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Alien Sea

John Rackham

I

Helpless, crippled and alone, the ship cartwheeled through space. Its rate of tumble was ponderously slow, but its forward speed was as great as anything it had ever achieved under its own power. The gravity-sink of the incandescent star-mass dragged at it with mighty hunger, but its path was such that it was passing, it was in a cometary orbit; any time now it was due to swoop out of its loop and gradually begin to fall away again from that searing nuclear reaction.

At any rate, the hundred people carried within it hoped so. They lay still, sweating and aching, sipping at overheated air with tortured lungs, blinking agonized eyes, and hoped that the murderous temperatures would start falling soon. It had to be soon, or never. Frantic calculations had been made on a computer only partly functioning, the rest of it obliterated by the fragmentation-bombs that had blasted the rest of the hull like a collander. On the shaky basis of those figures the stuttering, protesting, half-maimed main-drive had been fired. Just one burst, because that was all it had left, and that burst had to be enough to nudge the suicidal plunge into holocaust just that fraction off, to graze and go on by. In ever increasing temperature, with the wounded and injured expiring one by one from heat exhaustion and other things, the survivors had watched, waited, and wondered just how high the temperature could go before they, too, expired.

And, eventually, they learned that they were lucky. The ship was to go on by. But luck is a comparative thing and they wondered about it as the more refined observations showed their ship was not going by, but around. Of the surviving hundred there were many who said, and many more who thought but didn't say, that the dead ones had been the lucky ones, after all. Those who were still rational enough to keep check estimated that it had been a matter of twelve days since the Harpat ship had shattered them with its last-gasp shot. Twelve days of falling helplessly away from their beleagured planet into the arms of the sun. And now, after four days of undiluted hell? The parched-throat rumor was that, with luck, they would spin off, out of the scorching bypass, and tumble all the way back again. But, by that time, it didn't seem to matter much. The only thing that mattered, the only thing anyone could think about was the heat, and whether the environment-complex, the one remaining out of four, would hold out.

Even Jeko Dogran, commanding officer of what had once been Starga Two, a fine ship, could hardly force his mind to consider anything else but that murderous heat. He lay limp in the untidy mess and nonfunctional litter of the control room and his weary eyes seldom shifted far from the pyrometer which read the hull temperatures. The needle hung far above the thick black line that indicated safe-maximum. But it hung. At least it wasn't climbing any longer. If only it would start to fall! He moved his eyes painfully to glance across at Falma Herk. She was very still, only the slow rise and fall of her rib cage indicating that she was still alive. One very junior lieutenant, on her first flight, and that was all he had left of his executive staff. Out of five hundred overall complement there could be no more than a hundred or so left alive, and those only because the moment of disaster had found them scattered in those compartments that had not been ruptured and burst by that damned salvo of bombs.

Dogran switched his gaze back to the pyrometer and tried to think ahead. Suppose—just suppose the temperature did fall. Suppose the ship fell, all the way back to Roggan, then what? A pulse pounded painfully at the back of his head as he tried to carry out the function of an executive, as laid down in the training manual. Arrange the data, assess the whole, then extrapolate. The data, then. One fifth, possibly less, of his crew remained. Great areas of Starga‘s hull were ripped away, or hung useless. The drive-assemblies, both main and guidance, were useless. One environment-complex out of four was still clanking and shuddering away, limping and overloaded in its vain efforts to preserve the proper temperatures and humidities. About one fifth of the hull-sensors were still submitting some kind of information. The computer was still working, but with half its fluidic circuits dead and the rest suspect. And there was, still, ample power available from the central converter unit.

Assemble that into a whole, he commanded himself. If this orbit is a cometary, if the ship swings away and down, then? His eyes hurt and he had to squeeze them tight to restore focus as he tried to shuffle what he knew into something worth concentrating on. The ship was a crippled wreck. Not that it had ever been an efficient warship in any case, even after conversion. Before that it had been a totally self-contained mine-and-smelt freighter, specifically designed and built to spend long weeks combing patiently and methodically in and out of the million moonlets which made up most of this planetary system. It was one of ten Starga s, and the Starga fleet but was but one of ten such fleets maintained by Vercal to dredge the million moonlets and bring back the ingots of metal that nation so desperately needed. The term "precious metal" had no place on Roggan. All and any metals were precious on a planet where only one twentieth of the surface was habitable land. Vercal needed metal just as much and as badly as did Harpat. They were the only two nations Roggan could support, and even they had to struggle. It was inevitable that they should be competitors. Perhaps it was inevitable that they should, in the end, go to war against each other. But it was suicide, and nothing less, when both sides decided simultaneously to escalate the war.

