“Sure, your little men are all right. But we aren’t,” he added as the floor shook to the detonation of a bomb.

 

  Johansen closed his eyes, got a grip on himself and let his curiosity overcome his fear. He stepped to the binocular telescope, gazed down it. There was nothing there but a curved sheet of gray material. He had never seen a gray quite like that. It was absolutey neutral. It didn’t seem soft and it didn’t seem hard, and to look at it made his brain reel. He looked up.

  Kidder was pounding the keys of a teletype, watching the blank yellow tape anxiously.

  “I’m not getting through to them,” he whimpered. “I don’t know. What’s the mat—Oh, of course!”

  “What?”

  “The shield is absolutely impenetrable! The teletype impulses can’t get through or I could get them to extend the screen over the building—over the whole island! There’s nothing those people can’t do!”

  “He’s crazy,” Johansen muttered. “Poor little—”

  The teletype began clicking sharply. Kidder dove at it, practically embraced it. He read off the tape as it came out. Johansen saw the characters, but they meant nothing to him.

  “Almighty,” Kidder read falteringly, “pray have mercy on us and be forbearing until we have said our say. Without orders we have lowered the screen you ordered us to raise. We are lost, O great one. Our screen is truly impenetrable, and so cut off your words on the word machine. We have never, in the memory of any Neoteric, been without your word before. Forgive us our action. We will eagerly await your answer.”

  Kidder’s fingers danced over the keys. “You can look now,” he gasped. “Go on—the telescope!”

  Johansen, trying to ignore the whine of sure death from above, looked.

  He saw what looked like land—fantastic fields under cultivation, a settlement of some sort, factories, and—beings. Everything moved with incredible rapidity. He couldn’t see one of the inhabitants except as darting pinky-white streaks. Fascinated, he stared for a long minute. A sound behind him made him whirl. It was Kidder, rubbing his hands together briskly. There was a broad smile on his face.

  “They did it,” he said happily. “You see?”

  Johansen didn’t see until he began to realize that there was a dead silence outside. He ran to a window. It was night outside--the blackest night—when it should have been dusk. “What happened?”

  “The Neoterics,” said Kidder, and laughed like a child. “My friends downstairs there. They threw up the impenetrable shield over the whole island. We can’t be touched now!”

  And at Johansen’s amazed questions, he launched into a description of the race of beings below them.

 

  Outside the shell, things happened. Nine airplanes suddenly went dead-stick. Nine pilots glided downward, powerless, and some fell into the sea, and some struck the miraculous gray shell that loomed in place of an island; slid off and sank.

  And ashore, a man named Wright sat in a car, half dead with fear, while government men surrounded him, approached cautiously, daring instant death from a non-dead source.

  In a room deep in the White House, a high-ranking army officer shrieked, “I can’t stand it any more! I can’t!” and leaped up, snatched a red cube off the president’s desk, ground it to ineffectual litter under his shining boots.

  And in a few days they took a broken old man away from the bank and put him in an asylum, where he died within a week.

  The shield, you see, was truly impenetrable. The power plant was untouched and sent out its beams; but the beams could not get out, and anything powered from the plant went dead. The story never became public, although for some years there was heightened naval activity off the New England coast. The navy, so the story went, had a new target range out there—a great hemi-ovoid of gray-material. They bombed it and shelled it and rayed it and blasted all around it, but never even dented its smooth surface.

  Kidder and Johansen let it stay there. They were happy enough with their researches and their Neoterics. They did not hear or feel the shelling, for, the shield was truly impenetrable. They synthesized their food and their light and air from materials at hand, and they simply didn’t care. They were the only survivors of the bombing, with the exception of three poor maimed devils who died soon afterward.

  All this happened many years ago, and Kidder and Johansen may be alive today, and they may be dead. But that doesn’t matter too much. The important thing is that the great gray shell will bear watching. Men die, but races live. Some day the Neoterics, after innumerable generations of inconceivable advancement, will take down their shield and come forth. When I think of that I feel frightened.

 

JAY SCORE

  Astounding Science Fiction May by Eric Frank Russell

 

  "Jay Score" was somewhat overshadowed when it first appeared because the May, 1941 Astounding happened to contain two important Heinlein stories, "Universe" (too long for inclusion here), and "Solution Unsatisfactory" (in his "Anson MacDonald" persona). In addition, there was "Liar!" by one of your editors, and as a bonus, Heinlein provided a guide and outline to his still-in-process Future History. Sorry, Isaac, but they don't make sf magazines like this any more.

  Russell's contribution is a fine story and was the first of a series of four, finally collected as Men, Martians and Machines in 1955.

 

  (No, they don't, Marty. And I'm the first to agree. To this day, people speak of the 1927 Yankees as the greatest ball team of all time, and I agree. And my feeling is that the 1939-1941 Astoundings were the greatest science fiction magazines of all time, including my own, and that the May, 1941 issue and September, 1941 issue may be the greatest individual issues of all time. I'm surprised, looking back on it, that John Campbell published two robot stories in the May issue, but "Jay Score" was so good. In fact, from my own self-centered viewpoint it was the best robot story not written by myself since "Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey—I.A.)

 

  There are very good reasons for everything they do. To the uninitiated some of their little tricks and some of their regulations seem mighty peculiar-but rocketing through the cosmos isn't quite like paddling a bathtub across a farm pond, no, sir!

  For instance, this stunt of using mixed crews is pretty sensible when you look into it. On the outward runs toward Mars, the Asteroids or beyond, they have white Terrestrials to tend the engines because they're the ones who perfected modern propulsion units, know most about them and can nurse them like nobody else. All ships' surgeons are black Terrestrials because for some reason none can explain no Negro gets gravity-bends or space nausea. Every outside repair gang is composed of Martians who use very little air, are tiptop metal workers and fairly immune to cosmic-ray burn.

  As for the inward trips to Venus, they mix them similarly except that the emergency pilot is always a big clunker like Jay Score. There's a motive behind that; he's the one who provided it. I'm never likely to forget him. He sort of sticks in the mind, for keeps. What a character!

  Destiny placed me at the top of the gangway the first time he appeared. Our ship was the Upskadaska City, a brand new freighter with limited passenger accommodation, registered in the Venusian space-port from which she took her name. Needless to say she was known among hardened spacemen as the Upsydaisy.

  We were lying in the Colorado Rocket Basin, north of Denver, with a fair load aboard, mostly watchmaking machinery, agricultural equipment, aeronautical jigs and tools for Upskadaska, as well as a case of radium needles for the Venusian Cancer Research Institute. There were eight passengers; all emigrating agriculturalists planning on making hay thirty million miles nearer the Sun. We had ramped the vessel and were waiting for the blow-brothers-blow siren due in forty minutes, when Jay Score arrived.

  He was six feet nine, weighed at least three hundred pounds yet toted this bulk with the easy grace of a ballet dancer. A big guy like that, moving like that, was something worth watching. He came up the duralumin gangway with all the nonchalance of a tripper boarding the bus for Jackson's Creek. From his hamlike right fist dangled a rawhide case not quite big enough to contain his bed and maybe a wardrobe or two.

  Reaching the top, he paused while he took in the crossed swords on my cap, said, "Morning, Sarge. I'm the new emergency pilot. I have to report to Captain McNulty."

  I knew we were due for another pilot now that Jeff Durkin had been promoted to the snooty Martian scent-bottle Prometheus. So this was his successor. He was a Terrestrial all right, but neither black nor white. His expressionless but capable face looked as if covered with old, well-seasoned leather. His eyes held fires resembling phosphorescence. There was an air about him that marked him an exceptional individual the like of which I'd never met before.

  "Welcome, Tiny," I offered, getting a crick in the neck as I stared up at him. I did not offer my hand because I wanted it for use later on. "Open your satchel and leave it in the sterilizing chamber. You'll find the skipper in the bow.”

  "Thanks," he responded without the glimmer of a smile. He stepped into the airlock, hauling the rawhide haybarn with him. "We blast in forty minutes," I warned.

  Didn't see anything more of Jay Score until we were two hundred thousand out, with Earth a greenish moon at the end of our vapour trail. Then I heard him in the passage asking someone where he could find the sergeant-at-arms. He was directed through my door. "Sarge," he said, handing over his official requisition, "I've come to collect the trimmings." Then he leaned on the barrier; the whole framework creaked and the top tube sagged in the middle. "Hey!" I shouted. "Sorry!" He unleaned. The barrier stood much better when he kept his mass to himself.

  Stamping his requisition, I went into the armoury, dug out his needle-ray projector and a box of capsules for same. The biggest Venusian mud-skis I could find were about eleven sizes too small and a yard too short for him, but they'd have to do. I gave him a can of thin, multipurpose oil, a jar of graphite, a Lepanto power-pack for his microwave radiophone and, finally, a bunch of nutweed pellicules marked: "Compliments of the Bridal Planet Aromatic Herb Corporation:"

  Shoving back the spicy lumps, he said, "You can have 'em-they give me the staggers." The rest of the stuff he forced into his side-pack without so much as twitching an eyebrow. Long time since I'd seen anyone so poker-faced.

  All the same, the way he eyed the spacesuits seemed strangely wistful. There were thirty bifurcated ones for the Terrestrials, all hanging on the wall like sloughed skins. Also there were six head-and-shoulder helmets for the Martians, since they needed no more than three pounds of air. There wasn't a suit for him. I couldn't have fitted him with one if my life had depended upon it. It'd have been like trying to can an elephant.

  Well, he lumbered out lightly, if you get what I mean. The casual, loose-limbed way he transported his tonnage made me think I'd like to be some place else if ever he got on the rampage. Not that I thought him likely to run amok; he was amiable enough though sphinxlike. But I was fascinated by his air of calm assurance and by his motion which was fast, silent and eerie. Maybe the latter was due to his habit of wearing an inch of sponge-rubber under his big dogs.

  I kept an interested eye on Jay Score while the Upsydaisy made good time on her crawl through the void. Yes, I was more than curious about him because his type was a new one on me despite that I've met plenty in my time. He remained uncommunicative but kind of quietly cordial. His work was smoothly efficient and in every way satisfactory. McNulty took a great fancy to him, though he'd never been one to greet a newcomer with love and kisses.

  Three days out, Jay made a major hit with the Martians. As everyone knows, those goggle-eyed, tententacled, half breathing kibitzers have stuck harder than glue to the Solar System Chess Championship for more than two centuries. Nobody outside of Mars will ever pry them loose. They are nuts about the game and many's the time I've seen a bunch of them go through all the colours of the spectrum in sheer excitement when at last somebody has moved a pawn after thirty minutes of profound cogitation.

  One rest-time Jay spent his entire eight hours under three pounds pressure in the starboard airlock. Through the lock's phones came long silences punctuated by wild and shrill twitterings as if he and the Martians were turning the place into a madhouse. At the end of the time we found our tentacled outside-crew exhausted. It turned out that Jay had consented to play Kli Yang and had forced him to a stalemate. Kli had been sixth runner-up in the last Solar melee, had been beaten only ten times-each time by a brother Martian, of course.

  The red-planet gang had a finger on him after that, or I should say a tentacle-tip. Every rest-time they waylaid him and dragged him into the airlock. When we were eleven days out, he played the six of them simultaneously, lost two games, stalemated three, won one. They thought he was a veritable whizzbang--for a mere Terrestrial. Knowing their peculiar abilities in this respect, I thought so, too. So did McNulty. He went so far as to enter the sporting data in the log.

  You may remember the stunt that the audiopress of 2270 boosted as McNulty's Miracle Move'? It's practically a legend of the spaceways. Afterward, when we'd got safely home, McNulty disclaimed the credit and put it where it rightfully belonged. The audiopress had a good excuse, as usual. They said he was the captain, wasn't he? And his name made the headline alliterative, didn't it? Seems that there must be a sect of audio-journalists who have to be alliterative to gain salvation.

  What precipitated that crazy stunt and whitened my hair was a chunk of cosmic flotsam. Said object took the form of a gob of meteoric nickel-iron ambling along at the characteristic speed of pssst! Its orbit lay on the planetary plane and it approached at right angles to our sunward course.

  It gave us the business. I'd never have believed anything so small could have made such a slam. To the present day I can hear the dreadful whistle of air as it made a mad break for freedom through that jagged hole.

  We lost quite a bit of political juice before the autodoors sealed the damaged section. Pressure already had dropped to nine pounds when the compensators held it and slowly began to build it up again. The fall didn't worry the Martians; to them nine pounds was like inhaling pigwash.

  There was one engineer in that sealed section. Another escaped the closing doors by the skin of his left ear. But the first, we thought, had drawn his fateful number and eventually would be floated out like so many spacemen who've come to the end of their duty.

  The guy who got clear was leaning against a bulwark, white-faced from the narrowness of his squeak. Jay Score came pounding along. His jaw was working, his eyes were like lamps, but his voice was cool and easy.

  He said," Get out. Seal this room. I'll try make a snatch. Open up and let me out fast when I knock."

  With that he shoved us from the room which we sealed by closing its autodoor. We couldn't see what the big hunk was doing but the telltale showed he'd released and opened the door to the damaged section. Couple of seconds later the light went out, showing the door had been closed again. Then came a hard, urgent knock. We opened. Jay plunged through hell-for-leather with the engineer's limp body cuddled in his huge arms. He bore it as if it were no bigger and heavier than a kitten and the way he took it down the passage threatened to carry him clear through the end of the ship.

  Meanwhile we found we were in a first-class mess. The rockets weren't functioning any more. The venturi tubes were okay and the combustion chambers undamaged. The injectors worked without a hitch-providing that they were pumped by hand. We had lost none of our precious fuel and the shell was intact save for that one jagged hole. What made us useless was the wrecking of our co-ordinated feeding and firing controls. They had been located where the big bullet went through and now they were so much scrap.

  This was more than serious. General opinion called it certain death though nobody said so openly. I'm pretty certain that McNulty shared the morbid notion even if his official report did under-describe it as "an embarrassing predicament" That is just like McNulty. It's a wonder he didn't define our feelings by recording that we were somewhat nonplussed.

  Anyway, the Martian squad poured out, some honest work being required of them for the first time in six trips. Pressure had crawled back to fourteen pounds and they had to come into it to be fitted with their head-and-shoulder contraptions.

  Kli Yang sniffed offensively, waved a disgusted tentacle and chirruped, "I could swim." He eased up when we got his dingbat fixed and exhausted it to his customary three pounds. That is the Martian idea of sarcasm: whenever the atmosphere is thicker than they like they make sinuous backstrokes and declaim, "I could swim!"

  To give them their due, they were good. A Martian can cling to polished ice and work continuously for twelve hours on a ration of oxygen that wouldn't satisfy a Terrestrial for more than ninety minutes. I watched them beat it through the airlock, eyes goggling through inverted fishbowls, their tentacles clutching power lines, sealing plates and quasi-arc welders. Blue lights made little auroras outside the ports as they began to cut, shape and close up that ragged hole.

  All the time we continued to bullet sunward. But for this accursed misfortune we'd have swung a curve into the orbit of Venus in four hours' time. Then we'd have let her catch us up while we decelerated to a safe landing.

  But when that peewee planetoid picked on us we were still heading for the biggest and brightest furnace hereabouts. That was the way we continued to go, our original velocity being steadily increased by the pull of our fiery destination.

  I wanted to be cremated--but not yet!

  Up in the bow navigation-room Jay Score remained in constant conference with Captain McNuIty and the two astrocomputator operators. Outside, the Martians continued to crawl around, fizzing and spitting with flashes of ghastly blue light. The engineers, of course, weren't waiting for them to finish their job. Four in spacesuits entered the wrecked section and started the task of creating order out of chaos.

  I envied all those busy guys and so did many others. There's a lot of consolation in being able to do something even in an apparently hopeless situation. There's a lot of misery in being compelled to play with one's fingers while others are active.

  Two Martians came back through the lock, grabbed some more sealing-plates and crawled out again. One of them thought it might be a bright idea to take his pocket chess set as well, but I didn't let him. There are times and places for that sort of thing and knight to king's fourth on the skin of a busted boat isn't one of them. Then I went along to see Sam Hignett, our Negro surgeon.

  Sam had managed to drag the engineer back from the rim of the grave. He'd done it with oxygen, adrenalin and heart-massage. Only his long, dexterous fingers could have achieved it. It was a feat of surgery that has been brought off before, but not often.

  Seemed that Sam didn't know what had happened and didn't much care, either. He was like that when he had a patient on his hands. Deftly he closed the chest incision with silver clips, painted the pinched flesh with iodized plastic, cooled the stuff to immediate hardness with a spray of ether. "Sam," I told him. "You're a marvel.”

  "Jay gave me a fair chance," he said. "He got him here in time."

  "Why put the blame on him?" I joked, unfunnily. "Sergeant," he answered, very serious, "I'm the ship's doctor. I do the best I can. I couldn't have saved this man if Jay hadn't brought him when he did."

  "All right, all right," I agreed. "Have it your own way." A good fellow, Sam. But he was like all doctors--you know, ethical. I left him with his feebly breathing patient.

  McNulty came strutting along the catwalk as I went back. He checked the fuel tanks. He was doing it personally, and that meant something. He looked worried, and that meant a devil of a lot. It meant that I need not bother to write my last will and testament because it would never be read by anything living.

