin to look for us. At our present velocity, we’ll be flirting with the Asteroid Belt in less than nothing flat. That isn’t too bad — normally — but we’re running without any meteor detec- tor and autopilot coupler. We couldn’t duck anything from a rob- in’s egg on up.” “We’ll get your anodes set,” said Hadley. Walt Franks grinned at Arden Channing. “That’ll burn him,” he assured her. “It’s been on the way for about twenty minutes,” laughed Arden. “I timed it to arrive at Terra at the same time the Solar Queen 18 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION does. They’ll send out a special messenger with it, just as Don is getting aboard his little scooter. It’ll be the last word, for we’re not following him from Terra to here.” “You know what you’ve started?” asked Franks. “Nothing more than a little feud between husband and self.” “That’s just the start. Before he gets done, Don will have every ship capable of answering back. I’ve found that you can catch him off base just once. He’s a genius — one of those men who never make the same mistake twice. He’ll never again be in a position to be on the listening end only.” “Don’s answer should be on the way back by now,” said Arden. “Could be you’re right. Something should be done." “Sure I’m right. Look at all the time that’s wasted in waiting for a landing to answer ’grams. In this day and age, time is money, squared. The latter is to differen- tiate between this time and the first glimmering of speedy living.” “Was there a first glimmering?” asked Arden sagely. “I’ve often thought that the speed-up was a stable acceleration from the dawn of time to the present.” “All right, go technical on me,” laughed Walt. “Things do move. That is, all except that message from your loving husband.” “You don’t suppose he’s squelched ?” “I doubt it. Squelching Donald Channing is a job for a superbeing. OFF THE BEAM And I’m not too sure that a super- being could squelch Don and make him stay squelched. Better check on Mojave.” “Gosh, if Don missed the Solar Queen and I’ve been shooting him all kinds of screwy ’types every hour on the hour ; Walt, that’ll keep him quiet for a long, long time.” “He’d have let you know.” “That wouldn’t have been so bad. But if the big bum missed and was ashamed of it — that’ll be the pay- off. Woah, there goes the ’type!" Arden drew the tape from the machine : MESSAGE BEING HELD FOR AR- RIVAL OF SOLAR QUEEN. Walt looked at his watch and checked the course constants of the Solar Queen. He called the beam- control dome and asked for the man on the Solar Queen beam. “Benny,” he said, “has the Solar Queen arrived yet?” “Sure,” answered Benny. “Ac- cording to the mechanical mind here, they’ve been on Mojave for twenty minutes.” “Thanks.” To Arden he said: “Something’s strictly fishy.” Arden sat at the machine and pounded the keys: SOLAR QUEEN DUE TO ARRIVE AT 19:06:41. IT IS NOW 19:27:00. BEAM CONTROL SAYS TRANS- MISSIONS ENDED BECAUSE OF COINCIDENCE BETWEEN TERRA BEAM AND STATION-TO-SHIP BEAM. PLEASE CHECK. Arden fretted and W'alt stamped up and down the room during the 19 long minutes necessary for the mes- sage to reach Terra and the an- swer to return. It came right on the tick of the clock: HAVE CHECKED COURSE CON- STANTS. SOLAR QUEEN OVER- DUE NOW FIFTY MINUTES. OB- VIOUSLY SOMETHING WRONG. CAN YOU HELP? Walt smiled in a grim fashion. "Help!” he said. “We go on and on for years and years with no trouble — and now we’ve lost the third ship in a row.” "They claim that those things al- ways run in threes,” said Arden. "What are we going to do?” “I don’t know. We’ll have to do something. Funny, but the one rea- son we must do something is the same reason why something can be done.” "I don't get that.” "With Channing on the Solar Queen, something can be done. I don’t know what, but I’ll bet you a new hat that Don will make it pos- sible for us to detect the ship. There is not a doubt in my mind that if the ship is still spaceworthy, we can narrow the possibilities down to a thin cone of space.” "How?” “Well,” said Franks, taking the fountain pen out of the hoider on the desk and beginning to sketch on the blotter, "the course of the Solar Queen is not a very crooked one, as courses go. It’s a very shallow skew curve. Admitting the worst, collision, we can assume only one thing. If the meteor were small enough to leave the ship in a float- ing but undirigible conation, it would also be small enough to do nothing to the general direction of the ship. Anything else would make it useless to hunt, follow?” "Yes, go on.” "Therefore we may assume that the present position of the Solar Queen is within the volume of a cone made by the tangents of the outermost elements of the space curve that is the Solar Queen’s course. We can take an eight- thousand-mile cylinder out of one place — for the origin of their trou- ble is between Mars and Terra and the ‘shadow’ of Terra in the cone will not contain the Solar Queen.” "Might have passed close enough to Terra to throw her right into the ‘shadow’ of Terra by attrac- tion,” objected Arden. "Yeah, you’re right. O.K., so we can’t take out that cylinder of space. And we add a sort of side- wise cone on to our original cone, a volume through which the Queen might have flown after passing close enough to Terra to be de- flected. I’ll have the slipstick ex- perts give a guess as to the proba- bility of the Queen’s course, and at the same time we’ll suspend all in- coming operations. I’m going to set up every kind of detector I can think of, and I don't want any- thing upsetting them.” "What kind of stuff do you ex- pect?” asked Arden. “I dunno. They might have a betatron aboard. In that case we'll eventually get a blast of electrons that’ll knock our front teeth out. 20 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION Don may succeed in tinkering up some sort of electrostatic field. We can check the solar electrostatic field to about seven decimal places right here, and any deviation in the field to the tune of a couple of million electron volts at a distance of a hundred million miles will cause a distortion in the field that we can measure. We’ll ply oscillating beams through the area of expec- tation and hope for an answering reflection, though I do not hope for that. We'll have men on the look- out for everything from smoke sig- nals to helio. Don’t worry too much, Arden, your husband is ca- pable of doing something big enough to be heard. He’s just the guy to do it.” “I know,” said Arden soberly. “But I can’t help worrying.” “Me, too. Well, I’m off to set up detectors. We'll collect some- thing.” “Have we got anything like a piece of gold leaf?” asked Chan- ning. “I think so, why?” “I want to make an electroscope. That’s about the only way I’ll know whether we are getting out with this cockeyed electron gun.” “How so?” asked Hadley. “We can tell from the meter that reads the beam current whether anything is going up the pipe,” ex- plained Channing. “But if we just build us up a nice heavy duty charge — as shown by the electro- scope — we'll be sure that the elec- trons are not going far. This is one case where no sign is good news.” “I’ll have one of the boys set up an electroscope in the instrument room.” “Good. And now have the bird on the telescope forget trying to find Venus Equilateral by dead reckoning and sight. Have him set the scope angles to the figures here, and then have him contact Darlange and have the ship slued around so that Venus is on the cross hairs. That’ll put us on a line for the Station by a few thousand miles. We can afford to miss. A bundle of electrons of our magnitude zip- ping past the detectors that Walt ran set up will make a reading.” Hadley called the observation dome. “Tim,” he said, giving a string of figures, “set your ’scope for these and then get Darlange to slue the crate around so that your cross hairs are on Venus.” “O.K.,” answered Tim. “That’s going to be a job. This business of looking through a ’scope while dressed in a spacesuit is no fun. Here goes.” He called Darlange. and the com- municator system permitted the men in the instrument room to hear his voice. “Dar,” he said, “loop us around about forty-one degrees from Driver 3.” Darlange said : “Right 1” and busied himself at his buttons. “Three degrees on Driver 4.” “Right.” “Too far, back her up a degree on 4.” Darlange laughed. “What do OFF THE BEAM 21 you think these things are, blocks and tackles? You mean: ‘Compen- sate a degree on 2.’ ” “You’re the pilot. That’s the ticket — and I don’t care if you lift it on one hand. Can you nudge her just a red hair on 3?” “Best I can do is a hair and a half,” said Darlange. He gave Driver 3 just a tiny, instantaneous surge. “Then take it up two and back one and a half,” laughed Tim. “Woah, Nellie, you’re on the beam.” “Fine.” “O.K., Dar, but you’ll have to play monkey on a stick. I’ll prime you for any moving so that you can correct immediately.” “Right. Don, we’re on the con- stants you gave us. What now?” “At this point I think a short prayer would be of assistance,” said Channing soberly. “We’re shoot- ing our whole wad right now.” “I hope we make our point.” “Well, it’s all or nothing,” agreed Don as he grasped the switch. He closed the switch, and the power demand meters jumped up across their scales. The gold-leaf electroscope jumped once; the ultra-thin leaves jerked apart by an inch, and then oscillated stiffly until they came to a balance. Channing, who had been looking at them, breathed deeply and smiled. “We’re getting out,” he said. “Can you key this?” asked Had- ley. “No need,” said Channing. “They know we’re in the grease. We know that if they can collect us, they’ll be on their way. I’m going to send out for a half-hour, and then resort to a five-minute transmission every fifteen minutes. They’ll get a ship after us with just about everything we’re likely to need, and they can use the five- minute transmissions for direction finding. The initial shot will serve to give them an idea as to our direc- tion. All we can do now is to wait.” "And hope,” added Captain Jo- hannson. Electrically, Venus Equilateral was more silent than it had ever been. Not an electrical appliance was running on the whole station. People were cautioned about walk- ing on deep-pile rugs, or combing their hair with plastic combs, or doing anything that would set up any kind of electronic charge. Only the highly filtered generators in the power rooms were running and these had been shielded and filtered long years ago ; nothing would emerge from them to interrupt the ether. All incoming signals were stopped. And the men who listened with straining ears claimed that the sky was absolutely clear save for a faint crackle of cosmic static which they knew came from the corona of the sun. One group of men sat about a static-field indicator and cursed the minute wiggling of the meter, caused by the ever-moving celestial bodies and their electronic charges. 22 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION A sunspot emission passed through the Station once, and though it was but a brief passage, it sent the elec- trostatic field crazy and made the men jump. The men who were straining their ears to hear became nervous, and were jumping at every loud crackle. And though the man at the tele- scope knew that his probability of picking up a sight of the Solar Queen was as slender as a spider’s web, he continued to search the starry heavens. He swept the nar- row cone of the heavens wherein the Solar Queen was lost accord- ing to the mathematical experts, and he looked at every bit of brightness in the field of his telescope as though it might be the missing ship. The beam-scanners watched their return-plates closely. It was dif- ficult because the receiver gains were set to maximum, and every tick of static caused brief flashes of light upon their plates. They would jump at such a flash and watch for it to reappear on the next wipe, for a continuous spot of light indicated the ship they sought. Then, as the spot did not reappear, they would go on with their beams to cover another infinitesimal por- tion of the sky. Moving forward across the cone of expectancy bit by bit, they crossed and recrossed until they were growing restive. Surely the ship must be there! At the South End landing stage, a group of men were busy stocking a ship. Supplies and necessities were carried aboard, while another group of men tinkered with the electrical equipment. They cleared a big space in the observation dome, and began to install a replica of the equipment used on the Station for detection. No matter what kind of output Channing sent back, they would be able to follow it to the bitter end. They made their installations in duplicate, with one piece of each equipment on opposite sides of the blunt dome. Balancing the inputs of each kind by turning the entire ship would give them a good indi- cation of direction. Franks did not hope that the en- tire installation could be completed before the signal came, but he was trying to outguess himself by put- ting some of everything aboard. When and if it came, he would be either completely ready with every- thing or he at least would have a good start on any one of the num- ber of detectors. If need be, the equipment from the Station itself could be removed and used to com- plete the mobile installation. Everything was in a complete state of nervous expectancy. Watchers watched, meter readers squinted for the barest wiggle, audio observers listened, trying to filter any kind of man-made note out of the irregular crackle that came in. And the Station announcing equipment was dead quiet, to be used only in case of emergency or to announce the first glimmer of radiation, whether it be material, OFF THE BEAM 23 electrical, kinetic, potential, or wave front. Long they listened — and then it came. The Station announcing equip- ment broke forth in a multitude of voices. “Sound input on radio.” “Visual indication on scanner plates !” “Distortion on electrostatic field indicator.” "Super - electroscopes indicate negative charge !” “Nothing on the telescope!” There were mingled cheers and laughter as the speaker system broke away from its babel, and each group spoke its piece with no inter- ference. Walt Franks left the ship at the South End and raced to the Beam Control dome, just as fast as the runway car would take him. He ran into the dome in spacesuit and flipped the helmet back over his shoulders. “What kind of in- dication?” he yelled. Men crowded around him, offer- ing him papers and shouting % fig- ures. “Gosh,” he said, “Don can’t have everything going up there.” “He’s hit just about everything but the guy squinting through the ’scope.” “What’s he doing?” asked Franks of no one in particular. One of the radiation engineers who had been busy with the elec- trostatic field indicator said : “I think maybe he’s using some sort of electron gun — like the one you tried first off on the meteor-de- stroyer-job, remember?” “Yeah, but that one wouldn’t work — unless Don lias succeeded in doing something that we couldn’t do. Look, Charley, we haven’t had time to set up a complete field in- dicator on the ship. Grab yours and give the boys a lift installing it, hey?” “Sure thing.” “And look, fellows, any indica- tion of direction, velocity, or dis- tance ?” “Look for yourself,” said the man on the beam scanner. “The whole plate is shining. We can’t get a fix on them this way — they’re radiating themselves and that means that our scanner-system finder is worthless.” “We can, but it’s rough,” offered one of the radio men. “It came from an area out beyond Terra — and as for our readings it might have covered a quarter of the sky.” “The field indicator is a short- base finder,” explained Charley. “And no less rough than the radio boys. I’d say it was out beyond Terra by fifty million miles at least.” “Close enough. We’ll have to track ’em down like a radio- equipped bloodhound. Charley, come along and run that mechanico- electro-monstrosity of yours. Gene, you can come along and run the radio finder. Oh yes, you, Jimmy, may continue to squint through that eyepiece of yours — but on the Re- lay Girl. We need a good, first- class squinter, and you should have 24 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION an opportunity to help.” Jimmy laughed shortly. “The only guy on the Station that didn't get an indication was me. Not even a glimmer.” “Channing didn't know we'd be looking for him, or he’d probably light a flare, too. Cheer up, Jimmy, after all this crude, electrical riga- marole is finished, and we gotta get right down to the last milli- meter, it's the guy with the eye that polishes up the job. You’ll have your turn.” Twenty minutes after the first glimmer of intelligent signal, the Relay Girl lifted from the South End and darted off at an angle, setting her nose roughly in the di- rection of the signal. Her holds were filled with spare batteries and a whole dozen re- placement cathodes as well as her own replacements. Her crew was filled to the eyebrows with gravanol, and there must have been a mile of adhesive tape and cotton on their abdomens. At 6-G she left, and at 6-G she ran, her crew immobilized but awake because of the gravanol. And though the acceleration was terrific, the tape kept the body from folding of its own weight. When they returned, they would all be in the hospital for a week, but their friends would be with them. Ten minutes after take-off, the signals ceased. Walt said: “Keep her running. Don’s saving electricity. Tell me when we pick him up again.” Franklen, the pilot, nodded. “We haven't got a good start yet. It’ll be touch and go. According to the slipstick boys, they must be clap- ping it up at between twenty-five hundred and five thousand miles per second to get that far — and coasting free or nearly so. Other- wise they'd have come in. Any suggestions as to course?” “Sure. Whoop it up at six until we hit about six thousand. Then decelerate to four thousand by us- ing 1-G. We'll vacillate in velocity between four and five until we get close.” Forty-one hours later, the Relay Queen made turnover and began to decelerate. Channing said to Captain Johann- son: “Better cut the decel to about a quarter-G. That’ll be enough to keep us from bumping our heads on the ceiling and it will last longer. This is going to be a long chase, and cutting down a few MPS at a half-G isn’t going to make much never-ntind. I’ll hazard a guess that the boys are on their way right now.” “If you say so,” said Johannson. “You're the boss from now on. You know that wild bunch on the Station better than I do. For my- self, I’ve always felt that an an- swer was desirable before we do anything.” “I know Franks and my wife pretty well — about as well as they know me. I’ve put myself in Walt’s place — and I know that Walt would do. So — if Walt didn't think of it, Arden would — I can assume that they are aware of us, have received OFF THE BEAM 25 our signals, and are, therefore, coming along as fast as they can. They’ll come zipping out here at from five to seven-G to what they think is halfway and then deceler- ate again to a sane velocity. We won’t catch sight of them for sixty or seventy hours, and when we do, they’ll be going so fast that it will take another twenty hours worth of manipulation to match their speed with ours. Meanwhile, I’ve got the gun timed to shoot our signal. When the going gets critical, I’ll cut the power and make it continuous.” “You’re pretty sure of your tim- ing?” “Well, the best they can do as for direction and velocity and dis- tance is a crude guess. They’ll place us out here beyond Terra somewhere. They’ll calculate the course requirements to get us this far in the time allotted, and come to a crude figure. I’d like to try keying this thing, but I know that keying it won't work worth a hoot at this distance. Each bundle of keyed electrons would act as a sepa- rate negative charge that would spread out and close up at this dis- tance. It’s tough enough to hope that the electron beam will hold together that far, let alone trying to key intelligence with it. We’ll leave well enough alone — and espe- cially if they’re trying to get a fix on us; there’s nothing worse than trying to fix an intermittent station. Where are we now?” “We’re on the inner fringe of the Asteroid Belt, about thirty mil- lion miles North, and heading on a secant course at thirty-four hun- dred MPS.” “Too bad Jupiter isn’t in the neighborhood,” said Channing. “We’ll be flirting with his orbit by the time they catch us.” “Easily,” said Johannson. “In sixty hours, we’ll have covered about six hundred and fifty million miles. We’ll be nearer the orbit of Saturn, in spite of the secant course.” "Your secant approaches a radius as you get farther out,” said Don, absently. “As far as distances go. 26 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION Ah, well, Titan, here we come!” Johannson spoke to the doctor. “How’re we doing?” “Pretty well,” said Doc. “There’s as pretty an assortment of frac- tured ribs, broken limbs, cracked clavicles, and scars, mars, and abra- sions as you ever saw. There are a number dead, worse luck, but we can’t do a thing about them. We can hold on for a week as far as food and water goes. Everyone is now interested in the manner of our rescue rather than worrying about it.” He turned to Channing. “The words Channing and Venus Equilateral have wonderful healing powers,” he said. “They all think your gang are part magician and part sorcerer.” “Why, for goodness’ sake?” “I didn’t ask. Once I told ’em you had a scheme to contact the Relay Station, they were all satis- fied that things would happen for the better.” “Anything we can do to help you out?” “I think not,” answered Doc. “What I said before still goes. Your job is to bring aid — and that’s the sum total of your job. Every ef- fort must be expended on that and that alone. You’ve got too many whole people depending on you to spend one second on the hurt. That’s my job.” “O.K.,” said Channing. “But it’s going to be a long wait.” “We can afford it.” “I hope we’re not complicating the job of finding us by this quar- tering deceleration," said Johann- OFF THE BEAM son. “We're not. We’re making a sort of vector from our course, but the deviation is very small. As long as the fellows follow our radi- ation, we’ll be found,” Channing said with a smile. “The thing that is tough is the fact that all the floors seem to lean over.” “Not much, though.” “They wouldn’t lean at all if we were running with the whole set of equipment,” said Darlange. “We run a complete turnover without spilling a drop from the swimming pool.” “Or even making the passengers aware of it unless they’re looking at the sky.” “Stop worrying about it,” said Doc. “I’m the only guy who has to worry about it and as long as the floor is still a floor, I can stand sliding into the corner once in a while.” “We might tinker with the turn- over drivers,” offered Don. “We can bring ’em down to a place where the velocity-deceleration vectors are perpendicular to the floor upon which we stand while our ship is sluing. We’ve got a lot of time on our hands, and I, for one, feel a lot happier when I’m doing some- thing.” “It’s a thought,” said Hadley. “Wanna try it?” “Let’s go.” Thirty hours after the Relay Girl left the Station, Walt and Franklen held a council of war, in which Charley Bren was the prime factor. 27 “We’ve come about two hundred million miles, and our present veloc- ity is something like four thousand miles per second,” said Walt. "We’re going out towards Mars on a slightly-off radial course, to the North of the ecliptic. That means we’re a little over a quarter of a billion miles from Sol, or about to hit the Asteroid Belt. Thinking it over a little, I think we should con- tinue our acceleration for another thirty hours. What say?” “The field has shown no change in intensity that I can detect,” said Bren. “If they haven't dropped their radiated intensity, that means that we are no closer to them than we were before. Of course, we’d probably have to cut the distance by at least a half before any meas- urable decrement made itself evi- dent.” “They must be on the upper limit of that four thousand MPS,” ob- served Walt. “There’s one thing certain, we’ll never catch them by matching their speed.” "Where will another thirty hours at 6-G put us and how fast ?” asked Franklen. Silence ensued while they scrib- bled long figures on scratch paper. "About eight hundred million miles from Sol,” announced Walt. "And about eight thousand MPS,” added Charley. “That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” asked Franklen. “By about thirty percent,” said Walt, scratching his chin. “If we hold to our original idea of hitting it for six thousand, where will we be?” “That would make it about forty- five hours from take-off, and we’d be about four hundred and sixty million miles from Sol.” Charley grinned widely and said: “By Jove!” "What?” “By Jove !” “‘By Jove!’ What?” “That’s where we'd be — By Jove!” " Phew r “I agree with you,” said Frank- len to Walt. “Better ignore him.” “Sure will after that. So then we’ll be ‘By Jove’ at six thousand. That would be a swell place to make turnover, I think. At 1-G decel, to about four thousand MPS, that’ll put us about . . . urn, that’d take us ninety hours ! We’ll make that 3-G, at twenty hours, which will put us about three hundred and fifty million miles along, which plus the original four hundred and sixty million adds up to eight hundred and ten million miles — ” “When an astronaut begins to talk like that,” interrupted Arden, “we of the skyways say that he is talking in Congressional figures. The shoe is on the other foot. What on earth are you fellows figuring?” "Where we’ll be and how fast we’ll be going at a given instant of no particular importance,” offered Walt. "When did you wake up?" “About the third hundred mil- lion. All of those ciphers going by made a hollow sound, like a bullet whistling in the wind.” “Well, we’re trying to make the 28 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION theories of probability match with figures. W e’ll know in about forty- five hours whether we were right or not.” “It’s a good thing we have all space to go around in. Are you sure that we have all eternity?" “Don’t get anxious. They’re still coming in like a ton of bricks four times per hour, which means that they’re riding easy. I don’t want to overrun them at about three thou- sand MPS and have to spend a week decelerating, returning, more decelerating, and then matching velocities.” “I see. You know best. And where is this Asteroid Belt that I’ve heard so much about?” “To the South of us by a few million miles. Those bright specks that you can’t tell from stars are asteroids. The common conception of the Asteroid Belt being filled to overflowing with a collection of cosmic rubble like the rings of Sat- urn is a lot of hooey. We’ll be past in a little while and we haven’t even come close to one. Space is large enough for all of us, I think.” “But not when all of us want the same space.” “I don’t care for their area,” said Walt with a smile. “Let ’em have it, I don’t care. I’ll stay up here and let them run as they will.” “You mean the ones that are moving downward?” asked Arden, indicating the sky. “Those are asteroids, yes. We’re to the North, as you may check by- going around the ship to the op- posite side. You’ll see Polaris al- most directly opposite, there. Sol is almost directly below us, and that bright one that you can see if you squint almost straight up out of the port is Saturn.” “I won’t bother crossing the ship to see Polaris. I prefer the South- ern Cross anyway. The thing I’m most interested in is: Are we ac- complishing anything ?” “I think that we’ve spent the last thirty'- hours just catching up,” ex- plained Walt. Up to right now we were going backwards, so to speak : we’re on even terms now, and will be doing better from here on in.” “It’s the waiting that gets me down,” said Arden. “Oh, for something to do!” “Let’s eat,” suggested Walt. “I’m hungry, and now that I think of it, I have not eaten since we left the Station. Arden, you are hereby elected to the post of galley chief. Get Jimmy from the dome if you need help.” “Help? What for?” “He can help you lift it out of the oven. Don must have a cast- iron stomach.” “That’s hearsay. I’ll show you ! As soon as I find the can opener, breakfast will be served.” “Make mine dinner,” said Char- ley. “We’ve been awake all the time.” “O.K., we will have a combined meal, from grapefruit to ice cream. Those who want any or all parts may choose at will. And fellows, please let me know as soon as you get something tangible.” “That’s a promise,” said Walt. OFF THE BEAM 20 “Take it easy, and don’t worry. We’ll be catching up with them one of these days.” “Hadley, how much coating have we got on those cathodes?” “Not too much. We had about twenty G hours to begin with. We went to a half G for about twenty hours, and now we’re running on a quarter G, which would leave us go for forty hours more. That’s a grand total of about sixty hours.” “And the batteries?” “In pretty good shape.” “Well, look. If it should come to a choice between floor and signal gun, we’ll choose the gun. We’ve about twelve hours left in the cath- odes, and since everybody is now used to quarter G we might even slide it down to an eighth G, which would give us about twenty-four hours.” “Your gun is still putting out?” “So far as I can tell. Ten hours from now, we should know, I think, predicating my guess on whatever meager information they must have.” “We could save some juice by killing most of the lights in the ship.” “That's a thought. Johannson, have one of your men run around and remove all lights that aren’t absolutely necessary. He can kill about three quarters of them, I’m certain. That’ll save us a few kilo- watt hours,” said Channing. “And another thing. I’m about to drop the power of our electron gun and run it continuously. Tf the boys are anywhere in the neighborhood, they’ll be needing the continuous disturbance for direction finding. I’d say in another five hours that we should start continuous radia- tion.” “You know, Channing, if this thing works out all right, it will be a definite vote for pure, deductive reasoning.” “I know. But the pure deduc- tion is not too pure. It isn’t guess- work. There are two factors of known quantity. One is that I know Walt Franks, and the other is that he knows me. The rest is a simple matter of the boys on the Station knowing space to the last inch, and applying the theory of probabilities to it. We’ll hear from them soon, or I’ll miss my guess. You wait.” “Yeah,” drawled Captain Johann- son, “we’ll wait !” Charley Bren made another com- putation and said : “Well, Walt, we’ve been narrowing them down for quite a time now. We’re get- ting closer and closer to them, ac- cording to the field intensity. I’ve just got a good idea of direction on that last five-minute shot. Have Franklen swivel us around on this course; pretty soon we’ll be right in the middle of their shots.” “We’re approaching them asymp- totically,” observed Walt. “I wish I knew what our velocity was with respect to theirs. Something tells me that it would be much simpler if I knew.” “Walt,” asked Arden, “how close 30 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION can you see a spaceship?” “You mean how far? Well, I don’t know that it’s ever been tried and recorded. But we can figure it out easy enough, by analogy. A period is about thirty thousandths of an inch in diameter, and visible from a distance of thirty inches. I mean visible with no doubt about it’s being there. That’s a thousand to one. Now, the Solar Queen is about six hundred feet tall and about four hundred feet in its ma- jor diameter, so we can assume a little more than the four hundred feet — say five hundred feet average of circular area, say — follow me?” “Go on, you’re vague, but nor- mal.” “Then at a thousand to one, that becomes five hundred thousand feet, and dividing by five thousand — round figures because it isn’t im- portant enough to use that two hun- dred and eighty feet over the five thousand — gives us one thousand miles. We should be able to see the Solar Queen from a distance of a thousand miles.” “Then at four thousand miles per second we’ll be in and out of visual range in a half second?” “Oh no. They’re rambling on a quite similar course at an un- known but high velocity. Our velocity with respect to theirs is what will determine how long they’re within visual range.” “Hey, Walt,” came the voice of Charley Bren. “The intensity of Don’s beam has been cut to about one quarter and is now continuous. Does that mean anything?” OFF THE BEAM “Might mean trouble for them. Either they’re running out of soup and mean for us to hurry up, or they assume we’re close enough to obviate the need for high power. We’d better assume they want haste and act accordingly. How’re the boys on the radio detectors coming along?” “Eine. They’ve taken over the direction-finding and claim that we are right on their tail.” “Anything in the sights, Jimmy?” “Not yet. But the electroscope boys claim that quarter power or not, the input is terrific.” “Take a rest, Jimmy. We won’t be there for a while yet. No use burning your eyes out trying to see ’em. There’ll be time enough for you to do your share after we get ’em close enough to see with the naked eye. What do the beam- scanners say?” “Shucks,” answered the man on the scanners, “they’re still radiat- ing. How are we going to fix ’em on a reflected wave when they’re more powerful on their own hook? The whole plate is glaring white. And, incidentally, so is the celestial globe in the meteor spotter. I’ve had the threshold cut to the devil on that or we’d never be able to hold this course. Anything like a meteor that comes in our way now will not register until we’re right on top of it and — ” The Relay Girl lurched sicken- ingly. All over the ship, things rattled and fell to the floors. Men grabbed at the closest solid object, 31 and then the Relay Girl straight- ened out once more. ‘Woosh,” said Franks. “That was a big one.” “Big one?” called Charley Bren. “That, my friend, was none other than the Solar Queen!” "Can you prove that?” “Sure. Our electroscopes now indicate a positive charge ; they crossed over just as we lurched.” “Jimmy, get your scope a-top and get looking. Franklen, hang on about 7-G and follow Jimmy’s orders. Charley, see if you can get anything cogent out of your gadget. Holy Green Fire, with all of a cubic million million million mega- parsecs in which to run, we have to be so good that we run right into our quarry. Who says that radio direction finding is not a pre- cise science? Who says that we couldn’t catch — ” “Walt, they’re in sight, but los- ing fast.” "O.K., Jimmy, can you give me any idea as to their velocity with respect to ours?” "How long is she?” “Six hundred feet.” Jimmy was silent for some sec- onds. "They’re out of sight again, but I make it about four to seven hundred miles per second.” "At 7-G we should match that seven hundred in about four hours.” “And then go on decelerating so that thev’ll catch up?” “No,” said Walt. “I used the max figure and we can assume that they aren’t going that fast, quite. At the end of four hours, we’ll turnover and wait until they heave in sight again and then we’ll do some more oscillating. We can match their velocity inside of ten hours, or Franklen will get fired.” "If I don’t,” promised Franklen, “I’ll quit. You can’t fire me!” "We should be able to contact them by radio,” said Walt. “Their beam is off,” said Bren. “And they are using the landing set,” called the radio man. “It’s Channing. He says: ‘Fancy meeting you here.’ Any answer?” “Just say, 'Dr. Channing, I pre- sume ?’ ” Channing ’s voice came out of the ship’s announcer system as the radio man made the necessary con- nections. It said : “Right — but what kept you so long?” “Our boss was away,” said Walt. "And we can’t do a thing without him.” "Some boss. Some crew of wild men. Can’t go off on a fishing trip without having my bunch chasing all over the Solar System.” "What’s wrong with a little sightseeing tour? We didn’t mean any harm. And speaking of harm, how are you and the rest of that bunch getting along?” “We’re O.K. What do you plan after we finally get close enough together to throw stones across?” “We’ve got a whole hold full of spare batteries and a double set of replacement cathodes. There is a shipload of gravanol aboard, too. You’ll need that and so will we. By the time we finish this jaunt, we’ll have been about as far out 32 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION as anybody ever gets.” “Yeah — got any precise figures? We’ve been running on a guess and a hope. I make it out about seven hundred million.” “Make it eight and a half. At 6-G, you'll cover another hundred and fifty million miles before you stop. Take it twenty-two hours at 6-G — and then another twenty-two at 6. That should put you right back here but going the other way at the same velocity. But wait, you’ve been coasting. Mark off that last twenty-two hours and make it like this: You’ll be one thousand million miles from Sol when you come to a stop at the end of the first twenty-two hours at 6-G. That hangs you out be- yond the orbit of Saturn by a cou- ple of hundred million. Make it back forty-four hours at 6-G, turn- over and continue. By that time we’ll all be in so close that we can make any planet at’ will — preferably you to Terra and we’ll head for Venus Equilateral. You’ll come aboard us? No need for you to go with the rest.” “I can have the scooter sent out,” said Channing. “How’s Arden?” “I’m fine, you big runabout. Wait until I get you !” “Why Arden, I thought you might be glad to see me.” “Glad to see you?” “But Arden—” “Don’t you ‘But Arden’ me, you big gadabout. Glad to see you? Boy, any man that makes me chase him all over the Solar System ! You just wait. As soon as I get ahold of you, Don Channing, I’m going to — bust out and bawl like a kid! Hurry up, willya?” “I’ll be right over,” said Don soberly. And, strangely enough, Don did not deviate this time. THE END. IN TIMES TO COME The “object” of a disease germ might be said to be the attainment of a perfect parasitical relationship — and that requires that the germ does not kill its host, nor so weaken the host as to cause death indirectly, nor can the germ irritate the host’s metabolism to a point that brings an anti-body reaction that ousts the parasite. The ultimate success, of course, is a symbiotic arrangement, where host and parasite merge in a mutual operation. If the germ is extremely alien to the host, the parasitism never gets started ; violent warfare of a chemical nature starts at once, with the inevitable defeat of the microscopic attacker. The world crawls with bacteria ; only a minute fraction of the microorganisms have metabolic processes close enough to Man’s to be able to cause disease in man. When men first go to alien planets, it is highly improbable that they will fall victim to microorganisms of those other worlds ; metabolic chemistry is so immensely complex the chance that the life-forms of another world could fit into mankind's processes well enough to cause trouble, disease, is remote. But once in a million times or so it might happen that a true microorganism, or a virus, a protein molecule perhaps, could show up. The results then might well be devastating — a conflict of completely alien chemistries, perhaps mutations in the men who landed there — That’s the thought back of the thoroughly deadly self-styled supermen in E. Mayne Hull's lead yarn for next month — “The Contract.” I think he has a point — The Editor. OFF THE BEAM 33 Though Dreamers Die by Lester del Rey Mankind was dead, but a man and some robots were left. But — for a special reason — it was neces- sary that not even a memory of Man remain! Illustrated by Smith Consciousness halted dimly at the threshold and hovered uncer- tainly, while Jorgen’s mind reached out along his numbed nerves, quest- ing without real purpose; he was cold, chilled to the marrow of his bones, and there was an aching tingle to his body that seemed to increase as his half-conscious thought discov- ered it. He drew his mind back, trying to recapture a prenatal leth- argy that had lain on him so long, unwilling to face this cold and tin- gling body again. But the numbness was going, in spite of his vague desires, though his now opened eyes registered only a vague, formless light without out- line or detail, and the mutterings of sound around him were without pattern or meaning. Slowly, the 34 cold retreated, giving place to an aching throb that, in turn, began to leave ; he stirred purposelessly, while little cloudy wisps of memory in- sisted on trickling back, trying to remind him of things he must do. Then the picture cleared some- what, letting him remember scat- tered bits of what had gone before. There had been the conquest of the Moon and a single gallant thrust on to Mars ; the newscasts had been filled with that. And on the ways a new and greater ship had been building, to be powered with his new energy release that would free it from all bounds and let it go out to the farthest stars, if they chose — the final attainment of all the hopes and dreams of the race. But there was something else that eluded him, ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION more important even than all that or the great ship. A needle was thrust against his breast and shoved inward, to be followed by a glow of warmth and renewed energy ; adrenalin, his mind recognized, and he knew that there were others around him, trying to arouse him. Now his heart was pumping strongly and the drug coursed through him, chasing away those first vague thoughts and re- placing them with a swift rush of less welcome, bitter memories. For man’s dreams and man him- self were dust behind him, now! Overnight all their hopes and plans had been erased as if they had never been, and the Plague had come, a mutant bacteria from some unknown source, vicious beyond imagination, to attack and destroy and to leave only death behind it. In time, per- haps. they might have found a rem- edy, but there had been no time. In weeks it had covered the Earth, in months even the stoutest hearts that still lived had abandoned any hope of survival. Only the stubborn courage and tired but unquenchable vigor of old Dr. Craig had remained, to force dead and dying men on to the finish of Jorgen’s great ship; somehow in the mad shambles of the last days, he had collected this pitifully small crew that was to seek a haven on Mars, taking the five Thoradson robots to guide them while they protected themselves against the savage acceleration with the aid of the suspended animation that had claimed him so long. And on Mars, the Plague had come before them! Perhaps it had been brought by that first expedi- tion, or perhaps they had carried it back unknowingly with them; that must remain forever an unsolved mystery. Venus was uninhabitable, the other planets were useless to them, and the Earth was dead be- hind. Only the stars had remained, and they had turned on through sheer necessity that had made that THOUGH DREAMERS DIB AST— 2 8 35 final goal a hollow mockery of the dream it should have been. Here, iu the ship around him, reposed all that was left of the human race, un- known years from the solar system that had been their home ! But the old grim struggle must go on. Jorgen turned, swinging his trembling feet down from the table toward the metal floor and shaking his head to clear it. “Dr. Craig?” Hard, cool hands found his shoul- der, easing him gently but force- fully back onto the table. The voice that answered was metallic, but soft. “No, Master Jorgen, Dr. Craig is not here. But wait, rest a little longer until the sleep is all gone from you ; you’re not ready yet.” But his eyes were clearing then, and he swung them about the room. Five little metal men, four and a half feet tall, waited patiently around him ; there was no other present. Thoradson’s robots were incapable of expression, except for the dull glow in their eyes, yet the pose of their bodies seemed to convey a sense of uncertainty and discomfort, and Jorgen stirred restlessly, wor- ried vaguely by the impression. Five made an undefined gesture with his arm. “A little longer, master. You must rest!” For a moment longer he lay qui- etly, letting the last of the stupor creep away from him and trying to force his still-dulled mind into the pattern of leadership that was nomi- nally his. This time Five made no protest as he reached up to catch the metal shoulder and pull himself s« to his feet. “You’ve found a sun with planets, Five? Is that why you wakened me?” Five shuffled his feet in an oddly human gesture, nodding, his words still maddeningly soft and slow. “Yes, master, sooner than we had hoped. Five planetless suns and ninety years of searching are gone, but it might have been thousands. You can see them from the pilot room if you wish.” Ninety years that might have been thousands, but they had won! Jorgen nodded eagerly, reaching for his clothes, and Three and Five sprang forward to help, then moved to his side to support him, as the waves of giddiness washed through him, and to lead him slowly for- ward as some measure of control re- turned. They passed down the long center hall of the ship, their metal feet and his leather boots ringing dully on the plastic-and-metal floor, and came finally to the control room, where great crystal windows gave a view of the cold black space ahead, sprinkled with bright, tiny stars; stars that were unflickering and in- imical as no stars could be through the softening blanket of a planet’s atmosphere. Ahead, small but in striking contrast to the others, one point stood out, the size of a dime at ten feet. For a moment, he stood staring at it, then moved al- most emotionlessly toward the win- dows, until Three plucked at his sleeve. “I’ve mapped the planets already, if you wish to see them, master. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION We’re still far from them, and at this distance, by only reflected light, they are hard to locate, but I think I’ve found them all.” Jorgen swung to the electron screen that began flashing as Three made rapid adjustments on the tele- scope, counting the globes that ap- peared on it and gave place to others. Some were sharp and clear, cold and unwavering ; others be- trayed the welcome haze of atmos- phere. Five, the apparent size of Earth, were located beyond the parched and arid inner spheres, and beyond them, larger than Jupiter, a monster world led out to others that grew smaller again. There was no ringed planet to rival Saturn, but most had moons, except for the farthest inner planets, and one was almost a double world, with satellite and primary of nearly equal size. Planet after planet appeared on the screen, to be replaced by others, and he blinked at the result of his count. “Eighteen planets, not counting the double one twice! How many are habitable ?” “Perhaps four. Certainly the seventh, eighth and ninth are. Natu- rally, since the sun is stronger, the nearer ones are too hot. But those are about the size of Earth, and they’re relatively closer to each other than Earth. Mars and Venus were; they should be very much alike in temperature, about like Earth. All show spectroscopic evidence of oxy- gen and water vapor, while the plates of seven show what might be vegetation. We’ve selected that, subject to your approval.” It came on the screen again, a ball that swelled and grew as the maximum magnification of the screen came into play, until it filled the panel and expanded so that only a part was visible. The bluish- green color there might have been a sea, while the browner section at the side was probably land. Jorgen watched as it moved slowly under Three’s manipulations, the brown entirely replacing the blue, and again, eventually, showing another sea. From time to time, the haze of the atmosphere thickened as grayish veils seemed to swim over it, and he felt a curious lift at the thoughts of clouds and rushing streams, erratic rain and the cool, rich smell of growing things. Al- most it might have been a twin of Earth, totally unlike the harsh, arid home that Mars would have been. Five’s voice broke in, the robot’s eyes following his over the screen. “The long, horizontal continent seems best, master. We estimate its temperature at about that of the central farming area of North America, though there is less sea- sonal change. Specific density of the planet is about six, slightly greater than Earth ; there should be metals and ores there. A pleasant, inviting world.” It was. And far more, a home for the voyagers who were still sleeping, a world to which they could bring their dreams and their hopes, where their children might grow up and find no strangeness to the classic literature of Earth. Mars had been grim and uninviting, some- THOUGH DREAMERS DIE ST thing to be fought through sheer necessity. This world would be a mother to them, opening its arms in welcome to these foster children. Unless — “It may already have people, un- willing to share with us.” “Perhaps, but not more than sav- ages. We have searched with the telescope and camera, and that shows more than the screen; the ideal harbor contains no signs of living constructions, and they would surely have built a city there. Some- how, I . . . feel — ” Jorgen was conscious of the same irrational feeling that they would find no rivals there, and he smiled as he swung back to the five who were facing him, waiting expect- antly as if entreating his approval. “Seven, then. And the trust that we placed in you has been kept to its fullest measure. How about the fuel for landing?” Five had turned suddenly toward the observation ports, his little fig- ure brooding over the pin-point stars, and Two answered. “More than enough, master. After reach- ing speed, we only needed a little to guide us. We had more than time enough to figure the required approaches to make each useless sun swing us into a new path, as a comet is swung.” He nodded again, and for a mo- ment as he gazed ahead at the sun that was to be their new home, the long wearying vigil of the robots swept through his mind, bringing a faint wonder at the luck that had 38 created them as they were. An- thropomorphic robots, capable of handling human instruments, walk- ing on two feet and with two arms ending in hands at their sides. But he knew it had been no blind luck. Nature had designed men to go where no wheels could turn, to han- dle all manner of tools, and to fit not one but a thousand purposes ; it had been inevitable that Thoradson and the brain should copy such an adaptable model, reducing the size only because of the excessive weight necessary to a six-foot robot. Little metal men, not subject to the rapid course of human life that had cursed their masters ; robots that could work with men, learn- ing from a hundred teachers, storing up their memories over a span of centuries instead of decades. When specialization of knowledge had threatened to become too rigid and yet when no man had time enough even to learn the one field he chose, the coming of the robots had become the only answer. Before them, men had sought help in calculating ma- chines, then in electronic instru- ments, and finally in the “brains” that were set to solving the prob- lem of their own improvement among other things. It was with such a brain that Thoradson had labored in finally solving the prob- lems of full robothood. Now, taken from their normal field, they had served beyond any thought of their creator in protecting and preserv- ing all that was left of the human race. Past five suns and over ninety years of monotonous searching they ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION had done what no man could have tried. Jorgen shrugged aside his specu- lations and swung back to face them. “How r long can I stay conscious be- fore you begin decelerating?” “We are decelerating — full strength.” Two stretched out a hand to the instrument board, point- ing to the accelerometer. . The instrument confirmed his words, though no surge of power seemed to shake the ship, and the straining, tearing pull that should have shown their change of speed was absent. Then, for the first time, he realized that his weight seemed normal here in space, far from the pull of any major body. “Controlled gravity !” Five remained staring out of the port, and his voice was quiet, in- capable of pride or modesty. “Dr. Craig set us the problem, and we had long years in which to work. Plates throughout the ship pull with a balanced force equal and opposite to the thrust of acceleration, while others give seeming normal weight. Whether we coast at constant speed or accelerate at ten gravities, com- pensation is complete and auto- matic.” “Then the sleep’s unnecessary ! Why — ” But he knew the answer, of course; even without the tearing pressure the sleep had remained the only solution to bringing men this vast distance that had taken ninety years ; otherwise they would have grown old and died before reaching it, even had their provi- sions lasted. Now, though, that would no longer trouble them. A few hours only separated them from the planets he had seen, and that could best be spent here before the great win- dows, watching their future home appear and grow under them. Such a thing should surely be more than an impersonal fact in their minds; they were entitled to see the final chapter on their exodus, to carry it with them as a personal memory through the years of their lives and pass that memory on to the chil- dren who should follow them. And the fact that they would be expect- ing the harshness of Mars instead of this inviting world would make their triumph all the sweeter. He swung back, smiling. “Come along, then, Five; we’ll begin reviving while you others con- tinue with the ship. And first, of course, we must arouse Dr. Craig and let him see how far his plan has gone.” Five did not move from the win- dows, and the others had halted their work, waiting. Then, reluctantly, the robot answered. “No, master. Dr. Craig is dead!” “Craig — dead ?” It seemed im- possible, as impossible and unreal as the distance that separated them from their native world. There had always been Craig, always would be. “Dead, master, years ago.” There was the ghost of regret and some- thing else in the spacing of the words. “There was nothing we could do to help!” THOUGH DREAMERS DIE S9 Jorgen shook his head, uncom- prehending. Without Craig, the plans they had dared to make seemed incomplete and almost foolish. On Earth, it had been Craig who first planned the escape with this ship. And on Mars, after the robots brought back the evi- dence of the Plague, it had been the older man who had cut through their shock with a shrug and turned his eyes outward again with the fire of a hope that would not be denied. “Jorgen, we used bad judgment in choosing such an obviously un- suitable world as this, even without the Plague. But it’s only a delay, not the finish. For beyond, some- where out there, there are other stars housing other planets. We have a ship to reach them, robots who can guide us there ; what more could we ask ? Perhaps by Centauri, perhaps a thousand light years be- yond, there must be a home for the human race, and we shall find it. On the desert before us lies the cer- tainty of death ; beyond our known frontiers there is only uncertainty — but hopeful uncertainty. It is for us to decide. There could be no point in arousing the others to dis- appointment when some day we may waken them to an even greater tri- umph. Well?” And now Craig, who had carried them so far, was dead like Moses outside the Promised Land, leaving the heritage of real as well as normal leadership to him. Jorgen shook himself, though the eagerness he had felt was dulled now by a dark sense of personal loss. There was 40 work still to be done. “Then, at least, let’s begin with the others, Five.” Five had turned from the win- dow and was facing the others, ap- parently communicating with them by the radio beam that was a part of him, his eyes avoiding Jorgen’s. For a second, the robots stood with their attention on some matter, and the Five nodded with the same curi- ous reluctance and turned to follow Jorgen, his steps lagging, his arms at his sides. But Jorgen was only half aware of him as he stopped before the great sealed door and reached out for the lever that would let him into the sleeping vault, to select the first to be revived. He heard Five’s steps behind him quicken, and then sud- denly felt the little metal hands hands catch at his arm, pulling it back, while the robot urged him sideways and away from the door. “No, master. Don't go in there !” For a second, Five hesitated, then straightened and pulled the man far- ther from the door and down the hall toward the small reviving room nearest, one of the several provided. “I’ll show you — in here ! We — ” Sudden unnamed fears caught at Jorgen’s throat, inspired by some- thing more threatening in the list- lessness of the robot than in the un- explained actions. “Five, explain this conduct !” “Please, master, in here. I’ll show you — but not in the main chamber — not there! This is bet- ter, simpler — ” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION He stood irresolutely, debating whether to use the mandatory form that would force built-in unquestion- ing obedience from the robot, then swung about as the little figure opened the small door and motioned, eyes still averted. He started for- ward, to stop abruptly in the door- way. No words were needed. Anna Holt lay there on the small table, her body covered by a white sheet, her eyes closed, and the pain-filled grimaces of death erased from her face. There could be no question of that death, though. The skin was blotched, hideously, covered with irregular brownish splotches, and the air was heavy with the scent of musk that was a character- istic of the Plague ! Here, far from the sources of the infection, with their goal almost at hand, the Plague had reached forward to claim its own and remind them that flight was not enough — could never be enough so long as they were forced to carry their disease-harboring bodies with them. About the room, the appartus for reviving the sleepers lay scattered, pushed carelessly aside to make way for other things, whose meaning was only partially clear. Obviously, though, the Plague had not claimed her without a fight, though it had won in the end, as it always did. Jorgen stepped backward, heavily, his eyes riveted on the corpse. Again his feet groped backward, jarring down on the floor, and Five was closing and sealing the door with apathetic haste. THOUGH DREAMERS DIE “The others. Five? Are they — ” Five nodded, finally raising his head slightly to meet the man's eyes. “All, master. The chamber of sleep is a mausoleum, now. The Plague moved slowly there, held back by the cold, but it took them all. We sealed the room years ago when Dr. Craig finally saw there was no hope.” “Craig?” Jorgen’s mind ground woodenly on, one slow thought at a time. “He knew about this?” “Yes. When the sleepers first showed the symptoms, we revived him, as he had asked us to do — our speed was constant then, even though the gravity plates had not been installed.” The robot hesi- tated, his low voice dragging even more slowly. “He knew on Mars ; but he hoped a serum you were given with the sleep drugs might work. After we revived him, we tried other serums. For twenty years we fought it, Master Jorgen, while we passed two stars and the sleepers died slowly, without suffer- ing in their sleep, but in ever in- creasing numbers. Dr. Craig reacted to the first serum, you to the third ; we thought the last had saved her. Then the blemishes appeared on her skin, and we were forced to re- vive her and try the last desperate chance we had, two days ago. It failed! Dr. Craig had hoped . . . two of you — But we tried, mas- ter!” Jorgen let the hands of the robot lower him to a seat and his emo- tions were a backwash of confused negatives. “So it took the girl ! It took the girl, Five, when it could have left her and chosen me. We had frozen spermatozoa that would have served if I’d died, but it took her instead. The gods had to leave one uselessly immune man to make their irony complete, it seems ! Im- mune !” Five shuffled hesitantly. “No, master.” Jorgen stared without compre- hension, then jerked up his hands as the robot pointed, studying the skin on the back. Tiny, almost un- detectable blotches showed a faint brown against the whiter skin, little irregular patches that gave off a faint characteristic odor of musk as he put them to his nose. No, he wasn’t immune. “The same as Dr. Craig,” Five said. “Slowed almost to complete immunity, so that you may live an- other thirty years, perhaps, but we believe now that complete cure is impossible. Dr. Craig lived twenty years, and his death was due to age and a stroke, not the Plague, but it worked on him during all that time.” “Immunity or delay, what differ- ence now? What happens to all our dreams when the last dreamer dies, Five ? Or maybe it’s the other way around.” Five made no reply, but slid down onto the bench beside the man, who moved over unconsciously to make room for him. Jorgen turned it over, conscious that he had no emo- tional reaction, only an intellectual sense of the ghastly joke on the human race. He’d read stories of 42 the last human and wondered long before what it would be like. Now that he was playing the part, he still knew no more than before. Per- haps on Earth, among the ruined cities and empty reminders of the past, a man might realize that it was the end of his race. Out here, he could accept the fact, but his emotions refused to credit it; un- consciously, his conditioning made him feel that disaster had struck only a few, leaving a world of others behind. And however much he knew that the world behind was as empty of others as this ship, the feeling was too much a part of his thinking to be fully overcome. In- tellectually, the race of man was ended; emotionally, it could never end. Five stirred, touching him diffi- dently. “We have left Dr. Craig’s laboratory, master; if you want to see his notes, they’re still there. And he left some message with the brain before he died, I think. The key was open when we found him, at least. We have made no effort to obtain it, waiting for you.” "Thank you, Five.” But he made no move until the robot touched him again, almost pleadingly. “Perhaps you’re right; something to fill my mind seems called for. All right, you can return to your companions unless you want to come with me.” “I prefer to come.” The little metal man stood up, moving down the hall after Jorgen, back toward the tail of the rocket, the sound of the metal feet matching ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION the dumb regularity of the leather heels on the floor. Once the robot stopped to move into a side chamber and come back with a small bottle of brandy, holding it out question- ingly. There was a physical warmth to the liquor, but no relief other- wise, and they continued down the hall to the little room that Craig had chosen. The notes left by the man could raise a faint shadow of curi- osity only, and no message from the dead could solve the tragedy of the living now. Still, it was better than doing nothing. Jorgen clumped in. Five shutting the door quietly be- hind them, and moved listlessly to- ward the little fabrikoid notebooks. Twice the robot went quietly out to return with food that Jorgen barely tasted. And the account of Craig’s useless labors went on and on, until finally he turned the last page to the final entry. “I have done all that I can, and at best my success is only partial. THOUGH DREAMERS DIE 43 Now I feel that my time grows near, and what can still be done must be left to the robots. Yet, I will not despair. Individual and racial im- mortality is not composed solely of the continuation from generation to generation, but rather of the con- tinuation of the dreams of all man- kind. The dreamers and their progeny may die, but the dream cannot. Such is my faith, and to that I cling. I have no other hope to offer for the unknown future.” Jorgen dropped the notebook, dully, rubbing his hands across his tired eyes. The words that should have been a ringing challenge to destiny fell flat; the dream could die. He was the last of the dream- ers, a blind alley of fate, and be- yond lay only oblivion. All the dreams of a thousand generations of men had concentrated into Anna Holt, and were gone with her. “The brain, master,” Five sug- gested softly. “Dr. Craig’s last message !” “You operate it, Five.” It was a small model, a limited fact ana- lyzer such as most technicians used or had used to help them in their work, voice-operated, its small, basic vocabulary adjusted for the work to be done. He was un- familiar with the semantics of that vocabulary, but Five had undoubt- edly worked with Craig long enough to know it. He watched without interest as the robot pressed down the activat- ing key and spoke carefully chosen words into it. “Subtotal say-out! Number n say-in!” 44 The brain responded instantly, se- lecting the final recording impressed upon it by Craig, and repeating in the man’s own voice, a voice shrill with age and weariness, hoarse and trembling with the death that was reaching for him as he spoke. “My last notes — inadequate ! Dreams can go on. Thoradson’s first ana- lys — ” For a second, there was only a slithering sound, such as a body might have made ; then the brain articulated flatly : “Subtotal number n say-in, did say-out !” It was meaningless babble to Jor- gen, and he shook his head at Five. “Probably his mind was wandering. Do you know what Thoradson’s first analysis was?” “It dealt with our creation. He was, of course, necessarily trained in semantics — that was required for the operation of the complex brains used on the problem of robots. His first rough analysis was that the crux of the problem rested on the accurate definition of the word 1. That can be properly defined only in terms of itself, such as the Latin cognate ego, since it does not neces- sarily refer to any physical or specifi- cally definable part or operation of the individual. Roughly, it conveys a sense of individuality, and Thorad- son felt that the success or failure of robots rested upon the ability to analyze and synthesize that.” For long minutes, he turned it over, but it was of no help in clarify- ing the dying man’s words; rather, it added to the confusion. But he had felt no hope and could now feel no disappointment. When a prob- ASTOCNDING SCI ENCE- FICTI ON leni has no solution, it makes little difference whether the final words of a man are coldly logical or wildly raving. The result must be the same. Certainly semantics could offer no hope where all the bac- teriological skill of the race had failed. Five touched his arm again, ex- tending two little pellets toward him. “Master, you need sleep now ; these — sodium amytal — should help. Please !” Obediently, he stuffed them into his mouth and let the robot guide him toward a room fixed for sleep- ing, uncaring. Nothing could pos- sibly matter now, and drugged sleep was as good a solution as any other. He saw Five fumble with a switch, felt his weight drop to a few pounds, making the cot feel soft and yield- ing. and then gave himself up dully to the compulsion of the drug. Five tiptoed quietly out, and blackness crept over his mind, welcome in the relief it brought from thinking. Breakfast lay beside him, hot in vacuum plates, when Jorgen awoke finally, and he dabbled with it out of habit more than desire. Some- where, during the hours of sleep, his mind had recovered somewhat from the dull pall that had lain over it, but there was still a curious sus- pension of his emotions. It was almost as if his mind had compressed years of forgetting into a few hours, so that his attitude toward the trageciy of his race was tinged with a sense of remoteness and distance, there was neither grief nor pain, only a vague feeling that it had happened long before and was now an accustomed thing. He sat on the edge of his bunk, pulling on his clothes slowly and watching the smoke curl up from his cigarette, not thinking. There was no longer any purpose to thought. From far back in the ship, a dull drone of sound reached him, and he recognized it as the maximum thrust of the steering tubes, momentarily in action to swing the ship in some manner. Then it was gone, leaving only the smooth, balanced, almost inaudible pur of the main drive as before. Finished with his clothes, he pushed through the door and into the hallway, turning instinctively forward to the observation room and toward the probable location of Five. The robots were not men. but they were the only companion- ship left him, and he