Dogran halted his train of thought a moment to look at that word that had appeared in his mind. Simultaneously? Faced with almost certain extinction and slightly lightheaded with heat and privation, he was getting a new and unreal perspective on many things. He was Vercalian, and Harpat was the deadly, treacherous, unspeakable enemy— surely? Or was it all an illusion? Had both sides shifted from sea-battles to air-assaults, to missiles and then to jury-rigged armor and weapons on their spacecraft, at the same time? Had some collective insanity overtaken the entire humanoid population of Roggan? Dogran had read and absorbed some of the propaganda put about in the early stages of the war, and had believed it because he wanted to. Now, all at once, he saw it as false. This war was pointless, was suicidal. He faced this new vision without flinching. Life on Roggan favored the ruthless and pragmatic approach. Life was cheap there, was overabundant. Living creatures were of small account: there were too many of them always. Living space was the all-important thing. That's what the war was all about. Room to live, on a planet of which only one twentieth of the surface was solid, the rest sea. And of that twentieth a considerable proportion lurked under the massive icecaps at either pole. Roggan's tilt was so extreme that the poles ached with cold so fierce that even the land-hungry humanoids couldn't live there for more than a week or two at a time.

Room to live! Dogran jerked his feverish mind back from the futile channels it had slid into. What a time to cogitate on philosophy, when the immediate future might extend no further than hours! He squeezed his eyes tight shut again, to clear them, and squinted painfully at the master pyrometer. He stared, blinked again to be sure, and it was so. The skin-temperature was falling. Not rapidly, but it was falling. The orbit was cometary. The ship was going to swing away, all the way out again as far as Roggan's orbit. Dogran drew a careful breath, disciplined his mind to be calm. Death had receded. But had it gone away altogether, or was it just waiting in the wings?

He reached and levered his couch upward to the point where he could operate the microphone of the internal communication system. He had last used it fifteen hours ago to inform those who could hear just what was ahead for them. He hoped it was still working.

"Your captain speaks. Hear this. The outside temperature is falling slowly. This seems to indicate that we have passed our nearest point to the sun and are now swinging away. Possible, not certain. There will be a wait of one hour, when I will speak to you again." He moved the switch to cut out the microphone, rolled his head and said, "Lieutenant Herk, go and find Dr. Orsini, tell him to report to me, here, at once!" Falma Herk stirred, sat up, swung her legs to the deck and stood, reeling. Pale blue eyes glazed with near-exhaustion, her long forelock of straw-yellow hair plastered back over her shaved skull with caked sweat, she put a shaky index finger to the paint-band on her brow and said, "Yes, sir. At once."

As she went feebly down the ladder from the control room into the warped guts of the ship, Dogran scowled to himself. All his executive staff dead except Herk, a green junior, and a female at that. It was this damned war, of course. In Roggan's ruthless economy, women were strictly confined to their destined functions as non-skilled, non-opinioned labor, and for breeding offspring as—but only as—economic circumstances indicated. Before the war, women would have flown this ship, would have worked in the smelter, or the detector room, or as labor in the drive-chamber, but never on an executive level. Decisions were made by men, always. Dogran himself had been an up-and-coming

merchant-banker until the war had gouged him out of his narrow rut. He had a talent for organization, and that talent had insured his rapid rise this far. He could command people, but now he needed to know just how many people, and what kind of a command he still had. For that he needed Orsini. It was symptomatic of his feeling for the ship's medical man that he had not thought of him when regretting his lack of executive staff. It was hard to think of Orsini as that kind of material. Dogran squinted again at the pyrometer, to see that the temperature was still falling, grudgingly. Here came Orsini up the ladder now, to halt and turn and extend an arm to assist Falma Herk.

"All right? Now, you just stretch out on your couch and relax; it's the coolest thing to do. Forget everything else."

"Orsini!" Dogran edged his voice. "You will refrain from ordering my staff. That is my function!"