  His portly form disappeared into the bow navigation room and I heard him say, "Jay, I guess you--" before the closing door cut off his voice.

  He appeared to have a lot of faith in Jay Score. Well, that individual certainly looked capable enough. The skipper and the new emergency pilot continued to act like cronies even while heading for the final frizzle.

  One of the emigrating agriculturalists came out of his cabin and caught me before I regained the armoury. Studying me wide-eyed, he said, "Sergeant, there's a half-moon showing through my port."

  He continued to pop them at me while I popped mine at him. Venus showing half her pan meant that we were now crossing her orbit. He knew it too-I could tell by the way he bugged them.

  "Well," he persisted, with ill-concealed nervousness, "how long is this mishap likely to delay us?" "No knowing." I scratched my head, trying to look stupid and confident at one and the same time. "Captain McNulty will do his utmost. Put your trust in him--Poppa knows best." "You don't think we are . . . er . . . in any danger?"

  "Oh, not at all."

  "You're a liar," he said.

  "I resent having to admit it," said I. That unhorsed him. He returned to his cabin, dissatisfied, apprehensive. In short time he'd see Venus in three-quarter phase and would tell the others. Then the fat would be in the fire.

  Our fat in the solar fire.

  The last vestiges of hope had drained away just about the time when a terrific roar and violent trembling told that the long-dead rockets were back in action. The noise didn't last more than a few seconds. They shut off quickly, the brief burst serving to show that repairs were effective and satisfactory.

  The noise brought out the agriculturalist at full gallop. He knew the worst by now and so did the others. It had been impossible to conceal the truth for the three days since he'd seen Venus as a half-moon. She was far behind us now. We were cutting the orbit of Mercury. But still the passengers clung to desperate hope that someone would perform an unheard-of miracle.

  Charging into the armoury, he yipped, "The rockets are working again. Does that mean?"

  "Nothing," I gave back, seeing no point in building false hopes.

  "But can't we turn round and go back?" He mopped perspiration trickling down his jowls. Maybe a little of it was forced out by fear, but most of it was due to the unpleasant fact that interior conditions had become anything but arctic.

  "Sir," I said, feeling my shirt sticking to my back, "we've got more pull than any bunch of spacemen ever enjoyed before. And we're moving so goddam fast that there's nothing left to do but hold a lily."

  "My ranch," he growled, bitterly. "I've been allotted five thousand acres of the best Venusian tobacco-growing territory, not to mention a range of uplands for beef."

  "Sorry, but I think you'll be lucky ever to see it" Crrrump! went the rockets again. The burst bent me backward and made him bow forward like he had a bad bellyache. Up in the bow, McNulty or Jay Score or some- one was blowing them whenever he felt the whim. I couldn't see any sense in it.

  "What's that for?" demanded the complainant, regaining the perpendicular.

  "Boys will be boys," I said. Snorting his disgust he went to his cabin. A typical Terrestrial emigrant, big, healthy and tough, he was slow to crack and temporarily too peeved to be really worried in any genuinely soul-shaking way.

  Half an hour later the general call sounded on buzzers all over the boat. It was a ground signal, never used in space. It meant that the entire crew and all other occupants of the vessel were summoned to the central cabin. Imagine guys being called from their posts in full flight!

  Something unique in the history of space navigation must have been behind that call, probably a compose-yourselves-for-the-inevitable-end speech by McNulty.

  Expecting the skipper to preside over the last rites, I wasn't surprised to find him standing on the tiny dais as we assembled. A faint scowl lay over his plump features but it changed to a ghost of a smile when the Martians mooched in and one of them did some imitation shark-dodging.

  Erect beside McNulty, expressionless as usual, Jay Score looked at that swimming Martian as if he were a pane of glass: Then his strangely lit orbs shifted their aim as if they'd seen nothing more boring. The swim-joke, was getting stale, anyway.

  "Men and vedras," began McNulty--the latter being the Martian word for `adults' and, by implication, another piece of Martian sarcasm--"I have no need to enlarge upon the awkwardness of our position." That man certainly could pick his words--awkward! "Already we are nearer the Sun than any vessel has been in the whole history of cosmic navigation."

  "Comic navigation," murmured Kli Yang, with tactless wit.

  "We'll need your humour to entertain us later," observed Jay Score in a voice so flat that Kli Yang subsided. "We are moving toward the luminary," went on McNulty, his scowl reappearing, "faster than any ship moved before. Bluntly, there is not more than one chance in ten thousand of us getting out of this alive." He favoured Kli Yang with a challenging stare but that tentacled individual was now subdued."However, there is that one chance--and we are going to take it."

  We gaped at him, wondering what the devil he meant. Every one of us knew our terrific velocity made it impossible to describe a U-turn and get back without touching the Sun. Neither could we fight our way in the reverse direction with all that mighty drag upon us. There was nothing to do but go onward, onward, until the final searing blast scattered our disrupted molecules.

  "What we intend is to try a cometary," continued McNulty. "Jay and myself and the astro-computators think it's remotely possible that we might achieve it and pull through."

  That was plain enough. The stunt was a purely theoretical one frequently debated by mathematicians and astronavigators but never tried out in grim reality. The idea is to build up all the velocity that can be got and at the same time to angle into the path of an elongated, elliptical orbit resembling that of a comet. In theory, the vessel might then skim close to the Sun so supremely fast that it would swing pendulum like far out to the opposite side of the orbit whence it came. A sweet trick--but could we make it?

  "Calculations show our present condition fair enough to permit a small chance of success," said McNulty. "We have power enough and fuel enough to build up the necessary velocity with the aid of the Sun-pull, to strike the necessary angle and to maintain it for the necessary time. The only point about which we have serious doubts is that of whether we can survive at our nearest to the Sun. "He wiped perspiration, unconsciously emphasising the shape of things to come. "I won't mince words, men. It's going to be a choice sample of hell!"

  "We'll see it through, skipper," said someone. A low murmur of support sounded through the cabin.

  Kli Yang stood up, simultaneously waggled four jointless arms for attention, and twittered, "It is an idea. It is excellent. I, Kli Yang, endorse it on behalf of my fellow vedras. We shall cram ourselves into the refrigerator and suffer the Terrestrial stink while the Sun goes past"

  Ignoring that crack about human odour, McNulty nodded and said, "Everybody will be packed into the cold room and endure it as best they can."

  "Exactly," said Kli. "Quite," he added with bland disregard of superfluity. Wiggling a tentacle-tip at McNulty, he carried on, "But we cannot control the ship while squatting in the ice-box like three and a half dozen strawberry sundaes. There will have to be a pilot in the bow. One individual can hold her on course-until he gets fried. So somebody has to be the fryee."

  He gave the tip another sinuous wiggle, being under the delusion that it was fascinating his listeners into complete attention. "And since it cannot be denied that we Martians are far less susceptible to extremes of heat, I suggest that--"

  "Nuts !"snapped McNulty. His gruffness deceived nobody. The Martians were nuisances--but grand guys. "All right" Kli's chirrup rose to a shrill, protesting yelp. "Who else is entitled to become a crisp?"

  "Me," said Jay Score. It was queer the way he voiced it, just as if he were a candidate so obvious that only the stone-blind couldn't see him.

  He was right, at that! Jay was the very one for the job. If anyone could take what was going to come through the fore observation ports it was Jay Score. He was big and tough, built for just such a task as this. He had a lot of stuff that none of us had got and, after all, he was a fully qualified emergency pilot. And most definitely this was an emergency, the greatest ever.

  But it was funny the way I felt about him. I could imagine him up in front, all alone, nobody there, our lives depending on how much hell he could take, while the tremendous Sun extended its searing fingers.

  "You !" ejaculated Kli Yang, breaking my train of thought. His goggle eyes bulged irefully at the big, laconic figure on the dais. "You would! I am ready to mate in four moves, as you are miserably aware, and promptly you scheme to lock yourself away."

  "Six moves," contradicted Jay, airily. "You cannot do it in less than six.'

  "Four !" Kli Yang fairly howled." And right at this point you--"

  It was too much for the listening McNulty. He looked as if on the verge of a stroke. His purple face turned to the semaphoring Kli.

  "To hell with your blasted chess!" he roared. "Return to your stations, all of you. Make ready for maximum boost. I will sound the general call immediately it becomes necessary to take cover and then you will all go to the cold room.” He stared around, the purple gradually fading as his blood pressure went down. "That is, everyone except Jay."

  More like old times with the rockets going full belt. They thundered smoothly and steadily. Inside the vessel the atmosphere became hotter and hotter until moisture trickled continually down our backs and a steaminess lay over the gloss of the walls. What it was like in the bow navigation-room I didn't know and didn't care to discover. The Martians were not inconvenienced yet; for once their whacky composition was much to be envied.

  I did not keep check on the time but I'd had two spells of duty with one intervening sleep period before the buzzers gave the general call. By then things had become bad. I was no longer sweating : I was slowly melting into my boots.

  Sam, of course, endured it most easily of all the Terrestrials and had persisted long enough to drag his patient completely out of original danger. That engineer was lucky, if it's luck to be saved for a bonfire. We put him in the cold room right away, with Sam in attendance.

  The rest of us followed when the buzzer went. Our sanctuary was more than a mere refrigerator; it was the strongest and coolest section of the vessel, a heavily armoured, triple shielded compartment holding the instrument lockers, two sick bays and a large lounge for the benefit of space-nauseated passengers. It held all of us comfortably.

  All but the Martians. It held them, but not comfortably. They are never comfortable at fourteen pounds pressure which they regard as not only thick but also smelly-something like breathing, molasses impregnated with aged goat. Under our very eyes Kli Yang produced a bottle of hooloo scent, handed it to his half-parent Kli Morg. The latter took it, stared at us distastefully then sniffed the bottle in an ostentatious manner that was positively insulting. But nobody said anything.

  All were present excepting McNulty and Jay Score. The skipper appeared two hours later. Things must have been raw up front, for he looked terrible. His haggard face was beaded and glossy, his once-plump cheeks sunken and blistered. His usually spruce, well-fitting uniform hung upon him sloppily. It needed only one glance to tell that he'd had a darned good roasting, as much as he could stand.

  Walking unsteadily, he crossed the floor, went into the first-aid cubby, stripped himself with slow, painful movements. Sam rubbed him with tannic jelly. We could hear the tormented skipper grunting hoarsely as Sam put plenty of pep into the job.

  The heat was now on us with a vengeance. It pervaded the walls, the floor, the air and created a multitude of fierce stinging sensations in every muscle of my body. Several of the engineers took off their boots and jerkins. In short time the passengers followed suit, discarding most of their outer clothing. My agriculturalist sat a miserable figure in tropical silks, moody over what might have been.

  Emerging from the cubby, McNulty flopped onto a bunk and said," If we're all okay in four hours' time, we're through the worst part."

  At that moment the rockets faltered. We knew at once what was wrong. A fuel tank had emptied and a relay had failed to cut in. An engineer should have been standing by to switch the conduits. In the heat and excitement, someone had blundered.

  The fact barely had time to register before Kli Yang was out through the door. He'd been lolling nearest to it and was gone while we were trying to collect our overheated wits. Twenty seconds later the rockets renewed their steady thrum.

  An intercom bell clanged right by my ear. Switching its mike, I croaked a throaty, "Well?" and heard Jay's voice coming back at me from the bow. "Who did it?"

  "Kli Yang," I told him. "He's still outside."

  "Probably gone for their domes," guessed Jay. "Tell him I said thanks.”

  "What's it like around where you live?" I asked.

  "Fierce. It isn't so good . . . for vision." Silence a moment, then, "Guess I can stick it . . . somehow. Strap down or hold on ready for next time I sound the . . . bell”

  "Why?" I half yelled, half rasped.

  "Going to rotate her. Try . . . distribute . . the heat" A faint squeak told that he'd switched off. I told the others to strap down. The Martians didn't have to bother about that because they owned enough saucer-sized suckers to weld them to a sunfishing meteor.

  Kli came back, showed Jay's guess to be correct; he was dragging the squad's head-and-shoulder pieces. The load was as much as he could pull now that temperature had climbed to the point where even he began to wilt.

  The Martian moochers gladly donned their gadgets, sealing the seams and evacuating them down to three pounds pressure. It made them considerably happier. Remembering that we Terrestrials use spacesuits to keep air inside, it seemed queer to watch those guys using theirs to keep it outside.

  They had just finished making themselves comfortable and had laid out a chessboard in readiness for a minor tourney when the bell sounded again. We braced ourselves. The Martians clamped down their suckers.

  Slowly and steadily the Upsydaisy began to turn upon her longitudinal axis. The chessboard and pieces tried to stay put, failed, crawled along the floor, up the wall and across the ceiling. Solar pull was making them stick to the sunward side.

  I saw Kli Morg's strained, heat-ridden features glooming at a black bishop while it skittered around, and I suppose that inside his goldfish bowl were resounding some potent samples of Martian invective.

  "Three hours and a half," gasped McNulty.

  That four hours estimate could only mean two hours of approach to the absolute deadline and two hours of retreat from it. So the moment when we had two hours to go would be the moment when we were at our nearest to the solar furnace, the moment of greatest peril.

  I wasn't aware of that critical time, since I passed out twenty minutes before it arrived. No use enlarging upon the horror of that time. I think I went slightly nuts. I was a hog in an oven, being roasted alive. It's the only time I've ever thought of the Sun as a great big shining bastard that ought to be extinguished for keeps. Soon afterward I became incapable of any thought at all.

  I recovered consciousness and painfully moved in my straps ninety minutes after passing the midway point. My dazed mind had difficulty in realizing that we had now only half an hour to go to reach theoretical safety.

  What had happened in the interim was left to my imagination and I didn't care to try picture it just then. The Sun blazing with a ferocity multi-million times greater than that of a tiger's eye, and a hundred thousand times as hungry for our blood and bones. The flaming corona licking out toward this shipload of half-dead entities, imprisoned in a steel bottle.

  And up in front of the vessel, behind its totally inadequate quartz observation-ports, Jay Score sitting alone, facing the mounting inferno, staring, staring, staring Getting to my feet I teetered uncertainly, went down like a bundle of rags. The ship wasn't rotating any longer, and we appeared to be bulleting along in normal fashion. What dropped me was sheer weakness. I felt lousy.

  The Martians already had recovered. I knew they'd be the first. One of them lugged me upright and held me steady while I regained a percentage of my former control. I noticed that another had sprawled right across the unconscious McNulty and three of the passengers. Yes, he'd shielded them from some of the heat and they were the next ones to come to life.

  Struggling to the intercom, I switched it but got no response from the front. For three full minutes I hung by it dazedly before I tried again. Nothing doing. Jay wouldn't or couldn't answer.

  I was stubborn about it, made several more attempts with no better result. The effort cost me a dizzy spell and down I flopped once more. The heat was still terrific. I felt more dehydrated than a mummy dug out of sand a million years old.

  Kli Yang opened the door, crept out with dragging, pain-stricken motion. His air-helmet was secure on his shoulders. Five minutes later he came back, spoke through the helmet's diaphragm.

  "Couldn't get near the bow navigation-room. At the midway catwalk the autodoors are closed, the atmosphere sealed off and it's like being inside a furnace.” He stared around, met my gaze, answered the question in my eyes. "There's no air in the bow."

  No air meant the observation-ports had gone phut. Nothing else could have emptied the navigation-room. Well, we carried spares for that job and could make good the damage once we got into the clear. Meanwhile here we were roaring along, maybe on correct course and maybe not, with an empty, airless navigation-room and with an intercom system that gave nothing but ghastly silence.

  Sitting around we picked up strength. The last to come out of his coma was the sick engineer. Sam brought him through again. It was about then that McNulty wiped sweat, showed sudden excitement. "Four hours, men," he said, with rim satisfaction. "We've done it!" We raised a hollow cheer. By Jupiter, the superheated atmosphere seemed to grow ten degrees cooler with the news. Strange how relief from tension can breed strength; in one minute we had conquered former weakness and were ready to go. But it was yet another four hours before a quartet of spacesuited engineers penetrated the forward hell and bore their burden from the airless navigation-room. They carried him into Sam's cubby-hole, a long, heavy, silent figure with face burned black.

  Stupidly I hung around him saying, "Jay, Jay, how're you making out?”

  He must have heard, for he moved the fingers of his right hand and emitted a chesty, grinding noise. Two of the engineers went to his cabin, brought back his huge rawhide case. They shut the door, staying in with Sam and leaving me and the Martians fidgeting outside. Kli Yang wandered up and down the passage as if he didn't know what to do with his tentacles.

  Sam came out after more than an hour. We jumped him on the spot. "How's Jay?"

  "Blind as a statue." He shook his woolly head. "And his voice isn't there any more. He's taken an awful beating.  So that's why he didn't answer the intercom.”

  I looked him straight in the eyes. "Can you . . . can you do anything for him, Sam?"

  "I only wish I could. His sepia face showed his feelings. "You know how much I'd like to put him right. But I can't." He made a gesture of futility. "He is completely beyond my modest skill. Nobody less than Johannsen can help him. Maybe when we get back to Earth…" His voice petered out and he went back inside. Kli Yang said, miserably, "I am saddened.”

  A scene I'll never forget to my dying day was that evening we spent as guests of the Astro Club in New York. That club was then--as it is today--the most exclusive group of human beings ever gathered together. To qualify for membership one had to perform in dire emergency a feat of astro-navigation tantamount to a miracle. There were nine members in those days and there are only twelve now.