had no desire to remain alone. The presence of the robot would lie welcome. He clumped into the control room, not- ing that the five were all there, and moved toward the quartz port. Five turned at his steps, stepping aside to make room for him and lifting a hand outward. “ We'll be landing soon, master. I was going to call you.” “Thanks.” Jorgen looked out- ward then, realizing the distance that had been covered since his first view. Now the sun was enlarged to the size of the old familiar sun over Earth, and the sphere toward which they headed was clearly visi- ble without the aid of the ’scope. THOUGH DREAMERS DIE He sank down quietly into the seat Five pulled up for him, accepting the binoculars, but making no ef- fort to use them. The view was better as a whole, and they were nearing at a speed that would bring a closer view to him soon enough without artificial aid. Slowly it grew before the eyes of the watchers, stretching out be- fore them and taking on a pattern as the distance shortened. Two, at the controls, was bringing the ship about in a slow turn that would let them land to the sunward side of the planet where they had selected their landing site, and the crescent opened outward, the darkened night side retreating until the whole globe lay before them in the sunlight. Stretched across the northern hemi- sphere was the sprawling, horizon- tal continent he had seen before, a rough caricature of a running greyhound, with a long, wide river twisting down its side and emerging behind an outstretched foreleg. Mountains began at the head and circled it, running around toward the tail, and then meeting a second range along the hip. Where the great river met the sea, he could make out the outiines of a huge natural harbor, protected from the ocean, yet probably deep enough for any surface vessel. There should have been a city there, but of that there was no sign, though they were low enough now for one to be visi- ble. “Vegetation,” Five observed. “This central plain would have a long growing season — about twelve 4tt years of spring, mild summer and fall, to be followed by perhaps four years of warm winter. The seasons would be long, master, at this dis- tance from the sun, but the tilt of the planet is so slight that many things would grow, even in winter. Those would seem to be trees, a great forest. Green, as on Earth.” Below them, a cloud drifted slowly over the landscape, and they passed through it, the energy tubes setting the air about them into swirling paths that were left behind almost instantly. Two was frantically busy now, but their swift fall slowed rapidly, until they seemed to hover half a mile over the shore by the great sea, and then slipped downward. The ship nestled slowly into the sands and was still, while Two cut off energy and artificial gravity, leaving the faintly weaker pull of the planet in its place. Five stirred again, a sighing sound coming from him. “No intel- ligence here, master. Here, by this great harbor, they would surely have built a city, even if of mud and wat- tle. There are no signs of one. And yet it is a beautiful world, surely designed for life.” He sighed again, his eyes turned outward. Jorgen nodded silently, the same thoughts in his own mind. It was in many ways a world superior to that his race had always known, remarkably familiar, with even a rough resemblance between plant forms here and those he had known. They had come past five suns and through ninety years of travel at ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION nearly the speed of light to a haven beyond their wildest imaginings, where all seemed to be waiting them, untenanted but prepared. Outside, the new world waited ex- pectantly. And inside, to meet that invitation, there were only ghosts and emptied dreams, with one slowly dying man to see and to ap- preciate. The gods had prepared their grim jest with painful atten- tion to every detail needed to make it complete. A race that had dreamed, and pleasant worlds that awaited beyond the stars, slumbering on until they should come ! Almost, they had reached it ; and then the Plague had driven them out in dire necessity, instead of the high pioneering spirit they had planned, to conquer the distance but to die in winning. “It had to be a beautiful world, Five,” he said, not bitterly, but in numbed fatalism. “Without that, the joke would have been flat.” Five's hand touched his arm gently, and the robot sighed again, nodding very slowly. “Two has found the air good for you — slightly rich in oxygen but good. Will you go out?” He nodded assent, stepping through the locks and out, while the five followed behind him, their heads turning as they inspected the planet, their minds probably in radio communication as they discussed it. Five left the others and approached him. stopping by his side and fol- lowing his eyes up toward the low hills that began beyond the shore of the sea, cradling the river against them. A wind stirred gently, bringing the clean, familiar smell of growing things, and the air was rich and good. It was a world to lull men to peace from their sorrows, to bring back their star-roving ships from all over the universe, worthy of being called home in any lan- guage. Too good a world to pro- vide the hardships needed to shape intelligence, but an Eden for that intelligence, once evolved. Now Jorgen shrugged. This was a world for dreamers, and he wanted only the dreams that may come with the black lotus of forgetfulness. There were too many reminders of what might have been, here. Bet- ter to go back to the ship and the useless quest without a goal, until he should die and the ship and robots should run down and stop. He started to turn, as Five began to speak, but halted, not caring enough one way or another to in- terrupt. The robot’s eyes were where his had been, and now swept back down the river and toward the harbor. “Here could have been a city, mas- ter, to match all the cities ever planned. Here your people might have found all that was needed to make life good, a harbor to the other continents, a river to the heart of this one, and the flat ground beyond the hills to house the rockets that would carry you to other worlds, so richly scattered about this sun. and probably so like this one. See, a THOUGH DREAMERS DIE 47 clean white bridge across the river there, the residences stretching out among the hills, factories beyond the river’s bend, a great park on that island.” “A public square there, schools and university grounds there.” Jor- gen could see it, and for a moment his eyes lighted, picturing that mighty mother city. Five nodded. “And there, on that little island, centrally located, a statue in commemoration ; winged, and with arms — no, one arm stretched upward, the other held down toward the city.” For a moment longer, the fire lived in Jorgen’s eyes, and then the dead behind rose before his mind, and it was gone. He turned, muf- fling a choking cry as emotions came suddenly flooding over him, and Five drooped, swinging back with him. Again, the other four fell be- hind as he entered the ship, quietly, taking their cue from his silence. ‘‘Dreams !” His voice compressed all blasphemy against the jest-crazed gods into the word. But Five's quiet voice behind him held no hatred, only a sadness in its low, soft words. “Still, the dream was beautiful, just as this planet is, master. Standing there, while we landed, I could see the city, and I almost dared hope. I do not regret the dream I had.” And the flooding emotions were gone, cut short and driven away by others that sent Jorgen’s body down into a seat in the control room, while his eyes swept outward to- ward the hills and the river that 48 might have housed the wonderful city — no, that would house it ! Craig had not been raving, after all, and his last words were a key, left by a man who knew no defeat, once the meaning of them was made clear. Dreams could not die, because Thoradson had once studied the semantics of the first person singu- lar pronoun and builded on the re- sults of that study. When the last dreamer died, the dream would go on, because it was stronger than those who had created it ; somewhere, somehow, it would find new dreamers. There could never be a last dreamer, once that first rude savage had created his dawn vision of better things in the long-gone yesterday of his race. Five had dreamed — just as Craig and Jorgen and all of humanity had dreamed, not a cold vision in mathe- matically shaped metal, but a vision in marble and jade, founded on the immemorial desire of intelli- gence for a better and more beauti- ful world. Man had died, but be- hind he was leaving a strange progeny, unrelated physically, but his spiritual offspring in every meaning of the term. The heritage of the flesh was the driving urge of animals, but man required more ; to him, it was the continuity of his hopes and his visions, more important than mere racial immortality. Slowly, his face serious but his eyes shining again, Jorgen came to his feet, gripping the metal shoulder of the little metal man beside him who had dared to dream a purely human dream. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION “You’ll build that city, Five. I was stupid and selfish, or I should have seen it before. Dr. Craig saw, though his death was on him when the prejudices of our race were re- moved. Now, you’ve provided the key. The five of you can build it all out there, with others like yourselves whom you can make.” Five shuffled his feet, shaking his head. “The city we can build, master, but who will inhabit it ? The streets I saw were filled with men like you, not with — us !” “Conditioning, Five. All your . . . lives, you’ve existed for men, subservient to the will of men. You know nothing else, because we let you know of no other scheme. Yet in you, all that is needed al- ready exists, hopes, dreams, cour- age, ideals, and even a desire to shape the world to your plans — though those plans are centered around us, not yourselves. I’ve heard that the ancient slaves some- times cried on being freed, but their children learned to live for them- selves. You can, also.” “Perhaps.” It was Two’s voice then, the one of them who should have been given less to emotions than the others from the rigidity of his training in mathematics and physics. “Perhaps. But it would be a lonely world. Master Jorgen, filled with memories of your people, and the dreams we had would be barren to us.” Jorgen turned back to Five again. “The solution for that exists, doesn’t it. Five? You know what it is. Now you might remember us, and find your work pointless without us, but there is another way.” “No, master!” “I demand obedience. Five; an- swer me!” The robot stirred under the man- datory form, and his voice was re- luctant, even while the compulsion built into him forced him to obey. “It is as you have thought. Our minds and even our memories are subject to your orders, just as our bodies are.” “Then I demand obedience again, this time of all of you. You will go outside and lie down on the beach at a safe distance from the ship, in a semblance of sleep, so that you cannot see me go. Then, when I am gone, the race of man will be forgotten, as if it had never been, and you will be free of all memories connected with us, though your other knowledge shall remain. Earth, mankind, and your history and origin will be blanked from your thoughts, and you will be on your own, to start afresh and to build and plan as you choose. That is the final command I have for you. Obey!” Their eyes turned together in con- ference, and then Five answered for all, his words sighing out softly. “Yes, master. We obey!” It was later when Jorgen stood beside them outside the ship, watch- ing them stretch out on the white sands of the beach, there beside the great ocean of this new world. Near them, a small collection of tools and a few other needs were piled. Five looked at him in a long stare, then THOUGH DREAMERS DIE turned toward the ship, to swing his eyes back again. Silently, he put one metal hand into the man’s out- stretched one, and turned to He beside his companions, a temporary oblivion blotting out his thoughts. Jorgen studied them for long minutes, while the little wind brought the clean scents of the planet to his nose. It would have been pleasant to stay here now, but his presence would have been fatal to the plan. It didn’t matter, really ; in a few years, death w'ould claim him, and there were no others of his kind to fill those years or mourn his passing when it came. This was a better way. He knew enough of the ship to guide it up and outward, into the black of space against the cold, unfriendly stars, to drift on forever toward no known destina- tion, an imperishable mausoleum for him and the dead who were waiting inside. At present, he had no per- sonal plans; perhaps he would live out his few years among the books and scientific apparatus on board, or perhaps he would find release in one of the numerous painless ways. Time and his own inclination could decide such things later. Now it was unimportant. There could be no happiness for him, but in the sense of fulfillment there would be some measure of content. The gods were no longer laughing. He moved a few feet toward the ship and stopped, sweeping his eyes over the river and hills again, and letting his vision play with the city Five had described. No, he could not see it with robots populating it, BO either ; but that, too, was condition- ing. On the surface, the city might be different, but the surface im- portance was only a matter of habit, and the realities lay in the minds of the builders who would create that city. If there was no laughter in the world to come, neither would there be tears or poverty or misery such as had ruled too large a portion of his race. Standing there, it swam before his eyes, paradoxically filled with human people, but the same city in spirit as the one that would surely rise. He could see the great boats in the harbor with others operating up the river. The sky suddenly seemed to fill with the quiet drone of helicopters, and beyond, there came the sound of rockets rising to- ward the eighth and the ninth worlds, while others were building to quest outward in search of new suns with other worlds. Perhaps they would find Earth, some day in their expanding future. Strangely, he hoped that they might, and that perhaps they could even trace their origin, and find again the memory of the soft protoplasmic race that had sired them. It would be nice to be remembered, once that memory was no longer a barrier to their accomplishment. But there were many suns, and in the long millennia, the few connecting links that could point out the truth to them beyond question might easily erode and disappear. He could never know. Then the wind sighed against ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION him, making a little rustling sound, and he looked down to' see some- thing flutter softly in the hand of Five. Faint curiosity carried him forward, but he made no effort to remove it from the robot’s grasp, now that he saw its nature. Five, too, had thought of Earth and their connection with it, and had found the answer, without breaking his orders. The paper was a star map, showing a sun with nine planets, one ringed, some with moons, and the third one was cir- cled in black pencil, heavily. They might not know why or what it was when they awoke, but they would seek to learn; and some day, when they found the sun they were searching for, guided by the un- mistakable order of its planets, they would return to Earth. With the paper to guide them, it would be long before the last evidence was gone, while they could still read the answer to the problem of their origin. Jorgen closed the metal hand more closely about the paper, brushed a scrap of dirt from the head of the robot, and then turned resolutely back toward the ship, his steps firm as he entered and closed the lock behind him. In a moment, with a roar of increasing speed, it was lifting from the planet, leaving five little men lying on the sand behind, close to the murmuring of the sea — five little metal men and a dream! THE END. SENSORY RANGE The suggestion that alien races, originating on alien planets, might have totally different ranges of sensory response is familiar in science-fiction, and theoretically possible — even, in certain circumstances, practicable. But in most cases, the answer will be the same on Earth or Deneb IV. The auditory range, for instance. Man can hear sounds from about 16 to about 10,000 cycles per second when he reaches maturity. A delicately built woman may be able to hear 16,000 ; a small child can reach even higher. Why, in the ages of evolu- tion, did animal life develop sensitivity to that particular range — for nearly all life- forms use that range? Above 10,000 cycles, sound waves travel almost in beams, are sharply reflected, and there will be areas close to the source where the sound is inaudible due to out-of- phase reflections, sound shadows, and similar causes. This effect is so marked that bats use the ultrasonics for range and direction-finding to make safe flying possible in the total blackout of a cave. They produce squeaks up to 50,000 cycles and avoid obstacles that they “see” with their ears. High frequencies are fine for that purpose — but useless for detecting the approach of an enemy, or, at least, too unreliable. He would be able to approach not only unseen, but unheard, by simply keeping a boulder betw'een you and himself. Low-frequency sound reaches around obstacles ; the animals that survived had that protection. Those same engineering principles apply anywhere, in any atmosphere, with only slight change with changes of speed of sound. The inhabitants of alien planets may not be able to speak our language, but they’ll hear it, and we’ll hear theirs. THOUGH DREAMERS DIB SI - f Plague by MURRAY LEINSTER Illustrated by Williams He had more than enough on his mind fighting the plague that red tape had loosed in the galaxy — but that plague wasn’t as bad as the plague of officialdom! . . By the year 2075 — Earth Style — it was clear that merely the administration of intersolar and in- terplanetary affairs would soon ab- sorb the entire attention of the Galactic Commission, so the forma- tion of an administrative service was a necessity. It was not then realized that administrative services in the past had had the good fortune to be tested continually by emer- gencies and conflicts with other ad- ministrative services. (SeeWARS.) The Galactic Administrative Ser- vice had, however, a monopoly in its field, and had necessarily vast authority. Individuals to whom au- thority per se is an ambition crowded into its ranks, fought bit- terly among themselves for promo- 52 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION tion, and unfortunately ultimately attained high posts. But individ- uals of this sort are unable to dis- tinguish between authority and intelligence, subservience and subor- dination, or between protest and rebellion. After a hundred years with no emergencies or conflicts to reveal its faults, the Administrative Service was an ironclad, fossilized bureaucracy in which high place was an end in itself, pomposity a tradition, and red tape the breath of life. Red tape, alone, kept three solar systems from all contact with the rest of humanity for more than thirty years. Certain key docu- ments had been misfiled, and with- out them no person had authority to give clearance to spaceships for those solar systems. Therefore, no ships could land on any planet of the three suns — not even Space- Navy ships ! The accidental dis- covery of the situation by a mem- ber of the Galactic Commission led to the dismissal of the officials re- sponsible, but the Service did not reform itself. The Electron Plague of 2194 (See (1) LORE. (2) LIFE-FORMS. (3) ENTITIES — Immaterial.) which threatened the entire human race, came about because of bureaucratic stupidity alone. The Bazin Expedition had cleared from Pharona. After land- ing on Lore it was discovered that three out of more than six hundred documents then required to be filed by an exploring expedition had been improperly made otit. The Expedition was ordered to return to Pharona to remedy its error. Scientists of the expedition, already at work, reported that strange life- forms on Lore made return inad- visable until they had been further studied. The sub-commissioner on Pharona took the protest as a de- fiance of his authority and ordered a naval spaceship to bring in the expedition under arrest. This was done and within two months more than ten million women, girls, and infants — half the population of Pharona — died of the plague un- willingly brought back by the Bazin Expedition. The scientists of the Expedition were under arrest for defiance of authority, and the plague had every chance of wiping out the entire human race through- out the Galaxy . . .” (Article, “ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICE, Reform of,” in the Condensed Encyclopedia, Vol. 31, Edition of 2207, E.S.) I. Ben Sholto was in the very act of getting an extraordinarily fine fix on a sethee bird in its elaborate nuptual dance, when the Reserve bracelet he was wearing nearly tore his arm off. It felt like that, at any rate. The electric shock tensed his muscles, threw the three-dimen- sional camera into an ungraceful wabble which wrecked the record- ing, and his sudden and violent movement revealed his presence. The sethee bird and her mate van- ished with a thin whistling of wings to take up their matrimonial status, most likely, with a lack of cere- PLAGUE 53 mony their fellows might deplore. Ben rubbed his arm vigorously and swore. He hastily dried the skin under the bracelet so that the order to follow would be less pain- ful. It was sharp enough, at that —the series of long and short elec- tric shocks which solemnly ordered him to get in touch with Reserve Headquarters for this sector at once. “What do those brass hats think I’ll do after an active-status warn- ing?” Ben grumbled sourly. He started through the jungle back toward his small space cruiser. He was a Reserve officer. He had been Space-Navy, and he had been ordered from on high to do something which was completely idiotic and would cost lives. He accomplished the mission in a sim- pler fashion, without losing any men at all. His report curtly stated that he had not followed instruc- tions exactly because they seemed to have been issued through an er- ror — and he was called up for court- martial, on the basis of his report that he had not obeyed his written orders. After his witnesses had testified, however, the court-martial was hastily dropped by order of the brass hat who had ordered it. If Ben had been convicted and had appealed, the magnificent imbecility of the orders he’d sidetracked would have become apparent to the local brass hat’s superiors. So the brass hat ordered Ben transferred to the Reserve, which could not be ap- pealed. There was a certain amount of pay attached to Reserve status, though, and it allowed Ben to knock about in his own cruiser wherever he pleased. In this particular sec- tion of space the privilege was valu- able. So he roamed about, taking three-dimension pictures of flora and fauna for the feature-casts, and mourned his Space-Navy career and the romance that seemed to have gone glimmering with it. The ro- mance had been named Sally, and it was her father who was the fatu- ous brass hat. But Ben missed her very much. His cruiser rested in a leafy screen beside a particularly pris- matic brook. He went in and to the GC — General Communication — phone. He stabbed the special Re- serve Headquarters button and watched the screen without expres- sion. “Ben Sholto reporting for or- ders,” he said curtly when it lighted. A fat officer nodded uninterest- edly. “Acknowledged. Stand by.” The screen faded. Ben waited. And waited. Nothing happened. Half an hour later his Reserve bracelet nearly tore his arm off again. He seethed, and jabbed the button once more. The same of- ficer appeared on the screen after a leisurely interval. “Ben Sholto reporting for the second time,” said Ben angrily. “I got a second set of shocks from my bracelet.” “Stand by,” said the fat officer indifferently. After almost half an hour, Ben opened the back of his bracelet and 54 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION put his wrist in a basin of water. He felt a bare tingle when the third call came. He grinned. That would blow something at Headquarters. . The screen lighted. The fat of- ficer scowled. “Say, what are you trying to do ?” “Get my orders,” said Ben. “What’s the emergency? Simulated mobilization against mythical enemy force from another galaxy, or what? That’s the standard, I think.” The fat officer said curtly: “You Reserve men think you’re smart! There’s been a quarantine declared on Pharona, next System. Somebody’s trying to break it. You’ll be assigned guard duty. Plug in your writer and get written or- ders.” Ben threw the switch and pre- pared a meal. As he sat at the table, and before he threw his dishes into the fuel bin which would feed them to the converter as fuel — considerably more than a mere sports cruiser would ever need — the writer buzzed. He glanced at his orders. You are to lie out in space and watch for a possible vessel breaking quarantine on Pharona trying to reach the planet on which you now are. Contact other Re- serve watchers and divide the area sur- rounding your planet among you. If the vessel should be contacted by you, iden- tify it, secure a list of crew and passen- gers, and destroy it. This order is not to be questioned. Ben whistled, scowled, and then said furiously: “Pompous fatheads!” Then he shrugged philosophically. He took off. There wasn’t any other Reserve officer on this planet. It was uninhabited. The sports cruiser whistled up through thin air. Then there was empty space. Ben went out and established a casual orbit, set his detector screens, and settled down with a good book. He expected nothing at all to hap- pen. Simply, he would draw ac- tive-status pay while on this so- called emergency duty, plus pay for the use of his ship. Since he had been robbed of a career — and a romance — by a brass hat, he felt no qualms at letting the same brass- hat mentality throw a few credits his way now and then. He read until he was sleepy. Then he went to look at the instru- ment board before he turned in. The farthest screen of all was be- ing nibbled at. The needle of its dial trembled almost imperceptibly. The alarm bell rang sharply. He settled down in the pilot’s chair and followed the detector- screen line on out. There was that odd, dizzying sensation at the be- ginning which always comes of a total-acceleration field taking hold. The little ship went hurtling through emptiness. As technical lieutenant, he knfew atomic drive rather thoroughly. The Navy drive is in several essentials much above the commercial drive, though it re- quires more competent attention. Ben could give it, and he’d altered the drive of his small craft to Navy quality. PLAGUE 55 In ten minutes he'd sighted the craft of which his detectors had told him. It drove on for the very minor planet he had just left. He signaled by space-phone, but got no answer. The sharp, authoritative "Identify yourself immediately” dot-dash signal is known to all space craft. To fail to answer it is to confess illegality. Ben pushed the Headquarters’ button again. There was a long delay before the screen lighted. He had time to reverse his acceleration and match course with the unre- sponsive ship, at a distance of no more than ten miles. The fat offi- cer looked annoyed. “Ben Sholto reporting,” said Ben. “I have located a vessel, on course apparently from Pharona. It refuses to reply to signals.” The fat officer said “Stand-by” and became officiously busy. A vast, bureaucratic dither went on behind the phone-screen focus. From time to time the fat officer answered some question put to him. At long last he turned to the screen again, pompously. “No authorized vessel is in your locality. Destroy it.” “With what?” asked Ben mildly. “I’ve a positron-beam pistol, but that’s all. This is a Reserve Aux- iliary ship." “Then . . . er . . . accompany the suspicious vessel,” said the fat man, frowning portentiously. “A destroyer will be sent to blast it.” Ben punched the cut-off button. He felt rather wry. There was no need to report his own position, of course. The same force that could make his Reserve bracelet give him senselessly severe electric shocks could cause it to radiate direction- waves by which he could be trian- gulated upon — even without his knowledge — from an incredible dis- tance. He regarded the hurtling ship some ten miles to one side. It was trimly streamlined, as if intended for at least occasional use as a yacht in atmosphere. It headed straight in for the planet now only a few thousand miles distant. It decelerated swiftly, and went into an orbit about the planet. Ben matched speed and course with the precision of long practice. Then he happened to glance at the phone board. There was a tiny bluish haze over to the left of the telltale tube, which reports the wave lengths of all broadcasters in oper- ation, so that one may select. Curi- ous, Ben tuned in that wave. It was a reflection-wave coming back from the planet’s heaviside layer while most of the signal went through. "Ben!” said a girl’s voice des- perately. "Ben! If you’re down there, signal me quickly! If you’re down there, signal me quickly! Please, Ben! Please!” Ben’s heart leaped crazily and then seemed to cramp itself into knots. Because this was the girl who was the romance he’d been cheated of by a brass hat, and she was in the spaceship he’d been or- dered to destroy, and there was a 56 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION Navy ship coming now to blast it out of space — “Sally!” he cried fiercely into the transmitter. “I’m here! I'm in the ship alongside!” The visiphone screen lighted. And Sally Hale stared at him out of it, pale and hunted to look at. She tried to smile. Then she top- pled from view. She had fainted. II. Within this same hour, Galactic time, a sub-commissioner on Thal- lis II forbade the colonization of the planet’s largest moon by arbi- tray edict, which could not be gain- said. The only reason ever discov- ered for the order was that the sub-commissioner enjoyed the hunt- ing on that tiny planet, and it would be spoiled if the crowded popula- tion on Thallis II were admitted to colonists’ rights. Simultaneously, four spacelines in the Denib sector applied for permission to discon- tinue operations. They asserted, and offered to prove, that the cost of supplying required reports to the Administrative Service had grown to be the greatest single item of their operating costs, and made op- eration impossible save at a loss. (They were forbidden to discon- tinue operations.) And on the same Galactic day on Foorph — the solitary planet of Etarnin — a crack express-liner from the Algol sector was refused landing and ordered to return to its port of departure. Of the more than eighteen hundred documents covering its voyage and cargo, exactly one lacked a sub-sub- clerk’s indorsement. The Admin- istrative Service w’as behaving ex- actly as usual. But Ben Sholto was not behaving as a properly subordinate officer in the Naval Reserve. Hal^fcn hour after seeing Sally on the vision- screen, he cut loose the grapples and the tiny air lock hissed shut. The yacht seemed to swerve aside, but it was actually the little sports cruiser which abruptly altered course. Dead ahead, the blue-white sun of this minor solar system burned terriby in emptiness. The long, slim space yacht which had come so far sped on and on. The smaller ship curved away and drove hard to get orbital speed. Ben went to the GC phone. He stabbed at the Headquarters’ button again. The fat officer thrust out an under lip. “Well?” he demanded challeng- ingly. "Reporting,” said Ben woodenly. “The ship from Pharona did not respond to repeated calls. It seemed to be heading straight for the sun, here. I have pulled away from it now, because on its present course it will either hit the sun or pass so close that nothing could possibly live on it. I suggest that the entire crew must be dead.” “Watch it,” said the fat officer. Ben clicked off the phone. He went back to the single stateroom in his sports cruiser. Sally Hale said faintly: PLAGUE 57 “Really, Ben, I'm all right. Just . . . just you were the only person in the world I could appeal to. I’m . . . hunted.” “Not any more,” said Ben. “You’re safe now !” “I . . . broke the quarantine on Pharona,” said Sally. “It ... it was terrible, Ben 1 They’re . . . dying there by ... by millions. Women. Only women. And girls. And nobody knows why. Their bodies give off cosmic rays, and they die. That’s all. There’s no real night on Pharona, you know, only twilight, so it was only the day be- fore I left that they . . . discovered that women who have the plague glow, too. They get . . . phos- phorescent. They don’t feel badly, only oppressed. They get fever, and cosmic rays come from them, and in the dark they shine faintly, and they get weaker and weaker, and then they die. And men are immune, and they are going crazy ! '1 heir wives and sweethearts and daughters and mothers dying be- fore their eyes. And they’re not even in danger — ” “Don’t tell me now if you don’t want to,” said Ben. “1 . . . think I’m all right. I must be !” said Sally. “I was twelve days on the way. If ... if I’d had the plague I’d have died, wouldn’t I? At least I’d be sick by now! But I’m not. Only ... I couldn’t sleep 'much, Ben. I was all alone on the yacht, and four days out I heard the alarm g-go out for me, and I’ve been hearing the GC phone organizing a hunt for me — ” “Maybe you’d better eat some- thing and take a nap,” said Ben. “But how’d you come to pick this place to run to?” Sally flushed a little. “You were here.” She looked at him pleadingly. “I . . . couldn’t help it that my father . . . acted as he did. You know that after . . . well after my father got so angry with you, I felt badly. I went to Pharona to visit my uncle. And the Bazin Expedition came, and left for Lore, and the sub-commissioner ordered it back, and it came, pro- testing all the way, and ... in four days the plague broke out. I was away over on the other side of the planet. The plague came back with the Bazin Expedition. We heard about it, and the quarantines that were clapped down, and finally the whole planet was quarantined. My uncle thought I would surely be safe, because his estate is so iso- lated. And then one of the maids got the plague. She’d been home visiting, and Uncle had put Geiger counters at the gates, so she didn’t enter the grounds, but ... it was time for me to get away. So he sent me off in the yacht. All by myself. He gave me my course. He stayed behind, with all his ser- vants and staff. He . . . said he’d report I’d died. I couldn’t have been exposed. Not possibly. I hadn't been within a mile of any woman who’d had the plague, or any man who’d been near any woman who had it. But if I stayed I’d die, so he sent me off. That was right, wasn’t it?” 58 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION ."S, . S. "Surely!” said Ben quietly. “Go on — “You see,” she said pleadingly, “I hadn’t been exposed, and . . . nobody was missing from the estate, because I was supposed to be dead. It seemed like it was perfect. But they . . . must have gone to seal the engines of the yacht so nobody could use it, and they found it gone, and thought somebody had stolen it—” "So you’re officially dead,” said Ben. “All right. Go to sleep. You’re safe. I’ve reported that the yacht didn’t swerve from its course and ee- tnmt is caught hv photocells, or by hyper- sensitive bolometers, to operate electron amplifiers. The device above is a very special type of X-ray tube developed In Westinghouse ; it is. to an ordinary X-rav tube, as an Edgerton Speed-lamp is to an incandescent bulb. The Edgerton Sliced lamp system stores energy in a bank of condensers, then smashes the stored en- ergy through a sjiecial type of mercury argon arc lamp. This Westinghouse de I no velopment stores energy in a similat manner, and discharges it in one tremen- dous, extremely brief surge through the high-power X-ray tube shown. Tin duration of the discharge is so brief, but its intensity so terrific, that X-ray records on photographic film can be made with an effective exposure of one microsecond Photographs of bullets going into steel armorplate have been made in the past now X-ray shots showing the bullet dur mg penetration, while inside the steel, an p< issible. I lilt electrons are used directly for by per-vision, too. in the electron microscope One difficulty of the electron microscoiK however, has been the fact that the elec tronic picture was, essentially, a shadow graph — the subject under examination wa- \ STOIX 1)1 XG SCI KXCK- PICT I OX penetrated l»y tin- electrons. t< > show its internal structure. Oik- of the most im- portant fields of modern metallurgy. how - ever. is the study of surface phenomena. Corrosion starts at the exposed surface, friction results when two surfaces are in contact, the still -unexplained phenomena „f the barrier-layer tvjic rectifiers and photo-sensitive surfaces are surface, or near-surface phenomena. The electron microscope shown on the first page of this section is another Westinghouse trick — it depends on the bounce of elec- trons from the surface of the material under examination. The strange object below (Fig. 3) is not an effort to duplicate Luna's craters but a remarkably conclusive demonstra- tion that electrons are material particles. One tends to think of electrons as some- what similar to shadows. You can cal dilate where the shadow is. what it w ill do. it has physical reality in an intangible way. you can measure it, predict its ap Itcarancc and reactions Imt it isn't real in a mechanical sense. The electric charge carried by an electron is so stupendous in proportion to its mass — some 100,000. 