"You have no function!" Orsini said it flatly, without emphasis. He stood easily, lean and somehow slouched, yet poised. "That's obvious. Think it over." He moved to sit sideways on the vacant copilot couch. Dogran glared, his anger hurting his head. The man was insufferable. Like everyone else he was stripped down to just a brief black loincloth, enough to provide pouches for his minimum equipment, but unlike the others, and in sharp distinction to Dogran himself, he looked almost comfortable. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his brow, where the broad black-and-white band of a lieutenant-commander crossed, just above his eyebrows, but that was all.

"I command this ship." Dogran rasped, always conscious of the red-edged band across his own brow. "I give the orders. You have never properly appreciated that, Orsini. I have noticed it, meaning to speak to you about it. I do so now. I demand your obedience and cooperation." Orsini did not look impressed, or even interested. "Three years ago," he said, "the war claimed you. Half a year ago you came aboard this ship as commanding officer. That was your function. Twelve days ago that function ended. We are no longer at war with Harpat."

"Treason?" Dogran offered the word coldly, despite the heat that was scorching his nostrils. Orsini's tone was that of logic, a reasoned statement of fact. To Roggan's brood, logic was a way of life.

"Not treason. Common sense. This ship is now at war with the elements only. We are not fighting Harpat. We are fighting to survive." Dogran studied it, and nodded slowly. "But I am still commander."

"If you insist, but only if you ignore the prime need. You are the executive of a warship. This is no longer a warship." Orsini paused, then went on as if talking to himself. "Eleven years ago I first became medical officer on this ship. I know it from bow-scoop to stern-chute. The commanding officer we had then had to go aground to learn the arts of war, and you came. Most of the crew stayed, are still here, have survived. You probably think the ship a wreck. It isn't. I have known emergencies almost as bad as this many times. Ore-hunting is a hazardous business." As his voice ceased Dogran looked again at the temperature. It was still creeping back. He pondered Orsini's words. They made sense, were logical.

"The prime need," was a powerful phrase.

"You are suggesting that I surrender my command? To you?"

"Not openly." Orsini grinned. "Some of your staff still survive. The rest are trained to think of you as the chief order-giver. So you should go on giving orders. But I will advise you how, and what." Dogran frowned, finding a flaw in the reasoning. "You would be doing this in any case. For instance, I sent for you to find out how many people still survive, what their condition is, how many can work. I ask it now."

"The answer is, exactly one hundred, including ourselves. All the injured and disabled perished in the heat. Of the hundred, fifty-two are women, forty-eight are men. But that is not the point now. Of that hundred, forty-three, including myself, are long-service crew of this ship. Those are the people who know what is to be done. None of them are executive, or in authority of any kind. Your first order will have to be to change that, to get those people and put them in charge of every department where repairs are possible. The second order will have to be that everybody works. Everybody will contribute time, and effort, and labor. We can no longer afford any passengers." Although Orsini kept Iris tone even, Dogran got the point at once, this time.

"I am a passenger?"

"You have been. This was a ship first, a fighting unit second. It is no longer a fighting unit. If it is to become a workable ship again everybody will have to contribute. I include myself, of course. You agree?" Dogran didn't like it. His military training had not included any course on what to do with a wrecked and crippled ship. Vercal had blithely assumed such training would be necessary only for Harpatian ships, not its own. He did not like, furthermore, the idea of the skulking and hitherto ignored "black gang" taking over and giving orders. But if they knew how to lash-up and jig the ship so that it would work again—he stifled his personal feelings and bowed to logic, like a good Roggan.

"Very well," he said, "I agree. What is the first step?"

"We need information. We will assume that we are falling out from the sun and work on that basis. Assume that we have eleven—twelve days in which to get something going, enough to be able to reestablish control. I know my section of the crew. They need no telling what's to be done, only to be told to get on with it. But they will need help, and that's what we must find out first. So you will call a meeting. Best place is the central smelter, which is big enough and undamaged. You need to know just what skills you have among your staff. I mean skills, not combat training. Anybody who knows one end of a wrench from the other. Anybody who knows how to handle sodium wiring, or radio, or can fix a light circuit. Or those who don't know a thing but can contribute muscles to lift and eyes to watch. Economization."