  Mace Waldron, the famous pilot who saved that Martian liner in 2263, was the chairman. Classy in his soup and fish, he stood at the top of the table with Jay Score sitting at his side. At the opposite end of the table was McNulty, a broad smirk of satisfaction upon his plump pan. Beside the skipper was old, white-haired Knud Johannsen, the genius who designed the J-series and a scientific figure known to every spaceman.

  Along the sides, manifestly self-conscious, sat the entire crew of the Upsydaisy, including the Martians, plus three of our passengers who'd postponed their trips for this occasion. There were also a couple of audio-journalists with scanners and mikes.

  "Gentlemen and vedras," said Mace Waldron, "this is an event without precedent in the history of humanity, an event never thought-of, never imagined by this club. Because of that I feel it doubly an honour and a privilege to propose that Jay Score, Emergency Pilot, be accepted as a fully qualified and worthy member of the Astro Club."

  "Seconded!" shouted three members simultaneously.

  "Thank you, gentlemen." He cocked an inquiring eyebrow. Eight hands went up in unison. "Carried," he said. "Unanimously."

  Glancing down at the taciturn and unmoved Jay Score, he launched into a eulogy. It went on and on and on, full of praise and superlatives, while Jay squatted beside him with a listless air.

  Down at the other end I saw McNulty's gratified smirk grow stronger and stronger. Next to him, old Knud was gazing at Jay with a fatherly fondness that verged on the fatuous. The crew likewise gave full attention to the blank-faced subject of the talk, and the scanners were fixed upon him too.

  I returned my attention to where all the others were looking, and the victim sat there, his restored eyes bright and glittering, but his face completely immobile despite the talk, the publicity, the beam of paternal pride from Johannsen.

  But after ten minutes of this I saw J.20 begin to fidget with obvious embarrassment.

  Don't let anyone tell you that a robot can't have feelings!

 

UNIVERSE

  Astounding Science Fiction May by Robert A. Heinlein

 

  Another SFWA HALL OF FAME story, "Universe" is justly famous, both as a story and as the prototype (if not the actual first) treatment of a self-contained, confined world, in this case an enormous spaceship whose inhabitants have forgotten who they were, what they were doing, and even the nature of their existence.

  It is truly one of the most influential and important stories in science fiction.

 

  (There was no one like Bob Heinlein for getting there first. The self-contained world is now not only a staple of science fiction, but a recognized part of science itself. I have written frequently of "starships" as representing the serious future of humanity in my non-fiction, and I tell you quite unabashedly that the idea came to me from "Universe." I can't say that Gerard O'Neill got the notion of his "space settlements" from "Universe," but if it turned out he had, T would be pleased, but not surprised. Ah, that golden year of 1941.—I.A.)

 

LIAR!

  Astounding Science Fiction May by Isaac Asimov

 

  (I was very fortunate to have squeezed a story into the May, 1941, Astounding, if only that I found myself in company with giants, though I must admit it was frightening to feel that I was in competition with them.

  "Liar!" was only the fourth story I had sold to Campbell and the second positronic robot story I had placed with him. The first was "Reason." "Liar!" was also the first that John had taken without requesting revision of any sort.

  I wish he had, though. There were parts that were embarrassingly amateurish, and that I carefully revised nine years later when I prepared the story for inclusion in I, Robot. Here, however, because of the necessity of playing fair with the reader and with the historical imperative, the story appears as it had appeared in the magazine. If you snicker at my clumsiness here and there, please remember that I wrote it when I was only 20.—I.A.)

 

  Alfred Lanning lit his cigar carefully, but the tips of his fingers were trembling slightly. His gray eyebrows hunched low as he spoke between puffs.

  "It reads minds all right-damn little doubt about that! But why?" He looked at Mathematician Peter Bogert, "Well?"

  Bogert flattened his black hair down with both hands, "That was the thirty-fourth RB model we've turned out, Lanning. All the others were strictly orthodox."

  The third man at the table frowned. Milton Ashe was the youngest officer of U. S. Robot & Mechanical Men, Inc., and proud of his post.

  "Listen, Bogert. There wasn't a hitch in the assembly from start to finish. I guarantee that."

  Bogert's thick lips spread in a patronizing smile, "Do you? If you can answer for the entire assembly line, I recommend your promotion. By exact count, there are seventy-five thousand, two hundred and thirty-four operations necessary for the manufacture of a single positronic brain, each separate operation depending for successful completion upon any number of factors, from five to a hundred and five. If any one of them goes seriously wrong, the 'brain' is ruined. I quote our own information folder, Ashe."

  Milton Ashe flushed, but a fourth voice cut off his reply.

  "If we're going to start by trying to fix the blame on one another, I'm leaving." Susan Calvin's hands were folded tightly in her lap, and the little lines about her thin, pale lips deepened, "We've got a mind-reading robot on our hands and it strikes me as rather important that we find out just why it reads minds. We're not going to do that by saying, 'Your fault! My fault!' "

  Her cold gray eyes fastened upon Ashe, and he grinned.

  Lanning grinned too, and, as always at such times, his long white hair and shrewd little eyes made him the picture of a biblical patriarch, "True for you, Dr. Calvin."

  His voice became suddenly crisp, "Here's everything in pill-concentrate form. We've produced a positronic brain of supposedly ordinary vintage that's got the remarkable property of being able to tune in on thought waves. It would mark the most important advance in robotics in decades, if we knew how it happened. We don't, and we have to find out. Is that clear?"

  "May I make a suggestion?" asked Bogert.

  "Go ahead!"

  "I'd say that until we do figure out the mess -- and as a mathematician I expect it to be a very devil of a mess -- we keep the existence of RD-34 a secret. I mean even from the other members of the staff. As heads of the departments, we ought not to find it an insoluble problem, and the fewer know about it-"

  "Bogert is right," said Dr. Calvin. "Ever since the Interplanetary Code was modified to allow robot models to be tested in the plants before being shipped out to space, antirobot propaganda has increased. If any word leaks out about a robot being able to read minds before we can announce complete control of the phenomenon, pretty effective capital could be made out of it."

  Lanning sucked at his cigar and nodded gravely. He turned to Ashe; "I think you said you were alone when you first stumbled on this thought-reading business."

  "I'll say I was alone -- I got the scare of my life. RB-34 had just been taken off the assembly table and they sent him down to me. Obermann was off somewheres, so I took him down to the testing rooms myself -- at least I started to take him down." Ashe paused, and a tiny smile tugged at his lips, "Say, did any of you ever carry on a thought conversation without knowing it?"

  No one bothered to answer, and he continued, "You don't realize it at first, you know. He just spoke to me -- as logically and sensibly as you can imagine -- and it was only when I was most of the way down to the testing rooms that I realized that I hadn't said anything. Sure, I thought lots, but that isn't the same thing, is it? I locked that thing up and ran for Lanning. Having it walking beside me, calmly peering into my thoughts and picking and choosing among them gave me the willies."

  "I imagine it would," said Susan Calvin thoughtfully. Her eyes fixed themselves upon Ashe in an oddly intent manner. "We are so accustomed to considering our own thoughts private."

  Lanning broke in impatiently, "Then only the four of us know. All right! We've got to go about this systematically. Ashe, I want you to check over the assembly line from beginning to end -- everything. You're to eliminate all operations in which there was no possible chance of an error, and list all those where there were, together with its nature and possible magnitude."

  "Tall order," grunted Ashe.

  "Naturally! Of course, you're to put the men under you to work on this -- every single one if you have to, and I don't care if we go behind schedule, either. But they're not to know why, you understand."

  "Hm-m-m, yes!" The young technician grinned wryly. "It's still a lulu of a job."

  Lanning swiveled about in his chair and faced Calvin, "You'll have to tackle the job from the other direction. You're the robo-psychologist of the plant, so you're to study the robot itself and work backward. Try to find out how he ticks. See what else is tied up with his telepathic powers, how far they extend, how they warp his outlook, and just exactly what harm it has done to his ordinary RB properties. You've got that?"

  Lanning didn't wait for Dr. Calvin to answer.

  "I'll co-ordinate the work and interpret the findings mathematically." He puffed violently at his cigar and mumbled the rest through the smoke; "Bogert will help me there, of course."

  Bogert polished the nails of one pudgy hand with the other and said blandly, "I dare say. I know a little in the line."

  "Well! I'll get started." Ashe shoved his chair back and rose. His pleasantly youthful face crinkled in a grin, "I've got the darnedest job of any of us, so I'm getting out of here and to work."

  He left with a slurred, "B' seein' ye!"

  Susan Calvin answered with a barely perceptible nod, but her eyes followed him out of sight and she did not answer when Lanning grunted and said, "Do you want to go up and see RB-34 now, Dr. Calvin?"

  RB-34's photoelectric eyes lifted from the book at the muffled sound of binges turning and he was upon his feet when Susan Calvin entered.

  She paused to readjust the huge "No Entrance" sign upon the door and then approached the robot.

  "I've brought you the texts upon hyperatomic motors, Herbie -- a few anyway. Would you care to look at them?"

  RB-34 -- otherwise known as Herbie -- lifted the three heavy books from her arms and opened to the title page of one:

  "Hm-m-m! 'Theory of Hyperatomics.' " He mumbled inarticulately to himself as he flipped the pages and then spoke with an abstracted air, "Sit down, Dr. Calvin! This will take me a few minutes."

  The psychologist seated herself and watched Herbie narrowly as he took a chair at the other side of the table and went through the three books systematically.

  At the end of half an hour, he put them down, "Of course, I know why you brought these."

  The corner of Dr. Calvin's lip twitched, "I was afraid you would. It's difficult to work with you, Herbie. You're always a step ahead of me."

  "It's the same with these books, you know, as with the others. They just don't interest me. There's nothing to your textbooks. Your science is just a mass of collected data plastered together by makeshift theory -- and all so incredibly simple, that it's scarcely worth bothering about.

  "It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotions" -- his mighty hand gestured vaguely as he sought the proper words.

  Dr. Calvin whispered, "I think I understand."

  "I see into minds, you see," the robot continued, "and you have no idea how complicated they are. I can't begin to understand everything because my own mind has so little in common with them -- but I try, and your novels help."

  "Yes, but I'm afraid that after going through some of the harrowing emotional experiences of our present-day sentimental novel" -- there was a tinge of bitterness in her voice -- "you find real minds like ours dull and colorless."

  "But I don't!"

  The sudden energy in the response brought the other to her feet. She felt herself reddening, and thought wildly, "He must know!"

  Herbie subsided suddenly, and muttered in a low voice from which the metallic timbre departed almost entirely. "But, of course, I know about it, Dr. Calvin. You think of it always, so how can I help but know?"

  Her face was hard. "Have you -- told anyone?"

  "Of course not!" This, with genuine surprise, "No one has asked me."

  "Well, then," she flung out, "I suppose you think I am a fool."

  "No! It is a normal emotion."

  "Perhaps that is why it is so foolish." The wistfulness in her voice drowned out everything else. Some of the woman peered through the layer of doctorhood. "I am not what you would call -- attractive."

  "If you are referring to mere physical attraction, I couldn't judge. But I know, in any case, that there are other types of attraction."

  "Nor young." Dr. Calvin had scarcely heard the robot.

  "You are not yet forty." An anxious insistence had crept into Herbie's voice.

  "Thirty-eight as you count the years; a shriveled sixty as far as my emotional outlook on life is concerned. Am I a psychologist for nothing?"

  She drove on with bitter breathlessness, "And he's barely thirty-five and looks and acts younger. Do you suppose he ever sees me as anything but ... but what I am?"

  "You are wrong!" Herbie's steel fist struck the plastic-topped table with a strident clang. "Listen to me-"

  But Susan Calvin whirled on him now and the hunted pain in her eyes became a blaze, "Why should I? What do you know about it all, anyway, you ... you machine. I'm just a specimen to you; an interesting bug with a peculiar mind spread-eagled for inspection. It's a wonderful example of frustration, isn't it? Almost as good as your books." Her voice, emerging in dry sobs, choked into silence.

  The robot cowered at the outburst. He shook his head pleadingly. "Won't you listen to me, please? I could help you if you would let me."

  "How?" Her lips curled. "By giving me good advice?"

  "No, not that. It's just that I know what other people think -- Milton Ashe, for instance."

  There was a long silence, and Susan Calvin's eyes dropped. "I don't want to know what he thinks," she gasped. "Keep quiet."

  "I think you would want to know what he thinks"

  Her head remained bent, but her breath came more quickly. "You are talking nonsense," she whispered.

  "Why should I? I am trying to help. Milton Ashe's thoughts of you-" he paused.

  And then the psychologist raised her head, "Well?"

  The robot said quietly, "He loves you."

  For a full minute, Dr. Calvin did not speak. She merely stared. Then, "You are mistaken! You must be. Why should he?"

  "But he does. A thing like that cannot be hidden, not from me."

  "But I am so ... so-" she stammered to a halt.

  "He looks deeper than the skin, and admires intellect in others. Milton Ashe is not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes."

  Susan Calvin found herself blinking rapidly and waited before speaking. Even then her voice trembled, "Yet he certainly never in any way indicated-"

  "Have you ever given him a chance?"

  "How could I? I never thought that-"

  "Exactly!"

  The psychologist paused in thought and then looked up suddenly. "A girl visited him here at the plant half a year ago. She was pretty, I suppose -- blond and slim. And, of course, could scarcely add two and two. He spent all day puffing out his chest, trying to explain how a robot was put together." The hardness had returned, "Not that she understood! Who was she?"

  Herbie answered without hesitation, "I know the person you are referring to. She is his first cousin, and there is no romantic interest there, I assure you."

  Susan Calvin rose to her feet with a vivacity almost girlish. "Now isn't that strange? That's exactly what I used to pretend to myself sometimes, though I never really thought so. Then it all must be true."

  She ran to Herbie and seized his cold, heavy hand in both hers. "Thank you, Herbie." Her voice was an urgent, husky whisper. "Don't tell anyone about this. Let it be our secret -- and thank you again." With that, and a convulsive squeeze of Herbie's unresponsive metal fingers, she left.

  Herbie turned slowly to his neglected novel, but there was no one to read his thoughts.

  Milton Ashe stretched slowly and magnificently, to the tune of cracking joints and a chorus of grunts, and then glared at Peter Bogert, Ph.D.

  "Say," he said, "I've been at this for a week now with just about no sleep. How long do I have to keep it up? I thought you said the positronic bombardment in Vac Chamber D was the solution."

  Bogert yawned delicately and regarded his white hands with interest. "It is. I'm on the track."

  "I know what that means when a mathematician says it. How near the end are you?"

  "It all depends."

  "On what?" Ashe dropped into a chair and stretched his long legs out before him.

  "On Lanning. The old fellow disagrees with me." He sighed, "A bit behind the times, that's the trouble with him. He clings to matrix mechanics as the all in all, and this problem calls for more powerful mathematical tools. He's so stubborn."

  Ashe muttered sleepily, "Why not ask Herbie and settle the whole affair?"

  "Ask the robot?" Bogert's eyebrows climbed.

  "Why not? Didn't the old girl tell you?"

  "You mean Calvin?"

  "Yeah! Susie herself. That robot's a mathematical wiz. He knows all about everything plus a bit on the side. He does triple integrals in his head and eats up tensor analysis for dessert."

  The mathematician stared skeptically, "Are you serious?"

  "So help me! The catch is that the dope doesn't like math. He would rather read slushy novels. Honest! You should see the tripe Susie keeps feeding him: 'Purple Passion' and 'Love in Space.' "

  "Dr. Calvin hasn't said a word of this to us."

  "Well, she hasn't finished studying him. You know how she is. She likes to have everything just so before letting out the big secret."

  "She's told you."

  "We sort of got to talking. I have been seeing a lot of her lately." He opened his eyes wide and frowned, "Say, Bogie, have you been noticing anything queer about the lady lately?"

  Bogert relaxed into an undignified grin, "She's using lipstick, if that's what you mean."

  "Hell, I know that. Rouge, powder and eye shadow, too. She's a sight. But it's not that. I can't put my finger on it. It's the way she talks -- as if she were happy about something." He thought a little, and then shrugged.

  The other allowed himself a leer, which, for a scientist past fifty, was not a bad job, "Maybe she's in love."

  Ashe allowed his eyes to close again, "You're nuts, Bogie. You go speak to Herbie; I want to stay here and go to sleep."

  "Right! Not that I particularly like having a robot tell me my job, nor that I think he can do it!"

  A soft snore was his only answer.

  Herbie listened carefully as Peter Bogert, hands in pockets, spoke with elaborate indifference.

  "So there you are. I've been told you understand these things, and I am asking you more in curiosity than anything else. My line of reasoning, as I have outlined it, involves a few doubtful steps, I admit, which Dr. Lanning refuses to accept, and the picture is still rather incomplete."

  The robot didn't answer, and Bogert said, "Well?"

  "I see no mistake," Herbie studied the scribbled figures.

  "I don't suppose you can go any further than that?"

  "I daren't try. You are a better mathematician than I, and -- well, I'd hate to commit myself."

  There was a shade of complacency in Bogert's smile, "I rather thought that would be the case. It is deep. We'll forget it." He crumpled the sheets, tossed them down the waste shaft, turned to leave, and then thought better of it.