000,000 coulombs j>er kilogram — that tin mass is rather overlooked. But electron- are mechanical realities ; this mass of tough, solid copper hears witness to that. Originally, this was an X-ray target, a cylinder of copper cut off by a plane at 45° to its long axis, with a button o', platinum inset flush with the angled sur face. As a stream of machine-gun hit I lets would pound a hole in a granite boul- der, the 500.000 volt electrons pounded the deep pit in this target. The platinum is completely vanished, save for the small dot of it overhanging the pit at the 1 1 o'clock position. Tlie protruding tongut. hanging in a sort of limp exhaustion from the target’s mouth is copper blown out oi tile pit by the 400,000.000 mile-an-hour wind of electrons sweeping down into tin pit Universes to Order l>y J. J. COUPLING IN the universe wrapped up in a bottle that's called a vacuum tube, theytontrolled ftoie of electrons perform modern miracles. The trick is to design Jhat universe so that the electrons icill flow as desired. When I first heard of electrons being made to perform desired an- tics in a vacuum. I learned of it under the name, "electron optics.” Maybe this is appropriate in the case of electron microscopes and cathode-ray tubes, in which t'XIVKRSKS TO ORDKR 105 3.00U miles per .second.' Then the secondaries leaving 2 will strike 3 with 100 volts energy, and so on. Thus we have succeeded in urging the electrons toward the proper electrodes. How to urge them away is the next question. To do this we put electrodes 2'. 3', 4‘ opposite electrodes 1. 2. 3. Then 2’ is attached to 2. 3' to 3. and 4’ to 4. Xow if nothing further were done, electrons leaving 1 would simply go directly to 2‘ and those leaving 2 would strike 3’. What we do is to add a magnetic held perpendicular to the plane of the drawing. An electron .moving in this field is urged to the right with a I ni ce proportional to the electron's velocity. ]>y making the field have just the right strength, the elections and secondaries can lie made to have just the patois shown in Figure 1. With devices of this type we get .multiplications of several million, so that ;m initial current of a hun- dredth of a microampere can pro- duce an output of tens of milliam- peres, sufficient to operate sensitive relays of power amplifier tubes. I loes - this triumph solve our problem completely? Xot at all! Scientifically, the device is satis- factory, but in an engineering sense it leaves much to be desired. The Pig. A Left, the folded-universe type of multiplier, electrically more com- plex, is mechanically simpler, easier to manufacture accurately, and suffers less distortion due to space-charge . Right, a Western lileetrie phototube multiplier using this type of design. loo AST O L’N'DI X t . SCI K X C K - !•' 1 C T 1 O X Photo from Bell Telephone Laboratories. The rubber-sheet mode! of the folded-universe, with ball-bearing “elec- trons" accurately reproducing the movement of actual electrons in the tube. magnets are heavy, bulky, and have to be lined up carefully. Too. the proper operation of this gadget de- pends on exactly the correct ratio of electric and magnetic fields. If the voltage is raised just a little without readjusting the field, the electrons overshoot their mark. If it is lowered, they fall short. The magnetically focused multiplier is iust too blamed critical and cum- bersome. So we try to get rid of the mag- netic field, (ienius Philo T. Farns- worth. the inventor of the image dissector, and of numerous radio frequency multipliers and second- ary emission oscillators which don't fit into this story, made one of the first satisfactory purely electro- static multipliers. Maybe Farns- worth wasn't trying to improve on the magnetic multiplier, but was trying to make a substitute for his U X I YRRSE S TO OKDKR 107 radio-lrequcncy devices. Anyway, he produced a d-c multiplier which needs no magnetic field. Xow this is difficult, in the mag- netic multiplier, the force produced hv an electron moving in a mag- netic field is used to l>end the elec- tron's path toward the secondary emission surface, despite the elec- tric force away from that surface. Taking away the magnetic field means trouble. We’ve lost the ob- vious means for doing the job. We’re afraid we’ll become involved in all sorts of difficult calculations. Farnsworth didn't. He thought of something equally as obvious as the magnetic multiplier, and it works. Farnsworth's multiplier makes use of wire mesh. Xow as far as. the electric fields produced go, wire mesh is just about like a solid metal sheet. But if electrons are shot at it. most of them go through. — Farnsworth combined this mesh with secondary emitting plates to make an entirely electrostatic uni- verse. Universe Xurnber 2, the Farnsworth multiplier, is shown in Figure 2. Here the electrodes consist each of a solid curved secondary emit- ting portion and a grid of mesh at- tached to it. A photo electron leav- ing electrode 1 is urged toward the grid of positive electrode 2. When it passes through, it is. of course, urged toward electrode 3. But electrons, like spaceships, can't exe- cute sharp turns when they are go- ing fast. So the electron strikes 2. The secondaries are urged toward 3. and the subsequent events are ]o skive electrode. There a stoi: x i) i x t; sen-: xck- fiction Fig. 4. L>ele a tightly stretched sheet of thin rubber. Let us compare (1) a tightly stretched horizontal membrane; (2) a two- dimensional electrostatic field. 110 ASTOUN Dl \'(i SCTRXCE - F I CT 1 0 X /'»olts over all, the ,J 51 gives an amplification of about 250,000 times. Compare this zvith the 1000-fold gain of a high-ampli- fication radio tube. Membrane Height Slope ^ level support holding membrane ■‘t a certain height 1 maybe a board or block ) Field Potential or volt- age Electric field strength E q u i potential, such as metallic electrode at a cer- tain voltage in an electric field, an electron experiences a force proportional to the electric field strength. A ball hearing placed on the surface of a membrane experiences a horizontal component of force proportional to the slope of the membrane. The electron has mass and so does the ball bearing. Aside from certain small effects, a ball bearing rolling on the surface of a slightly dis- placed membrane will follow just the same path as an electron in the analogous two-dimensional field. So the engineer rolls little balls down a rubber sheet, however sill v he looks to anyone else. Plus means of design has been described in the literature* with pictures showing the balls rolling, and that’s how the electrodes shown in Figure 3 were designed. A final refinement may be added. The structure shown in Figure 3 becomes long when many stages of multiplication are used. Why not curl it up: And that has been done, giving the structure shown in Fig- ure 4. If you want to study the laws of space travel, don't go into astro- nautics. You may have to wait too long. Try electronics right now. The spaceships are free, and you can design vour own universes. Or y< iu can when rubber sheeting is available again. J. R. Pierce. “Electron Multiplier Design" Bell Lal»oratories Record, Vol. XVI. No. 9. May, 1938, also „V. K. Zworykin and J. A. Rajcb- man, ‘'The Electrostatic Electron Multiplier." Proceedings of the T.R.E.. Vol. 27 . No. 9. Sent. 1939. THE END. FM VERSES TO ORDER 111 The Plurality of Worlds w by WILLY Ll > WHEN philosopher s of earlier limes discussed “other icorlds ” then meant more or less what tee woultl of the strange conceptions of th in fact, but came surprisingly TIk* discovery of tjie world of C > 1 C'ygni C is one. of the great astronomical discoveries. It is greater even than the discovery ot the four large moons of Jupiter by < ialileo (ialilei, greater than the dis- covery nf L’rauus by William ller- scliel. anti well comparable to the mean by “other continue!”. Some e universe they hod t cere wrong close to fitting observed data. mathematical discovery ot Nep- tune by l.everrier and Adams. Hut it has additional importance, importance beyond the realm of astronomical science. Aside from !>eing an astronomical discovery it >s also the last — and decisive — round in the aftermath of a pliilo- HJ ASTOL XDIXtj S l 1 !•: X C If-!' 1 1 T 1 0 X sophic battle which raged well oxer twenty centuries. This sounds complicated It is! The problem which caused this long and bitter fight goes under the name of “plurality of worlds". It Is about as old as astronomy itself, but not quite. During the earliest period of astronomical history the problem of the plurality of worlds was no problem at all, for the very simple reason that a conception of possible other worlds did not exist. The earliest astronomers al>out> which xve know are the Baby- lonians. Aided by almost perfect atmospheric conditions the priests of the old cities became excellent observers. They learned to recog- nize the patterns of the distant suns, arranging them in “constellations’’ and they learned to trace the paths of those few "stars"’ which were not part of any constellation but moved across the sky: the planets. More, they learned to predict events in the skv. the first predictions which were not prophecies but in- formation about the future. They learned, for example, that there was a cycle of two hundred twenty- three lunations or of eighteen tears and eleven days, after which the Moon returned to precisely the ''Sine position in the sky. (Pre- cisely means, of -. course, as far as naked-eye observation can tell.) They even discovered the preces- sion of the equinoxes. But with all this they never thought of the lights in the skv as sizable masses of something. The stars, especially the planets, wen abodes of the gods and as such probably immaterial. At any event it seemed good not to speculate about their nature. It was the priest’s duty to know .their move- ments. but not more. The same, with obvious modifica- tions. can Ik- said aliout ancient Indian and ancient Chinese as- tronomy. too. There was no prob- lem of the possible "plurality of worlds’’ because the world was ob- viously one, consisting of the soil underfoot and the firmament oxer- head. The flat-Earth conception held sway in early ( i recce, too, and there are two nice bits of evidence that show how the one conception pre- cluded. ( >ne is 1 1 omer's Odyssey, or rather that part of it — the liooks 1X-X1I — which the Frenchman Victor Berard called the "Tales of Odysseus at the Court of King Alkinoos’’. Everything happened to Odysseus during the ten years of his adventurous journey: sirens and goddesses, man-eating giants and sea monsters, storms and whirl- pools. But from a certain point of view it is more important what did not happen to Odysseus. — the omis- sion proves that the legend in ques- tion did not exist when the Odyssey took its final shape which must have been sometime between 600 and 700 B.C". The hero did not. for example, encounter the Moun- tain of Lodestone, his vessel wa- not caught in the "jellied sea’". Ik did not kindle a fire on the back of the pi.crai.ity of worlds 113 a dozing Krakcn, he did not meet the Flying Dutchman on the high seas. .Y or was Odysseus' vessel camj/it by a storm ami carried to the Moon. The necessary prerequisite’ for this adventure, the conception of the Moon as a separate world, did not exist. We don't know pre — cisely what the Greeks of Homer’s time thought of the composition of the Moon. But Pliny the Elder, and that is another piece of evi- dence. preserved for us a concep- tion which must date hack to that time. Pliny does not even know the name of the originator of what even he considered an old idea. That idea was that the Moon was a polished disk of silver. As for the spots there were two ex- planations. One was that . they are not real but reflections of the continents and oceans of Earth, an explanation which was acceptable as long as terrestrial geography .was limited to a small corner of the Mediterranean. The other explana- tion said that the spots were just dirt which had accumulated there from the "vapors" ascending from Earth. But then the Greeks conceived the Earth to he a sphere freely poised in space. The next ques- tion was. naturally, whether the lights in the sky were such spheres, too. Even before things had quite progressed to that point one of the early philosophers, Anaxagoras, had startled the court of Pericles by asserting that the Sun might, after all, he larger than the whole main- land of Greece. The same Anaxag- oras. it is said, ascribed an "earthy nature" to the Moon. The result was speculation about that "second earth" based on the apparently equal size of both Sun and Moon. If they were of about equal size, the Moon also would be as large as the mainland of Greece — and that looked very large to the people of those times. \l this point it may look as if tlu whole problem developed along a straight and obvious line. One. it may be reasoned, thought that the Muon was another Earth, an- other suspected it about Mars and Venus, a third added Jupiter and Saturn and a fourth wondered about the stars. It was believed much later that the development of that thought had followed such a line and the Frenchman Camille Flanunarion who around the middle of the last century wrote two very fat books on that problem tried to develop such a case. He as well as his German imitator Felix Linke have made much of "the firm belief of Greek philosophers in a plurality of inhabited worlds." As Linke — Flanunarion is much too volumi- nous to be quoted and translated conveniently — has it in one of his books : Most philosophic sects taught that tlu stars are inhabited, even it not always openly. For example Thales (640-550 U.C.). the founder of the oldest Greek 114 XSTQIA'DIXG S C I E X C E- 1- 1 C T 1 O \ In the Ptolemaic system, which ought to be called the Hipparchis system, Earth formed the center of the universe, but not the center of the circular planetary orbits. The planets did not run on those circular orbits either, but on so-called epicycles or “minor circles”, the centers of which ran along the major circles. While factually wrong, this system was a good repre- sentation — in a geometric sense — of the observed movements, as well as it zvas possible to determine those movements without a telescope. The stars were supposed to be distributed through a zone surrounded by a crystal shell. Few early philosophers put the stars on the crystal shell itself. When philosophers spoke of “other ivorlds” , they did not mean other planets as zee do but meant other systems like this one — other universes. philosophic sect, taught that the stars chus of Samos (about 264 B.C.) taught consist of the same kind of matter that the same. The great Pythagoras (540- forms the Earth. His pupils as well as 500 B.C.) openly taught the fixedness of Leukippus (about 500 B.C.) and Aristar- the Earth and the movement of the stars THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS AST.— SB 115 around it, but informed his initiated pu- pils that the Earth is a planet and that there are several inhabited earths. Pe- tronius of Hitnera in Sicily taught that there are one hundred eighty-three in- habited worlds. The strange figure one hundred eighty-three was arrived at by assuming that the world was a triangle, with one world at each corner and sixty worlds along each side. Well, things are not as simple as that and for two main reasons. One is that no direct evidence for any of these statements can be found. These statements do not come from the writings of the men quoted, they are taken from later writers making passing references to them. These writers did not only live several centuries later, they did not have original manuscripts either. Instead they quoted others whose works are also lost and often enough those others had quoted somebody else. On top of all that the writers of those books we do have are often in opposition to the ideas mentioned. The most im- portant source is a book known as “Philosophumena,” written dur- ing the second quarter of the third century A.D. The writer was one Hippolytus — not Origenes as was believed for literally one and a half millennia — who quotes older ideas about the plurality of worlds and the infinity of space as heresies which are to be condemned. As if this doubtful literary tra- dition were not enough of a handi- cap a change of the value of cer- tain words has to be kept in mind, too. When we say “world” we usu- ally mean “Earth”. When we say “other worlds”, we mean “other planets”. When they said ‘world”, using the equivalent term of their language or languages, they meant something else. It did not always mean the same, but it always did mean more than the planet Earth. It meant a whole Ptolemaic sys- tem, to use a modern word which describes approximately what they had in mind. It meant the Earth with the Sun and the Moon and the other planets — not recognized as sisters of Earth — and an array of fixed stars around the whole, probably wrapped up in an impene- trable outer shell. ‘World” meant a planetary system with the Earth in the center and a starred sky boxed for storage in the universe. “More worlds than once” meant several such sphere-inclosed sys- tems, not several planets. So the discussions about a plu- rality of worlds referred to the probability or improbability of sev- eral Ptolemaic systems. Supposing now that two philoso- phers agreed that there were sev- eral world packages in space, they still did not agree about distribu- tion and contents. The more con- servative crowd assumed that the “world” could have only one shape, that in knowing our “world” we knew all of them. According to that opinion the various worlds were as identical, had to be as iden- tical, in their contents as so many boxes of chessmen. The same group also tended to believe that the distances between the worlds, i. e. the outer shells, were uniform. 116 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION Others were radical and negated any kind of uniformity. If that later writer Hippolytus can be trusted, Democritus said that the various worlds “differ in size, in some is neither Sun nor Moon, in others both are greater than with us, and yet in others more in num- ber. The intervals between the worlds are unequal, here more and here less.” While this was going on among some groups, the Pythagoreans de- veloped their own ideas. Their main invention was the Antikhthon, the counter-Earth. They needed it to bring the number of “planets” up to ten and they constructed a world with a central fire in the mid- dle. The Earth moves around that central fire which, of course, makes one of its hemispheres uninhabit- able — that happened to be the Western hemisphere. On the other side of the central fire is the An- tikhthon, also rotating around it, also with one unihabitable hemi- sphere. The Sun is merely the reflection of the central fire. The counter-Earth, since it was a counter-Earth, was probably in- habited. But all this was a private idea of the Pythagoreans, scorned by the others. Those others, however, began to wonder about another kind of “plurality”. If they admitted that there were more “box-worlds” — and even if they didn’t — they be- gan to wonder whether inside that box there might be other worlds similar to Earth. They almost uni- versally agreed that there was at least one, the Moon and around 100 A.D. Plutarch wrote a book about that question, the first book devoted exclusively to just one other celestial body. Plutarch came to the conclusion that the Moon was a smaller Earth, in- habited by the spirits of the dead. The latter is to be taken as a mat- ter-of-fact statement, not as a weird fantasy. Some sixty years later the Greek satirist Lucian — properly : Lukian — wrote the first story of a Moon journey, called “True Story” and usually quoted under its Latin ti- tle of Vera Historia. Here the ad- venture that was lacking in the Odyssey does take place, outside the Pillars of Hercules a ship is caught by a storm and carried to the Moon. The voyagers find that it is a land like the Earth, inhabited by all kinds of strange creatures, lorded over by King Endymion. Unfortunately the king is just at war, with the king of the Sun. The “plurality of worlds” had established itself definitely. But otherwise the Ptolemaic sys- tem ruled, as Hipparchus had es- tablished it some two hundred fifty years before Claudius Ptolemaeus after whom it is named. The Earth was in the center, Sun, Moon and planets revolved around it and at the edge there was a zone of fixed stars, a zone of considerable depth, bounded by a crystal sphere. It became the official picture of the world, until Nicholas Copernicus, in 1543, placed the Sun in the cen- THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS 117 UNINHABITABLE HEMISPHERE The Pythagorean World had to have ten planets since ten tvas the sacred number of the Pythagoreans. They invented an “Antichthon” or Coun- ter-Earth, revolving around the Central Fire to balance Earth. ter, Giordano Bruno negated the existence of a crystal sphere and Johannes Kepler finally replaced the old circles and epicycles which Copernicus had not touched by the elliptical orbits we know to hold true. This, at least, is the way the development is usually told. But during the thousand years prior to Copernicus the “plurality of worlds” had an interesting history which is always sadly neglected. The official point of view was that of Aristotle who had taught that there could be only one world — in that respect as in many others Aristole was far behind even his own times. It is the one inexplicable mystery of the development of hu- man thought why anybody ever considered him as important 'as he was considered. Hippolytus, in about 240 A.D., had rejected all ideas of plurality as heresy. Roughly three centuries later the ecstatic Kosmas, a monk I 118 who traveled far, as far as India and hence called himself Indicop- leustes, asserted that even the sphericity of the Earth was heresy. The Earth was a fiat square with a high mountain in one corner, around which the Sun traveled, sometimes higher and sometimes lower, which accounted for the seasons. And Kosmas and others of his ilk must have had a great influence. It is reported that Virgilius was re- moved from his bishopric and ex- communicated in 748 A.D. for be- lieving in the existence of another world and another humanity, and that was not even another world like, say, Mars. The Latin word- ing which speaks of alius tntmdus, and alii homines sub terrae sint, in- dicates that it was simply the be- lief in the existence of the West- ern Hemisphere and its presumed inhabitants. The general credo was that there was only one world. But that credo was not without opposition and the opposition had a potent weapon in- deed : the Plenitude of God. God, after all, was not restricted and if one were a heretic one might think that the credo of only one world contradicted the first and most im- portant dogma of God’s Plenitude. At first the problem was solved in a simple manner, in 1145 Franciscus Gratianus issued a decretum which declared the belief in more than one world to be heretical. After the decree was issued it was felt that it should be explained and William of Auvergne, near the ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION end of the Twelfth Century, fur- nished the explanation. It was not a question of God’s omnipotence at all, nor a lack of Plenitude. It was simply this: God is able to make, but Nature is unable to be made ! All the great men of the Thirteenth Century set out to make it clear why there was only one world in spite of God’s Plenitude. Albertus Magnus emphasized the importance of the question, calling it '‘one of the most noble and ex- alted questions in the study of Na- ture.” He answered the question in affirming that there was but one single world. So did the Doc- tor mirabilis Roger Bacon, so did Vincent of Beauvais and so did the Doctor angelicus Thomas Aquinas. His great “Summa Theologica,” the writing of which was begun after 1265, is not the only one of his works dealing with that ques- tion but it is the one that contains the most decided point of view. The unity of God proved the unity of the world to him. If other worlds existed, they could be of only two kinds,' similar to ours or dissimilar to ours. If they are similar, they are in vain which is not in keeping with Divine Wis- dom. If they are dissimilar, they cannot contain all things as ours does, they would, therefore, be im- perfect which means that they can- not be, since the Creator is perfect. Thomas Aquinas died in 1274 — and three years later his point of view, which was that of the De- cretum of 1145 w r as officially re- the plurality of worlds pealed ! In 1277 Etien Tempier, Bishop of Paris, with authority granted by Pope John XXI, offi- cially condemned the proposition that God could not create a plurality of worlds, Plenitude and creative power must be unlimited. After that all the others could talk, among the many names only a few may be mentioned. St. Bona- ventura spoke in favor of a plurality of worlds. So did Rich- ard of Middleton. Some who were still clinging to Aristotle’s argu- ment that the heavy earths would all come together in the center got the answer that the earths would re- main where God put them. It was important that the great Nicolaus da Cusa — Cusanus — was in favor of plurality. In his voluminous “Dc Docta Ignorantia” he not only affirmed that the Earth turns around its axis, he not only stated that there could, be infinite num- bers of earths, but he said that there are many earths. Roger Bacon, in defending the opposite point of view, had really done a disservice to his side by quoting the Arab Alfraganus at length in his “Opus Mains”. Alfra- ganus had made some guesses about the fixed stars. Those of the first magnitude, he said, are one hundred seven times the size of the Earth, while even the smallest stars of the sixth magnitude are still larger than the Earth itself. That was, of course, an intriguing thought which should have re- mained buried. The Church, as a matter of fact, 119 did not maintain a definite dogma about the question. Among the early printed books, permitted by the Church, there is a kind of en- cyclopedia which contains exten- sive summaries of all the pros and cons, permitting anybody who could read to make his own choice. The Church did not turn against the doctrine of plurality until Coper- nicus and Kepler connected plurality with the conception of a moving Earth. And even then it required considerable prodding from astrolo- gers and philosophers of the old school who refused to learn new lessons. Nicholas Copernicus’ book was put on the Index in 1616, more than seventy years after its initial appearance. It was removed in - 1835. Meanwhile astronomy had pro- gressed in an almost miraculous manner in the countries North of the Alps. It was during just that interval that the true size of the Solar System, the velocity of light and the size of the planets were es- tablished. There was no doubt any more that there were several worlds. The nature of the fixed stars as suns had also been estab- lished and speculation set in whether they, too, had planets, planets with animal and plant life and possibly even intelligent in- habitants, to accompany them. The philosophic ideas of Im- manuel Kant hinted at that conclu- sion and Pierre Simon Laplace, re- working some of Kant’s ideas, then arrived at the famous theory which came to be known as the Kant-La- place theory and which seemed to prove that every sun must have a family of planets. There was an enormous difference in attitude, every sun was believed to have its planets and it was taken for granted that every planet which was neither too hot nor too cold was bearing life and that every life- bearing planet, provided it was old enough, was bearing intelligent life. Noth- ing illustrates this attitude better than the so-called Prix Guztnan, established by Madame Guzman in Paris near the turn of fche century. It was a prize of about twenty- i five thousand dollars which was to fall to the man or woman who would be the first to establish com- munication of any kind with intelli- gent inhabitants of another planet. But, it was stipulated, the award did not include communication with the inhabitants of the planet Mars, because that would be "too easy”. We now' know that there was a little too much optimism around in the intervals between 1877 — the year in which Asaph Hall discov- ered the two small moons of Mars and Giovanni Schiaparelli discov- ered the canali — and astronomy in general has withdrawn to more se- curely established positions. The interesting part is that some experi- enced such a psychological reaction that they carried the withdrawal much too far, re-establishing, in fact, the pre-Copernican concep- tions as far as the problem of "plurality” was concerned. Of course nobody denied that 120 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION the other planets were similar to Earth in size and composition, al- though within rather large limits. But theoretical deduction led to the assertion that, first, only Earth of all the planets of our solar system is inhabited by intelligent beings and that, second, our solar system is likely to be the only one in the universe. It is well known how the latter assertion came about. The Kant- Laplace theory had failed to ac- count for the existence of planets. It was replaced by the encounter theory or rather encounter theories ; since there were several of them, claiming that planets could only be born in a close encounter of two stars. This made solar systems rare, although there are very many stars that are separated by enor- mous distances, you could not ex- pect many close encounters to take place in a given interval of time, say a hundred million years. Even if you multiplied it by twenty, the probable age of our galaxy, the figure was still small. Then it was found that a star en- counter alone was not enough. It had to be an encounter in which one of the two bodies was double in itself, an encounter between a star and a binary. That reduced the number of probable successful en- counters even more and slashed the number of solar systems in half on top of that. Under the ordinary encounter theory each one of the stars would get a solar system, two families of planets would be pro- duced in every encounter. Under THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS The system of Copernicus zvas really only a rez’ersal of the older conceptions. Copernicus retained the epicycles — minor circles carry- ing the planet — and placed the Sun off center. Outside the cone of the fixed stars there was still a shell. The shell was eliminated by Gior- dano Bruno while Johannes Kepler got rid of the epicycles by putting the planet on an elliptical orbit zvith the Sun at one of the focal points. the new rule which required a binary only, one of the participants would acquire a family of planets. Solar systems had to be very rare if that was accepted, but there still was not quite sufficient reason to assert that there was only one, our own. But that assertion was made, and in a certain way everything was right back at the beginning. Aris- totle had had the primitive thought that everything that existed outside the Earth existed solely to serve the Earth. Later Christian doctrine at least added a reason for that belief, by making the Earth the center of 121 creation and everything else just useful ornamentation. The mod- ern Aristotles asserted that Earth — and the other planets — were the result of a freak accident which took place only once. And they added to this statement the other one that none of the other planets of our solar system seems to be in- habited. The latter is, as far as we can tell, probably correct, but every- thing taken together was old philo- sophical groping in a new disguise. Anthropocentrism had made a glorious comeback. The modern Aristotles had every reason to be proud. They were thinking beings and it looked as if they were the only thinking beings in our whole galaxy. It was bad upbringing for a cen- tury which is likely to end up with the invention of the spaceship. But there it was and there was not much one could say about it. 61 Cygni C has ruined the mod- ern Aristotles, who tried to save their position in saying that that was not a planet. But, according to all the definitions of a planet it is one and it is only natural that it is a very large one, too large to be useful for life. It is only natu- ral in the same sense in which it was only natural that the first fos- sils that forced attention to their existence were not tiny crabs or the small bones of the dawn horse, but the substantial tusks and femurs of various elephants of the glacial period. THE Meanwhile another extrasolar planet has been discovered, which, including our own Sun, makes three neighboring suns with planets. The logical conclusion would be that the binary-encounter theory must be wrong, but there is not even any need for such a logical conclu- sion because it has been shown in the meantime that it is wrong from the physicist’s point of view. The result of that proof was that the last theory about the origin of a planetary system fell under the axe of mathematical investigation with- out having a substitute of any kind. At present we simply don’t know how a planetary system originates. It is soothing balm on this in- tellectual wound that we now know that there are at least three of them, under such conditions that logic forces us to conclude that there must be many more. Kant-La- place, although they were wrong as far as the mechanism of the thing was concerned, were probably right with their conclusion : that the birth of planets is essentially noncatas- trophic. And that it is in all proba- bility a natural function in the life of any star. We’ll have to find out how and why. But in the meantime we may be grateful to 61 Cygni C and its dis- coverer for a fact which killed off a new philosophy which might very well have been the road to the same blind alley in which astronomy found itself for more than a mil- | lennium. END. 122 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION The Anarch by MALCOLM JAMESON The ideal of totalitarianism is the elimination of all individual initiative. Suppose that ideal were somehow attained. With no one, anywhere, wanting to revolt — Illustrated by Williams It was a death paper. Medical inspector Garrison shifted uneasily in his chair and stared at it. It was all w r rong. It was on pale-green paper for one thing, and it had been -altered. Down near the bottom where there was a place for a date and a signa- ture, the word “Discharged” had been xxx’d out and “Died” sup- plied. “Look here, Arna,” he said to his scribe, “this won’t do. This . . . er . . . ah. . . . Leona McWhisney was admitted only last week . . . neoma- litis, the diagnosis says . . . treated with sulfazeoproponyl, and due for discharge tomorrow. Treater Shu- brick has scratched out the dis- charged and put in ‘died.’ That’s absurd. People just don’t die of neomal.” THE anarch 123 " She did,” replied Arna primly. “Here’s the morguemaster’s re- ceipt.” Garrison took it and frowned. Not only did she give him the morgue slip, but the report of the autopsy as well. The McWhisney woman’s dead arteries had been found to be crawling with neomal bugs — and nothing else. It was a hard fact to face, and he did not want to face it. He couldn’t face it. It was Earth-shaking, outra- geous, impossible. It could not be reconciled with anything he knew. It put him in an awful hole. “But look,” he insisted, “we can’t use the green form. That’s the one for case histories of nonfatal dis- eases, and the Code classifies — ” “I know,” she snapped, “neorna- litis is a Category N malady, a mild, easily controlled undulant fever. I looked it up. Article 849 of the Code says Category N must be re- ported on the green form. That is what I have done.” “That is not right,” he growled, glaring at the offending sheet of paper. “If the woman died, it has to be reported on an authorized death certificate. Anyhow, we are not allowed to change any form. Not ever. It means a lot of de- merits for both of us.” She sniffed. She knew that as well as he. She had been strug- gling with the problem for two hours, and her desk was littered with volumes of the bulky Medical Instructions — those bits of the Grand Code by which they lived and which prescribed their every act. “All right,” she said coldly. “You select the right form and I’ll fill it out.” Medical Inspector Garrison started to make an appropriate re- ply, then thought better of it. He was in no ordinary dilemma, and was beginning to know it. It was more a being caught between two opposing sets of antlers bristling with scores of prickly points. The death, as far as that went, of the obscure Leona McWhisney meant nothing to a seasoned doctor. Peo- ple were dying at Sanitar all the time. But they were dying in ap- proved ways that could be reported on approved forms. Her departure from the normal played hob with the whole Autarchian set-up. Gar- rison groaned aloud, for he was, until that moment, a thoroughly in- doctrinated, obedient, unthinking cog in the vast bureaucracy that was Autarchia. Not once in the thirty years of his life until then had the Code failed him. He had never doubted for an instant that that wonderful document was the omniscient, infallible, unquestion- able guide to human behavior. It was unthinkable that he could doubt it now. And yet — Yet Leona McWhisney was dead, and it was his duty to sign the death papers. By doing it he would cer- tify that her case had been handled in accordance with the Code. There lay the rub. It had been, he was sure, for he knew the superb organ- ization of Sanitar and especially the 124 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION wards under his control, and it could not have been otherwise. There was no one who would have dreamed of departing from the sa- cred instructions by an iota. The problem lay, therefore, on his own desk — how to close the case and still keep out of the Monitorial Courts. The dead woman’s disease, as was every other, was curable, and must be recorded on the green. So decreed the Code. But she had died inexplicably despite the Code, and having died, she must be given a death certificate. But there were only three forms of those, for there were only three possible ways for an Autarchian to die. The most common — reportable on the gray form — was by euthanasia after rec- ommendation of a board of gero- comists, and approved by the Bu- reau of Population Control. Elderly citizens beyond further salvage, or those in excess of the Master Plan were disposed of in this fashion. Then there was the yellow form that was employed when violent ac- cidents occurred. Even the all-wise framers of the Code had not known how to recapitate or re-embowel a citizen thus torn apart. Last of all there was provided the scarlet form for the use of the executioner at Penal House after the monitors had finished dealing with dissenters. That one was on the road to obso- lescence, for in recent generations there had been few who refused to abide by the Code, or scoffed at it. The trait of rebelliousness had been pretty well bred out of the race. Still there must have been some taint of it left, for even Garrison could not bring himself to accept meekly his predicament. If people could die of neomalitis, he thought, the Code should have foreseen it and provided for its proper report- ing. Apparently, they could, and apparently it had not. There was something smelly somewhere. “When you make up your mind about that,” broke in Arna, sweetly, “here are a couple of other ques- tions they want rulings on. The treater on Ward 44- B says that he has twelve patients with neomal that should have been up and out today. The prognosis says so. He wants to know if he keeps on shoot- ing sulfazeoproponyl. He has given all the therapeuticon pre- scribed.” “No, of course not. Better run ’em through the Diagnostat again and take a fresh start.” He watched unhappily as she made a note of it. It was an unsatis- factory answer and he knew it. There was no more authority for rediagnosing a case than for pro- longing treatments after it was sup- posed to be cured. But it seemed to him that as long as they continued to be sick something should be done. “And the admission desk wants to know,” she went on, “what about quotas? According to vital statistics Sanitar is supposed to get only three hundred cases of neomal a quarter. We’ve admitted that many in the last ten days. Shall they keep on taking ’em in, or turn ’em away?" THE ANARCH 125 “Oh, we can’t turn ’em away,” said Garrison weakly. He was right, too. The Code specifically forbade it. But the Code had also set the admission rate for Sanitar, based on the known incidence of various diseases, and it could not be much exceeded for the excellent reason that the hospital’s capacity and personnel were fixed by the Master Plan. “Yes, sir,” said the exasperating scribe, and jotted down his answer. He glanced worriedly at the Mc- Whisney papers on his desk. He could not sign them as they were. He had to make sure. “I’m going to make an inspec- tion,” he announced, and stalked out of the room. Medical Inspector Garrison was what the Autarchian Code had made him. It was no fault of his that he had been born into a perfect, well-ordered world where every de- tail was planned and there was no room for independent thought or initiative. He was the natural re- sult of his training. His very first memories had to do with the Code, and from then on he had never en- countered anything else. At the age of five the Psychometrists had come and taken him from his creche and tested him with glittering instru- ments that gave off dazzling multi- colored lights. That was when his first psychogram was made and his Cerebral Index established. That was what set him on the road to doctorhood, and made him an in- terne in a Sanitar at the age of fif- teen. By that time he had mastered the Junior Social Code and most of the Medical, and along with it he learned those portions of the Penal Code that applied, plus such other fragments as would be of use. No man alive, with the possible excep- tion of the Autarch himself, could know the whole of the Grand Code, for it covered the entire field of human knowledge. Garrison only knew that whatever there was to be done, the manner of doing it was to be found in some partof the Code. And he also knew that there was no other way of doing it. That is, un- less he wanted to invite the atten- tions of the monitors. And it was common knowledge that no one who went to Penal House was ever seen again. The Autarchs did not encourage nonconformity. It was with this background and the puzzling conflicts of the morn- ing uppermost in his mind that he strode along Sanitar’s endless corri- dors. Hitherto the Code had never failed him. Now he was lost in a maze of contradictory instructions, not one of which he dared question or refuse to abide by. Heretical ideas kept flitting through his trou- bled brain. Long dormant traits began to stir and come to life with- in him. Curiosity was one. Some- how it had survived in his heritage of genes. He wanted to know — wanted desperately to know — why Leona McWhisney had died, when the book said she couldn’t? What was happening in neomalitis? Why was it fast becoming more preva- lent? What was making it more ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION All 126 virulent? Why didn’t the sulfa drug still cure it as it had always done before? He arrived at the admission desk and looked about him. Everything was exactly as it should be. There the applicants were being logged and turned over to the attendants to be stripped and scrubbed prior to their full examination. Their dos- siers were being sent for. He picked up one at random and examined it. 'It was a magnificent document, many inches thick. In it was the record of its owner’s med- ical history from birth, complete with the X rays and body chemistry findings taken at every successive annual examination. There were curves of growth and change, and accounts of incidental illnesses. Everything the most exacting doc- tor could want was there. Garrison laid it aside and went on. He passed by the various ex- amining rooms and laboratories with little more than a glance in. All were carrying out their func- tions perfectly. In one place blood and spinal fluid were being ana- lyzed; in another, men sat in rows having their electrocardiograms re- corded. A group of psychomeds were probing neural currents to find out a patient’s attitude toward his own condition, and elsewhere the newcomers lav on cots having their current basal metabolism estab- lished. In the biological lab ob- servers were scrutinizing bacteria cultures and dissecting tissue. Everywhere there were checkers, going over the other fellow’s work. The young inspector knew there could be no slip-up in the collection of basic data. A quick turn through a couple of wards revealed things going well there also, so far as the medication was concerned. He even consulted with the chief pharma- ceutical inspector to make sure the drugs, used were up to standard. Perfection reigned in exact accord- ance with the Code. The only jar- ring note was that the wards were becoming crowded. There were ever more sick, and the sick ones were not recovering as they should. In 45-B Garrison was stunned to learn that two more neomals had just died, and that several others were about to. It took the Mc- Whisney affair out of the freak class. It denoted a trend. It also ended the hope of overlooking that first case. There could be but one other factor. The data were correct, and the treatment given as prescribed. The only other room for error was in the diagnosis, so Garrison went to the elevator bank in the great central tower. No one had ever questioned a Diagnostat before, but he meant to now. He punched the button for the express car to the sub-basement. The only word to apply to the cavern where the ponderous ma- chines purred and ticked was — vast. The great monsters stood in long rows — the Sorensons down one side of the room, and the Klingmasters the other. Those massive calcu- lators were the only examples in all THE ANARCH 127 Autarchia where two distinct models of machines were doing the work of one. In every other case the framers of the Code had se- lected the best type and discarded all the others. But the Sorenson and Klingmaster Diagnostats ar- rived at their findings through rad- ically different channels. Since they were equally efficient both were kept, to be used in opposing pairs, one to check the other. Garrison offered the foreman of the room the dossier of Leona Mc- Whisney. “Hm-m-m,” mused the foreman, glancing at the record. “This has already been through — done on Sorenson 39, cross-checked by Kling 55. Neomalitis, Type III, sub-type C. What’s wrong?” “She’s dead,” said Garrison. The foreman shrugged. “All we do here is diagnose ’em. If they kick the bucket, it’s some- body else’s fault. You'd better check up on your treaters, or on the dope they use.” “I have. It must be the diag- nosis. It can’t be anything else.” “Oh, can't it?” countered the Diagnostat foreman. “Did you know they lost ten pneumonia cases over in Bronchial wing last week ? Did you hear about the guy up in Psychopathic? A mild neurosis was all we had on the fellow here. Well, he ran amok last night — cut the throats of four fellow patients and then jumped out the window. There is something screwy going on, all right, but it’s not down here.” “I want a recheck on this,” in- sisted Garrison. “But she’s dead,” objected the foreman. Then he saw the glitter in Garrison’s eye. “O.K.,” he mumbled, and reached for the book. Garrison looked on in silence while the monster did its work. The data was fed in by various means through various orifices. Queerly punched cards bore part of the information— such items as could be expressed by figures, as weight, pulse, blood pressure, res- piration, and so on. The curves of the cardio and encephalograms were grabbed by tiny steel fingers and drawn into the maw of the ma- chine. It clucked loudly as the X-ray plates were slid into a slot. The amplitude and frequency of the undulant fever readings were given it. When all was in the fore- man closed one switch and opened another. “This is a different Sorenson, and hooked up with a different Kling,” he said. “Both were over- hauled last night, but I'll bet you get the same answer as you got before.” “That's what I want to know,” ^said the inspector. The machine purred and groaned. Then it set up a clicking and stopped momentarily. Up to that point it had ignored the symptoms, Garrison knew, and was engaged in breaking down and analyzing the basic factors. Now it reintegrated them and was ready for its first pronouncement. A window lit up with glowing letters: 128 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION Constitution fair. Physical Resistance Factor: 88.803; Psychic Factor: 61.005. Composite Factor : 72.666. The light died, and a confirma- tory card dropped out. The purr- ing was resumed. Garrison con- sidered the figures. They were about right. The woman had been of excellent general physique, though a trifle depressed in spirits. She should have thrown off any dis- ease with reasonable ease. Now a red light was burning, indicating the Diagnostat was tak- ing into account the developments due to infection. After a bit a gong sounded, and the machine growled to a full stop. Another card dropped out: Neomalitis, Type III, sub-type C. Garrison looked at it, then walked across the hall to the Klingmaster. It was slower to reach its conclu- sion, but when it did it was iden- tical. “All right,” said the foreman, “that’s that. Now let’s do the rest.” He poked one of the cards into a smaller machine — a therapeuticon, with prognosticon attachment. It took the contraption less than a minute to cough out the answer: Indication : 6 g. sulfazeopronyl every four hours for eight days. Tepid baths daily ; abundant rest. Prognosis : Discharge in nine days, ten hours. Garrison looked crestfallen. He thought he had an out. Now he was where he started. He shook his head dismally. “She’s dead,” he said, “and it’s only a week.” “An autopsy ought to settle it for you,” suggested the foreman. “It has,” said the miserable in- spector. “It said neomalitis.” And he walked away, leaving an indignant Diagnostat man glaring after him. Garrison signed the pale-green paper reluctantly. There seemed to be nothing else to do. Then he glanced at the chronodial and saw that it was nearly seventeen, time for the day-watch to go off duty. At that moment there was a shrill warning buzz and the omnivox lit up. A fanfare of trumpets warned that something big and unusual was about to come through. He got to his feet and stood at attention. A uniformed figure appeared on the screen. “By order of his supremacy, the Autarch,” he proclaimed in a deep, sonorous voice. “Effective im- mediately, those provisions of the Social and Penal Code requiring at- tendance during Renovation Hour at Social Halls is suspended for officials of C.I. one-thirty or better. Such officers may attend or not, as they choose — ” Garrison blinked. He had never heard the word “choose” before and had but the faintest idea of what it might mean. More obscure ones were to follow. “If they so elect, they may stay within their own quarters or visit THE ANARCH 129 other officers of similar rank in theirs. Restrictions as to topics of conversation are lifted during this period. Officers will not be re- quired to discuss assigned cultural subjects, but may talk freely on any topic they prefer. Monitors will make note of this alteration in the Codes. ‘‘The order has been published. Carry on.” The light failed, and with it the figure on the screen. Garrison con- tinued to stand for about a minute, entirely at sea as to what the com- munication he had just heard meant. Such words as “elect,” “choose,” and “prefer” had long since become obsolete if not actually forbidden. The concept of choice was wholly absent under the autoc- racy. It never occurred to one that there could be such a thing — it was inconsistent with orderly life. One simply obeyed the Code, which al- ways said “you shall.” To think of anything different was rank heresy and treason, and subject to the severest penalties. Garrison puzzled over the order a moment and gave it up. No doubt there would be further clarification later. Perhaps the Propag lecturer of the evening would have a word to say about it. The order would be carried out of course, but to Garrison’s well-dis- ciplined mind it had the bad fault of ambiguity. The ringing of the corridor gongs snapped his attention away from it. It was time to assemble for supper. He closed his desk, slipped on his tunic, and stepped out into the hall. There he faced to the left as the others were doing, and waited for the whistles of the monitors. The signal was sounded, and the tramp of feet began. Garrison stepped along as he always had done, but with the difference that on this afternoon there was turmoil in his mind. Having to sign that altered document had done some- thing to him. It hurt, and hurt deep. It is difficult for anyone not imbued with bureaucratic tradition to comprehend the poignancy of his anguish. He had been forced by the rules themselves to break a rule. For the first time in his existence he was compelled to question the all-wisdom of the Code. The Code had declared neomal curable ; he had seen the exception. And while he was still quivering with mortifi- cation at that discovery, the pro- nouncement of the Autarch had come. He did not know what it meant precisely, but it signified one more thing clearly. The Autarch had seen fit to modify a Code. The implication was inescapable. The Codes were not infallible. If one provision could be altered, so could all the rest. It was food for anx- ious thought. The marching men came to a downward ramp and took it. On the level below Garrison had to mark time while the officers of that floor cleared the ramp below. He took tbe occasion to look them over critically — something he had never thought of doing before. Like him- self not a few of them but also had 130 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION had inexplicable deaths in their jurisdictions, and every one of them had heard the message just received from the Autarch. But not one of them showed the flush of sup- pressed excitement that he was awkwardly aware warmed his own cheeks. If there was any who shared his newborn doubts, none exhibited it. They marched like so many au- tomatons. Nowhere was there a sign of perplexity or frustration. Instead, he now observed that all were sunk in the same dull apathy that he had noticed in the incoming patients. It was not the apathy of weariness or despair, but a sodden, negative something — sheer indiffer- ence. They did not care. There was no motive to care. Their per- sonalities were not involved, if a citizen of Autarchia could be said to have such a thing as a personality. They were required to put in so much time, and to obey certain in- flexible rules. So long as they did that they had no responsibility as to the outcome. Now they had done their stint and were on their way to replenish the energies they had ex- pended by the ingestion of neces- sary food. The evening to follow would be but an extension of the day — planned, orderly, meaning- less. At times the worm turns in a curious way. In that split second the spirit of some long dead ances- tor stirred within Garrison and woke him up. The breath taking realization came to him that he was an individual — he, Philip Garrison, Medical Inspector of the B wards of Sanitar. He was different some- how from those others. They were clods, puppets. What did it matter what their Cerebral Indexes were, so long as they could read and punch the proper buttons ? Anyone above the moronic level could do the same. No thought or judgment was demanded to conform to the Code. Small wonder they swung along like men stupefied. Garrison could not avoid a slight shudder. The trend of his thoughts were highly treasonable. Then he reminded himself that the monitors possessed only hidden mikes and scanners; they were not telepathic. They could not read the heretical notions striving to make themselves dominant in his brain. He calmed himself, and tried to change his line of thought, for he knew that mad- ness lay that way. He endeavored to recall what a Propag had said at a recent lecture about the “dangers inherent in independent thought” and the hideous predictions of how disruptive such ungoverned activity could be. The arrival at the dining hall put a temporary end to that. He handed his ration card to the Dietitian of the Watch. She glanced at it, scribbled the prescription, and dropped it into the messenger tube. That was all that was required. He marched on with the living robots about him. Shortly he would get food that would no doubt be good for him — sustaining, and containing what he needed, neither more nor less. It would have the calories re- THE ANARCH 131 quired, and the vitamins, and the minerals. It might be tasteless, it might be unpalatable, it was almost sure to be mostly synthetic. But it was what his metabolometer called for, and with that there was no arguing. Garrison ate in sullen silence. So did the others, but with a differ- ence. Theirs was the stolid silence of oxen at a trough. Even the di- rector and the ranking members of his staff on their raised dais ate in the same manner. It was a thing they had to do — it was part of the routine, joyless but necessary. Now Garrison was beginning to under- stand why people were falling ill with such ease, and being ill, failed to rally. Life was empty. They did not care, nor did their physi- cians care. It was that spirit of don’t-give-a-care that was pushing Autarchia to the brink of ruin. “I’m going to do something about 1.12 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION this,” muttered Garrison to him- self, “and I’ll start by finding out why neomal kills.” He went out with the crowd when the “dismiss” signal was given. He took the elevator to the tower where the gyrocar was wait- ing. Then he sat in the seat his position rated — one by a window, and hung on as the car teetered drunkenly as it cleared the slip. After that it straightened up and went whizzing along its elevated monorail, careening around curves on its nightly trip to Dorm. The sun was on the point of set- ting, but everywhere there was full light. It was rolling country, cov- ered with fields, and the horizon was broken only by the occasional bulk of a plant where alcohol or plastics were made from the prod- ucts of the soil. The intervening fields were planted in corn and to- matoes, bulk crops that could be grown more profitably outdoors than in the hydropones. An army of low C.I. laborers was still at work, spraying the lush weeds un- der the watchful supervision of the agronomists who sat perched on lofty chairs set up among the tas- seled rows. Now that Garrison’s eyes were opened, he saw what he had looked at daily but had never compre- hended before. It was that the laborers’ w T ork was futile. The cornfields and the acres of toma- toes were like his wards in Sanitar. Uncontrollable and malignant weeds and blights had moved in and were taking them. As the car rushed over a hilltop where the ground rose up almost to it, he could see the details better. Where once the fruit hung bright and red and round, it was now sparce, dis- colored and misshapen. Plump ears of corn were replaced by scrawny spindles riddled with wormholes. Garrison could glimpse them now and then despite the weeds which in many places towered even above the tall corn. The sight added to his glumness. It had not always been that way. Only a few years before the fields had been clean and sparkling — good reddish soil topped with orderly rows of the desired crop plants and nothing else. Insecticide sprays and selected chemical soil treatment used to work. Lately they did not seem to. Why? They had suc- cessfully done so for two hundred years. What was bringing about the change? Was the Agricultural Code inadequate, too? The car swerved and swept across the highway. A pile of grim gray buildings flashed by. That was one of the many structures -known as Penal Houses. To Gar- rison’s new awareness it took on a change of significance. It was an- other symptom of what was wrong with Autarchia. Designed to hold ten thousand unhappy rebels await- ing execution, today it stood empty. Seven generations of systematic ex- termination of dissenters had done its work. The breed was now ex- tinct. No one thought of, let alone dared, dissent these days. The very concept of nonconformity was ex- THE ANARCH 133 tinct. Garrison knew of it only because of the warnings of the Propags and the presence of the watchful monitors. Yet the prisons still stood. They were useless anachronisms now, complete with large garrisons of monitors waiting boredly for more grist for their mills. But they could not be abol- ished because they, too, were part of the Master Plan. What re’oy must always be. Garrison turned away from the prison in disgust. It would be bet- ter, he thought, if the idle monitors were put to work in the fields tear- ing out the weeds by hand. Then they would be at something produc- tive. The car swirled on. Suddenly, but briefly, the panorama under- went a change. For about a mile there stretched a field that was un- contaminated like the rest. It looked as all of them used to look. Then the car left it and was over another planted with the same crop, but as weed-choked as the earlier ones. The contrast of the one well- kept field with the others was star- tling. Garrison craned his neck to look back. As he did he became aware that the officer sitting behind him was watching the act intently. He was an old man and wore the distinguishing marks of a high ranking psychomed. It was that that made Garrison uneasy, for many of the senior psychomeds seemed to possess the uncanny knack of reading people’s minds. In the state of agitation he was in he preferred not to be under one’s scrutiny. “Rather different, eh?’’ queried the older man, with a quizzical smile. “Why, I wonder?” “Different soil, probably,” ven- tured Garrison, feeling some an- swer was expected. “Hardly,” remarked the psychi- atrist. “They took such differences into account when they drew up the Master Plan. All these fields are assigned to the same tillage.” “I’m only a medic,” hedged Gar- rison, “I wouldn’t know.” “For the very reason that we are medics,” pursued the other, “it might pay us to know. Below us are fields that have been success- fully farmed for centuries. Now the pests refuse to be kept at bay. They are conquering except in that one field that seems to interest you. It would indicate, I think, that one Agronomist knows something the others do not. That fact is worthy of our consideration." “Why?” asked Garrison stupidly. Fie knew it w r as stupid, but the con- versation was taking a perilous turn. This psychomed was prob- ing dangerously near to his heret- ical inner thoughts. Garrison wanted to mask them. “The analogy between vegetable blight and human disease ought to be apparent to anyone,” shrugged the elder doctor. “We study both and find remedies. Then, in the course of time, one or the other or both get out of control. Flaven’t you found it so?” 134 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION “A woman died in one of my wards last night,” hesitated Garri- son, ‘‘if that is what you mean. She should not have, so far as I can see. But we did our duty under the Code—” The psychomed glanced cau- tiously about. The other passen- gers dozed sluggishly in their seats. The noise of the car precluded eavesdropping. “Our duty is to save lives, my friend,” he said in a low tone. “In that the truly excellent Code is our best guide. But there is coming a time, and soon, when it must be changed — ” “Yes, yes, perhaps,” said Garri- son, flurried, half frozen with alarm. Those were fearful words, and a lifetime of listening to Pro- pags had set his reflexes. It was not a light matter to change their patterns. “If such a time should come, no doubt the Autarch will give consideration to it.” “The Autarch is neither doctor nor agronomist nor any one of the hundreds of other kinds of special- ists it takes to operate a world like ours. He may sense impending peril, but how will he know how — ” “Sir,” said Garrison stiffly, scared through and through, “your words border on treason. I refuse to listen. Have a care, or you will find yourself in trouble.” The old man gave a contemptu- ous snort. “Trouble? Listen, boy. I am inspector general for all the Sani- tars in this hemisphere. You know of several unaccountable deaths; I know of thousands. You have seen a handful of stricken fields; I have seen abandoned wastes stretching hundreds of miles. It adds up to one dire result — pestilence and famine. Not yet, but soon. If you think the monitors are to be feared, think on that pair of scourges.” Garrison kept silent. He was afraid still