Another key word. Dogran nodded. Economization was a creed with all Roggans. Maximum results with minimum resources. Waste not. For one crisp moment he contrasted that survival doctrine with the fantastic squandering waste that was war, and his home planet felt very far away and unreal. What insanity it all was. This was what the pitiful little handful of pacifists had been trying to promote all this time. One world!

Live together! He wished too late, that he had listened more attentively.

"Very well," he said again, and reached for the microphone. The outside temperature was still falling.

The meeting and the subsequent discussion and working out of survival plans went better than he had expected. In any self-conscious humanoid there must be a nonrational component, an amalgam of the inner and outer values and abstractions which together make up "society." Harpat and Vercal alike had their creeds and beliefs, and shared a stubborn to-the-death hatred of each other out of which had come the final insanity of war. But all were even more fundamentally Roggan, and the evolution of life on that planet had instilled in them values that were far more basic than any cultural implant. Nineteen-twentieths of its surface were trackless sea perpetually torn with storms. Between the twin ice caps and the semitropical equatorial belt where the two major landmasses lay, the temperature extremes were so great that there was a permanent cloud-blanket over the whole planet, through which they saw their primary and the other, scattered masses of the system only vaguely. Out of such an environment the Roggans had grown to be able to put aside odd and trivial things like fancies and fashions, art and delicacy. Survival came first. Dogran himself had accepted it. Now the people under his command accepted it in the same way, once he had made the point.

Starga Two continued to fall back and out, away from the sun. The heat-bleached humanoids aboard grimly reorganized themselves, pooled their resources, forgot about protocol and status, learned not to bother about watches and rest-periods, but came to think, instead, that so long as there was still something to be done, there was no rest. Clothing was discarded permanently, because they couldn't afford the precious resources needed to keep it repaired, washed, pressed and presentable. Marks of respect and rank went too. Those who knew how, did, and showed others. Dogran himself discovered a hitherto unsuspected dexterity with fine wiring, and Falma Herk came to tower above him because she had a gift for grasping the principles underlying fluidic circuits. The drive engineers contrived, cannibalized the beamers to jury-rig control units and, in turn, managed to adapt spares from the drive to lash up several of the frag-bomb projectors.

By the fifth day it was pretty certain they were going to survive and Dogran began, in rare moments of rest, to cast his mind ahead to the point where he could ask, "survive for what?" By the ninth day the question became acute. The main-drive was four-fifths efficient, the navigation-complex adequate for anything but the most strenuous acrobatics. Outside sensors were working to the point where he could, at last, get a fix on the cloud-ball that was Roggan itself. Calculations with the patched up computer told him that it was well within their capacity to adjust their fall so as to intercept. They could get home safely. But what then?

He called another meeting. The habit of assembly for discussion and working out ideas had grown to be enjoyable, but this time the atmosphere was grim as he announced his findings.

"We are fly-worthy enough to make reentry," he told them. "Enough to locate Vercal and get down. We have armament enough to defend ourselves in the event of an encounter, up to a point. If we are unfortunate enough to be intercepted we will fight; that goes without question. If, however, we are lucky enough to get back to home base and set down, what then? The ship, of course, will require a massive overhaul. We will be pulled off and, we must presume, be sent to transfer. To fight again. Is that what you want?" He studied the stern, pale-eyed faces around him curiously.

"What does it matter what we want?" Orsini asked, just to keep the dialogue going. "There's a war on. We have no choice." The rest gave no sign one way or the other. Dogran took his courage and used all of it at once. "I find a choice in me," he said. "The past days have taught me something. I shall resign my commission. I intend to become a pacifist, to do whatever I can to end this futile waste of war."

"You'll be shot," Orsini told him, flatly and without emphasis. "You will achieve nothing."

"Perhaps," Dogran agreed. "That remains to be seen. All I wanted to say here is that I am your commander until we get down. Until then, we go on as before. But after then— you must all do what you think best. I have told you what I am going to do. That's all."

It was a very unsatisfactory meeting, but it did mark a point. From that moment Starga Two was back on a military footing. Falma Herk, reporting to the control room, found herself made a

lieutenant-commander on the spot.

"Me?" she demanded, overawed.

"You. You are the only executive officer left. I will make other adjustments in due course. For now, Herk, get busy on the radio and see if you can raise a polar beacon. We should be in range now."