  "By the way-"

  The robot waited.

  Bogert seemed to have difficulty. "There is something -- that is, perhaps you can -- " He stopped.

  Herbie spoke quietly. "Your thoughts are confused, but there is no doubt at all that they concern Dr. Lanning. It is silly to hesitate, for as soon as you compose yourself, I'll know what it is you want to ask."

  The mathematician's hand went to his sleek hair in the familiar smoothing gesture. "Lanning is nudging seventy," he said, as if that explained everything.

  "I know that."

  "And he's been director of the plant for almost thirty years." Herbie nodded.

  "Well, now," Bogert's voice became ingratiating, "you would know whether ... whether he's thinking of resigning. Health, perhaps, or some other-"

  "Quite," said Herbie, and that was all.

  "Well, do you know?"

  "Certainly."

  "Then-uh-could you tell me?"

  "Since you ask, yes." The robot was quite matter-of-fact about it. "He has already resigned!"

  "What!" The exclamation was an explosive, almost inarticulate, sound. The scientist's large head hunched forward, "Say that again!"

  "He has already resigned," came the quiet repetition, "but it has not yet taken effect. He is waiting, you see, to solve the problem of -- er -- myself. That finished, he is quite ready to turn the office of director over to his successor."

  Bogert expelled his breath sharply, "And this successor? Who is he?" He was quite close to Herbie now, eyes fixed fascinatedly on those unreadable dull-red photoelectric cells that were the robot's eyes.

  Words came slowly, "You are the next director."

  And Bogert relaxed into a tight smile, "This is good to know. I've been hoping and waiting for this. Thanks, Herbie."

  Peter Bogert was at his desk until five that morning and he was back at nine. The shelf just over the desk emptied of its row of reference books and tables, as he referred to one after the other. The pages of calculations before him increased microscopically and the crumpled sheets at his feet mounted into a hill of scribbled paper.

  At precisely noon, he stared at the final page, rubbed a blood-shot eye, yawned and shrugged. "This is getting worse each minute. Damn!"

  He turned at the sound of the opening door and nodded at Lanning, who entered, cracking the knuckles of one gnarled hand with the other.

  The director took in the disorder of the room and his eyebrows furrowed together.

  "New lead?" he asked.

  "No," came the defiant answer. "What's wrong with the old one?"

  Lanning did not trouble to answer, nor to do more than bestow a single cursory glance at the top sheet upon Bogert's desk. He spoke through the flare of a match as he lit a cigar.

  "Has Calvin told you about the robot? It's a mathematical genius. Really remarkable."

  The other snorted loudly, "So I've heard. But Calvin had better stick to robopsychology. I've checked Herbie on math, and he can scarcely struggle through calculus."

  "Calvin didn't find it so."

  "She's crazy."

  "And I don't find it so." The director's eyes narrowed dangerously.

  "You!" Bogert's voice hardened. "What are you talking about?"

  "I've been putting Herbie through his paces all morning, and he can do tricks you never heard of."

  "Is that so?"

  "You sound skeptical!" Lanning flipped a sheet of paper out of his vest pocket and unfolded it. "That's not my handwriting, is it?"

  Bogert studied the large angular notation covering the sheet, "Herbie did this?"

  "Right! And if you'll notice, he's been working on your time integration of Equation 22. It comes" -- Lanning tapped a yellow fingernail upon the last step -- "to the identical conclusion I did, and in a quarter the time. You had no right to neglect the Linger Effect in positronic bombardment."

  "I didn't neglect it. For Heaven's sake, Lanning, get it through your head that it would cancel out-"

  "Oh, sure, you explained that. You used the Mitchell Translation Equation, didn't you? Well -- it doesn't apply."

  "Why not?"

  "Because you've been using hyper-imaginaries, for one thing."

  "What's that to do with?"

  "Mitchell's Equation won't hold when-"

  "Are you crazy? If you'll reread Mitchell's original paper in the Transactions of the Far-"

  "I don't have to. I told you in the beginning that I didn't like his reasoning, and Herbie backs me in that."

  "Well, then," Bogert shouted, "let that clockwork contraption solve the entire problem for you. Why bother with nonessentials?"

  "That's exactly the point. Herbie can't solve the problem. And if he can't, we can't -- alone. I'm submitting the entire question to the National Board. It's gotten beyond us."

  Bogert's chair went over backward as he jumped up a-snarl, face crimson. "You're doing nothing of the sort."

  Lanning flushed in his turn, "Are you telling me what I can't do?"

  "Exactly," was the gritted response. "I've got the problem beaten and you're not to take it out of my hands, understand? Don't think I don't see through you, you desiccated fossil. You'd cut your own nose off before you'd let me get the credit for solving robotic telepathy."

  "You're a damned idiot, Bogert, and in one second I'll have you suspended for insubordination" -- Lanning's lower lip trembled with passion.

  "Which is one thing you won't do, Lanning. You haven't any secrets with a mind-reading robot around, so don't forget that I know all about your resignation."

  The ash on Lanning's cigar trembled and fell, and the cigar itself followed, "What ... what-"

  Bogert chuckled nastily, "And I'm the new director, be it understood. I'm very aware of that, don't think I'm not. Damn your eyes, Lanning, I'm going to give the orders about here or there will be the sweetest mess that you've ever been in."

  Lanning found his voice and let it out with a roar. "You're suspended, d'ye hear? You're relieved of all duties. You're broken, do you understand?"

  The smile on the other's face broadened, "Now, what's the use of that? You're getting nowhere. I'm holding the trumps. I know you've resigned. Herbie told me, and he got it straight from you."

  Lanning forced himself to speak quietly. He looked an old, old man, with tired eyes peering from a face in which the red had disappeared, leaving the pasty yellow of age behind, "I want to speak to Herbie. He can't have told you anything of the sort. You're playing a deep game, Bogert, but I'm calling your bluff. Come with me."

  Bogert shrugged, "To see Herbie? Good! Damned good!"

  It was also precisely at noon that Milton Ashe looked up from his clumsy sketch and said, "You get the idea? I'm not too good at getting this down, but that's about how it looks. It's a honey of a house, and I can get it for next to nothing."

  Susan Calvin gazed across at him with melting eyes. "It's really beautiful," she sighed. "I've often thought that I'd like to-" Her voice trailed away.

  "Of course," Ashe continued briskly, putting away his pencil, "I've got to wait for my vacation. It's only two weeks off, but this Herbie business has everything up in the air." His eyes dropped to his fingernails, "Besides, there's another point -- but it's a secret."

  "Then don't tell me."

  "Oh, I'd just as soon, I'm just busting to tell someone -- and you're just about the best -er- confidante I could find here." He grinned sheepishly.

  Susan Calvin's heart bounded, but she did not trust herself to speak.

  "Frankly," Ashe scraped his chair closer and lowered his voice into a confidential whisper, "the house isn't to be only for myself. I'm getting married!"

  And then he jumped out of his seat, "What's the matter?"

  "Nothing!" The horrible spinning sensation had vanished, but it was hard to get words out. "Married? You mean-"

  "Why, sure! About time, isn't it? You remember that girl who was here last summer. That's she! But you are sick. You-"

  "Headache!" Susan Calvin motioned him away weakly. "I've ... I've been subject to them lately. I want to ... to congratulate you, of course. I'm very glad-" The inexpertly applied rouge made a pair of nasty red splotches upon her chalk-white face. Things had begun spinning again. "Pardon me -- please-"

  The words were a mumble, as she stumbled blindly out the door. It had happened with the sudden catastrophe of a dream -- and with all the unreal horror of a dream.

  But how could it be? Herbie had said-

  And Herbie knew! He could see into minds!

  She found herself leaning breathlessly against the doorjamb, staring into Herbie's metal face. She must have climbed the two flights of stairs, but she had no memory of it. The distance had been covered in an instant, as in a dream.

  As in a dream!

  And still Herbie's unblinking eyes stared into hers and their dull red seemed to expand into dimly shining nightmarish globes.

  He was speaking, and she felt the cold glass pressing against her lips. She swallowed and shuddered into a pertain awareness of her surroundings.

  Still Herbie spoke, and there was agitation in his voice -- as if he were hurt and frightened and pleading.

  The words were beginning to make sense. "This is a dream," he was saying, "and you mustn't believe in it. You'll wake into the real world soon and laugh at yourself. He loves you, I tell you. He does, he does! But not here! Not now! This is an illusion."

  Susan Calvin nodded, her voice a whisper, "Yes! Yes!" She was clutching Herbie's arm, clinging to it, repeating over and over, "It isn't true, is it? It isn't, is it?"

  Just how she came to her senses, she never knew -- but it was like passing from a world of misty unreality to one of harsh sunlight. She pushed him away from her, pushed hard against that steely arm, and her eyes were wide.

  "What are you trying to do?" Her voice rose to a harsh scream. "What are you trying to do?"

  Herbie backed away, "I want to help"

  The psychologist stared, "Help? By telling me this is a dream? By trying to push me into schizophrenia?" A hysterical tenseness seized her, "This is no dream! I wish it were!"

  She drew her breath sharply, "Wait! Why ... why, I understand. Merciful Heavens, it's so obvious."

  There was horror in the robot's voice, "I had to!"

  "And I believed you! I never thought-"

  Loud voices outside the door brought her to a halt. She turned away, fists clenching spasmodically, and when Bogert and Lanning entered, she was at the far window. Neither of the men paid her the slightest attention.

  They approached Herbie simultaneously; Lanning angry and impatient, Bogert, coolly sardonic. The director spoke first.

  "Here now, Herbie. Listen to me!"

  The robot brought his eyes sharply down upon the aged director, "Yes, Dr. Lanning."

  "Have you discussed me with Dr. Bogert?"

  "No, sir." The answer came slowly, and the smile on Bogert's face flashed off.

  "What's that?" Bogert shoved in ahead of his superior and straddled the ground before the robot. "Repeat what you told me yesterday."

  "I said that " Herbie fell silent. Deep within him his metallic diaphragm vibrated in soft discords.

  "Didn't you say he had resigned?" roared Bogert. "Answer me!"

  Bogert raised his arm frantically, but Lanning pushed him aside, "Are you trying to bully him into lying?"

  "You heard him, Lanning. He began to say 'Yes' and stopped. Get out of my way! I want the truth out of him, understand!"

  "I'll ask him!" Lanning turned to the robot. "All right, Herbie, take it easy. Have I resigned?"

  Herbie stared, and Lanning repeated anxiously, "Have I resigned?" There was the faintest trace of a negative shake of the robot's head. A long wait produced nothing further.

  The two men looked at each other and the hostility in their eyes was all but tangible.

  "What the devil," blurted Bogert, "has the robot gone mute? Can't you speak, you monstrosity?"

  "I can speak," came the ready answer.

  "Then answer the question. Didn't you tell me Lanning had resigned? Hasn't he resigned?"

  And again there was nothing but dull silence, until from the end of the room Susan Calvin's laugh rang out suddenly, high-pitched and semi-hysterical.

  The two mathematicians jumped, and Bogerts eyes narrowed, "You here? What's so funny?"

  "Nothing's funny." Her voice was not quite natural. "It's just that I'm not the only one that's been caught. There's irony in three of the greatest experts in robotics in the world falling into the same elementary trap, isn't there?" Her voice faded, and she put a pale hand to her forehead, "But it isn't funny!"

  This time the look that passed between the two men was one of raised eyebrows. "What trap are you talking about?" asked Lansing stiffly. "Is something wrong with Herbie?"

  "No," she approached them slowly, "nothing is wrong with him -- only with us." She whirled suddenly and shrieked at the robot, "Get away from me! Go to the other end of the room and don't let me look at you."

  Herbie cringed before the fury of her eyes and stumbled away in a clattering trot.

  Lanning's voice was hostile, "What is all this, Dr. Calvin?"

  She faced them and spoke sarcastically, "Surely you know the fundamental First Law of Robotics."

  The other two nodded together. "Certainly," said Bogert, Irritably, "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow him to come to harm"

  "How nicely put," sneered Calvin. "But what kind of harm?"

  "Why -- any kind."

  "Exactly! Any kind! But what about hurt feelings? What about deflation of one's ego? What about the blasting of one's hopes? Is that injury?"

  Lanning frowned, "What would a robot know about-" And then he caught himself with a gasp.

  "You've caught on, have you? This robot reads minds. Do you suppose it doesn't know everything about mental injury? Do you suppose that if asked a question, it wouldn't give exactly that answer that one wants to hear? Wouldn't any other answer hurt us, and wouldn't Herbie know that?"

  "Good Heavens!" muttered Bogert.

  The psychologist cast a sardonic glance at him, "I take it you asked him whether Lanning had resigned. You wanted to hear that he had resigned and so that's what Herbie told you."

  "And I suppose that is why," said Lanning, tonelessly, "it would not answer a little while ago. It couldn't answer either way without hurting one of us."

  There was a short pause in which the men looked thoughtfully across the room at the robot, crouching in the chair by the bookcase, head resting in one hand.

  Susan Calvin stared steadfastly at the floor, "He knew of all this. That ... that devil knows everything -- including what went wrong in his assembly." Her eyes were dark and brooding.

  Lanning looked up, "You're wrong there, Dr. Calvin. He doesn't know what went wrong. I asked him."

  "What does that mean?" cried Calvin. "Only that you didn't want him to give you the solution. It would puncture your ego to have a machine do what you couldn't. Did you ask him?" she shot at Bogert.

  "In a way." Bogert coughed and reddened. "He told me he knew very little about mathematics."

  Lanning laughed, not very loudly and the psychologist smiled caustically. She said, "I'll ask him! A solution by him won't hurt my ego" She raised her voice into a cold, imperative, "Come here!"

  Herbie rose and approached with hesitant steps.

  "You know, I suppose," she continued, "just exactly at what point in the assembly an extraneous factor was introduced or an essential one left out."

  "Yes," said Herbie, in tones barely heard.

  "Hold on," broke in Bogert angrily. "That's not necessary true. You want to hear that, that's all."

  "Don't be a fool," replied Calvin. "He certainly knows as much math as you and Lanning together, since he can read minds. Give him his chance."

  The mathematician subsided, and Calvin continued, "All right, then, Herbie, give! We're waiting." And in an aside, "Get pencils and paper, gentlemen."

  But Herbie remained silent, and there was triumph in the psychologist's voice, "Why don't you answer, Herbie?"

  The robot blurted out suddenly, "I cannot. You know I cannot! Dr. Bogert and Dr. Lanning don't want me to."

  "They want the solution."

  "But not from me."

  Lanning broke in, speaking slowly and distinctly, "Don't be foolish, Herbie. We do want you to tell us."

  Bogert nodded curtly.

  Herbie's voice rose to wild heights, "What's the use of saying that? Don't you suppose that I can see past the superficial skin of your mind? Down below, you don't want me to. I'm a machine, given the imitation of life only by virtue of the positronic interplay in my brain -- which is man's device. You can't lose face to me without being hurt. That is deep in your mind and won't be erased. I can't give the solution."

  "We'll leave," said Dr. Lanning. "Tell Calvin."

  "That would make no difference," cried Herbie, "since you would know anyway that it was I that was supplying the answer."

  Calvin resumed, "But you understand, Herbie, that despite that, Drs. Lanning and Bogert want that solution."

  "By their own efforts!" insisted Herbie.

  "But they want it, and the fact that you have it and won't give it hurts them. You see that, don't you?"

  "Yes! Yes!"

  "And if you tell them that will hurt them, too"

  "Yes! Yes!" Herbie was retreating slowly, and step-by-step Susan Calvin advanced. The two men watched in frozen bewilderment.

  "You can't tell them," droned the psychologist slowly, "because that would hurt and you mustn't hurt. But if you don't tell them, you hurt, so you must tell them. And if you do, you will hurt and you mustn't, so you can't tell them; but if you don't, you hurt, so you must; but if you do, you hurt, so you mustn't; but if you don't, you hurt, so you must; but if you do, you-"

  Herbie was up against the wall, and here he dropped to his knees. "Stop!" he shrieked. "Close your mind! It is full of pain and frustration and hate! I didn't mean it, I tell you! I tried to help! I told you what you wanted to hear. I had to!"

  The psychologist paid no attention. "You must tell them, but if you do, you hurt, so you mustn't; but if you don't, you hurt, so you must; but-"

  And Herbie screamed!

  It was like the whistling of a piccolo many times magnified -- shrill and shriller till it keened with the terror of a lost soul and filled the room with the piercingness of itself.

  And when it died into nothingness, Herbie collapsed into a huddled heap of motionless metal.

  Bogert's face was bloodless, "He's dead!"

  "No!" Susan Calvin burst into body-racking gusts of wild laughter, "not dead -- merely insane. I confronted him with the insoluble dilemma, and he broke down. You can scrap him now -- because he'll never speak again."

  Lanning was on his knees beside the thing that had been Herbie. His fingers touched the cold, unresponsive metal face and he shuddered. "You did that on purpose." He rose and faced her, face contorted.

  "What if I did? You can't help it now." And in a sudden access of bitterness, "He deserved it."

  The director seized the paralyzed, motionless Bogert by the wrist, "What's the difference. Come, Peter." He sighed, "A thinking robot of this type is worthless anyway." His eyes were old and tired, and he repeated, "Come, Peter!"