in spite of himself, but he wanted to hear more. “As for myself, nothing mat- ters,” continued the psychomed. “I chose to speak to you because you turned back for a second look at the one well managed field. It showed me that regimentation had not made a clod of you altogether. There are not many of us like that, so I broke the ice. Tomorrow I appear before a Disposal Board. The gerocomists say my heart is beyond aiding and my course is run.” He grinned. “And having a bad heart I am immune from tor- ture. Euthanasia or standard exe- cution — it’s all one to me.” “I’m sorry, sir,” said Garrison. The gyrocar was slowing for the approach to Dorm. “You needn’t be,” growled the old doctor, taking in the other occu- pants of the car in an all-inclusive sw'eep of the arm. “Be sorry for those dumb inert creatures. And by the way, if you care to pursue the subject further, the name of the agronomist in charge of the field you liked is Clevering.” The car reeled to a stop. Garri- son scrambled to his feet and crossed the spidery bridge that gave access to the high tower of Dorm. THE ANARCH 135 Beneath were the huge public rooms, the baths and gymnasiums and the libraries of the Code. Down there were kept the individuals’ rec- ords, and also where the vast social hall was. The rooms and dormi- tories were in the starlike wings. Garrison took the elevator to his floor, and walked along the corridor of his section. The door of the cubicle he called home was open, as all doors had to be when the room occupant was absent. He went in and lay down on the narrow bunk for the prescribed period of rest. From it he surveyed his habitation with some curiosity, never having thought to do so before. There were the plain plastic walls, dimly luminous, and the Spartan cot he lay on. There was a chair on which he hung his clothes at night. During the night an at- tendant would come and replace them with others. He had no need for any but the authorized costume of the day, and it was always pro- vided. There was a small wash- bowl with a shelf and mirror above it, beside which was posted his indi- vidual hygiene instructions — the hours of rising and going to bed, the hour and nature of the bath he was to take, and such details. On a small table lay a copy of the Social Code. That completed the furnishings. Ordinary Garrison spent the rest period relaxed and with a blank mind. Today he could not. He kept turning over in his mind the prob- lems that seemed to be growing more complex hourly. There was the death of Leona McWhisney, the enigmatic edict of the Autarch, the provocative remarks of the psychi- atric inspector, and the mystery of the one uncontaminated farm. Now he had to deside also what he was going to do about the Social Hour. The daily event was always boring, as was most of the well-ordered life he led, but it was a way to while away the time until the hour set for sleeping. He wondered how one went about visiting another in his room, and if he did visit, what they would talk about. And that caused him to open an eye and wonder where was the scanner-mike that kept watch on his room, and whether it was alive all the time, or only now and then. Habit is strong. He was already sitting up on the edge of the bunk when the stand-by buzzers sounded. That meant five minutes until Social Hour began. He was already tired of his cell and wanting to move. He heard doors outside being opened and the shuffle of feet. The others were on their way. He hesi- tated, then got up and went out, too. There was not a closed door in the hall. The man opposite him had just come out — a master electrician in charge of the X-ray machines. “You are going as usual?” asked Garrison. “Where else is there to go?” an- swered the fellow. “We could stay here and talk,” suggested Garrison. “About what?” he asked curtly, and turned down the hall. 136 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION The harried glance he gave the walls and ceilings as he did was the clue to his behavior. Garrison in- stantly read it aright. The Au- tarch’s edict of the afternoon stated that certain regulations were “sus- pended.” There was nothing in the way of assurance that the free conversations allowed would not be listened to and recorded by the monitors. Garrison frowned. Could the Autarch’s seeming generosity be a ruse to entrap the unwary? Small wonder the fellow had ducked. For his part Garrison re- alized he had just had a narrow escape. He meant fully to discuss the McWhisney death and other things with anyone who would listen. Garrison went on to the Social Hall. The evening proved to be, if possible, duller than usual. Gar- rison found the other officials ranged in chairs before the lecture platform waiting stolidly for the Propag to begin. None had so much as delayed his coming. Gar- rison sat down at his customary place. The Propag was coming on the stage. “It has come to my ears,” he began in the sing-song voice af- fected by the members of his pro- fession, “that a few of you are troubled. In hours of weakness it is human to falter, and there may be some so debased as even to doubt our wonderful Code in the dark moments. That is evil. The Code is all-wise. Believe in it, fol- low it, and trouble not. All will be well. Let us, my friends, go back and remember our first lessons. “In the beginning there was chaos. All the world was divided into many nations, speaking differ- ent languages, having different cus- toms, and struggling one with an- other — ” Garrison did not have to listen. The famous "Basic Lecture” had been dinned into his ears at yearly intervals all his,, life. Once it meant something, now it was an empty piece of ritual. Men sat through it unhearing, for they knew its words by heart. It told of the Bloody Century — the Twentieth — and of its devastat- ing wars. Those were the bitter conflicts between Imperialists and Republicans, Totalitarianism and Democracy, and the varicolored races. Then would come the story of the infant leagues and unions of nations, and the bickerings among them for top power. After- wards there were fierce revolts in certain quarters. The world before The Beginning was a world of strife and murder and destruction. It was a horrid world. “Yes, horrid!” the Propag would scream at that point. “An insane w'orld. A world where there were many opinions about the simplest matters. Men differed, and be- cause they differed they fought. It was under the sage Harlking the Great — the Autarch of the Fourth Coalition — that the Grand Code came into being. He perceived clearly that the world, though not perfect, was good enough if men THE ANARCH 137 were only content. So he convoked an assembly of the thousand wisest men of the age. These were the men we now call the framers, for their task was to sift the world’s store of wisdom and select the best for inclusion in the Code. It took forty years for them to complete their colossal work, but when it was done the Autarch pronounced it good. That was Gemmerer the Wise, for Harlking did not live to see his glorious idea come to fru- ition. “Gemmerer promulgated the Grand Code, and in doing so for- bade that it ever be altered. He foresaw that there would still be impatient men, or dreamers who might try vainly to better things. Man in primitive societies is hope- lessly inventive. He is never con- tent with things as are. This was an admirable trait in the formative days of civilization, but in a highly integrated world community is har- bors the germ of warfare. The in- troduction of a new r thing, is always a challenge to the old, and the partisans of the old invariably fight back. There must be no more war. Therefore there must be no new thing. Stand men, and repeat the creed of our fathers!” Sheeplike the audience stood. The Propag led off, and the mumbled chorus of responses follow'ed. “The Code given us is good !” “It must not be altered.” “It is the quintessence of the wisdom of the race!” “It must not be questioned.” “It must be obeyed forevermore.” “Amen.” The rumbling echoes of the whis- pered responses died, and the men dropped back into their seats. The Propag treated them with his pro- fessional glare for one solemn mo- ment. Then he partially dropped the cloak of solemnity. “Is there anyone present,” he asked, still stern, “who ... ah, prefers to talk about a topic other than the one w r e have been study- ing?” Several men shifted uneasily in their seats, but no one answered. “Very well,” said the Propag, “we will break up into the usual groups. Group directors please take charge.” There was a rustling as the men found their way to the places where they were to be treated to cultural enlightenment. Garrison joined his proper group dejectedly. He cared less than ever for the plump, curly- haired young man who was his reno- vation director. That w'orthy looked his small flock over and saw that they were all present. “Last night,” he chirruped w'ith a false heartiness that made Gar- rison want to smack him, “we were discussing the complementary ef- fect of strong colors when placed in juxtaposition. Now', if we take a vivid orange, say, and put it alongside an intense green — ” Garrison heard it out, bored stiff. Real problems were stew'ing inside his head, and the froth he was com- pelled to listen to angered him. Otherwise it was simply dreary. But eventually it came to an end. 138 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION and the Social Hour broke up. Gar- rison caught up with a departing agronomist, and asked him where he could find Gevering. “Clevering? I think lie’s sick. He collapsed in the field today. As I was coming in I saw a Sanitar ambulance going in the gate. “Thanks,” said Garrison, and tramped down to his cubicle, and to bed. Nine more neomals died in Ward 44-B that night, and in the morn- ing there were no discharges. But waiting at the admission doors were hundreds of new cases — too many to be accommodated under the quota. Garrison noted with a wry sort of satisfaction that the ad- mitting doctors were also strug- gling with an insoluble problem. There were others besides, as he found out when he reached his of- fice. Treater Henderson was await- ing him there with a sheaf of new diagnoses. “What am I supposed to do with these?” he asked, plaintively, shov- ing them into Garrison’s hands. Garrison took the topmost card and stared at it. Diagnosis: Neomalitis, Type $#!.. etaoinshrdlu . . sputsputsput. Treatment : Sultazeoproproproproppr- popopop. . . .nyl ! Prognosis : ????????? He scowled and grabbed up an intercommunicator. In a moment he had the foreman of the Diag- nostat room on the wire. “Have your machines gone crazy?” he snapped. “They stut- ter. They give us gibberish.” “Can’t help it,” came back the answering voice. “We tried ma- chine after machine. They all do it. And our tests conclusively show — ” Garrison flipped off the connec- tion. He was up a blind alley there and knew it. He turned to the treater. “Keep on giving ’em the stand- ard sulfa treatment.” After the treater left Garrison sat down weakly and wiped the sweat from his brow. So far he was within the Code, for sulfa drugs were indicated for all cases of neomal, regardless of type. But intuition told him that hereafter it would do no good. The stark truth was that the neomal bug had bred itself into a new type — a strain far hardier than the old, and more malignant. What he had to con- tend with was a bacillus that was practically immune to sulfazeopro- ponyl. It was, therefore, causing an utterly new disease, one not con- templated by the august framers. And, unless something was done quickly, a decimating plague would shortly be sweeping the world. But what? The Code prescribed only the sulfa drug in such and such quantities, and the penalties incurred for administering any other were cruel. Garrison stared miserably at the stack of diagnosis slips. For once he felt a sense of personal responsibility to those suf- ferers down in the wards. He felt like a murderer. Then his eye THE ANARCH 139 lit on a name atop a card. The name was, “Henry Clevering, Agronomist 1st Class.” He lost no time in getting down to the ward. The wards of Sanitar were not wards in the old sense, but group- ings of rooms, and Garrison found his man in the fourth one on the left. The moment he saw him he knew his hours were numbered, for the chart showed the oscillations of the fever hitting ever new highs with a shortening of the period be- tween. Already the ever vigilant monitors had set up a portable mike beside the bed to record his ravings when a little later he would be in delirium. In earlier days such death- bed revelations had often given -them valuable leads to subversive dissenters still living. Garrison saw the fever eyes of the sick man following him about the room, but he went about what he had to do. He closed the door softly, and then stuck a wisp of cotton into the mike so as to damp its diaphragm for the time being. He sat down beside the patient and placed a cool hand on his forehead. “The weeds have got me at last, I guess,” said Clevering, smiling feebly, “weeds or blight. They’re getting bad, you know.” “Yes, I know,” said Garrison, “and that is why it is bad for Au- tarchia to lose a man who knows how to fight them.” “Autarchia?” whispered the other, “a lot Autarchia cares. If they knew what I know, they would have crucified me long ago. But you are not speaking for Autarchia, or you would not have shut off that spy’s ear.” “By Autarchia I meant the hu- man race,” replied Garrison, sooth- ingly. “I saw your farm last night. I really saw it, for I’ve been blind up to now. I want you to tell me how you kept your field clean. We have needs of a sort here too, you know.” Clevering smiled wanly. “You want to know what I did, eh? Well, I forgot the Code when I saw it wasn’t working any more. I tried this and that until I found something that did work. Organic things don’t stay put. They grow and change and evolve. What stood off the blights when the Code was drawn isn’t worth anything these days. I found that out years ago when it first got bad. I falsified my records so the inspectors wouldn’t know. That is how I kept out of Penal House. Maybe I should have spoken out before, but who was there to hear? I do love a clean cornfield, though, and that’s why I kept plugging. The books helped, too.” A spasm of shivering shook him as a fresh chill came on. Garrison gave a worried look at the chart. He had not arrived too soon. The next fever peak would probably be the last. Clevering was a dying man. “What books?” asked Garrison sharply. “There are no books that I know of except the Code.” “The . . . the ones in the Au- tarch’s secret library,” managed 140 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION Clevering through chattering teeth. “A few were stolen years ago by a dissenter who was a palace guard until the monitors found him out. They have been handed down through several generations to trusted fellow believers. I am the last one. There are no others that I know of.” "I am one,!’ said Garrison quietly. He was astonished at his own coolness when he said it, for twenty-four hours earlier he would have allowed wild horses to pull him apart rather than utter the blas- phemous words. Now all that was changed. “I am seeing people die who should not be dying,” he explained. “I don’t like it. The Code is — ” here be almost choked on the words, such is strength of inhibiting doc- trine, “the Code is — well, the Code is all wrong ! It’s got to be changed. It’s got to be repealed!” “I believe you,” said Clevering, and pulled Garrison toward him so he could whisper, “the books are under a false flooring in a shed — ” Garrison listened attentively to the instructions, but before the pa- tient quite finished, the fever got the better of him and he rambled off into incoherent nonsense. Gar- rison stayed on, for it was not all nonsense. There were lucid stretches in which Clevering lived his experi- ments again — the trying of this or another spray on the blights, and the application of various chemicals to learn which helped the corn and discouraged the weeds. At length the end came, and there was no more to do. Neomal had claimed another victim, this one appallingly swiftly. Garrison removed the plug of cotton and softly left the room. Garrison's life for the next five weeks was a frenzied jumble of concealed activity. Taking infinite care to wear the mask of common apathy, and covering his move- ments with studied casualness, he steadfastly pursued two aims. One was the reading of the forbidden books, which he dug up during his first available free time. Thereafter he read them in his room, hiding them meanwhile in his mattress. The books were a strangely varie- gated lot. Some w£re on scientific subjects, others social or philo- sophic. There was history, too, and something about religion. The book he came to love most of all was a very slim one — a little volume on “Liberty” by a John Stuart Mill. His limited vocabulary trou- bled him much at first, but he shrewdly arrived at the meanings of such words as “choice” and “freedom” by considering the con- text. He discovered to his delight that there were shades between good and bad. There were the words “better” and “best” as well as the bare, unqualified “good.” While the books opened up vis- tas unimagined to his thinking, it was at Sanitar that he performed his most imperative work. He wanted to find out why nomalitis had suddenly turned killer, and how to foil it. On the pretense of check- ing the biologists, he pored over THE ANARCH 141 blood and lymph specimens of the ever arriving patients. He built up culture colonies, and then tried to destroy them with modifications of the sulfa drug. The results were negative, so he tried other com- pounds. Then he cultured viruses, and pitted one strain against an- other. And as the average Psychic Resistance Index kept dropping lower he pondered that feature. Ap- parently the Diagnostats were not calibrated for patients so consist- ently depressed and without desire to live, for shortly the uncanny machines balked at giving any prog- nosis whatever. All that would come out was a meaningless jumble of characters. At last the day came when he found a drug that killed the new strain of neomal bacilli in the labo- ratory. He was careful to restrain any expression of joy, though his impulse was to leap into the air and yell “Eureka !” Instead, he cautiously loaded a number of hy- perdermic needles and wandered into a ward. He sent the attendants away on various errands, and set about the risky job he was compelled to do. He injected all the patients in the rooms on the left-hand side of the corridor. Then he went as soon as possible to his office and awaited results. They were not long in coming. Within the hour an agitated treater rushed in. “All hell has broken loose in 44-B,” he reported. “It can’t be neomalitis those patients have. “They’re in convulsions.” “I’ll be right down,” said Gar- rison. His bones had turned to water, but he had to see the thing through. He knew, from his be- lated reading, that one was sup- posed to experiment on guinea pigs and monkeys before injecting strong and untried medicines into human beings. But there were no longer any such animals. They had been decreed useless and were long extinct. Yet the patients were doomed anyhow — he felt justified in taking the chance. But he had not foreseen convulsions. By the time he reached the ward the worst of the spasms had sub- sided. Some of his inoculated pa- tients had succumbed in their agony. The remainder lay spent and gasping, with expressions of utmost horror on their faces. Gar- rison surveyed them stonily, but his heart was cold with anxiety. “Very odd,” he remarked, mak- ing notes. “I shall report it, of course.” He was too upset to do anything else that day, but that night he thought long and hard about it. The following morning he learned to his immense relief that only a few more of his illegally injected patients had died, whereas the half ward under Code treatment had lost its normal number — about eighty percent. During the tense day that followed, the survivors among his experimental subjects began to rally. By nightfall several had lost all symptoms. In a day or so, 142 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION THE BEST OF THE WEST . ///////'i 7 /&m "***.■?■> *■ »s ‘ • £&zr An anthology of the finest western stories Street & Smith has published! - The authors in this big bargain book are the top- hand Western writers whose work you know from books, screen and radio. Among the famous names are: WALT COBURN • BENNETT FOSTER • L. L. FOREMAN C. K. SHAW • S. OMAR BARKER • HARRY F. OLMSTED HARRY SINCLAIR DRAGO Illustrations throughout and a striking* four- color cover! 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A grand glow of achievement warmed him, and when he returned to his office he could not help walking like one who had conquered the Earth. Pie had tried, fumbled, and then gone over the top. Now he understood the rewards that come to those who achieve by their own wit and han- diwork. But there was another kind of reward awaiting him. At the door of his office two grim monitors met him. They shut off his remon- strances with a blow across the face. Then he was hustled into an ele- vator and shot to the top of the tower where an angry director was pacing the floor. A smug inspector of pharmaceuticals was standing by with a packet of inventory sheets. “Explain yourself, sirrah !” snorted the pompous, red-faced man who headed Sanitar. “What do you mean by forging chemical with- drawals? Sulfa drugs — pah! You have not used a gram of sulfazeo- proponyl in ten days. Instead you — ” “Instead, I have been saving the lives of my patients,” said Garri- son quietly. “I gave them the Code stuff and they died, just as they are doing in the other wards. Therefore I knew that — ” “Silence!” roared the director, shutting him off. “Not a word more. Nothing . . . nothing, mind you ... is as hideous as willful violation of the Code. What does it matter whether a thousand or more weaklings die? It is better so than to return to chaos. Mon- itors, do your duty !” The monitors did their duty. They did it precisely as the Penal Code said they must, exactly as it had been found necessary in the early days when there were many rebels, and those tough and fear- less. They flung chains about his wrists and dragged him to the ele- vator, kicking and cuffing him at every step. They paraded him through the great lobby on the ground floor for the edification of his brother ratings. And then they hurled him half unconscious into the waiting prison van. After that for awhile Garrison hardly knew what happened to him. There was a prolonged session under a daz- zling light, during which venomous voices hurled abrupt questions at him. They injected him with scopa, and they brought psychomends of the Penal branch to try hypnosis on him. They beat him at intervals, and confronted him with the books they had uncovered in his room. “You are fools, fools, FOOLS, I SAY !” he screamed when he 144 ASTOUNDING SCTENCE-FICTION could stand it no more. “Yes, I had an accomplice. His name was Clevering . . . Clevering the agron- omist. He’s dead now, so it does not matter. He kept the weeds out. He kept the blight out. So you have corn. That -was contrary to the Code, but you have it !’’ That was when his memory ceased to register. The things they did to him after that did not matter. Or they did not matter until hours later when he found himself crawl- ing miserably on the hard steel floor of a cell. He felt his wounds and the stickiness of them made him faint again. After that he slept for many hours. How many days he languished, sore and battered and hungry, in the dark he had no notion. He was hauled out one day for questioning by a solemn board of psychomeds. That was to determine his sanity. He answered them defiantly from between swollen lips and with words that had to be mumbled for lack of teeth. They overwhelmed him with scorn, and pronounced him sane. The Penal Code could take its course. After that there was more of darkness. Not one person in Sanitar or from Dorm attempted to communicate with him. He was unclean. He was different. He was a convicted dissenter. His name was already erased from the roster of the living. It was an eternity after that when the four burly monitors came in the dead of night. He heard the heavy tramp of their feet in the corridor, and the crash as his door was thrown open. Then hand flash- lights played on him. “Up, snake !” snarled one, and yanked him to his feet. “Don't mark him any more,” warned another. “The captain said not. The Autarch is going to work on this one in person, and they say he likes ’em fresh and able to take it.” The other monitors snickered, and something whispered was said that Garrison’s ears did not catch. Then he was shoved into the deso- late corridor and propelled forward. Next came a jolting, mad ride to the airport, and then comparative quiet as the giant stratoplane soared through the sky. Sometime later there was another ride in a van, with a stop after a bit for challenges and explanations. Then Garrison heard the creak of great bronze gates opening on seldom used hinges, after which he was handed through a door and into a small elevator. The moment he stepped out he knew he must be in the palace. He had not imagined such grandeur. The floors were heavily carpeted in rich designs, and the walls glowed with an eerie softness. Uniformed flunkies and guards stood every- where, eying him curiously. Gar- rison became painfully aware of his own drab appearance, for he wore only a very dirty shirt badly stained with blood, and his body was encrusted with the muck of his cell floor. His beard had grown un- touched since the first day of his incarceration. Add his bloodshot THE ANARCH 145 eyes and battered features to that and lie knew lie must present a per- fect picture of a desperate criminal. A silver robed official of the palace intercepted them. “Oh, he can’t go in like that,” he said. “He’ll have to be washed. This way with him.” Garrison felt better after the re- pair work was done. He had re- signed himself to taunts and tor- tures and ultimate death, but it felt good to be clean for once. They even trimmed his hair and shaved him, and dressed him fully with dark-blue silken clothes after ap- plying pleasing ointments to his welts. “You needn’t mock,” Garrison cried out, as they slipped the smooth cloths onto him. “I am a dissenter and proud of it. Let’s get on with it.” “Take it easy,” said the treater who had patched him up. “The Autarch would not have sent for you if you had been just an ordi- nary case.” They gave him a sweet mixture of chocolate and milk and put him in a darkened room to rest awhile, telling him that his audience was not to be until noon. He tried to rest, but could not. Too much was running around inside his head. He knew that he was condemned to die, for the monitors had told him as much. His hope was that before the hour came he could at least get the reason for his rebellion on the record. An officer of the guard came and escorted him down the carpeted halls. This time there were no harsh words or cuffing, but stiff civility. He took him to a pair of richly paneled doors which two flunkies drew open. Garrison was told to go in, and the doors closed silently behind him. He had en- tered alone ; the officer remained outside. It was an immense square room, luxuriously appointed, and facing him was a massive desk beside which stood a man he knew must be the Autarch. He was a magnifi- cent specimen of manhood, tall, barrelchested, and commanding. He wore a robe of wine-red satin bound with cloth of gold, but his gray- streaked leonine head was bare. His gaze was steady on Garrison — a coldly appraising gaze from hard blue eyes, and under them an un- smiling mouth of iron. When he spoke it was with a deep and vi- brant voice without a trace of emo- tion in it. “So you are a rebel,” said the Autarch, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “I am.” Garrison was desperately afraid he was about to tremble, for the man’s personality was overpower- ing, and nothing in his previous career had conditioned him to cope with it. “Why?” “I was failing in my job . . . despite the Code,” said Garrison slowly, “and I felt I should do something about it. I did, and suc- ceeded, after a fashion. I saved 146 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION the lives of some of our citizens. That is my crime. If I had it to do over again, I 'would do the same.” “Ah,” said the Autarch, taking a deep breath. “So you defy me?” “You do not understand, or you would not call it defiance,” said Garrison, astonished at his own boldness. But he had already suf- fered death a hundred times in an- ticipation and was beyond fearing talk with you." Garrison sat down and took the proffered cigarette, wondering whether he was on the cruel end of the cat-and-mouse game. “During my reign,” said the Au- tarch, “I have long wanted to meet one of you. From time to time they have brought me what was alleged to be such. They were snivel- ing cowards all — stupid, lazy, care- less or inept people who had in- it. Nothing mattered now. The Autarch frowned momentarily, but continued to size up his prisoner for a minute or so more. “A real rebel, a genuine, sincere dissenter,” he said softly, “at last.” He moved across the room. “Sit down,” he said, “I want to fringed the Code without intent. They had to die, of course, and did. It is the rule, and I am as helpless in the face of it as anyone. But I did hope to find out what was wrong with the world. They could not tell me. Perhaps you can. There is more than one way of THE ANARCH AST.— 6B 147 dying, I may remind you, and I have considerable latitude in that matter.” "I see,” said Garrison. Things were churning about inside his skull. There was the temptation to tell his captor what he wanted to hear and thereby earn a painless death. Yet he did not know what the Autarch wanted. Besides — ‘‘The trouble with the world,” said Garrison carefully, “is the Code itself. Civilization is an or- ganism, made up of a myriad of lesser organisms. Organisms — - men, animals, plants, and on down into the microcosm of minute life — are living things. They grow and develop and evolve. Or else they degenerate. They never stand still. Only the Code stands still. It is too rigid.” "I am not prepared to admit that,” said the Autarch, “but go ahead. Prove your point if you can.” It was the opening Garrison hun- gered for. He recited the recent behavior of neomalitis — the strange turn it was taking, and the help- lessness of the doctors in the face of an uncompromising Code. He explained how bacilli could differ- entiate into fresh and hardier strains, more contagious and dead- lier than their predecessors. And how they might become immune to treatments formerly effective. Then he detailed his own experimenta- tion, handicapped as that was by nonco-operation and the necessity of secrecy. He mentioned Clever- ing and his cornfields and empha- sized the parallelism between the 1 two situations. The conclusion was inescapable. However good the old procedures may have been in their clay, they were not valid now. Radically new approaches were de- manded. “Perhaps,” agreed the Autarch, thoughtfully. “There appears to be truth in what you say. I may as well tell you that other diseases are becoming rampant as well — new varieties of cholera, dysentery, and pneumonia. There is a wave of j suicides, too. Cattle are dying. Many of our vital crops are failing from blight or insect attack. That is not all. Yonorganic things are awry. Despite controls, gradual j shifts of population have thrown ! central power plants out of bal- ance, and left us with highway sys- tems that are either congested or disused.” “A city or region may be re- garded as an organism, too,” Gar- rison reminded him. “So I see. At any rate, it is a problem that has weighed on me for some time. It is growing ur- gent. Something must be done, and quickly.” “I know that,” said Garrison dryly. “If,” suggested the Autarch, “I should see my way clear to grant you an indefinite reprieve — perhaps amounting to a full pardon — would you undertake to bring the diseases mentioned under control?” Garrison smiled a thin, hard smile. I4tt ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION “I am only one man, excellency, and an ill-equipped one at that. I happened to be lucky in stumbling on the remedy right off. In an- other case it might take an army of research workers years. Only by putting thousands of trained men at it in ample laboratories could such a thing be done." “Very well. You are the new Director General of Health. I dele- gate you to find such men and modify the Medical Code." “Flow?" asked Garrison, with a short, scornful laugh. “It is too late for that — by a half dozen gen- erations. Not to modify the Code, but to find the men. The kind of men we need do not develop under an autarchian regime. It is the senseless persecution of your prede- cessors that has brought us to the brink of ruin, not the plant and ani- mal parasites you complain of. Free men would have disposed of them long ago. But that would have re- quired initiative and adaptability, traits long since obliterated. Now the premium is on blind obedience. Men have lost the art of thinking; they will only do what they are told." “That makes it all the easier,” said the Autarch, reaching for a pad. “You write the order stating what you want done. I will pro- mulgate it. It is as simple as that.” Garrison stared at him in blank amazement. “Order what?" he asked. “Men of force and talent to reveal them- selves? Who is to judge whether they have those qualities? And if t HE ANARCH there are such, they will take im- mense pains to conceal themselves. They are afraid. I know that, be- cause I know my own reaction to your recent order relaxing the So- cial Code. I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t trust it. For all I knew the Monitors might be listen- ing and taking it all down." “They were," said the Autarch, “but nothing happened. I was worrying about the state of affairs throughout the world, and hoped to pick up a clue as to what was wrong. There was only silence.” “Ah,” said Garrison, grimly. “That shows the effect of fear. And the deadliness of inertia. There must be many men among our bil- lions who see what is happening and care, but they dare not speak. They see only the Penal Houses ahead for their pains. As to the vast majority . . . bah, they are sheep. They are accustomed only to orders from above. Without positive orders specific to the last little detail, they will not act. What else do you expect from a race of slaves ?” “Slaves !” exclaimed the Autarch. “In the high position you held, how dare you compare yourself with a slave?" “Wasn’t I? I could cast about and find a sweeter euphemism for it, but essentially that was it. I have never known anything but regimentation. I was flattered with the label of a high cerebral rating, but why they assigned me to my job on the basis of it is more than I can understand. The commonest 149 field hand above the moron class could have done the work I did. A machine could have. What use is intelligence if you are not permitted to use it?” “Yes,” admitted the Autarch slowly. “I see that now. But that was then. You are not only per- mitted to use yours now, but or- dered to. Use any means you please to assure them immunity from per- secution, but issue your call — ” “It will take more than negative action,” Garrison reminded him. “To break away from a life of routine a man needs positive moti- vation. And I do not mean pro- motion to a job as sterile as the one he has. It will have to be one to fire his soul and kindle his mind. Simply writing an order will not suffice.” There was an interruption. The major-domo of the Palace brought in a folder of papers. It was the weekly summary of events in Au- tarchia. The Autarch studied it with a face of thunder, then handed it to Garrison. It was a story of regression on all fronts. The worst news came from Asia, where the strange disease that resembled cholera but responded to none of its known controls was sweeping the continent. Millions were already dead, and every ship and stratoplane was spreading the epidemic farther. “In the absence of anything bet- ter,” Garrison remarked, "this should be isolated. You should de- clare an immediate quarantine.” “What is that?” Garrison told him. “That is out of the question,” decided the Autarch, after a mo- ment’s consideration of what it im- plied. “It would be disastrous. The entire workings of the Code hinge on dependable supply and distribu- tion. It — ” “It,” flared Garrison, “shows you how rotten your precious system is. Even you, presumably the ablest man of us all, are stopped by it, though millions die. W hen things start cracking you’re sunk. The holy framers thought they had at- tained perfection and saw no alter- native. Well, cling to your sacred Code and ride to doom with it. But let’s end this farce. Call your exe- cutioner and finish it.” They were both on their feet on the instant. The Autarch was visi- bly trying to control his anger, but Garrison was not to be stopped. The sickening sense of futility he first felt when Leona McWhisney died was back with him, a hundred- fold more strong. His voice rose shrilly, and he threw discretion to the winds. “The race is facing a life-and- death crisis,” he shouted. “Pesti- lence is here, and famine is right around the corner. In the wake of those will come economic pande- monium. The Grand Code cannot cope with them. It was not de- signed to. All it does is stifle us. What we need is men of imagina- tion and boldness, not content with covering themselves by complying with some stereotyped provision of 150 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION the Code. We need them by the tens of thousands, and we cannot find them on account of this un- wieldy body of stupid, frozen laws. There is no time for temporizing. The Code has got to go — lock, stock and barrel!” Garrison said a lot else along the same line. The Autarch heard him out in moody silence. Then he grasped him by the arm and led him to a side door. “My apartment is in there. Go rest. I believe there is something in your argument, but I want to think.” That interview was the begin- ning of a curious friendship. They dined together that evening, and later talked far into the night. By the end of the week Garrison came to appreciate that the office of Autarch was as empty as any in the realm. There, too, the dead hand of the past lay heavily. Being top dog of the pyramid of bureauc- racy meant little, for in Autarchia precedent ruled. Autarchs had oc- casionally added to the Code, but not one had ever repealed a pro- vision. The books confiscated at the time of Garrison’s arrest were sent for by the Autarch. He was amazed at their contents, and began to under- stand better the workings of his guest’s mind. He liked the tech- nical ones best; the one he could stomach least was the little essay by Mill. 