"I should have told you earlier," she said, "but I had a computer-link to finish up. I tried to raise a beacon two hours ago. Nothing!"

"Oh! You're sure about the radio?"

"Almost. I'll go over it again now, of course, but I'm pretty sure."

"Go over it, quick as you can, and report!" Dogran left it at that and busied himself with the job of reverting to combat status, but his mind persisted on worrying. That the polar beacons had failed was unthinkable. One was just a bare possibility, but both was just not to be believed. Ever since the enterprising humanoids of Roggan had taken to the air the better to cross and exploit the vast wastes of sea, the need of permanent markers had been acute. With only a haze for sky, and all the land gathered in two great continents around the equator, it was easy to get lost elsewhere. So, in the one hard and fast example of coexistence ever recorded between Vercal and Harpat, the polar radio beacons had been established. The effort had been heroic, the installations massive and virtually indestructible, needing no attention, drawing their operating power from the thermal range between the icy land and the warmer air-streams that whirled evermore overhead.

Without the beacons, Dogran mused, the whole of Roggan would fall back into semi-primitive conditions, sailing and flying cautiously, never very far from visible land. Fishing fleets would be permanently crippled, space-mining impossible. Economic chaos had to follow. It didn't make sense. Those beacons could not have failed. The radio had to be faulty. But—and he faced it in the same way he had faced other unpalatable ideas recently—if it wasn't the fault of the radio, then the beacons had been taken out deliberately. And that was the logical and ultimate insanity that had to follow the original mistake of war. He felt all his insides sag and go heavy like lead. From this standpoint he could see no end now but annihilation, of one side or the other. And for what? So that the victor could survive and starve?

Half an hour later Falma Herk reported woodenly. "The radio is functional as far as it is possible to check. And there are no beacons."

"Keep trying," he ordered, concealing from her that he was not very surprised. She went back to her board, he returned to his gloomy thoughts. Logic still held. Whichever side had first decided to cut out a beacon as a tactical blow, the other had to duplicate or be at a disadvantage. Logic, yes, but with his new-found and hard-won insight it sounded gruesomely like cutting off a nose to spite a face. He sat on his convictions until the last hours of the eleventh day, when Roggan was a naked-eye disk in the viewers, when clumsy course corrections had been made to intercept her orbit, when the various work sections had reported three-fourths of the stern and midships armaments back in service once more. Then he called one more meeting.

"We shall strike atmosphere in six hours," he told the assembly, "and from that moment we will again be a warship. The drills have all been worked out, you all know your posts, and I could have announced this over the speaker-system, but I wanted this last chance to see you all together again."

The unspoken grimness in "last chance" stirred them to a ripple of restless movement. He waited for it to cease.

"I have to tell you now that for three days we have been trying to pick up a polar beacon signal. Lieutenant-Commander Herk is reasonably sure the radio is functional, but we have so far been unable to detect any signal of any kind. Beacons or otherwise."

He paused again, to let the implications grow and become apparent. The first to speak was Rackar Gron, the senior of the engine room staff.

"Maybe the war is all over," he suggested, and there was a grunt and growl from his own colleagues as they considered this. Then Orsini stood.

"It's over all right. In the worst way. If they have gone to the limits of bombing out the beacons, then they're all stark raving mad down there. They must be!"

Dogran scowled as their slightly different interpretation offered something to puzzle over. "I hadn't thought of that," he admitted. "I was assuming that one side or the other might deliberately cut out a beacon in order to gain a tactical advantage, if only for a while. I suppose it is just as much possible that one side would bomb out the beacons of the other." He saw Gron shaking his head. The senior engineer was a wizard with machinery but thickheaded at anything else. He obviously didn't grasp the reasoning. Before he could demand explanations Dogran went on.

"No matter what the reason, the effect is the same. For us this means we will be flying blind once we penetrate the cloud layer. Since no one else is using radio, we cannot either. You know what that means. We must be on constant alert if we are to find our way home, and no one knows how long it will take us. At the same time we must also be alert for Harpat ships. And all this with the naked eye. Lookouts and watches will be revised accordingly. If we can strike a free-fall orbit at twenty miles the fuel problem will not trouble us, but we are nearing our limit on food and drink. Ration allowances will be revised in that light. Orsini, I want your help on that, right away. That is all, except for one thing. I may not have the chance again so I will say it now, to all of you. Goodbye!"