  It was minutes after the two scientists left that Dr. Susan Calvin regained part of her mental equilibrium. Slowly, her eyes turned to the living-dead Herbie and the tightness returned to her face. Long she stared while the triumph faded and the helpless frustration returned -- and of all her turbulent thoughts only one infinitely bitter word passed her lips.

  "Liar!"

  --

  That finished it for then, naturally. I knew I couldn't get any more out of her after that. She just sat there behind her desk, her white face cold and -- remembering.

  I said, "Thank you, Dr. Calvin!" but she didn't answer. It was two days before I could get to see her again.

 

SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY

  Astounding Science Fiction May by Robert A. Heinlein

 

 

  What an issue. Writing as "Anson MacDonald" Robert Heinlein contributed this fine novelette of a war of the future. It is a powerful story of man's creation out of control, and it helped to establish science fiction's popular reputation for "accurate" prediction.

  In this case, one that we hope never happens again.

 

  (I don't know how many times I have used "Solution Unsatisfactory" in my talks about science fiction prophecy. In a sense, Bob predicted the Manhattan Project before anyone else dreamed of it. Predicting an actual nuclear weapon wasn't difficult and Bob at least avoided the too-obvious bomb and went straight to fallout. The real tickler, though, was predicting the nuclear stalemate in perfect detail. As far as I am concerned this story is the all-time record for an unclouded crystal ball.—I.A.)

 

TIME WANTS A SKELETON

  Astounding Science Fiction June by Ross Rocklynne (1913-         )

 

  Ross Rocklynne contributed two stories to Volume 2 of this series "(Into the Darkness," June Astonishing Stories and Quietus, from the September issue of Astounding), exceptional stories that point up the relative neglect suffered during the "Golden Age" by this talented and innovative writer, who labored in the shadow of Heinlein, Sturgeon, van Vogt, and others. Two relatively re-cent collections that feature the best of his early work are The Sun Destroyers and The Men and the Mirror (both 1973). His fiction continues to appear, but only infrequently.

  This powerful story was one of four that constituted his "Darkness" series, published over an eleven year period: "Daughter of Darkness" in the November, 1941 Astounding; "Abyss of Darkness" in the December, 1942, Astounding; and after a long hiatus, "Revolt of the Devil Star" in the February, 1951, Imagination.

 

  (Sometimes one does think that a certain weariness gets into one's bones with age; that the good old days weren't good at all, but that you were merely young then. In fact, I go around saying this all the time. Every once in a while, however, I am shaken.

  I do read science fiction these days with not quite the eager avidity of youth. Sometimes I would almost say I was jaded. When I reread "Time Wants a Skeleton," however, I suddenly felt all the old excitement. I tried for a long time to put my feelings into a phrase that wasn't a cliché and then gave up. The cliché it had to be.

  I said, "They don't write stories like that any more." —LA.)

 

  Asteroid No. 1007 came spinning relentlessly up.

  Lieutenant Tony Crow's eyes bulged. He released the choked U-bar frantically, and pounded on the auxiliary underjet controls. Up went the nose of the ship, and stars, weirdly splashed across the heavens, showed briefly.

  Then the ship fell, hurling itself against the base of the mountain. Tony was thrown from the control chair. He smacked against the wall, grinning twistedly. He pushed against it with a heavily shod foot as the ship teetered over, rolled a bit, and then was still—still, save for the hiss of escaping air.

  He dived for a locker, broke out a pressure suit, perspiration pearling his forehead. He was into the suit, buckling the helmet down, before the last of the air escaped. He stood there, pained dismay in his eyes. His roving glance rested on the wall calendar.

  "Happy December!" he snarled.

  Then he remembered. Johnny Braker was out there, with his two fellow outlaws. By now, they'd be running this way. All the more reason why .Tony should capture them now. He'd need their ship.

  He acted quickly, buckling on his helmet, working over the air lock. He expelled his breath in relief as it opened Nerves humming, he went through, came to his feet, enclosed by the bleak soundlessness of a twenty-mile planetoid more than a hundred million miles removed from Earth.

  To his left the mountain rose sharply. Good. Tony had wanted to put the ship down there anyway. He took one reluctant look at the ship. His face fell mournfully The stern section was caved in and twisted so much it looked ridiculous. Well, that was that.

  He quickly drew his Hampton and moved soundlessly around the mountain's shoulder. He fell into a crouch as he saw the gleam of the outlaw ship three hundred yards distant across a plain, hovering in the shadow thrown by an over-hanging ledge.

  Then he saw the three figures leaping toward him across the plain. His Hampton came viciously up. There was a puff of rock to the front left of the little group. They froze.

  Tony left his place of concealment, snapping his headset on.

  "Stay where you are!" he bawled.

  The reaction was unexpected. Braker's voice came blasting back.

  "The hell you say!"

  A tiny crater came miraculously into being to Tony's left. He swore, jumped behind his protection, came out a second later to send another projectile winging its way. One of the figures pitched forward, to move no more, the balloon rotundity of its suit suddenly lost. The other two turned tail, only to halt and hole up behind a boulder gracing the middle of the plain. They proceeded to pepper Tony's retreat.

 

  Tony shrank back against the mountainside, exasperated beyond measure. His glance, roving around, came to rest on a cave, a fault in the mountain that tapered out a hundred feet up.

  He stared at the floor of the cave unbelievingly.

  "I'll be double-damned," he muttered.

  What he saw was a human skeleton.

  He paled. His stomach suddenly heaved. Outrageous, haunting thoughts flicked through his consciousness. The skeleton was—horror!

  And it had existed in the dim, unutterably distant past, before the asteroids, before the human race had come into existence!

  The thoughts were gone, abruptly. Consciousness shuddered back. For a while, his face pasty white, his fingers trembling, he thought he was going to be sick. But he wasn't. He stood there, staring. Memories! If he knew where they came from— His very mind revolted suddenly from probing deeper into a mystery that tore at the very roots of his sanity!

  "It existed before the human race," he whispered. "Then where did the skeleton come from?'

  His lips curled. Illusion! Conquering his maddening revulsion, he approached the skeleton, knelt near it. It lay inside the cave. Colorless starlight did not allow him to see it as well as he might. Yet, he saw the gleam of gold on the long, tapering finger. Old yellow gold, untarnished by atmosphere; and inset with an emerald, with a flaw, a distinctive, ovular air bubble, showing through its murky transparency.

  He moved backward, away from it, face set stubbornly. "Illusion," he repeated.

  Chips of rock, flaked off the mountainside by the exploding bullets of a Hampton, completed the transformation. He risked stepping out, fired.

  The shot struck the boulder, split it down the middle. The two halves parted. The outlaws ran, firing back to cover their hasty retreat. Tony waited until the fire lessened, then stepped out and sent a shot over their heads.

  Sudden dismay showed in his eyes. The ledge overhanging he outlaw ship cracked—where the bullet had struck it.

  "What the hell—" came Braker's gasp. The two outlaws topped stock still.

  The ledge came down, its ponderousness doubled by the absence of sound. Tony stumbled panting across the plain as the scene turned into a churning hell. The ship crumbled like lay. Another section of the ledge descended to bury the ship inextricably under a small mountain.

  Tony Crow swore blisteringly. But ship or no ship, he still had a job to do. When the outlaws finally turned, they were looking into the menacing barrel of his Hampton.

  "Get 'em up," he said impassively.

 

  With studied insolence, Harry Jawbone Yates, the smaller of the two, raised his hands. A contemptuous sneer merely played over Braker's unshaved face and went upward to his smoky eyes.

  "Why should I put my hands up? We're all pals, now—theoretically." His natural hate for any form of the law showed in his eyes. "You sure pulled a prize play, copper. Chase us clear across space, and end up getting us in a jam it's a hundred-to-one shot we'll get out of."

  Tony held them transfixed with the Hampton, knowing what Braker meant. No ship would have reason to stop off on the twenty-mile mote in the sky that was Asteroid 1007.

  He sighed, made a gesture. "Hamptons over here, boys. And be careful." The weapons arced groundward. "Sorry. I was intending to use your ship to take us back. I won't make another error like that one, though. Giving up this early in the game, for instance. Come here, Jawbone."

  Yates shrugged. He was blond, had pale, wide-set eyes. By nature, he was conscienceless. A broken jawbone, protruding at a sharp angle from his jawline, gave him his nickname.

  He held out his wrists. "Put 'em on." His voice was an effortless affair which did not go as low as it could; rather womanish, therefore. Braker was different. Strength, nerve, and audacity showed in every line of his heavy, compact body. If there was one thing that characterized him it was his violent desire to live. These were men with elastic codes of ethics. A few of their more unscrupulous activities had caught up with them.

  Tony put cuffs over Yates' wrist.

  "Now you, Braker."

  "Damned if I do," said Braker.

  "Damned if you don't," said Tony. He waggled the Hampton, his normally genial eyes hardening slightly. "I mean it, Braker," he said slowly.

  Braker sneered and tossed his head. Then, as if resistance was below his present mood, he submitted.

  He watched the cuffs click silently. "There isn't a hundred-to-one chance, anyway," he growled.

  Tony jerked slightly, his eyes turned skyward. He chuckled.

  "Well, what's so funny?" Braker demanded.

  "What you just said." Tony pointed. "The hundred-to-one shot—there she is!"

  Braker turned.

  "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Damnation!"

  A ship, glowing faintly in the starlight, hung above an escarpment that dropped to the valley floor. It had no visible support, and, indeed, there was no trace of the usual jets.

  "Well, that's an item!" Yates muttered.

  "It is at that," Tony agreed.

  The ship moved. Rather, it simply disappeared, and next showed up a hundred feet away on the valley floor. A valve in the side of the cylindrical affair opened and a figure dropped out, stood looking at them.

  A metallic voice said, "Are you the inhabitants or just people?"

  The voice was agreeably flippant, and more agreeably feminine. Tony's senses quickened.

  "We're people," he explained. "See?" He flapped his arms like wings. He grinned. "However, before you showed up, we had made up our minds to be—inhabitants."

  "Oh. Stranded." The voice was slightly chilly. "Well, that's too bad. Come on inside. We'll talk the whole thing over Say, are those handcuffs?"

  "Right."

  "Hm-m-m. Two outlaws—and a copper. Well, come on inside and meet the rest of us"

 

  An hour later, Tony, agreeably relaxed in a small lounge was smoking his third cigarette, pressure suit off. Across the room was Braker and Yates. The girl, whose name, it developed, was Laurette, leaned against the door jamb, clad in jodhpurs and white silk blouse. She was blond and had clear, deep-blue eyes. Her lips were pursed a little and she looked angry. Tony couldn't keep his eyes off her.

  Another man stood beside her. He was dark in complexion and looked as if he had a short temper. He was snapping the fingernails of two hands in a manner that showed characteristic impatience and nervousness. His name was Erie Masters.

  An older man came into the room, fitting glasses over his eyes. He took a quick look around the room. Tony came to his feet.

  Laurette said tonelessly, "Lieutenant, this is my father. Daddy, Lieutenant Tony Crow of the IPF. Those two are the outlaws I was telling you about."

  "Outlaws, eh?" said Professor Overland. His voice seemed deep enough to count the separate vibrations. He rubbed at a stubbled jaw. "Well, that's too bad. Just when we had the DeTosque strata 1007 fitting onto 70. And there were ample signs to show a definite dovetailing of apex 1007 into Morrell's fourth crater on Ceres, which would have put 1007 near the surface, if not on it. If we could have followed those up without an interruption—"

  "Don't let this interrupt you," Masters broke in. His nails clicked. "We'll let these three sleep in the lounge. We can finish up the set of indications we're working on now, and then get rid of them."

  Overland shook his graying head doubtfully. "It would be unthinkable to subject those two to cuffs for a full month."

  Masters said irritably, "We'll give them a parole. Give them their temporary freedom if they agree to submit to handcuffs again when we land on Mars."

  Tony laughed softly. "Sorry. You can't trust those two for five minutes, let alone a month." He paused. "Under the circumstances, professor, I guess you realize I've got full power to enforce my request that you take us back to Mars. The primary concern of the government in a case like this would be placing these two in custody. I suggest if we get under way now, you can devote more time to your project."

  Overland said helplessly, "Of course. But it cuts off my chances of getting to the Christmas banquet at the university." Disappointment showed in his weak eyes. "There's a good chance they'll give me Amos, I guess, but it's already December third. Well, anyway, we'll miss the snow."

  Laurette Overland said bitterly, "I wish we hadn't landed on 1007. You'd have got along without us then, all right."

  Tony held her eyes gravely. "Perfectly, Miss Overland. Except that we would have been inhabitants. And, shortly, very, very dead ones."

  "So?" She glared.

  Erie Masters grabbed the girl's arm with a muttered word and led her out of the room.

 

  Overland grasped Tony's arm in a friendly squeeze, eyes twinkling. "Don't mind them, son. If you or your charges need anything, you can use my cabin. But we'll make Mars in forty-eight hours, seven or eight of it skimming through the Belt."

  Tony shook his head dazedly. "Forty-eight hours?" Overland grinned. His teeth were slightly tobacco-stained.

  "That's it. This is one of the new ships—the H-H drive. They zip along."

  "Oh! The Fitz-Gerald Contraction?"

  Overland nodded absently and left. Tony stared after him. He was remembering something now—the skeleton. Braker said indulgently, "What a laugh."

  Tony turned.

  "What," he asked patiently, "is a laugh?"

  Braker thrust out long, heavy legs. He was playing idly with a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand.

  "Oh," he said carelessly, "a theory goes the rounds the asteroids used to be a planet. They're not sure the theory is right, so they send a few bearded long faces out to trace down faults and strata and striations on one asteroid and link them up with others. The girl's old man was just about to nail down 1007 and 70 and Ceres. Good for him. But what the hell! They prove the theory and the asteroids still play ring around the rosy and what have they got for their money?"

  He absently played with his ring.

  Tony as absently watched him turning it round and round on his finger. Something peculiar about— He jumped. His eyes bulged.

  That ring! He leaped to his feet, away from it.

  Braker and Yates looked at him strangely.

  Braker came to his feet, brows contracting. "Say, copper, what ails you? You gone crazy? You look like a ghost."

  Tony's heart began a fast, insistent pounding. Blood drummed against his temples. So he looked like a ghost? He laughed hoarsely. Was it imagination that suddenly stripped the flesh from Braker's head and left nothing but—a skull?

  "I'm not a ghost." He chattered senselessly, still staring at the ring.

  He closed his eyes tight, clenched his fists.

  "He's gone bats!" said Yates, incredulously.

  "Bats! Absolutely bats!"

  Tony opened his eyes, looked carefully at Braker, at Yates, at the tapestried walls of the lounge. Slowly, the tensity left him. Now, no matter what developed he would have to keep a hold on himself.

  "I'm all right, Braker. Let me see that ring." His voice was low, controlled, ominous.

  "You take a fit?" Braker snapped suspiciously.

  "I'm all right." Tony deliberately took Braker's cuffed hands into his own, looked at the gold band inset with the flawed emerald. Revulsion crawled in his stomach, yet he kept his eyes on the ring.

  "Where'd you get the ring, Braker?" He kept his glance down.

  "Why—'29, I think it was; or '28." Braker's tone was suddenly angry, resentful. He drew away. "What is this, anyway? I got it legal, and so what?"

  "What I really wanted to know," said Tony, "was if there was another ring like this one—ever. I hope not ... I don't know if I do. Damn it!"

  "And I don't know what you're talking about," snarled Braker. "I still think you're bats. Hell, flawed emeralds are like fingerprints, never two alike. You know that yourself."

  Tony slowly nodded and stepped back. Then he lighted a cigarette, and let the smoke inclose him.

  "You fellows stay here," he said, and backed out and bolted the door behind him. He went heavily down the corridor, down a short flight of stairs, then down another short corridor.

  He chose one of two doors, jerked it open. A half dozen packages slid from the shelves of what was evidently a closet. Then the other door opened. Tony staggered backward, losing his balance under the flood of packages. He bumped into Laurette Overland. She gasped and started to fall. Tony managed to twist around in time to grab her. They both fell anyway. Tony drew her to him on impulse and kissed her.

  She twisted away from him, her face scarlet. Her palm came around, smashed into his face with all her considerable strength. She jumped to her feet, then the fury in her eyes died. Tony came erect, smarting under the blow.

  "Sportsmanlike," he snapped angrily.

  "You've got a lot of nerve," she said unsteadily. Her eyes went past him. "You clumsy fool. Help me get these packages back on the shelves before daddy or Brie come along. They're Christmas presents, and if you broke any of the wrappings— Come on, can't you help?"

  Tony slowly hoisted a large carton labeled with a "Do Not Open Before Christmas" sticker, and shoved it onto the lower rickety shelf, where it stuck out, practically ready to fall again. She put the smaller packages on top to balance it.

  She turned, seeming to meet his eyes with difficulty.

  Finally she got out, "I'm sorry I hit you like that, lieutenant. I guess it was natural—your kissing me I mean." She smiled faintly at Tony, who was ruefully rubbing his cheek. Then her composure abruptly returned. She straightened.

  "If you're looking for the door to the control room, that's it."

  "I wanted to see your father," Tony explained.

  "You can't see him now. He's plotting our course. In fifteen minutes—" She let the sentence dangle. "Brie Masters can help you in a few minutes. He's edging the ship out of the way of a polyhedron."