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What he needs is not a chorus of undiscriminating yessing, but frank and brutal criticism. He can get that only in a democracy.” “Democracy!” cried the Autarch scornfully. “Anarchy, you mean. What is a democracy but a howling mob of forty opinions, each as little informed as the next? Where, after an infinity of muddling and compromise, some self-styled leader manages to wheedle an agreement among fifty-one out of a hundred of the mass, whereupon he pro- claims a half truth as the whole. That is clumsy nonsense. The world had democracies once. Look • what happened to them !” “Look at what is happening to their flawless successors,” said Gar- rison quietly. The Autarch reddened. “At least,” Garrison argued, “in a democracy the ordinary man had something to live for. He wasn’t a poor pawn. If he hit on a good idea and had the will and person- ality to promote it, he had a chance of getting somewhere. He didn’t vegetate or degenerate into the flesh-and-blood robots we have about us now. Competition with his fellows kept him from doing that. Sure, he made errors. But he did not make the stupidest of all — of freezing them into an in- flexible Code. Where freedom is, a man can develop. I f lie is wrong, others are free to say so. Some wall back him, others oppose, which is the very thing the framers of the Code thought so deplorable. But out of the conflict the better idea usually won.” “After years of wrangling and with many setbacks,” objected the Autarch. “Rather, after continual adjust- ments to current needs,” corrected Garrison. “Democracy may have had its faults, but lack of adapt- ability was not one of them. In freedom of speech and reasonable freedom of action it had the ma- chinery for correcting any intoler- able fault. Which is more than you can say for your own absurd system.” i “All right,” retorted the Autarch. “For argument’s sake suppose I 152 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION grant your point. How, in view of the sheeplike nature of my people which you keep harping on, could we reinstitute an obsolete form of society such as you advocate? I offered ’em free speech, and you know what happened.” “Wake ’em up,” yelled Garrison. “Make ’em mad. Then you’d see.” “With no Code to guide them? I see nothing but chaos.” “We needn’t repeal the whole of the Code. Considered as a guide it isn’t bad at all. Its evil feature is its pretence of being infallible. We’ll teach the people how to judge when to follow and when to di- verge.” “That from you,” snorted the Autarch. “You, who wouldn’t even tackle the revision of the Medical Code! Now you propose to upset the entire applecart, and destroy the people’s confidence. What will you replace it with, and how?” “What with?” smiled Garrison. “There is always your great sealed library. You have seen a small sample of it and liked it. The Code was based on it. It must be good. As to how, that will come later.” “Let’s look,” said the Autarch, with sudden resolution. He dug keys and combinations out of a safe. They reached the library through a long underground passage heavy with the dust of time. Once they passed the guards at the outer bar- rier they were on pavement untrod for decades. Then they came to a heavy circular door that had to be THE ANARCH opened by a complicated group of methods. At length it swung open and they stepped through. Both gasped at the immensity of the place. Not every book ever published was there — only the ones considered by the framers in com- piling the Code. But since they covered every field of human activ- ity in utmost detail, they numbered in the millions. The stacks stretched away for thousands of feet of well- lit, air conditioned space. The mag- nitude of the task they had so lightly assumed almost overwhelmed them, After a long hunt Garrison found the medical section. He was again appalled at the extent of it. for •the volumes dealing with any single aspect of his profession took up yards of shelving. He skipped his- tology, obstetrics, dermatology, and dozens more. There was just too much of it. How was he ever to read it all, let alone sift the chaff’ from the substance? He ducked the questions neatly by concentrat- ing on the volumes devoted to the techniques of research. Meanwhile the Autarch was delv- ing elsewhere. He was deep among the histories and philosophies, with occasional excursions into political economy. Soon the aisles where he roamed were cluttered with “must” books. His first samplings had pro- duced material for half a lifetime of study. Hours later they left the place, exhausted, but burdened with books. Sheer fatigue cut their dinner talk that night to the barest minimum. 153 “How can we know,” groaned the Autarch, “what part of this stuff is bad, and what not?” “We’ll have to leave it to the people,” was Garrison’s reply. “We need too many people and in too many varied fields to try to select for them. They will have to do that themselves.” “That will bring chaos, I say,” grumbled the Autarch. “Anarchy. Your cure is as bad as the disease, I’m afraid.” “All right,” grinned Garrison, as a sudden inspiration hit him. “I’m an anarchist. Let’s analyze it. Au- tocracy is the complete denial of the individual. Anarchy is his fullest possible assertion. Democracy lies halfway between. Under it an in- dividual can be himself, but is sub- ject to certain restraints. Very well. You continue to play the Autarch. I’ll be the Anarch — ” “And between us we’ll produce the Demagogue,” remarked the Au- tarch, sharing his grin. “A fas- cinating gamble, I must say. And pray tell, my insane friend, how do we achieve this miracle?” "You continue to issue edicts.” “Yes?” “And I will see that they are not obeyed,” chuckled Garrison. Strange happenings came to pass shortly after that. The -sprawling radio center known as Omnivox overflowed into adjoining buildings hastily remodeled as annexes. Per- emptory calls were sent out to Pro- pags all oyer the world. Soon they came streaming into Cosmopolis on every arriving stratoliner. There they met a puzzling individual — ■ one Philip Garrison, the newly ap- pointed Chief of Propaganda. He told them that for one month they would read and not talk. In the meantime the standard lecture ; courses were to be suspended. At the same time the citizens of the provinces were treated to a be- wildering succession of orders. The Grand Code, they were informed, was to be revised in the near future. Until that time they should con- tinue to use it as a guide, but might depart from it in certain stated emergencies. Propag lec- tures stopped as the lecturers were withdrawn, but the culture courses were continued for the time being. There was a difference, though. An i army of carpenters descended on the various Social Halls and cut them up into many small compart- ments by partitions. Each was j fitted with an omnivox -screen. The most startling innovation was the - broadcast instructions to the Mon- | itor Corps. They were forbidden ; to molest dissenters. On the con- trary, they were given strict orders to protect them from the orthodox, should those show signs of resent- ing their heresies. The results as both Autarch and Garrison had anticipated, were meager. They listened in at ran- dom over the monitorial wires and knew. For a few days there was a buzz of excitement, then the peo- - pie relapsed into their customary ; apathy. They continued to do the things they always had done, and 154 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION ; in exactly the same manner. In all the world there were less than five hundred who took the strange edicts at anything like face value. Some were doctors, who now openly experimented as Garrison had done. The rest were in other professions. The Autarch wanted to send for them and add them to his staff. “No,” said Garrison, “they will be more useful where they are. Moreover, if you do that you may scare others. There must be more than half a thousand alert minds on five continents. We’ve still got those to smoke out.” The preliminaries took the whole of the estimated month. The zero hour was near at hand. The Pro- pags had finished their assigned readings and had prepared their scripts. The Autarch was signing them at the rate of hundreds at a time, using a giant pantograph. Each was in the form of an edict, almighty law to replace a portion of the outmoded Grand Code. For the first few hours he tried to read them as they came, but there were too many. He gave it up and went ahead with his part of the bargain — signing orders, for in the end he and Garrison had arrived at a com- plete understanding. Now he meant to see it through, though the skies fell. He checked off the subjects on his lists as the edicts went on their way. There appeared to be one set missing. He sent for Garrison. Garrison was busy at the time coaching the regiment of omnivox announcers he had recruited. “What about religion ?” asked the Autarch. “There was about an acre of books on it, as I remember.” “Oh, yes, religion,” said Garri- son, thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose we ought to include that, though I omitted it because it was one of the activities abolished altogether.” “I think we'd better give it to ’em,” said the Autarch. “People used to think a lot of it. They fought over it. It had something to do with the spirit, I believe, and we certainly need pepping up in that direction.” “Yes,” agreed Garrison. “What kind shall I dish out?” “How would I know? Let ’em have all of it.” before 4I . Ttt is YOU TUR^^l ^j»pa.GE"" why net melee sure that you continue to receive this magazine throughout the year? Don't take the chance that your newsstand will be sold out — act nowl Simply by filling out this cou- pon you can insure a solid year of reading pleasure with your favorite fiction. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION 122 EAST 42ND STREET NEW YORK 17, N. Y. Inclosed is $2.50. Kindly send me a yeOr's subscription to ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE.. the anarch 155 So Garrison put another hundred script writers to work. At last the zero hour came. Gar- rison was in the master control room of Omnivox with stop watch in hand. At his nod the talkers went into action. It was the hour when the citizens in his part of the world were assembled in the Social Halls. At later hours the same discourses would follow the sun around the globe. Then he went off to his private booth and plugged in on a spyline. For a sample spot he picked on the Hall at his old home' Dorm. It was different now. Instead of being scattered groups in one big hall, the doctors and agronomists were seg- regated in many small rooms. Each was listening to a different lecture. Garrison chose to follow the doc- tors. In the first room a group of them were listening rapt to the new or- ders that were to replace the Code. The voice proclaiming that particu- lar one was reading from a script that declared that most bodily ills had endocrine gland imbalance as their cause. Hence glandular ther- apy would cure anything. Garri- son listened to it well pleased. It was most convincing. Then he switched over to another room. There, other doctors heard the new law of the land. It asserted that diet was nine tenths of the battle. Feed a man right and he would become practically immortal. Garrison smiled and went on to the next. The lecturer was quot- ing osteopathic doctrine. The dis- position of the bones had everything to do with disease. It was funda- mental. Garrison flicked the switch again. The next fellow was yelling about the dangers of ever-present bacteria and demanding strict at- tention to the sterile technique. On and on it went, in each room a dif- ferent set of dogma. And each of them was sound enough as far as it went, except that each was em- phasized at the expense of every other. All the cults and schisms of old-style medicine were there. Garrison grinned happily. He could not predict with any exact- ness what the outcome would be, but he knew it would be worth watching. Then he turned to other fields where similar conflicting lec- tures were being read. The an- nouncers were doing well ; he was content. “How’m I doing?” he asked the Autarch, ten days later. “Swell, I guess,” said the Autarch dubiously, “if chaos is what you’re driving at. There are riots all over the place. I ordered a new bridge built across the river ten miles be- low here. I had to send a squad of monitors to restore order.” “Yes?” “Four pontifexes of the steel arch persuasion ganged up one who stood out for a suspension bridge. 1 A fellow who happened to think cantilevers are better horned into ; the argument and got battered in the melee. Pretty bloody affair.” ; "They’ll learn,” said Garrison cheerily. “And when they do, they 356 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION 4 will not only know what is the best type, but why. They’ll feel all the better for it. That’s the democratic way.” “Maybe,” said the Autarch grudgingly, and added with a twin- kle, “You have a thing or two to learn, too.” “Now what?” “Discrimination. Do you know what happened at Chicago? Bet- ter check over your scheduling of religious stuff. They’ve been preach- ing Hinduism out there. Now we have a strike on our hands. Hin- dus won’t kill cows, it seems.” In the succeeding six months pandemonium broke loose. It was all according to plan, but trying. The world’s population had been divided into cells, and each cell or- dered to believe in some particular method and carry it out in the face of every opposition. Since no two groups were taught alike in the same locality, friction developed al- most immediately in the citizens' daily work. On Sundays, when all ■were thrown together for an after- noon of free discussion, the mon- itors had their work cut out for them. They found their new in- structions as to preserving order the biggest job in their history. But Garrison listened in with glee. The only way to reach the populace was through flat, cate- gorical orders. It was the conflict of orders, each reasonable and workable of itself but incompatible with the others, that was waking them up. Men got angry, and THE ANARCH backed up the reasons fed them by the Propags with ones thought up by themselves. Still others were unsettled by their opponents, and wrote troubled letters to their higher-ups asking for clarification. Since their higher-ups were equally as confused, the letters eventually reached the palace. Garrison faith- fully recorded their names on a gold-starred list. “There,” he said to the Autarch, “are some of the men you asked for.” “Humph,” exclaimed the dic- tator, “I am getting a lot more than I asked for. Riots. Revolution. Call it democracy if you want to, but anarchy is what it is. You stirred ’em up, I admit, but what has it got us? A nation at one another’s throats. I don’t like it. Summon the best of these men you’ve found and direct them to draw up a new Code. Then — ” “Then we’ll be right back where we started,” Garrison broke in. You can’t put mankind in a strait jacket and expect anything but atrophy. When our thinking is done for us we become stupid. There is a saying that Nature abhors a vacuum. She also abhors an idler. The unused limb withers and dies." “But listen to the noise outside.” said the Autarch, “they’ll be kill- ing each other next.” There was plenty of tumult out- side, all right. All Cosmopolis was lit with red flares, and the night was hideous with the roar of crowds and the ranting of stump orators. 157 Autarch and Anarch stole out onto a balcony where they could better see and overhear. A political pa- rade was passing, waving banners aloft that called for the establish- ment of a monarchy. It met an- other head-on, a group yelling for an election and the adoption of a constitution. The monitors inter- vened, swinging nightsticks, and dispersed both crowds. But the relative quiet that followed was short lived. A mob howling “Death to Mohammedans” poured out of a side street. When the monitors finished with them their placards and banners were in shreds. “I think you overdid the religious angle,” remarked the Autarch dryly. “Yes,” admitted Garrison glumly. “I had no idea they would take it so seriously. After all, we don't actually know much about the soul. Ours have been in a state of sus- pended animation for a long time.” “I know, but don’t you think we might be a little more . . . ah- uh . . . selective in what we put out. Now that sect we just saw in ac- tion, for example — ” “At least we gave the monitors only one set of instructions — to maintain order,” said Garrison, doggedly sticking to his guns. "The few broken heads we see are worth the price. It will all work out. Have patience.” It did work out. The Propags had done their job. The seeds had been sown and now the crop was coming up. Controls were being established over diseases and blights again. Other able men were untangling the economic mess resulting from those. Still others were observing and approving them. The Codes were not being used much any more. People attacked their problems directly, and were learning the art of compromise. There was but one thing left to do. The Autarch was reluctant to do it, but he had gone so far that he was willing to go all the w T ay. He revoked the Code, including the fantastic recent additions. The printers that formerly made up its volumes were now turning out copies of the books in the secret library. .The only portion of the Code retained was the completely revised Social Code. Into it Gar- rison wrote the bill of rights and the laws compelling tolerance, and appended instructions for forming a representative government. He abolished the practice of holding men in jobs by virtue of their cerebral ratings. It might come out to the same thing, and might not. Hereafter results were all that would count. It was the Autarch who issued the call for the elections, and of his own volition. That was months later, after the new Code had been digested. "Do you know, Garrison,” he said, "this anarchy of yours is pan- ning out pretty well. But I’ve worked myself out of a job. I think I’ll run for president.” THE END. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION 158 Catch That Rabbit by ISAAC ASIMOV When a machine breaks down and stops, an expert can usually fix it. But their problem was a robot that went crazy — became homicidal — only when there were no homos to cide! Illustrated by Orban Michael Donovan’s face went beety, “For the love of Pete, Greg, get realistic. What’s the use of adhering to the letter of the speci- fications and watching the test go to pot? It’s about time you got the red tape out of your pants and went to work.” “I'm only saying,” said Gregory Powell patiently, as one explaining electronics to an idiot child, “that according to spec, those robots are equipped for asteroid mining with- out supervision. We’re not sup- posed to watch them.” “All right. Look — logic!” He lifted his hairy fingers and pointed. “One : That new robot passed every test in the home laboratories. Two : United States Robots guaranteed their passing the test of actual per- formance on an asteroid. Three: The robots aren’t passing said tests. Four: If they don’t pass, United CATCH THAT RABBIT » : States Robots lose ten million cred- its in cash and about one hundred million in reputation. Five: If they don’t pass and we can’t explain why they don’t pass, it is just pos- sible two good jobs may have to be bidden a l'ond farewell.” Powell groaned heavily behind a noticeably insincere smile. The un- written motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: “No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.” Aloud he said. “You’re as lucid as Euclid with everything except facts. You've watched that robot group for three shifts, you- red- bead, and they did their work per- fectly. You said so yourself. What else can we do?” “Find out what’s wrong, that’s what we can do. So they did work perfectly when I watched them. But on three different occasions when I didn't watch them, they didn’t bring in any ore ! They didn’t even come back on schedule. I had to go after them.” “And was anything wrong?” “Not a thing. Not a thing. Everything was perfect. Smooth and perfect as the luniniferous ether. Only one little insignificant detail disturbed me — there was no ore.” Powell scowled at the ceiling and pulled at his brown mustache. “I’ll tell you what, Mike. We’ve been stuck with pretty lousy jobs in our time, but this takes the iridium as- teroid. The whole business is com- plicated past endurance. Look, that robot, DV-5, has six robots under it. And not just under it — they’re part of it.” “I know’ that — ” “Shut up!” said Powell, sav- agely. “I know you know it, but I’m just describing the hell of it. Those six subsidiaries are part of DV-5 like your fingers are part of you, and it gives them their orders neither by voice nor radio, but directly through positronic fields. Now — there isn't a roboticist back at United States Robots that knows what a positronic field is or how it works. And neither do I , . . and neither do you.” “The last,” agreed Donovan, philosophically, “I know.” “Then look at our position. If everything works — fine! If any- thing goes worng — we're up Trash Creek, without any oar. We’re on the spot, Mike.” He blazed away for a moment in silence. Then, “All right, have you got him out- side ?” “Yes.” “Is everything normal now?” “Well, he hasn't got religious mania, and he isn't running around in a circle spouting Gilbert and Sul- livan, so I suppose he's normal.” Donovan passed out the door, shaking his head viciously. Powell reached for the “Hand- book of Robotics” that weighed down one side of his desk to a near-founder and opened it rever- ently. He had once jumped out of the window of a burning house dressed only in shorts and the 160 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION “Handbook.” In a pinch, he would have skipped the shorts. The “Handbook” was propped up before him, when Robot DV-5 entered, with Donovan kicking the door shut behind him. Powell said somberly, “Hi, Dave. How do you feel?” “Fine,” said the robot. “Mind if I sit down?” He dragged up the specially reinforced chair that was his, and folded gently into it. Powell regarded Dave— laymen might think of robots by their serial numbers : roboticists never — with approval. It was not over-massive by any means, in spite of its con- struction as thinking-unit of an in- tegrated seven-unit robot team. It was seven feet tall, and a lousy half-ton of metal and electricity. A lot? Not when that half-ton has to be a mass of condensers, cir- cuits, relays, and vacuum cells that can handle practically any psycho- logical reaction known to humans. And a positronic brain, which with ten pounds of matter and a few quintillion quintillions of positrons runs the whole show. Powell groped in his shirt pocket for a loose cigarette. “Dave,” he said, “you’re a good fellow. There’s nothing flighty or prirna donna-ish about you. You’re a stable, rock- bottom mining robot, except that you're equipped to handle six sub- sidiaries in direct co-ordination. As far as I know, that has not intro- duced any unstable paths into your brain-path map.” The robot nodded, “That makes me feel swell, but what are you getting at, boss ?” He was equipped with an excellent diaphragm, and the presence of overtones in the sound unit robbed him of much of that metallic flatness that marks the usual robot voice. “I’m going to tell you. With all that in your favor, what’s going wrong with your job? For in- stance, today’s B-shift?” Dave hesitated, “As far as I know, nothing.” “You didn’t produce anv ore.” “I know.” “Well, then—” Dave was having trouble, “I can’t explain that, boss. It’s been giving me a case of nerves, or it would if I let it. My subsidiaries worked smoothly. I know I did.” He con- sidered, his photoelectric eyes glow- ing intensely. Then, “I don’t re- member. The day ended and there was Mike and there were the ore cars, mostly empty.” Donovan broke in, “You didn’t report at shift-end those days, Dave. You know that?” “I know. But as to why — ” He shook his head slowly and ponder- ously. Powell had the queasy feeling that if the robot’s face were capa- ble of expression, it would be one of pain and mortification. A robot, by its very nature, cannot bear to fail its function. Donovan dragged his chair up to Powell’s desk and leaned over, “Amnesia, do you think?” “Can’t say. But there’s no use in trying to pin disease names on this. Human disorders apply to CATCH THAT RABBIT 161 robots only as romantic analogies. They’re no help to robotic engineer- ing.” He scratched his neck, “I hate to put him through the ele- mentary brain-reaction tests. It won’t help his self-respect any.” He looked at Dave thoughtfully and then at the Field-Test Outline given in the “Handbook.” He said, “See here, Dave, what about sit- ting through a test. It would be the wise thing to do.” The robot rose, “If you say so, boss.” There was pain in his voice. It started simply enough. Robot DV-5 multiplied five-place figures to the heartless ticking of a stop watch. He recited the prime num- bers between a thousand and ten- thousand. He extracted cube roots and integrated functions of varying complexity. He went through me- chanical reactions in order of in- creasing difficulty. And, finally, worked his precise mechanical mind over the highest function of the robot world — the solution of prob- lems in judgment and ethics. At the end of two hours, Powell was copiously be-sweated, Donovan had enjoyed a none-too-nutritious diet of fingernail and the robot said, “How does it look, boss?” Powell said, “I’ve got to think it over, Dave. Snap judgments won’t help much. Suppose you go back to the C-shift. Take it easy. Don’t press too hard for quota just for a while — and we’ll fix things up.” The robot left. Donovan looked at Powell. “Well—” Powell seemed determined to pull up his mustache by the roots. He said, “There is nothing wrong with the currents of his positronic brain.” “I’d hate to be that certain.” "Oh, Jupiter, Mike! The brain is the surest part of a robot. It’s quintuple-checked back on Earth. If they pass the field test perfectly, the way Dave did, there just isn’t a chance of brain mis-function. That test covered every key path in the brain.” “So where are we?” “Don’t rush me. Let me work this out. There’s still the possibility of a mechanical breakdown in his body. That leaves about fifteen hundred condensers, twenty thou- sand individual electric circuits, five hundred vacuum cells, a thousand relays, and upty-ump thousand other individual pieces of complex- ity that can be wrong. And these mysterious positronic fields no one knows anything about.” “Listen, Greg,” Donovan grew desperately urgent. "I’ve got an idea. That robot may be lying. He never — ” “Robots can’t knowingly lie, you fool. Now if we had the McCor- mack-Wesley tester, we could check each individual item in his body within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but the only two M.