"Getting sentimental?" Orsini demanded, as he clambered up into the control room on Dogran's heels. The commanding officer shook his head. A few days earlier he would have considered the comment insulting. Now he was amused by it. In a wry kind of way he and Orsini had grown to like each other.

"Not sentiment. Common sense. It may seem obvious to you, and it has been heard from our muttering philosophers a time or two, that we should not have time to fight each other. Our real fight is with the elements, and it has always been so, but I never realized the truth of it until recently. And we've lost the fight, Orsini. You realize that, don't you?"

"I know." The medical officer was as calm as ever, but the light in his pale eyes was bleak. "The way we've been crippling ourselves to fight this insane war, and it has to be the same for Harpat, we just do not have the resources, the manpower or the structural metals, to put those beacons back. And without them our whole way of life is finished."

"Back to the primitive," Dogran muttered, and Orsini shook his head.

"Not even that, Dogran. We can't go back. So far as we can tell, it has taken humanoid life something like half a million years to get this far. The last thousand years, the really civilized years, we achieved at the cost of every square inch of fertile soil producing to the limit under intensive technical boosting, and we have long ago skinned out the last metals. I've had time to think about this, in the years I've been riding this old bucket in and out of the moonlet swarm. Without us, you know, Roggan civilization would crumble. So it follows: take out the beacons and you cancel the ore-ships. Take out the ore and you cancel civilization as we know it. Try to imagine life, any kind of civilized life, without metal. We can't go back, Dogran. You can't go back to an empty bag!" Dogran sagged in his couch. "Sooner or later the crew will realize as much," he said. "By the Great Wave, what's the point of going on?"

"Why do we struggle to survive?" Orsini murmured. "I don't know the answer to that one. No one does. It just happens to be a built-in characteristic of living systems, that's all." His lean face split in a mirthless grin as he added, "It's a drive, and, like any other drive, it can warp. Then the individual goes suicidal. Had that crossed your mind?"

"It had. Pacifism seems a trifle empty, now. Orsini, why don't I just smash this ship straight down into the sea down there and finish it?"

"I can tell you why, but without logic. It's because you are not the type to give in. None of us are. We haven't survived this far on luck, altogether. We'll see it out to the bitter end because it's the type-pattern for us. That does not mean I think it's a good thing, though. Like you, I wish I could head this old wreck straight down into oblivion. But I couldn't. You can't. We have to go on."

They went on. They plunged through the ion-soup clouds in a nightmare of shuddering and buck-jumping. Starga Two, her arrowhead shape never very aerodynamic anyway, was now a caricature of a ship and she fought Dogran all the way through and out into the silent skies over Roggan. He ached all the way from wrists to ankles by the time he had leveled her out into the twenty-mile orbit he had predicted. He hit the button to signal "finished with drive", and leaned thankfully back but the thankfulness didn't last long. In a minute or two Falma Herk came up with sun-drift figures for the computer and there was a short burst of trimming-thrust. Then Starga Two was flying north-south. Or south-north. By the vast and uncaring deep down there, no one could tell which. All available sensors were on and working, striving to pick up a hint, a clue, a whisper. But nothing came, and Dogran knew, by some inner intuition, that nothing would come. His imagination painted for him the torn and blasted ruin of his homeland, the stark and lifeless debris from fragmentation bombs and corrosive charges, lethal gases—and there had been some persistent rumor, he remembered, of a new and dreadful device that could yield hell-fire from the partial annihilation of matter.

There would be nothing left. He knew it. With the apathetic calm of total despair he realized that he had known it all along, that millions of other people must have known it too. Yet there had been a war. What was it Orsini had said? A drive, any drive, could warp. Survival, driven too far, could warp into self-destruction? Dogran thought his way through a nonsense mixture of contradictory values and felt old and empty. How, he wondered, had it all happened? To his present regret he had never been much of a historian. Not that it mattered, but he was curious to know just how humanity, with all its wonderful potential, could also carry this suicidal streak. He came out of his black reverie to a startled squeak from Falma Herk.

"A signal, sir!" she gasped. "Very faint, far away. And it's voice-modulated!"