  "Polyhedron?"

  "Many-sided asteroid. That's the way we designate them." She was being patronizing now.

  "Well, of course. But I stick to plain triangles and spheres and cubes. A polyhedron is a sphere to me. I didn't know we were on the way. Since when? I didn't feel the acceleration."

  "Since ten minutes ago. And naturally there wouldn't be any acceleration with an H-H drive. Well, if you want anything, you can talk to Erie." She edged past him, went swinging up the corridor. Tony caught up with her.

  "You can help me," he said, voice edged. "Will you answer a few questions?"

  She stopped, her penciled brows drawn together. She shrugged. "Fire away, lieutenant."

  She leaned against the wall, tapping it patiently with one manicured fingernail.

  Tony said, "All I know about the Hoderay-Hammond drive, Miss Overland, is that it reverses the Fitz-Gerald Contraction principle. It makes use of a new type of mechanical advantage. A moving object contracts in the direction of motion. Therefore a stationary object, such as a ship, can be made to move if you contract it in the direction you want it to move. How that's accomplished, though, I don't know."

  "By gravitons—Where have you been all your life?"

  "Learning," said Tony. "Good manners."

  She flushed. Her fingers stopped drumming. "If you realized you were interrupting important work, you'd know why I forget my manners. We were trying to finish this up so daddy could get back to his farewell dinner at the university.

  I guess the professors guessed right when they sent his—Well, why should I explain that to you?"

  "I'm sure," said Tony. "I don't know."

  "Well, go on," she said coldly.

  Tony lighted a cigarette, offered her one with an apology. She shook her head impatiently.

  Tony eyed her through the haze of smoke. "Back there on 1007 I saw a skeleton with a ring on its finger."

  She seemed nonplused. "Well. Was it a pretty ring?"

  Tony said grimly, "The point is, Braker never got near that skeleton after I saw it, but that same ring is now on his finger."

  Startlement showed in her eyes. "That doesn't sound very plausible, lieutenant!"

  "No, of course it doesn't. Because then the same ring is in two different places at the same time."

  "And of course," she nodded, "that would be impossible. Go on. I don't know what you're getting at, but it certainly is interesting."

  "Impossible?" said Tony. "Except that it happens to be the truth. I'm not explaining it away, Miss Overland, if that's your idea. Here's something else. The skeleton is a human skeleton, but it existed before the human race existed"

  She shoved herself away from her indolent position. "You must be crazy."

  Tony said nothing.

  "How did you know?" she said sharply.

  "I know. Now you explain the H -H drive, if you will."

  "I will!" She said: "Gravitons are the ultimate particle of matter. There are 1846 in a proton, one in an electron, which is the reason why a proton is 1846 times as heavy as an electron.

  "Now you can give me a cigarette, lieutenant. I'm curious about this thing, and if I can't get to the bottom of it, my father certainly will."

  After a while, she blew out smoke nervously.

  She continued, speaking rapidly: "A Wittenberg disrupter tears atoms apart. The free electrons are shunted off into accumulators, where we get power for lighting, cooking, beating and so forth. The protons go into the proton analyzer, where the gravitons are ripped out of them and stored in a special type of spherical field. When we want to move the ship, the gravitons are released. They spread through the ship and everything in the ship.

  "The natural place for a graviton is in a proton. The gravitons rush for the protons—which are already saturated with 1846 gravitons. Gravitons are unable to remain free in three-dimensional space. They escape along the time line, into the past. The reaction contracts the atoms of the ship and everything in the ship, and shoves it forward along the opposite space-time line—forward into the future and forward in space. In the apparent space of a second, therefore, the ship can travel thousands of miles, with no acceleration effects.

   "Now, there you have it, lieutenant. Do what you can with it."

  Tony said, "What would happen if the gravitons were forced into the future rather than the past?"

  "Lieutenant, I would have been surprised if you hadn't said that! Theoretically, it's an impossibility. Anybody who knows gravitons would say so. But if Braker is wearing a ring that a skeleton older than the human race is also wearing—Ugh!"

  She put her hands to her temples in genuine distaste. "We'll have to see my father," she said wearily. "He'll be the one to find out whether or not you make this up as you go along."

  Brie Masters looked from Tony to Laurette.

  "You believe this bilge he's been handing you?"

  "I'm not interested in what you think, Brie. But I am in what you do, Daddy."

  Overland looked uneasy, his stubbled jaws barely moving over a wad of rough-cut.

  "It does sound like . . . er . . . bilge," he muttered. "If you weren't an IPF man, I'd think you were slightly off-center. But—one thing, young man. How did you know the skeleton was older than the human race?"

  "I said it existed before the human race."

  "Is there any difference?"

  "I think there is—somehow."

   "Well," said Overland patiently, "how do you know it'?"

  Tony hesitated. "I don't really know. I was standing at the mouth of the cave, and something—or someone—told me."

   "Someone!" Masters blasted the word out incredulously.

  "I don't know!" said Tony. "All I know is what I'm telling you. It couldn't have been supernatural—could it?"

  Overland said quickly, "Don't let it upset you, son. Of course it wasn't supernatural. There's a rational explanation somewhere. I guess. But it's going to be hard to come by."

  He nodded his head abstractedly, and kept on nodding it like a marionette. Then he smiled peculiarly.

  "I'm old now, son—you know? And I've seen a lot. I don't disbelieve anything. There's only one logical step for a scientist to take now, and that's to go back and take a look at that skeleton."

  Masters' breath sounded. "You can't do that!"

  "But we're going to. And remember that I employ you, because Laurette asked me to. Now turn this ship back to 1007. This might be more important than patching up a torn-up world at that." He chuckled.

  Laurette shook her blond head. "You know," she said musingly, "this might be the very thing we shouldn't do, going back like this. On the other hand, if we went on our way, that might be the thing we shouldn't do."

  Masters muttered, "You're talking nonsense, Laurette."

  He ostentatiously grabbed her bare arm, and led her from the room after her father, throwing Tony a significant glance as he passed.

  Tony expelled a long breath. Then, smiling twistedly, he went back to the lounge, to wait—for what? His stomach contracted again with revulsion—or was it a premonition?

 

  Braker came sharply to his feet. "What's up, Crow?"

  "Let me see that ring again," Tony said. After a minute he raised his eyes absently. "It's the same ring," he muttered.

  "I wish to hell," Braker exploded, "I knew what you were talking about!"

  Tony looked at him obliquely, and said under his breath, "Maybe it's better you don't."

  He sat down and lighted a cigarette. Braker swore, and finally wandered to the window. Tony knew what he was thinking: of Earth; of the cities that teemed; of the vast stretches of open space between the planets. Such would be his thoughts. Braker, who loved life and freedom.

  Braker, who wore a ring.

  Then the constellations showing through the port abruptly changed pattern.

  Braker leaped back, eyes bulging. "What the—"

  Yates, sitting sullenly in the corner, came alertly to his feet. Braker mutely pointed at the stars.

  "I could have sworn," he said thickly.

  Tony came to his feet. He had seen the change. But his thoughts flowed evenly, coldly, a smile frozen on his lips.

  "You saw right, Braker," he said coldly, then managed to grab the guide rail as the ship bucked. Braker and Yates sailed across the room, faces ludicrous with surprise. The ship turned the other way. The heavens spun, the stars blurring. Something else Tony saw besides blurred stars: a dull-gray, monstrous landscape, a horizon cut with mountains, a bright, small sun fringing tumbled clouds with reddish, ominous silver. Then stars again, rushing past the port, simmering through an atmosphere.

  Blackness crushed its way through Tony Crow's consciousness, occluding it until, finally, his last coherent thought had gone. Yet he seemed to know what had happened. There was a skeleton in a cave on an asteroid—millions of years from now. And the ship had struck.

 

  Tony moved, opened his eves. The lights were out. but a pale shaft of radiance was streaming through the still-intact port. Sounds insinuated themselves into his consciousness. The wet drip of rain, the low murmur of a spasmodic wind, a guttural kutakikchkut that drifted eerily, insistently, down the wind.

  Tony slowly levered himself to his feet. He was lying atop Braker. The man was breathing heavily, a shallow gash on his forehead. Involuntarily, Tony's eyes dropped to the ring. It gleamed—a wicked eye staring up at him. He wrenched his eyes away.

  Yates was stirring, mumbling to himself. His eyes snapped open stared at Tony.

  "What happened?" he said thickly. He reeled to his feet. "Phew!"

  Tone smiled through the gloom "Take care of Braker." he said, and turned to the door, which was warped off its hinges. He loped down the corridor to the control room, slowing down on the lightless lower deck ramp. He felt his way into the control room. He stumbled around until his foot touched a body. He stooped, felt a soft, bare arm. In sudden, stifling panic, he scooped Laurette's feebly breathing body into his arms. She might have been lead, as his feet seemed made of lead. He forced himself up to the upper corridor, kicked open the door of her father's room, placed her gently on the bed. There was light here, probably that of a moon. He scanned her pale face anxiously, rubbing her arms toward the heart. Blood came to her cheeks. She gasped, rolled over. Her eyes opened.

  "Lieutenant," she muttered.

  "You all right?"

  Tony helped her to her feet.

  "Thanks, lieutenant. I'll do." She tensed. "What about my father?"

  "I'll bring him up," said Tony.

  Five minutes later, Overland was stretched on the bed, pain in his open eyes. Three ribs were broken. Erie Masters hovered at the foot of the bed, dabbing at one side of his face with a reddened handkerchief, a dazed, scared look in his eyes. Tony knew what he was scared of, but even Tony wasn't playing with that thought now.

  He found a large roll of adhesive in the ship's medicine closet. He taped Overland's chest. The breaks were simple fractures. In time, they would do a fair job of knitting. But Overland would have to stay on his back.

  Masters met Tony's eyes reluctantly.

  "We'll have to get pressure suits and take a look outside."

  Tony shrugged. 'We won't need pressure suits. We're already breathing outside air, and living under this planet's atmospheric pressure. The bulkheads must be stowed in some place."

  Overland's deep voice sounded, slowly. "I think we've got an idea where we are, Erie. You can feel the drag of this planet—a full-size planet, too. Maybe one and a half gravities. I can feel it pulling on my ribs." A bleak expression settled on his stubbled face. He looked at Tony humorlessly. "Maybe I'm that skeleton, son."

  Tony caught his breath. "Nonsense. Johnny Braker's wearing the ring. If anybody's that skeleton, he is. Not that I wish him any bad luck, of course." He nodded once, significantly, then turned toward the door with a gesture at Masters. Masters, plainly resenting the soundless command, hesitated, until Laurette made an impatient motion at him.

  They prowled through the gloomy corridor toward the small engine room, pushed the door open. The overpowering odor of ozone and burning rubber flung itself at them.

  Masters uttered an expressive curse as Tony played a beam over what was left of the reversed Fitz-Gerald Contraction machinery. His nails clicked startlingly loud in the heavy silence.

  "Well, that's that," he muttered.

  "What d'you mean—that's that?" Tony's eyes bored at him through the darkness.

  "I mean that we're stuck here, millions of years ago." He laughed harshly, unsteadily.

  Tony said without emotion, "Cut it out. Hasn't this ship got auxiliary rocket blasts?"

  "Naturally. But this is a one and a half gravity planet. Anyway, the auxiliary jets won't be in such good condition after a fifty-foot drop."

  "Then we'll fix 'em," said Tony sharply. He added, "What makes you so sure it's millions of years ago, Masters?"

  Masters leaned back against the door jamb, face as cold and hard as stone.

  "Don't make me bow to you any more than I have to, lieutenant," he said ominously. "I didn't believe your story before, but I do now. You predicted this crack-up—it had to happen. So I'm ready to concede it's millions of years ago; mainly because there wasn't any one and a half gravity planet within hundreds of millions of miles of the asteroid belt. But there used to be one."

  Tony said, lips barely moving, "Yes?"

  "There used to be one—before the asteroids."

  Tony smiled twistedly. "I'm glad you realize that."

  He turned and went for the air lock, but, since the entire system of electric transmission had gone wrong somewhere, he abandoned it and followed a draft of wet air. He jerked open the door of a small storage bin, and crawled through. There was a hole here, that had thrust boxes of canned goods haphazardly to one side. Beyond was the open night.

  Tony crawled out, stood in the lee of the ship, occasional stinging drops of rain lashing at their faces. Wind soughed across a rocky plain. A low roar heralded a nearby, swollen stream. A low kutakikchkut monotonously beat against the night, night-brooding bird, Tony guessed, nested in the heavy growth flanking a cliff that cut a triangular section from a heavily clouded sky. Light from a probable moon broke dimly through clouds on the leftward horizon.

  Masters' teeth chattered in the cold.

  Tony edged his way around the ship, looking the damage over. He was gratified to discover that although the auxiliary rocket jets were twisted and broken, the only hole was in the storage bin bulkheads. That could be repaired, and so, in time, could the jets.

  They started to enter the ship when Masters grasped his arm. He pointed up into the sky, where a rift in the clouds showed.

  Tony nodded slowly. Offsetting murkily twinkling stars, there was another celestial body, visible as a tiny crescent. "A planet?" muttered Tony.

  "Must be." Masters' voice was low.

  They stared at it for a moment, caught up in the ominous, baleful glow. Then Tony shook himself out of it, went for the storage bin.

  Walking down the corridor with Masters, Tony came upon Braker and Yates.

  Braker grinned at him, but his eyes were ominous.

  "What's this I hear about a skeleton?"

  Tony bit his lip. "Where'd you hear it?"

  "From the girl and her old man. We stopped outside their room a bit. Well, it didn't make sense, the things they were saying. Something about an emerald ring and a skeleton and a cave." He took one step forward, an ugly light in his smoky eyes. "Come clean, Crow. How does this ring I've got on my finger tie up with a skeleton?"

  Tony said coldly, "You're out of your head. Get back to the lounge."

  Braker sneered. "Why? You can't make us stay there with the door broken down."

  Masters made an impatient sound. "Oh, let them go, lieutenant. We can't bother ourselves about something as unimportant as this. Anyway, we're going to need these men for fixing up the ship."

  Tony said to Yates, "You know anything about electricity? Seems to me you had an E.E. once."

  Yates' thin face lighted, before he remembered his sullen pose. "O. K., you're right," he muttered. He looked at Braker interrogatively.

  Braker said: "Sorry. We're not obligated to work for you. As prisoners, you're responsible for us and our welfare. We'll help you or whoever's bossing the job if we're not prisoners."

  Tony nodded. "Fair enough. But tonight, you stay prisoners. Tomorrow, maybe not," and he herded them back into the lounge. He cuffed them to the guide rail, and so left them, frowning a little. Braker had been too acquiescent.

  The reason for that struck Tony hard. Walking back along the corridor, he saw something gleaming on the floor. He froze. Revulsion gripping him, he slowly picked up the ring.

  Masters turned, said sharply, "What's up?"

  Tony smiled lopsidedly, threw the ring into the air twice, speculatively, catching it in his palm. He extended it to Masters.

  "Want a ring?"

  Masters' face went white as death. He jumped back. "Damn you!" he said violently. "Take that thing away!"

  "Braker slipped it off his finger," said Tony, his voice edging into the aching silence. Then he turned on his heel, and walked back to the lounge. He caught Braker's attention.

  He held the ring out.

  "You must have dropped it," he said.

  Braker's lips opened in a mirthful, raucous laugh.

  "You can have it, copper," he gasped. "I don't want to be any damned skeleton!"

  Tony slipped the ring into his pocket and walked back down the corridor with a reckless swing to his body.

  He knocked on the door to Overland's room, opened it when Laurette's voice sounded.

  Masters and Laurette looked at him strangely.

  Overland looked up from the bed.

   "Lieutenant," he said, an almost ashamed look on his face, "sometimes I wonder about the human mind. Masters seems to think that now you've got the ring, you're going to be the skeleton."

  Masters' nails clicked. "It's true, isn't it? The outlaws know about the ring. We know about it. But Crow has the ring, and it's certain none of us is going to take it."

  Overland made an exasperated clicking sound.

  "It's infantile," he snapped. "Masters, you're acting like a child, not like a scientist. There's only one certainty, that one of us is going to be the skeleton. But there's no certainty which one. And there's even a possibility that all of us will die." His face clouded angrily. "And the most infantile viewpoint possible seems to be shared by all of you. You've grown superstitious about the ring. Now it's—a ring of death! Death to him who wears the ring! Pah!"

  He stretched forth an imperative hand.

  "Give it to me, lieutenant! I'll tell you right now that no subterfuge in the universe will change the fact of my being a skeleton if I am the skeleton; and vice versa."

  Tony shook his head. "I'll be keeping it—for a while. And you might as well know that no scientific argument will convince anybody the ring is not a ring of death. For, you see, it is."

  Overland sank back, lips pursed. "What are you going to do with it?" he charged. When Tony didn't answer, he said pettishly, "Oh, what's the use! On the face of it, the whole situation's impossible." Then his face lighted. "What did you find out?"

  Tony briefly sketched his conclusions. It would be two or three weeks before they could repair the rocket jets, get the electric transmission system working properly.

  Overland nodded absently. "Strange, isn't it!" he mused. "All that work DeTosque, Bodley, Morrell, Haley, the Farr brothers and myself have done goes for nothing. Our being here proves the theory they were working on."

  Laurette smiled lopsidedly at Tony.