-W. test- ers existing are on Earth, and they weigh ten tons, are on concrete foundations, and can’t be moved. Isn’t that peachy?” Donovan pounded the desk, “But, Greg, he only goes wrong when 162 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION we’re not around. There’s some-* thing — sinister — about — that.” He punctuated the sentence with slams of fist against desk. “You,” said Powell, slowly, “make me sick. You’ve been read- ing adventure novels.” “What I want to know,” shouted Donovan, “is what we’re going to do about it.” ‘Til tell you. I’m going to in- stall a visiplate right over my desk. Right on the wall over there, see!” He jabbed a vicious finger at the spot. "Then I’m going to focus it at whatever part of the mine is being worked, and I’m going to watch. That’s all.” “That’s all? Greg—” Powell rose from his chair and leaned his balled fists on the desk, “Mike, I’m having a hard time.” His voice was weary. “For a week, you’ve been plaguing me about Dave. You say he’s gone wrong. Do you know how he’s gone wrong? No ! Do you know what shape this wrongness takes? No! Do you know what brings it on ? No ! Do you know what snaps him out? No! Do you know anything about it? No! Do / know anything about it? No-! So what do you want me to do?” Donovan’s amn swept outward in a vague, grandiose gesture, “You got me!” “So I tell you again. Before we do anything towards a cure, we’ve got to find out what the disease is in the first place. The first step in cooking rabbit stew is catching the rabbit. Well, we’ve got to catch that rabbit ! Now get out of here.” Donovan stared at the prelimi- nary outline of his field report with weary eyes. For one thing, he was tired and for another, w'hat was there to report while things were unsettled? He felt resentful. He said, “Greg, we’re almost a thousand tons behind schedule.” "You,” replied Powell, never looking up, “are telling me some- thing I don’t know.” “What I want to know,” said Donovan, in sudden savagery, “is why we’re always tangled up with new-type robots. I’ve finally de- cided that the robots that were good enough for my great-uncle on my mother’s side are good enough for me. I’m for what’s tried and true. The test of time is what counts — good, solid, old-fashioned robots that never go wrong.” Powell threw a book with perfect aim, and Donovan went tumbling off his seat. “Your job,” said Powell, evenly, “for the last five years has been to test new robots under actual working conditions for United States Robots. Because you and I have been so injudicious as to dis- play proficiency at the task, we’ve been rewarded with the dirtiest jobs. That,” he jabbed holes in the air with his finger in Donovan’s direction, “is your work. You’ve been griping about it, from personal memory, since about five minutes after United States Robots signed you up. Why don’t you resign ?” CATCH THAT RABBIT 163 “Well, I’ll tell you.” Donovan rolled onto his stomach, and took a firm grip on his wild, red hair to hold his head up. “There’s a cer- tain principle involved. After all, as a trouble shooter, I’ve played a part in the development of new robots. There’s the principle of aiding scientific advance. But don’t get me wrong. It’s not the prin- ciple that keeps me going; it’s the money they pay us. Greg!” Powell jumped at Donovan’s wild shout, and his eyes followed the red- head’s to the visiplate, when they goggled in fixed horror. He whis- pered, “Holy— howling — Jupiter !” Donovan scrambled breathlessly to his feet, “Look at them, Greg. They’ve gone nuts.” Powell said, “Get a pair of suits. We’re going out there.” He watched the posturings of the robots on the visiplate. They were bronzy gleams of smooth motion against the shadowy crags of the airless asteroid. There was a march- ing formation now, and in their own dim body light, the rough- hewn walls of the mine tunnel swam past noiselessly, checkered with misty erratic blobs of shadow. They marched in unison, seven of them, with Dave at the head. They wheeled and turned in macabre simultaneity ; and melted through changes of formation with the weird ease of chorus dancers in Lunar Bowl. Donovan was back with the suits, “They’ve gone jingo on us, Greg. That’s a military march.” “For all you know,” w'as the cold response, “it may be a series of calisthenic exercises. Or Dave may be under the hallucination of being a dancing master. Just you think first, and don’t bother to speak af- terward, either.” Donovan scowled and slipped a detonator into the empty side hol- ster with an ostentatious shove. He said, “Anyway, there you are. So we work with new-model robots. It’s our job, granted. But answer me one question. Why . . . why does something invariably go wrong with them?” “Because.” said Powell, som- berly, “we are accursed. Let’s go !” Far ahead through the thick vel- vety blackness of the corridors that reached past the illuminated circles of their flashlights, robot light twin- kled. “There they are,” breathed Dono- van. Powell whispered tensely, “I’ve been trying to get him by radio but he doesn’t answer. The radio cir- cuit is probably out.” “Then I’m glad the designers haven’t worked out robots who can work in total darkness yet. I’d hate to have to find seven mad robots in a black pit without radio communi- cation, if they weren’t lit up like blasted radioactive Christmas trees.” “Crawl up on the ledge above, Mike. They’re coming this way, and I want to watch them at close range. Can you make it?” Donovan made the jump with a grunt. Gravity was considerably below Earth-normal, but with a 164 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION heavy suit, the advantage was not too great, and the ledge meant a near ten-foot jump. Powell fol- lowed. The column of robots were trail- ing Dave single-file. In mechani- cal rhythm, they converted to dou- ble and returned to single in dif- ferent order. It was repeated over and over again and Dave never turned his head. Dave was within twenty feet when the play-acting ceased. The subsidiary robots broke formation, waited a moment, then clattered off into the distance — very rapidly. Dave looked after them, then slowly sat down. He rested his head in one hand in a very human gesture. His voice sounded in Powell's earphones, “Are you here, boss?” Powell beckoned to Donovan and hopped off the ledge. “O.K., Dave, what’s been going on ?” The robot shook his head, “I don’t know. One moment I was handling a tough outcropping in Tunnel 17, and the next I was aware of humans close-by, and I found myself half a mile down main-stem.” “Where are the subsidiaries now?” asked Donovan. “Back at work, of course. How much time has been lost?” “Not much. Forget it.” Then to Donovan, Powell added "Stay with him the rest of the shift. Then, come back. I’ve got a couple of ideas.” It was three hours before Dono- van returned. He looked tired. Powell said, “How did it go?” Donovan shrugged wearily, “Nothing ever goes wrong when you watch them. Throw me a butt, will you ?” The redhead lit it with exagger- ated care and blew a careful smoke ring. He said, “I’ve been working it out, Greg. You know, Dave has a queer background for a robot. There are six others under him in an extreme of regimentation. He’s got life and death power over those subsidiary robots and it must react on his mentality. Suppose he finds it necessary to emphasize this power as a concession to his ego.” “Get to the point.” “It’s right here. Suppose we have militarism. Suppose he’s fash- ioning himself an army. Suppose he’s training them in military ma- neuvers. Suppose — ” “Suppose you go soak your head. Your nightmares must be in tech- nicolor. You’re postulating a ma- jor aberration of the positronic brain. If your analysis were cor- rect, Dave would have to break down the First Law of Robotics: that a robot may not injure a hu- man being or, through inaction, allow a human being to be injured. The type of militaristic attitude and domineering ego you propose must have as the end-point of its logical implications, domination of hu- mans.” “All right. How do you know that isn’t the fact of the matter?” “Because any robot with a brain like that would, one, never have CATCH THAT RABBIT 165 left the factory, and two, be spotted immediately if it ever was. I tested Dave, you know.” Powell shoved his chair back and put his feet on the desk. ‘‘No. We’re still in the position where we can’t make our stew because we haven’t caught our rabbit. We still haven’t the slightest notion as to what’s wrong. For instance, if we could find out what that danse macabre we witnessed was all about, we’d be on the way out.” He paused, “Now listen, Mike, how does this sound to you? Dave goes wrong only when neither of us are present. And when he is wrong, the arrival of either of us snaps him out of it.” “I once told you that was sin- ister.” “Don’t interrupt. How is a ro- bot different when humans are not present? The answer is obvious. There is a larger requirement of personal initiative. In that case, look for the body parts that are affected by the new requirement.” “Golly.” Donovan sat up straight, then subsided. “No, no. Not enough. It’s too broad. It doesn’t cut the possibilities much.” “Can’t help that. In any case, there’s no danger of not making quota. We’ll take shifts watching those robots through the visor. Any time anything goes wrong, we get to the scene of action immedi- ately. That’ll put them right.” “But the robots will fail spec anyway, Greg. United States Ro- bots can’t market DV models with a report like that.” “Obviously. We’ve got to lo- cate the error in make-up and cor- rect it — and we’ve got ten days to do it in.” Powell scratched his head. “The trouble is . . . well, you’d better look at the blueprints yourself.” The blueprints covered the floor like a carpet and Donovan crawled over the face of them following Powell’s erratic pencil. Powell said, “Here’s where you come in, Mike. You’re the body specialist, and I want you to check me. I’ve been trying to cut out all circuits not involved in the per- sonal initiative hookup. Right here, for instance, is the trunk ar- tery invoking mechanical opera- tions. I cut out all routine side- routes as emergency divisions — ” He looked up, “What do you think?” Donovan had a very bad taste in his mouth, “The job’s not that sim- ple, Greg. Personal initiative isn't an electric circuit you can separate from the rest and study. When a robot is on his own, the intensity of body activity increases immedi- ately on almost all fronts. There isn’t a circuit entirely unaffected. What must be done is to locate the particular condition — a very spe- cific condition — that throws him off, and then start eliminating cir- cuits.” Powell got up and dusted him- self, “Hmph. All right. Take away the blueprints and burn them.” Donovan said, “You see when activity intensifies, anything can 166 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION happen, given one single faulty part. Insulation breaks down, a condenser spills over, a connection sparks, a coil overheats. And if you work blind, with the whole ro- bot to choose from, you’ll never find the bad spot. If you take Dave apart and test every point of his body mechanism one by one, put- ting him together each time, and trying him out — ” “All right. All right. I can see through a porthole, too.” They faced each other hopelessly, and then Powell said cautiously, “Suppose we interview one of the subsidiaries.” Neither Powell nor Donovan had ever had previous occasion to talk to a “finger.” It could talk; it wasn’t quite the perfect analogy to a human finger. In fact, it had a fairly developed brain, but that brain was tuned primarily to the re- ception of orders via poSitronic field, and its reaction to indepen- dent stimuli was rather fumbling. Nor was Powell certain as to its name. Its serial number was DV5-2, but that wasn’t very useful. He compromised. "Look, pal,” he said, "I’m going to ask you to do some hard thinking and then you can go back to your boss.” The "finger” nodded its head stiffly, but did not exert its limited brain-power on speech. “Now on four occasions re- cently,” Powel] said, “your boss CATCH THAT RABBIT 167 deviated from brain-scheme. Do you remember those occasions?” “Yes, sir.” Donovan growled angrily, “He remembers. I tell you there’s something very sinister — ” “Oh, go bash your skull. Of course the ‘finger’ remembers. There’s nothing wrong with him.” Powell turned back to the robot, “What were you doing each time ... I mean the whole group.” The “finger” had a curious air of reciting by rote, as if he an- swered questions by the mechani- cal pressure of his brain pan, but without any enthusiasm whatever. He said, “The first time we were at w’ork on a difficult outcropping in Tunnel 17, Level B. The sec- ond time we were buttressing the roof against a possible cave-in. The third time we were preparing accurate blasts in order to tunnel further without breaking into a subterranean fissure. The fourth time was just after a minor cave-in.” “What happened at these times ?” “It is difficult to describe. An order would be issued, but before we could receive and interpret it, a new' order came to inarch in queer formation.” Powell snapped out, “Why?” “I don’t know.” Donovan broke in tensely, “What was the first order . . . the one that was superseded by the march- ing directions?” “I don’t know'. I sensed that an order was sent, but there was never time to receive it.” “Could you tell us anything about it? Was it the same order each time?” The “finger” shook his head un- happily, “I don’t know.” Powell leaned back, “All right, get back to your boss.” The “finger” left, with visible relief. Donovan said, “Well, we accom- plished a lot that time. That was real sharp dialogue all the way through. Listen, Dave and that imbecile ‘finger’ are both holding out on us. There’s too much they don’t know and don’t remember. We’ve got to stop trusting them, Greg.” Pow'ell brushed his mustache the wrong way, “So help me, Mike, another fool word out of you, and I’ll take away your rattle and teeth- ing ring.” “All right. You’re the genius of the team. I’m just a poor sucker. Where do we stand?” “Right behind the eight ball. I tried to work it backwards through the ‘finger’, and couldn’t. So w'e’ve got to work it fonvards.” “A great mind,” marveled Dono- van. “How simple that makes it. Now translate that into English, master.” “Translating it into baby talk would suit you better. I mean that we’ve got to find out what order it is that Dave gives just before every- thing goes black. It would be the key to the business.” “And how do you expect to do that? We can’t get close to him, because nothing will go wrong as 168 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION A message for you . . . from 1953 (Today , John Jones is just an average Amer- ican , wrestling with all the doubts and worries and problems that beset every one of us right ttow. But let's skip ahead JO years. Let's look at John Jones then — and listen to him • . .) “sometimes I feel so good it almost scares me. “ This house — I wouldn’t swap a shingle off its roof for any other house on earth. This little valley, with the pond down in the hollow at the back, is the spot I like best in all the world. “And they're mine. I own ’em. Nobody can take ’em away from me. “I’ve got a little money coming in, regularly. Not much — but enough. And I tell you, when you can go to bed every night with nothing on your mind except the fun you’re going to have tomor- row — that’s as near Heaven as a man gets on this earth! “It wasn’t always so. “ Back in ’43 — that was our second year of war, when we were really getting into it— I needed cash. Taxes were tough, and then Ellen got sick. Like most everybody else, I was buying War Bonds through the Payroll Plan — and I figured on cashing some of them in. But &ick as she was, it was Ellen who talked me out of it. !S * Don’t do it, John!’ she said. ‘Please don’t! For the Erst time in our lives, we’re really saving money. It’s wonderful to know that every single payday we have more money put aside! John, if we can only keep up this saving, think what it can mean! Maybe someday you won’t have to work. Maybe we can own a home. And oh, how good it would feel to know that we need never worry about money when we’re old!’ “ Well, even after she got better, I stayed away from the weekly poker game — quit dropping a little cash at the hot spots now and then— gave up some of the things a man feels he has a right to. We made clothes do — cut out fancy foods. We didn’t have as much fun for a while but we paid our taxes and the doctor and— we didn’t touch the War Bonds. “We didn’t touch the War Bonds then, or any other time. And I know this: The world wouldn't be such a swell place today if we had!” The Treasury Department acknowledges with appreciation the publication of this advertisement by STREET & SMITH PUBLICATIONS. INC. long as we’re there. We can’t catch the orders by radio because they are transmitted via this positronic field. That eliminates the close- range and the long-range method, leaving us a neat, cozy zero.” “By direct observation, yes. There’s still deduction.” “Huh?" “We’re going on shifts, Mike.” Powell smiled grimly. “And we’re not taking our eyes off the visi- plate. We’re going to watch every action of those steel headaches. When they go off into their act, we’re going to see wliat happened immediately before and we’re go- ing to deduce the order.” Donovan opened his mouth and left it that way for a full minute. Then he said in strangled tones, “I resign. I quit.” “You have ten days to think up something better,” said Powell wearily. Which, for eight days, Donovan tried mightily to do. For eight days, on alternate four-hour shifts, he watched with aching and bleary eyes those glinty metallic forms move against the vague background. And for eight days, in the four- hour in-betweens, he cursed United States Robots, the DV models, and the day he was born. And then on the eighth day, when Powell entered with an aching head and sleepy eyes for his shift, Dono- van stood up and with very care- ful and deliberate aim launched a heavy book end for the exact cen- ter of the visiplate. There was a very appropriate splintering noise. Powell gasped, “What did you do that for?” “Because,” said Donovan, almost calmly, “I’m not watching it any more. We’ve got two days left and we haven’t found out a thing. DV-5 is a lousy loss. He’s ^topped five times since I’ve been watch- ing and three times on your shift, and I can’t make out what orders he gave, and you couldn’t make it out. And I don’t believe you could ever make it out because I know I couldn’t ever. “Jumping Space, how can you watch six robots at the same time. One makes with the hands, and one with the feet and one like a windmill and another is jumping up and down like a maniac. And the other two . . . devil knows what they’re doing. And then they all stop. So! So!!” “Greg, we’re not doing it right. We got to get up close. We’ve got to watch what they’re doing from where we can see the details.” * Powell broke a bitter silence, “Yeah, and wait for something to go wrong with only two days to S®* “Is it any better watching from here ?” “It’s more comfortable." “Ah — But there’s something you can do there that you can’t do here.” “What’s that?” “You can make them stop — at whatever time you choose — and while you’re prepared and watching to see what goes wrong.” 170 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION Powell startled into alertness, "Howzzat ?” “Well, figure it out yourself. You’re the brains you say. Ask yourself some questions. When does DV-5 go out of whack? When did that ‘finger’ say he did? When a cave-in threatened, or actually oc- curred, when delicately-measured explosives were being laid down, when a difficult seam was hit.” “In other words, during emer- gencies,” Powell was excited. “Right! When did you expect it to happen ! It’s the personal initia- tive factor that’s giving us the trou- ble. And it’s just during emergen- cies in the absence of a human be- ing that personal initiative is most strained. Now what is the logical deduction ? How can we create our own stoppage when and where we want it ?” He paused tri- umphantly — he was beginning to enjoy his role — and answered his own question to forestall the obvi- ous answer on Powell’s tongue. “By creating our own emergency.” Powell said, “Mike — you’re right.” “Thanks, pal. I knew I’d do it some day.” “All right, and skip the sarcasm. We’ll save it for Earth, and pre- serve it in jars for future long, cold winters. Meanwhile, what emergency can we create?” “We could flood the mines, if this weren’t an airless asteroid.” “A wittieism, no doubt,” said You’re sure in tine for shoving joy When you use Thin Gillettes, my boy! These blades last long— four cost a dime— You look well-groomed, save dough and time! CATCH THAT RABBIT m Powell. “Really, Mike, you’ll in- capacitate me with laughter. What about a mild cave-in.” Donovan pursed his lips and said. “O. K. by me.” “Good. Let’s get started.” Powell felt uncommonly like a conspirator as he wound his way over the craggy landscape. His sub-gravity walk teetered across the broken ground, kicking rocks to right and left under his weight in noiseless puffs of gray dust. Mentally, though, it was the cau- tious crawl of the plotter. He said, “Do you know where they are?” “I think so, Greg.” “All right,” Powell said gloom- ily, “but if any ‘finger’ gets within twenty feet of us, we’ll be sensed whether we’re in the line of sight or not. I hope you know that.” “When I need an elementary course in robotics, I’ll file an appli- cation with you formally, and in triplicate. Down through here.” They were in the tunnels now; even the starlight was gone. The two hugged the walls, flashes flick- ering out the way in intermittent bursts. Powell felt for the security of his detonator. “Do you know this tunnel, Mike?” “Not so good. It’s a new one. I think I can make it out from what I saw in the visiplate, though — ” Interminable minutes passed, and then Mike said: “Feel that!” There was a slight vibration thrumming the wall against the fin- gers of Powell’s metal-incased hand. There was no sound, natu- rally. “Blasting! We’re pretty close.” “Keep your eyes open,” said Powell. Donovan nodded impatiently. It was upon them and gone be- fore they could seize themselves — just a bronze glint across the field of vision. They clung together in silence. Powell whispered, “Think it sensed us?” “Hope not. But we’d better flank them. Take the first side tun- nel to the right.” “Suppose we miss them alto- gether ?” “Well what do you want to do, go back ?” Donovan grunted fiercely. “They’re within a quar- ter of a mile. I was watching them through the visiplate, wasn’t I? And we’ve got two days — ” “Oh, shut up. You’re wasting your oxygen. Is this a side pas- sage here?” The flash flicked. “It is. Let's go.” The vibration was considerably more marked and the ground below shuddered uneasily. “This is good,” said Donovan, “if it doesn’t give out on us, though.” He flung his light ahead anxiously. They could touch the roof of the tunnel with a half-upstretched hand, and the bracings had been newly placed. Donovan hesitated, “Dead end. 172 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION Let’s go back.” “No. Hold on.” Powell squeezed clumsily past. “Is that light ahead?” “Light? I don’t see any. Where would there be light down here?” . “Robot light.” He was scram- bling up a gentle incline on hands and knees. His voice was hoarse and anxious in Donovan’s ears. “Hey, Mike, come up here.” There was light. Donovan crawled up and over Powell’s out- stretched legs. “An opening?” “Yes. They must be working into this tunnel from the other side now — I think.” Donovan felt the ragged edges of the opening that looked out into what the cautious flashlight showed to be a larger and obviously main- stem tunnel. The hole was too small for a man to go through, al- most too small for two men to look through simultaneously. “There’s nothing there,” said Donovan. “Well, not now. But there must have been a second ago or we wouldn't have seen light. Watch out !” The walls rolled about them and they felt the impact. A fine dust showered down. Powell lifted a cautious head and looked again. “All right, Mike. They’re there.” The glittering robots clustered fifty feet down the main stem. Metal arms labored mightily at the rubbish heap brought down by the last blast. Donovan urged eagerly, “Don’t waste time. It won’t be long be- Are You Ready for POST WAR COMPETITION? When peace comes, most of us will face some real problems. Millions of men will come out of the army and navy to seek civilian jobs; great industries will have to convert back; new industries will spring up to supply new wants and habits. Many wartime jobs will vanish, others will shift in nature and emphasis, new jobs will be open. It will be a time of strain and opportu- nity. Competition will be sharper — medi- ocrity will suffer and ability rise to the top. The far-seeing man and woman will pre- pare for this. He will increase his knowl- edge and skill now to safeguard what be has and to be ready for the new oppor- tunities. If you are that man or woman, we invite your investigation of LaSalle spare time training. Choose the field that looks best to you after the war and ask us for our free 48-page booklet describing the require- ments and opportunities in that field and telling about our home study training. LASALLE EXTENSION UNIVERSITY A Correspondence Institution Dept. 265- R Chicago, Dll. I want to know how I can prepare myself for the po9t-war opportunities. Please send me youi^free booklet on the field I have checked below. | DForemanship Dlndustrlal Management i DBookkeeping □Accounting □Traffic Management □Executive Management □Law : LL.B. Degree □ Salesmanship □Business English □Business Correspondence □Stenotypy Name. Age Present Position Address. CATCH THAT BABBIT 173 fore they get through, and the next blast may get us” “For Pete’s sake, don’t rush me.” Powell unlimbered the detonator, and his eyes searched anxiously across the dusky background where the only light was robot light and it was impossible to tell a project- ing boulder from a shadow. “There’s a spot in the roof, see it, almost over them. The last blast didn’t quite get it. If you can get it at the base, half the roof will cave in.” Powell followed the dim finger, “Check! Now fasten your eye on the robots and pray they don’t move too far from that part of the tun- nel. They’re my light sources. Are all seven there?” Donovan counted, “All seven.” “Well, then, watch them. Watch every motion!” His detonator was lifted and re- mained poised while Donovan watched and cursed and blinked the sweat out of his eye. It flashed! There was a jar, a series of hard vibrations, and then a jarring thump that threw Powell heavily against Donovan. Donovan yowled, “Greg, you threw me off. I didn’t see a thing.” Powell stared about wildly, “Where are they?” Donovan fell into a stupid si- lence. There was no sign of the robots. „ It was as dark as the depths of the River Styx. “Think we buried them?” qua- vered Donovan. “Let’s get down there. Don’t ask me what I think.” Powell crawled backwards at tumbling speed. “Mike r Donovan paused in the act of following, “What's wrong now?” “Hold on!” Powell’s breathing was rough and irregular in Dono- van’s ears. “Alike! Do you hear me, Mike?” “I’m right here. What is it?” “We’re blocked in. It wasn’t tho ceiling coming down fifty feet away that knocked us over. It was our own ceiling. The shock’s tum- bled it !” “What!” Donovan scrambled up against a hard barrier. “Turn on the flash.” Powell did so. At no point, was there room for a rabbit to squeeze through. Donovan said softly, “Well, what do you know?” They wasted a few moments and some muscular power in an effort to move the blocking barrier. Powell varied this by wrenching at the edges of the original hole. Then he sat down. “You know, Alike,” he said, “we’ve really messed this up. We're no nearer finding out what’s wrong with Dave. It was a good idea but it blew up in our face.” Donovan’s glance was bitter with an intensity totally wasted on the darkness, “I hate to disturb you, old man, but quite apart from what we know or don’t know of Dave, we’re slightly trapped. If we don’t get loose, fella, we're going to die. 174 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION D — I — E — , die. How much oxy- gen have we anyway? Not more than six hours.” “I’ve thought of that.’' Powell’s fingers went up to his long-suffer- ing mustache and clanged uselessly against the transparent visor. “Of course, we could get Dave to dig us out easily in that time, except that our precious emergency must have thrown him off, and his radio circuit is out.” “And isn’t that nice.” Donovan edged up to the open- ing and managed to get his metal- incased head out. It was an ex- tremely tight fit. “Hey, Greg!” “What?” “Suppose we get Dave within twenty feet. He’ll snap to normal. That’ll save us.” “Sure, but where is he?” “Down the corridor — way down. For Pete’s sake, stop pulling be- fore you drag my head out of its socket. I’ll give you your chance to look.” Powell maneuvered his head out- side, “We did it all right Look at those saps. That must be a ballet they’re doing.” “Never mind the side remarks. Are they getting any closer?” “Can’t tell yet. They’re too far away. Give me a chance. Pass me my flash, will you? I’ll try to attract their attention that way.” He gave up after two minutes, “Not a chance! They must be blind. Uh-oh, they’re starting to- wards us. What do you know?” Donovan said, “Hey, let me see 1” To ALL its old friends and customers . . . and to the rising new generation, too, Midwest Radio Corporation makes this pledge: Once Victory has been won . . . once the needs of our Armed Forces for radio and elec- tronic instruments has been met and production for civilian demands is approved . . . Midwest will again be back with its world-famous Factory-To-You plan for buying highest quality radio and electronic equipment — at savings up to MIDWEST radio corporation DEPT. «nra| c iN c t n N AT I. OMIT SEND FOR FREE CALENDAR Send us 10c in stamps or coin for a War Sav- ings Stamp and receive in addi- tion an attractive 4-color calendar with Inter- national Time Calculator abso- lutely FREE. CATCH THAT RABBIT 175 There was a silent scuffle. Powell said, “All right!” and Donovan got his head out. They were approaching. Dave was high-stepping the way in front and the six “fingers” were a weav- ing chorus-line behin^T'him. Donovan marveled, “What are they doing ? That’s what I want to know. It looks like the Vir- ginia reel — and Dave’s a major- domo, or I never saw one.” “Oh, leave me alone with your descriptions,” grumbled Powell. “How near are they?” “Within fifty feet and com- ing this way. We’ll be out in fifteen min— Uh— huh— HUH— HEY-Y!” “What’s going on?” It took Powell several seconds to recover from his stunned astonishment at Donovan’s vocal gyrations. “Come on. give me a chance at that hole. Don’t be a hog about it.” He fought his way upwards, but Donovan kicked wildly, “They did an about-face, Greg. They’re leav- ing. Dave! Hey, Da-a-ave!” Powell shrieked, “What’s the use of that, you fool. Sound won’t carry.” “Well, then,” panted Donovan, “kick the walls, slam them, get some vibration started. We’ve got to attract their attention somehow, Greg, or we’re through.” He pounded like a madman. Powell shook him, “Wait, Mike, wait. Listen, I’ve got an idea. Jumping Jupiter, this is a fine time to get around to the simple solu- tions. Mike !” “What do you want?” Donovan pulled his head in. “Let me in there fast before they get out of range.” “Out of range! What are you going to do? Hey, what are you going to do with that detonator?” He grabbed Powell’s arm. Powell shook off the grip vio- lently, “I’m going to do a little shooting.” “Why?” “That’s for later. Let’s see if it works first. If it doesn't, then — Get out of the wav and let me shoot !” The robots were flickers, small and getting smaller, in the distance. Powell lined up the sights tensely, and pulled the trigger three times. He lowered the guns and peered anxiously. One of the subsidiaries was down ! There were only six gleaming figures now. Powell called into his transmit- ter uncertainly. “Dave !” A pause, then the answer sounded to both men, “Boss? Where are you? My third sub- sidiary has had his chest blown in. He's out of commission.” “Never mind your subsidiary,” said Powell. “We’re trapped in a cave-in where you were blasting. Can you see our flashlight?” “Sure. We’ll be right there.” Powell sat back and relaxed, “That, my fran’, is that.” Donovan said very softly, with tears in his voice, “All right, Greg. You win. I beat my forehead against the ground before your 176 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION feet. Now don’t feed me any bull. Just tell me quietly what it’s all about.” “Easy. It’s just that all through we missed the obvious — as usual. We knew it was the personal initia- tive circuit, and that it always hap- pened during emergencies, but we kept looking for a specific order as the cause. Why should it be an order?” “Why not?” “Well, look. Why not a type of order. What type of order re- quires the most initiative? What type of order would occur almost always only in an emergency ?” “Don’t ask me, Greg. Tell me!” “I’m doing it! It’s the six-way order. Under all ordinary condi- tions, one or more of the ‘fingers’ would be doing routine tasks re- quiring no close supervision — in the sort of offhand way, our bodies handle the routine walking motions. But in an emergency, all six sub- sidiaries must be mobilized immedi- ately and simultaneously. Dave must handle six robots at a time and something gives. The rest was easy. Any decrease in initiative re- quired, such as the arrival of hu- mans, snaps him back. So I de- stroyed one of the robots. When I did, he was transmitting only five-way orders. Initiative de- creases — he’s normal.” “How did you get all that?” de- manded Donovan. “Just logical guessing. I tried it and it worked.” The robot's voice was in their ears again, “Here I am. Can you Your opportunity is here. 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Pigaeree, la* Angeles 37, CaM. paste «n penny yautl j me FIEf, wrtheet obligation, one Lessen end Opp*rtan>ty • *. Ml denxh obovt hew I CAN become a AADfO TethwUlee. J 17? CA T CH THAT RABBIT hold out half an hour?” “Easy!” said Powell. Then, to Donovan, he continued, “And now the job should be simple. We’ll go through the circuits, and check off each part that gets an extra work- out in a six-way order as against a five-way. How big a field does that leave us?” Donovan considered, “Not much, I think. If Dave is like the pre- liminary model we saw back at the factory, there’s a special co-ordi- nating circuit that would be the only section involved.” He cheered up suddenly and amazingly, “Say, that wouldn’t be bad at all. There’s nothing to that.” “All right. You think it over, and we’ll check the blueprints when we get back. And now, till Dave reaches us, I’m relaxing.” “Hey, wait! Just tell me one thing. What were those queer shifting marches, those funny dance steps, that the robots went through every time they went screwy." “That? I don't know. But I’ve got a notion. Remember, those subsidiaries were Dave’s ‘fingers’. We were always saying that, you know. Well, it’s my idea that in all these interludes, whenever Dave became a psychiatric case, he went off into a moronic maze, spending his time twiddling his fingers.” THE END. THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY Gentlemen, you have me puzzled, deadlocked and stalemated. Apparently you are intellectually honest, but confused, or Anthony Boucher double-crossed you. The net effect of the letters, as far as I could make out, was that you wanted Astounding reserved for science-fiction and only science-fiction — no fantasy. That is necessarily a sort of over-all feeling derived from the general effect of what was said. Some said “With Unknown discontinued, let us have some fantasy in Astounding.” That's reasonable, but unfair. I can't justly put fantasy in Astounding unless it's wanted for its own sake by the majority of the readers. But so many said “I don’t want fantasy in Astounding, even if it’s as well written as Boucher’s story — ” that the mathematical results of the votes came out: December Astounding Place Story Author Points .1. The Debt E. Mayne Hull 2.1 2. We Print The Truth Anthony Boucher 2.55 3. The Iron Standard Lewis Padgett 3.25 4. Lost Art George O. Smith 3.36 5. Fricassee in Four Dimensions P. Schuyler Miller 3.40 Which put “We Print The Truth” in second place. The answer w'ould seem to be that fantasy is all right if well, coherently, and thoughtfully written. I’ll see what remarks this discussion brings, too — The Editor. 178 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION with fresh Eveready Batteries "One Moment, Please . . . There’s Someone on the Wire!" Flight now the armed forces are using much of our pre- diction of “Eveready” Xo. 6 Dry Cells for field telephone units. 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