Training asserted itself instantly. Dogran hit the alarm switch, sat forward tensely, and demanded, "Get a course fix on it, data into the comp at once. Range?"

She took a maddeningly long time to reply. "Just to make sure," she said, at last, "and I am, now. It's a suit-radio. Range about four hundred miles, bearing sixteen degrees left of our present course. And—sir!"

"Yes, what?" Dogran halted with his finger on the speaker switch.

"I'm also getting a kick from the echo-locator, dead ahead. Shallows!"

"Hmm!" Dogran considered this swiftly. Echo-location was useful on any mass less than five hundred feet below surface, and all such "shallows" were charted. It might help to know just exactly where he was by this method. "Very well, we will proceed on course for the moment, Herk. Read that shallow and get me a bearing from it. Fast!" He buttoned the speaker.

"Hear this. We are receiving faint signals from a suit-radio approximately four hundred miles away. Condition alert but await further data." He waited, watching Falma Herk from the corner of his eye and feeling curiously indifferent to all this evidence of warlike normality. His body and trained reflexes were responding, but his inside, his personality, seemed to have stepped off somewhere apart. She had let her pale forelock grow and thicken enough to be tied in a sedate little bow at the nape of her neck. As she craned down over her instruments now he thought she was extremely attractive. She had turned out to be very competent, too. It seemed criminal that all that grace, the beauty, the competence, should be utterly useless and wasted. He caught himself from reverie with a start, amazed to find, for the first time in his life, that he had consciously thought of some other person as attractive. One didn't think of people like that. He didn't, anyway. Other people were useless or not, significant or not, involved or not—but attractive—? She swiveled and looked at him, catching him unawares. Then the wide fear in her eyes cut through his other distractions.

"Sir!" Her voice had gone right back into her throat. "Sir —that shallow is two hundred and thirty-six miles north to south, and seventeen hundred and sixty miles east to west. And there's no such shallow on any chart!"

"There's got to be—" he began to snarl, then the figures sank home.

"Two thirty-six by seventeen sixty? But—but those are the rough dimensions of—of Vercal!"

"That's right," she whispered.

"Rubbish!" he shouted, as much at the chills on his spine as at her white face. "It must be coincidence. You can't sink a continent! Forget it for now. Fix on that radio again."

He fed data into the course computer and the ship shuddered gently as steering jets throbbed. The faint signal grew louder. Herk switched it to the main speaker. A voice began to sort itself out of the carrier mush, a voice that rambled and wavered like a man in stupefied delirium. Dogran took up the signal-mike, cleared his throat.

"This is Starga Two, of Vercal, Captain Dogran speaking. Identify!"

"By the Wave!" The rambling death-weary voice suddenly took on life and cut clear through the interference roar, "That was a living voice, or I am really mad at last. If you are really there, Starga Two, this is Ral Wentil, second lieutenant of the ship Colbar— what's left of it—of Harpat. Where in storm have you been, Starga?"

"What do you mean, where have we been? How many are you, Wentil?

Give your true state and power, or we blast you down!"

"Please do, Captain—Dogran, is it? Please do. We've been trying to do just that for three hellish days now, but we can't. There are sixteen of us, all in suits. The ship is a dead wreck, no power, no control, nothing, and our suits are running out. Make it quick, Captain!"

Dogran stared in bewilderment at Falma Herk, and then at Orsini, who had come up into the control room just in time to hear the plea. The medical officer moved a switch and muttered, "The rest ought to hear this. Something is hellishly wrong there."

"Hello, Wentil." Dogran made his voice obey him. "Do I read you that you want to be blasted down?"

"What else is left? Everything is gone, you know that!"

"Everything? You mean—Harpat has been wiped out?" Wentil laughed, or snarled, they couldn't be sure which. "It's all gone, Dogran. Harpat and Vercal. All gone. Drowned. Didn't you know?"

"Drowned?" Dogran's voice was talking by itself now, beyond his control or care. "Drowned?" it repeated foolishly. "But how?"

"It was the hell-bomb. Your side launched it. A missile with a hell-fire warhead."

Dogran went numb inside. So the rumor had been true, after all. He heard his stunned voice demanding, "But why would anyone launch a missile at a polar station?"