  "Lieutenant," she said, "maybe the skeleton was a woman."

  "A woman!" Masters' head snapped around, horror on his face. "Not you, Laurette!"

  "Why not? Women have skeletons, too—or didn't you know?" She kept her eyes on Tony. "Well, lieutenant? I put a question up to you."

  Tony kept his face impassive. "The skeleton," he said, without a tremor, "was that of a man."

  "Then," said Laurette Overland, stretching out her palm, cup-shaped, "give me the ring."

  Tony froze, staring. That his lie should have this repercussion was unbelievable. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Overland's slowly blanching face. On Masters, Laurette's statement had the most effect.

  "Damn you, Crow!" he said thickly. "This is just a scheme of yours to get rid of the ring!" He lunged forward.

  The action was unexpected. Tony fell backward under the impact of the man's fist. He sprawled on his back. Masters threw himself at him.

  "Brie, you utter fool!" That was Laurette's wall.

  Disgust settled on Tony's face. He heaved, by sheer muscular effort, and threw Masters over on his back. His fist came down with a brief but pungent crack. Masters slumped, abruptly lifeless.

  Tony drew himself to his feet, panting. Laurette was on her knees beside Masters, but her dismayed eyes were turned upward to Tony.

  "I'm sorry, lieutenant!" she blurted.

  "What have you got to be sorry about?" he snapped. "Except for being in love with a fool like that one."

  He was sorry for it the second he said it. He didn't try to read Laurette's expression, but turned sullen eyes to Overland.

  "It's night," he said abruptly, "and it's raining. Tomorrow, when the sun comes up, it'll probably be different. We can figure out the situation then, and start our plans for—" He let the sentence dangle. Plans for what? He concluded, "I suggest we all get some sleep," and left.

  He arranged some blankets on the floor of the control room, and instantly went to sleep, though there were times when he stirred violently. The skeleton was in his dreams.

 

  There were five of them at the breakfast table. Laurette serving; Masters beside her, keeping his eyes sullenly on the food; Braker, eating as heartily as his cuffed hands would allow; Yates, picking at his food with disinterest.

  Tony finished his second cup of coffee, and scraped his chair back.

  "I'll be taking a look around," he told Laurette in explanation. He turned to the door.

  Braker leaned back in his chair until it was balanced on two legs, and grinned widely.

  "Where you going, Mr. Skeleton?"

  Tony froze.

  "After a while, Braker," he said, eyes frigid, "the ring will be taken care of."

  Yates' fork came down. "If you mean you're going to try to get rid of it, you know you can't do it. It'll come back." His eyes were challenging.

  Masters looked up, a strange, milling series of thoughts in his sullen eyes. Then he returned to his food.

  Tony, wondering what that expression had meant, shrugged and left the room; and shortly, the ship, by way of the cavity in the storage bin.

  He wandered away from the ship, walking slowly, abstractedly, allowing impressions to slip into his mind without conscious resistance. There was a haunting familiarity in this tumbled plain, though life had no place in the remembrance. There was some animal life, creatures stirring in the dank humus, in long, thick grass, in gnarled tree tops. This was mountain country and off there was a tumbling mountain stream.

  He impelled himself toward it, the tiny, yet phenomenally bright sun throwing a shadow that was only a few inches long. It was high "noon."

  He stood on the brink of the rocky gorge, spray prismatically alive with color, dashing up into his face. His eyes followed the stream up to the mountain fault where water poured downward to crush at the rocks with the steady, pummeling blow of a giant. He stood there, lost in abstraction, other sounds drowned out.

  All except the grate of a shoe behind him. He tried to whirl; too late! Hands pushed against his back—in the next second, he had tumbled off the brink of the chasm, clutching wildly, vainly, at thick spray. Then, an awful moment of freezing cold, and the waters had enclosed him. He was borne away, choking for air, frantically flailing with his arms.

  He was swept to the surface, caught a chaotic glimpse of sun and clouded sky and rock, and then went under again, with a half lungful of air. He tensed, striving to sweep away engulfing panic. A measure of reason came back. Hands and feet began to work in purposeful unison. The surface broke around him. He stayed on top. But that was only because the stream was flowing darkly, swiftly, evenly. He was powerless to force himself against this current.

  He twisted, savagely looking for some sign of release. A scaly, oily tree limb came at him with a rush. One wild grab, and the limb was bending downstream, straining against the pressure his body was exerting. He dashed hair from his eyes with one trembling hand, winced as he saw the needle bed of rapids a hundred feet downstream. If that limb hadn't been there— His mind shuddered away from the thought.

  Weakly, he drew himself hand over hand upward, until the tree trunk was solidly below him. He dropped to the ground, and lay there, panting. Then he remembered the hands on his back. With a vicious motion, he jerked out his key ring. That was the answer—the key to the cuffs was gone, taken during the night, of course! Brie Masters, then, had pulled this prize play, or perhaps one of the outlaws, after Masters released him.

  After a while, he came to his feet, took stock of his surroundings. Off to his left, a cliff side, and scarcely a half-mile distant, the pathetically awry hulk of the ship, on the top of the slope that stretched away.

  The cliff side came into his vision again. A fault in the escarpment touched a hidden spot in his memory. He involuntarily started toward it. But he slowed up before he got to the fault: which was really a cave that tapered out to nothingness as its sides rose.

  The cave!

  And this sloping plain, these mountains, composed the surface of Asteroid 1007, millions of years from now.

 

  Tony dropped emotionlessly to his knees at the mouth of the cave. Not so long ago, he had done the same thing. Then there had been a complete, undisjointed skeleton lying there.

  Somehow, then, he had known the skeleton existed before the human race—as if it were someone—the skeleton?—that had spoken to him across the unutterable years. The skeleton? That could not be! Yet, whence had come the memory?

  He took the ring from his pocket and put it on his finger. It gleamed.

  He knelt there for minutes, lie a man who worships at his own grave, and he was not dead. Not dead! He took the ring from his finger, then, a cold, bleak smile growing on his face.

  He came to his feet, a rising wind whipping at his hair. He took a half dozen running steps toward the river, brought his arm over his shoulder in a throwing gesture.

  Somehow the ring slipped from his fingers and fell.

  He stooped, picked it up. This time, he made it leave his hand. It spun away, twinkling in the faint sunlight. But the gravity had hold of it, and it fell on the brink of the river, plainly visible.

  A dry, all-gone feeling rose in Tony's throat. Grimly, he went forward, picked it up again. Keeping his eyes on it, he advanced to the brink of the river gorge. He held the ring over the darkly swirling waters, slowly released it.

  It struck the river like a plummet. The waters enclosed it and it was gone. He looked at the spot where it had disappeared, half expecting it to spring back up into his hand. But it was gone. Gone for good!

  He started dazedly back to the ship, moving in an unreal dream. Paradoxical that he had been able to get rid of it. It had dropped from his hand once, fallen short of the river once. The third time it had given up trying!

  When he came up to the ship, Masters was standing at the stern, looking at the broken rocket jets. He turned, and saw Tony, water still dripping from his uniform. He fell back a step, face turned pallid.

  Tony's lips curled. "Who did it?"

  "D-did what?"

  "You know what I mean," Tony bit out. He took three quick steps forward.

  Masters saw that, and went reckless. Tony side-stepped him, brought his left arm around in a short arc. Masters went down cursing. Tony knelt, holding Masters down by the throat. He felt through his pockets, unearthed the key to the cuffs. Then he hauled Masters to his feet and shook him. Masters' teeth clicked.

  "Murderer!" Tony snapped, white with rage.

  Masters broke loose. "I'd do it again," he said wildly, and swung. He missed. Tony lashed out with the full power of his open palm, caught Masters on the side of the head. Masters went reeling back, slammed against the side of the ship. Tony glared at him, and then turned on his heel.

  He met Laurette Overland coming down the stairs to the upper corridor.

  "Lieutenant!" Her eyes danced with excitement. "I've been looking for you. Where in the world have you been?"

  "Ask Masters." He urged himself down the corridor, jaw set. She fell into step beside him, running to keep up with his long strides.

  "You're all wet!" she exclaimed. "Can't you tell me what happened? Did you go swimming?"

  "Involuntarily." He kept on walking.

  She grabbed his arm, and slowed him to a stop. An ominous glint replaced her excitement.

  "What," she said, "did you mean when you said I should ask Erie about it? Did he push you in? If he did, I'll—" She was unable to speak.

  Tony laughed humorlessly. "He admitted it. He stole my key to the handcuffs with the idea that it would be easier to free Braker and Yates that way after I was . . . uh . . . properly prepared to be a skeleton."

  Her head moved back and forth. "That's horrible," she said lowly. "Horrible."

  He held her eyes. "Perhaps I shouldn't have told you about it," he said, voice faintly acid. "He's your fiance, isn't he?"

  She nodded, imperceptibly, studying him through the half gloom. "Yes. But maybe I'll change my mind, lieutenant. Maybe I will. But in the meantime, come along with me. Daddy's discovered something wonderful."

 

  Professor Overland's head was propped up. He had a pencil and paper on his pyramided legs.

  "Oh. Lieutenant! Come in." His face lighted. "Look here! Gravitons can thrust their way through to the future, giving the ship a thrust into the past. But only if it happened to enter the spherical type of etheric vacuum. This vacuum would be minus everything—electrons, photons, cosmic rays and so forth, except under unusual circumstances. At some one time, in either the past or future, there might be a stream of photons bridging the vacuum. Now, when gravitons are ejected into the past, they grab hold of light photons, and become ordinary negative electrons. Now say the photons are farther away in the past than they are in the future. The gravitons therefore follow the line of least resistance and hook up with photons of the future. The photons in this case were perhaps hundreds of millions of years away in the vacuum. In traveling that time-distance, the gravitons kicked the ship back for a proportionate number of years, burned up our machinery, and wrecked us on this suddenly appearing before-the-asteroid world."

  Laurette said brightly, "But that isn't the important part, daddy."

  "I can find another of those etheric vacuums," Overland went on, preoccupiedly, pointing out a series of equations. "Same type, same structure. But we have to go to the planet Earth in order to rebuild the reversed contraction machinery. We'll find the materials we need there" He glanced up. "But we have to get off this world before it cracks up, lieutenant."

  Tony started. "Before this world cracks up?"

  "Certainly. Naturally. You can—" His heavy brows came down abruptly. "You didn't know about that, did you? Hmm-m." He stroked his jaw, frowning. "You recall the crescent planet you and Masters saw? Well, he took some readings on that. It's wonderful, son!" His eyes lighted. "It's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Not only do we know now that the asteroid evolved from a broken-up planet, but we also know the manner in which that planet broke up. Collision with a heavy, smaller body."

  Tony paled. "You mean—" he said huskily. "Good heavens!" Sweat stood out on his forehead. "How soon will that happen?" he said ominously.

  "Well, Erie has the figures. Something over eighteen or nineteen days. It'll be a crack-up that'll shake the sun. And we'll be here to witness it." He smiled wryly. "I'm more scientist than man. I guess. I never stop to think we might die in the crack-up, and furnish six skeletons instead of one."

  "There'll be no skeletons," Tony said, eyes narrowed. "For one thing, we can repair the ship, though we'll have to work like mad. For another—I threw the ring into the river. It's gone."

  Laurette seemed to pale. "I ... I don't see how that could be done," she stammered. "You couldn't get rid of it, not really—could you?"

  "It's gone," Tony said stubbornly. "For good. And don't forget it. There'll be no skeleton. And you might try to impress that on Masters, so he doesn't try to produce one," he added significantly.

  He left the room with a nod, a few seconds liter stepped into the lounge. Braker and Yates turned around. Both were cuffed.

  Tony took the key from his pocket and the cuffs fell away. In brief, pungent tones, then, he explained the situation, the main theme being that the ship had to be well away from the planet before the crack-up. Yates would go over the wiring system. Braker, Master's and Tony would work with oxyacetylene torches and hammers over the hole in the hull and the rocket jets.

  Then he explained about the ring.

  Yates ran a thin hand through his yellow hair.

  "You don't do it that easy," he said in his soft, effortless voice. "There's a skeleton up there, and it's got Braker's ring on its finger. It's got to be accounted for, don't it? It's either me or you or Braker or the girl or her old man or Masters. There ain't any use trying to avoid it, either." His voice turned sullen. He looked at Braker, then at Tony. "Anyway, I'm keeping my back turned the right way so there won't be any dirty work."

  Braker's breath sounded. "Why, you dirty rat," he stated. He took a step toward Yates. "You would think of that. And probably you'd try it on somebody else, too. Well, don't go pulling it on me, understand." He scowled. "And you better watch him, too, Crow. He's pure poison—in case you got the idea we were friends."

  "Oh, cut it out," Tony said wearily. He added, "If we get the ship in working order, there's no reason why all six of us shouldn't get off—alive." He turned to the door, waved Braker and Yates after him. Yet he was sickeningly aware that his back was turned to men who admittedly had no conscience to speak of.

 

  A week passed. The plain rang with sledgehammer strokes directed against the twisted tubes. Three were irreplaceable.

  Tony, haggard, tired, unbelievably grimed from his last trip up the twisted, hopeless-looking main blast tube, was suddenly shocked into alertness by sounds of men's voices raised in fury outside the ship. He ran for the open air lock, and urged himself toward the ship's stern. Braker and Yates were tangling it.

  "I'll kill him!" Braker raged. He had a rock the size of his fist in his hand. He was attempting, apparently, to knock Jawbone Yates' brains out. Erie Masters stood near, chewing nervously at his upper lip.

  With an oath, Tony wrenched the rock from Braker's hand, and hauled the man to his feet. Yates scrambled erect, whimpering, mouth bleeding.

  Braker surged wildly toward him. "The dirty—!" he snarled. "Comes up behind me with an oxy torch!"

  Yates shrilled, backing up, "That's a lie!" He pointed a trembling hand at Braker. "It was him that was going to use the torch on me!" .

  "Shut up!" Tony bawled. He whirled on Masters. "You've got a nerve to stand there," he snarled. "But then you want a skeleton! Damned if you're going to get one! Which one did it?"

  Masters stammered, "I didn't see it! I ... I was just—" "The hell you say!" Tony whirled on the other two, transfixing them with cold eyes.

  "Cut it out," he said, lips barely moving. "Either you're letting your nerves override you, or either one or both of you is blaming the other for a move he made himself. You might as well know the skeleton I saw was intact. What do you think a blow torch would do to a skeleton?" His lips curled.

  Braker slowly picked up his torch with a poisonous glance at Yates. Yates as slowly picked his sledgehammer. He turned on Tony.

  "You said the skeleton was intact?' Eagerness, not evident from his carefully sullen voice, was alive in his eyes.

  Tony's glance passed over the man's broken, protruding jaw.

  "The head," he replied, "was in shadow."

  He winced. The passing of hope was a hard thing to watch, even in a man like Jawbone Yates.

  He turned, releasing his breath in a long, tired sigh. What a man-sized job this was. Outwitting fate—negating what had happened!

 

  Tony worked longer than he expected that day, tracing down the web of asbestos-covered rocket fuel conduits, marking breaks down on the chart. The sun sank slowly. Darkness swept over the plain, along with a rising wind. He turned on the lights, worked steadily on, haggard, nerves worn. Too much work to allow a slowing up. The invading planet rose each night a degree or more larger. Increasing tidal winds and rainstorms attested to a growing gravitational attraction.

  He put an x-mark on the check—and then froze. A scream had gone blasting through the night.

  Tony dropped pencil and chart, went flying up the ramp to the upper corridor. He received the full impact of Masters' second scream. Masters had left his room, was running up the corridor, clad in pajamas. There was a knife sticking out of his shoulder.

  Tony, gripped with horror, impelled himself after the man, caught up with him as he plunged face downward. He dropped to one knee, staring at a heavy meat knife that had been plunged clear through the neck muscles on Masters' left shoulder, clearly a bid for a heart stroke.

  Masters turned on his side. He babbled, face alive with horror. Tony rose, went with the full power of his legs toward the lounge.

  A figure showed, running ahead of him. He caught up with it, whipped his arm around the man's neck.

  "You!"

  Yates squirmed tigerishly. He turned, broke loose, face alive with fury. Tony's open palm lashed out, caught Yates full on the face. Yates staggered and fell. He raised himself to one elbow.

  "Why'd you do it?" Tony rasped, standing over him.

  Yates' face was livid. "Because I'd rather live than anything else I can think of!" His booted foot lashed out. Tony leaped back. Yates rose. Tony brought his bunched fist up from his knees with all the ferocity he felt. Yates literally rose an inch off the floor, sagged, and sopped to the floor.

  Tony picked him up in one arm, and flung him bodily into the lounge.

  Braker rose from his sleeping position on a cushioned bench, blinking.

  Tony said cuttingly, "Your pal ran a knife through Masters' shoulder."

  "Huh?" Braker was on his feet. "Kill him?" In the half-light his eyes glowed.

  "You'd be glad if he did!"

  Braker looked at Yates. Then, slowly, "Listen, copper. Don't make the mistake of putting me in the same class with a rat like Yates. I don't knife people in the back. But if Masters was dead, I'd be glad of it. It might solve a problem that's bothering the rest of us. What you going to do with him?"

  "I already did it. But tell Yates he better watch out for Masters, now."

  Braker grunted scornfully. "Huh. Masters'll crack up and down his yellow back."

  Tony left.

  Laurette and Overland were taking care of Masters in his room. The wound was clean, hardly bleeding.

  Overland, somewhat pale, was hanging onto the door. "It's not serious, honey," he said, as her fingers nimbly wound bandages.

  "Not serious?' She turned stricken eyes up to Tony. "Look at him. And Daddy says it's not serious!"

  Tony winced. Masters lay face down on the bed, babbling hysterically to himself, his eyes preternaturally wide. His skin was a pasty white, and horror had etched flabby lines around his lips.

  "Knifed me," he gasped. "Knifed me. I was sleeping, that was the trouble. But I heard him—" He heaved convulsively, and buried his face in his pillow.

  Laurette finished her job, face pale.

  "I'll stay here the rest of the night," Tony told her. Overland gnawed painfully at his lower lip.

  "Who did it?"

  Tony told him.

  "Can't we do something about it?"

  "What?" Tony laughed scornfully. "Masters had the same trick pulled on him that he pulled on me. He isn't any angel himself."

  Overland nodded wearily. His daughter helped him out of the room.

  During the night, Masters tossed and babbled. Finally he fell into a deep sleep. Tony leaned back in a chair, moodily listening to the sough of the wind, later on watching the sun come up, staining the massed clouds with running, changing streaks of color.

  Masters awoke. He rolled over. He saw Tony, and went rigid. He came to his feet, and huddled back against the wall.

  "Get out," he gasped, making a violent motion with his hand.

  "You're out of your head," said Tony angrily. "It was Yates."

  Masters panted, "I know it was. What difference does it make? You're all in the same class. I'm going to watch myself after this. I'm going to keep my back turned the right way. I'm going to be sure that none of you—"

  Tony put his hands on his hips, eyes narrowed.

  "If you've got any sense, you'll try to forget this and act like a human being. Better to be dead than the kind of man you'll turn into."

  "Get out. Get out!" Masters waved his hand again, shuddering.

  Tony left, shaking his head slowly.

 

  Tony stood outside the ship, smoking a cigarette. It was night. He heard a footstep behind him. He fell back a step, whirling.

  "Nerves getting you, too?" Laurette Overland laughed shakily, a wool scarf blowing back in the heavy, unnatural wind.

  Tony relaxed. "After two weeks of watching everybody watching everybody else, I guess so."

  She shivered. He sensed it was not from the bite of the wind. "I suppose you mean Erie."

  "Partly. Your father's up and around today, isn't he? He shouldn't have gotten up that night."

  "He can get around all right."

  "Maybe he better lock himself in his room." He smiled with little amusement. "The others are certain the ring will come back."

  She was silent. Through the ominous gloom, lit now by a crescent planet that was visible as a small moon, and growing steadily larger, he saw a rueful, lopsided smile form on her face. Then it was gone.

  She said, "Brie was telling me the jets are in bad condition. A trial blast blew out three more."

  "That's what happened."

  She went on: "He also told me there was a definite maximum weight the jets could lift in order to get us free of the gravity. We'll have to throw out everything we don't need. Books, rugs, clothing, beds." She drew a deep breath. "And in the end, maybe a human being."

  Tony's smile was frozen. "Then the prophecy would come true."

  "Yes. It is a prophecy, isn't it?" She seemed childishly puzzled. She added, "And it looks like it has to come true. Because— Excuse me, lieutenant," she said hurriedly, and vanished toward the air lock.

  Tony stared after her, his mind crawling with unpleasant thoughts. It was unbelievable, fantastic. So you couldn't outwit fate. The ship would have to be lightened. Guesswork might easily turn into conviction. There might be one human being too many.

  Professor Overland came slowly from the air lock, wincing from the cold after his two weeks of confinement. His haggard eyes turned on Tony. He came forward, looking up at the growing planet of destruction.

  "Brie has calculated three days, eight hours and a few minutes. But it's ample time, isn't it, lieutenant?"

  "One jet will straighten out with some man-size labor. Then we can start unloading extra tonnage. Lots of it."

  "Yes. Yes. I know." He cleared his throat. His eyes turned on Tony, filled with a peculiar kind of desperation. "Lieutenant," he said huskily, "there's something I have to tell you. The ring came back."

  Tony's head jerked. "It came back?" he blurted.

  "In a fish."

  "Fish?"

  Overland ran a trembling hand across his brow. "Yesterday a week ago, Laurette served fried fish. She used an old dress for a net. I found the ring in what she brought to my room. Well, I'm not superstitious about the ring. One of us is the skeleton—up there. We can't avoid it. I put the ring on—more bravado than anything else. But this morning"—his voice sank to a whisper—"the ring was gone. Now I'm becoming superstitious, unscientifically so. Laurette is the only one who could—or would—have taken it. The others would have been glad it was on my finger rather than theirs. Even Brie."

  Tony stared through him. He was remembering Laurette's peculiar smile. Abruptly, he strode toward the ship, calling back hurriedly:

  "Better go inside, sir."

  In the ship, he knocked sharply on Laurette's door. She answered nervously, "Yes."

  "May I come in?"

  "No. No. Do you have to?"

  He thought a moment, then opened the door and stepped inside. She was standing near her bed, her eyes haunted.

  Tony extended a hand imperatively. "Give me the ring."

  She said, her voice low, controlled, "Lieutenant, I'll keep the ring. You tell that to the others. Then there won't be any of this nervous tension and this murder plotting."

  He said ominously, "You may wind up a skeleton." "You said the skeleton was not a woman."

  "I was lying."

  "You mean," she said, "it was a woman?"

  Tony said patiently, "I mean that I don't know. I couldn't tell. Do I get the ring, or don't I?"

  She drew a deep breath. "Not in the slightest can it decide who will eventually die."

  Tony advanced a step. "Even your father doesn't believe that now," he grated.

  She winced. "I'll keep the ring and stay in my room except when I cook. You can keep everybody out of the ship. Then there won't be anybody to harm me."

  Footsteps sounded in the corridor. Masters entered the room. Tension had drawn hollow circles under eyes that refused to stay still.

  "You," he said to Tony, his voice thin, wavering. He stood with his back to the wall. He wet his lips. "I was talking with your father."

  "All right, all right," she said irritably. "I've got the ring, and I'm keeping it."

  "No, you can't, Laurette. We're going to get rid of it, this time. The six of us are going to watch."

  "You can't get rid of it!" Then, abruptly, she snatched it off her finger. "Here!"

  Imperceptibly, he shrank back against the wall.

  "There's no use transferring it now. You've got it, you might as well carry it." His eyes swiveled, lighted with a sudden burst of inspiration. "Better yet, let Crow carry it. He represents the law. That would make it proper."

  She seemed speechless.

  "Can you imagine it? Can you imagine a sniveling creature like him— I'll keep the ring. First my father gets weak in the knees, and then—" She cast a disdainful look at Masters. "I wish you'd both leave me alone, please."

  Tony shrugged, left the room, Masters edging out after him.

  Tony stopped him.

  "How much time have we got left?"

  Masters said jerkily, "We've been here fourteen days. It happens on the twenty-fifth. That's eleven days from now, a few hours either way."

  "How reliable are your figures?"

  Masters muttered, "Reliable enough. We'll have to throw out practically everything. Doors, furniture, clothes. And then—"

  "Yes?"

  "I don't know," Masters muttered, and slunk away.

 

  It was the twenty-fourth of December.

  Tidal winds increased in savagery in direct proportion to the growing angular diameter of the invading planet. Heavy, dully colored birds fought their way overhead. On the flanks of abruptly rising cliff edges, gnarled trees lashed. Rain fell spasmodically. Clouds moved in thoroughly indiscriminate directions. Tentacular leaves whirlpooled. Spray, under the wind's impact, cleared the river gorge. The waterfall was muted.

  Rushing voluminous air columns caught at the growing pile emerging from the ship's interior, whisked away clothing, magazines, once a mattress. It did not matter. Two worlds were to crash in that momentous, before-history forming of the asteroids. There was but one certainty. This plain, these mountains—and a cave—were to stay intact through the millions of years.

  Inside the air lock, Masters stood beside a heavy weight scale. Light bulbs, dishes, silverware, crashed into baskets indiscriminately, the results weighed, noted, discarded. Doors were torn off their hinges, floors ripped up. Food they would keep, and water, for though they eventually reached Earth, they could not know whether it yet supported life.

  The ship, devoid of furnishings, had been a standard eleven tons for an H-H drive. Furnishing, food, et cetera, brought her to over thirteen tons. Under a one and a half gravity, it was twenty tons. Masters' figures, using the firing area the ship now had, with more than half the jets beyond use, were exact enough. The maximum lift the jets would or could afford was plus or minus a hundred pounds of ten and three quarter tons.

  Masters looked up from his last notation, eyes red-rimmed, lips twitching. Braker and Yates and Tony were standing in the air lock, watching him.

  Fear flurried in Masters' eyes. "What are you looking at me like that for?" he snarled. Involuntarily, he fell back a step.

  Yates giggled.

  "You sure do take the fits. We was just waiting to see how near we was to the mark. There ain't anything else to bring out."

  "Oh, there isn't?" Masters glared. "We're still eight hundred pounds on the plus side. How about the contraction machinery?"

  Tony said: "It's our only hope of getting back to the present. Overland needs it to rebuild the drive."

  "Pressure suits!"

  "We're keeping six of them, in case the ship leaks."

  "Doors!" said Masters wildly. "Rugs!"

  "All," said Tony, "gone."

  Masters' nails clicked. "Eight hundred pounds more," he said hoarsely. He looked at his watch, said, "Eleven hours plus or minus," took off his watch and threw it out. He made a notation on his pad, grinning crookedly. "Another ounce gone."

  "I'll get Overland," Tony decided.

  "Wait!" Masters thrust up a pointing finger. "Don't leave me alone with those two wolves. They're waiting to pounce on us. Four times one hundred and fifty is six hundred."

  "You're bats," said Braker coldly.

  "Besides," said Yates, "where would we get the other two hundred pounds?"

  Masters panted at Tony, "You hear that? He wants to know where they'd get the other two hundred pounds!" "I was joking," said Yates.

  "Joking! Joking! When he tried to knife me once!"

  "Because," concluded Yates, "the cards call for only one skeleton. I'll get him."

  He came back shortly with Laurette and her father. Overland fitted his glasses over his weak eyes while he listened, glancing from face to face.

  "It would be suicidal to get rid of the machinery, what's left of it. I have another suggestion. We'll take out all the direct-vision ports. They might add up to eight hundred pounds."

  "Not a bad idea," said Braker slowly. "We can wear pressure suits. The ship might leak anyway."

  Masters waved a hand. "Then get at it! Laurette, come here. You've got the ring. You don't want to be the skeleton, do you? Put your back to this wall with me."

  "Oh, Brie," she said in disgust, and followed her father out.

 

  Tony brought three hack saws from the pile of discarded tools. Working individual rooms, the three of them went through the ship, sawing the ports off at the hinges, pulling out the port packing material. The ship was now a truly denuded spectacle, the floors a mere grating of steel.

  The ports and packing were placed on the scale.

  "Five hundred—five twenty-five—five sixty-one. That's all!" Masters sounded as if he were going to pieces.

  Tony shoved him aside. "Five sixty-one it is. There may be a margin of error, though," he added casually. "Braker, Yates—out with this scale."

  The two stooped, heaved. The scale, its computed weight already noted, went out

  Tony said, "Come on, Masters."

  Masters trotted behind, doglike, as if he had lost the power of thought. Tony got the six pressure suits out of the corner of the control room, and gestured toward them. Everybody got into the suits.

  Tony buckled his helmet down. "Now give her the gun." Masters stood at the auxiliary rocket control board, face pale, eyes unnaturally wide.

  He made numerous minor adjustments. He slowly depressed a plunger. A heavy, vibrating roar split the night. The ship leaped. There was a sensation of teetering motion. In the vision plates, the plain moved one step nearer, as if a new slide had been inserted in a projector. The roar swept against them voluminously. The picture remained the same.

  Masters wrenched up the plunger, whirled.

  "You see?" he panted. "I could have told you!"

  Professor Overland silenced him with a wave of the hand, pain showing in his eyes.

  "I make this admission almost at the expense of my sanity," he said slowly. "Events have shaped themselves—incredibly. Backward. In the future, far away, in a time none of us may ever see again, lies a skeleton with a ring on its finger.

  "Now which causes which—the result or its cause?"

  He took off his glasses, blinked, fitted them back on.

  "You see," he said carefully, "some of the things that have happened to us are a little bit incredible. There is Lieutenant Crow's—memory of these events. He saw the skeleton and it brought back memories. From where? From the vast storehouse of the past? That does not seem possible. Thus far it is the major mystery, how he knew that the skeleton existed before the human race.

  "Other things are perhaps more incredible. Three ship-wrecks! Incredible coincidence! Then there is the incident of the ring. It is—a ring of death. I say it who thought I would never say it. Lieutenant Crow even had some difficulty throwing it into the river. A fish swallowed it and it came back to me. Then my daughter stole it from me. And she refused to give it up, or let us know what her plans for disposition of it are.

  "I do not know whether we are shaping a future that is, or whether a future that is is shaping us.

  "And finally we come to the most momentous occurrence of this whole madness. An utterly ridiculous thing like two hundred or two hundred and fifty pounds.

  "So we must provide a skeleton. The future that is says so."

  Silence held. The roar of the river, and the growing violence of the tidal wind rushed in at them. Braker's breath broke loose.

  "He's right. Somebody has to get off—and stay off! And it isn't going to be the old man, him being the only one knows how to get us back."

  "That's right," said Yates. "It ain't going to be the old man."

  Masters shrank back. "Well, don't look at me!" he snarled.

  "I wasn't looking at you," Yates said mildly.

 

  Tony's stomach turned rigid. This was what you had to go through to choose a skeleton to die on an asteroid, its skin and flesh to wear and evaporate away and finally wind up millions of years later as a skeleton in a cave with a ring on its finger. These were some of the things you had to go through before you became that skeleton yourself

  "Laurette," he said, "isn't in this lottery."

  Braker turned on him. "The hell she isn't!"

  Laurette said, voice edged, "I'm in. I might be the straw that broke the camel's back."

  Overland said painfully, "Minus a hundred and five might take us over the escarpment. Gentlemen, I'll arrange this lottery, being the only nonparticipant."

  Masters snarled, eyes glittering, "You're prejudiced in favor of your daughter!"

  Overland looked at him mildly, curiously, as he would some insect. He made a clicking sound with his lips.

  Masters pursued his accusation.

  "We'll cut for high man, low card to take the rap!"

  "Yah!" jeered Yates. "With your deck, I suppose."

  "Anybody's deck!" said Masters.

  "All the cards were thrown out. Why weren't yours?"

  "Because I knew it would come to this."

  "Gentlemen," said Overland wearily. "It won't be a deck. Laurette, the ring."

  She started, paled. She said, "I haven't got it."

  "Then," said her father, without surprise, "we'll wait around until it shows up."

  Braker whirled on him. "You're crazy! We'll draw lots anyway. Better still, we'll find where she put the ring."

  "I buried it," said the girl, and her eyes fluttered faintly. "You better leave it buried. You're just proving—"

  "Buried it!" blasted Masters. "When she could have used a hammer on it. When she could have melted it in an oxyacetylene torch. When she could—"

  "When she could have thrown it in the river and have a fish bring it back! Shut up, Masters." Braker's jawline turned ominous. "Where's the ring? The skeleton's got to have a ring and it's going to have one."

  "I'm not going to tell you." She made a violent motion with her hand. "This whole thing is driving me crazy. We don't need the ring for the lottery. Leave it there, can't you?" Her eyes were suddenly pleading. "If you dig it up again, you'll just complete a chain of coincidence that couldn't possibly—"

  Overland said, "We won't use the ring in the lottery. It'll turn up later and the skeleton will wear it. We don't have to worry about it, Braker."

  Yates said, "Now we're worrying about it!"

  "Well, it has to be there, doesn't it?" Braker charged.

  Tony interrupted by striking a match. He applied flame to a cigarette, sucked in the nerve-soothing smoke.

  His eyes were hard, watchful. "Ten hours to get out of range of the collision," his lips said.

  "Then we'll hold the lottery now," said Overland. He turned and left the room. Tony heard his heavy steps dragging up the ramp.

  The five stood statuesque until he came back. He had a book in one hand. Five straws stuck out from between the pages, their ends making an even line parallel with the book.

  Overland's extended hand trembled slightly.

  "Draw," he said. "My daughter may draw last, so you may be sure I am not tricking anybody. Lieutenant? Braker? Anybody. And the short straw loses."

  Tony pulled a straw.

  "Put it down on the floor at your feet," said Overland, "since someone may have previously concealed a straw." Tony put it down, face stony.

  The straw was as long as the book was wide.

  Braker said, in an ugly tone, "Well, I'll be damned!" Braker drew a shorter one. He put it down.

  Yates drew a still shorter one. His smile of bravado vanished. Sweat stood suddenly on his pale forehead.

  "Go ahead, Masters!" he grated. "The law of averages says you'll draw a long one."

  "I don't believe in the law of averages," said Masters sulkily. "Not on this planet, anyway— I'll relinquish the chance to Laurette."

  "That," said Laurette, "is sweet of you."

  She took a straw without hesitation.