"Didn't!" Wen til cackled. "That was cunning. You launched it in a sneak orbit, over the pole. But our intelligence was too good. We found out. A four-ship squad intercepted and shot it down. Over the North Pole ice cap."

You can't sink a continent. Dogran's own words came back to him. You could do the equivalent, though, simply by melting the millions of tons of water locked up in an ice cap.

"How long ago?" Orsini demanded, his voice choked with despair.

"Ten days. Silly, isn't it?" Wentil was coming closer to madness with every minute. "Our side had the hell-bomb too, but we tried to deliver ours with ships. Colbar was with the squadron covering the bomb-ships. We ran into opposition over the South Pole. Silly, isn't it? We've been drifting helplessly in orbit ever since, watching Roggan drown."

"What about surface ships?" Orsini growled, and this time Wentil did laugh, a hideous sound over the tinny radio.

"Surface ships, in tsunani waves half a mile high? The sea has won out, Vercalians. Roggan is dead. They said this was the war to end all wars, and they were right!"

Dogran sat back in his chair and felt suddenly old. There was no future, only this present moment. There was nowhere else, only this patched up ruin of a ship. There was nothing. He screwed his head around painfully to stare at Orsini, and then Falma Herk.

"What price pacifism now?" he asked stupidly. "Now what about your suicidal warped drive? Now"—his voice boiled up loud in his throat—"give me one good reason why I don't point this ship straight down there and get it all over with!"

"I'll do better than that!" Orsini was savage, the gleam in his pale eyes a terrible thing. "Listen, everybody. You on that ship, too. Listen. We still live. We are more than a hundred, fit and healthy. The world we knew is dead, drowned and destroyed, because it forgot the one thing that matters, the real enemy. They fought each other, and perished. We can live if we work together. Let me tell you how—"

And all that happened, allowing for Einsteinian edicts about simultaneity, about the same time that Caesar's legions were leaping down into the surf to start the conquest of Britain.

II

It was, therefore, about two thousand years later that an alarm-gong sounded in Dennis Dillard's ear, and a quietly firm voice announced:

"Your attention, please. We break into norm-space in five minutes, I repeat, five minutes. We will then proceed immediately to make splash-down on Hydro. All passengers are requested to proceed at once to their cabins and strap in according to the instructions printed over each couch. A single gong will mark the minutes. I say again, you have five minutes. Do not delay. Do not leave your couch until so instructed." Dillard began to pack his equipment rapidly. He had deliberately strewn it over the cabin table only ten minutes before. He had calculated carefully that if he hurried he could pack everything, wire spools, headband, amplifier-module, battery-pack and vernier-panel, and just give himself time to get to the control room before the acrobatics began. This was his way of making sure that his attention was too thoroughly occupied for him to think, and thus to get the cold shakes anticipating what was going to happen. He cursed as, in the delicate act of fitting the battery-pack into its recess, his cabin-visor chimed for attention. Still monitoring his fingers, he crossed to it and knocked the switch with his elbow. A beautiful but carefully aloof blonde gazed at him from under the beak of a black space-service cap.

"Mr. Dillard? You should be on your way, as arranged. Hurry, please."

"I'll be there," he muttered, settling the battery-pack and snatching for the switch. Damn it. That interruption was just enough to break the carefully contrived busy-ness he had built up. Now he had to rush. He grabbed the headband, which went in last because it was flexible, stuffed it in place, clicked the kit-box shut and hoisted the loop over his shoulder as he hurried out of the cabin, up two decks and out through the cross-member tunnel into the central body of the ship. A mellow gong sounded as he began stepping lively up the sharp spiral toward the control room. Hurry equals panic, he reminded himself, trying to keep calm. Why does everybody call this thing a spiral, he asked himself, when it's really a helix? Why does Captain Conway call the damned place "the bridge," when bridges went out with sailing ships? What's all the panic about, anyway? Breakout from Pauli-space was nothing! This was his very first space trip, and you couldn't get much greener than that, could you? Yet there had been three breakouts so far, for navigation purposes, and so what? For a split-second you felt as if you were being turned inside out, sure, but it was all over before you really had time to feel it. And he should know surely. He, Den Dillard, professional "feeler," should know. But it didn't work. None of his argument therapy ever did. Action was the only effective method. Carefully planned activity, not this edge-of-panic scramble. How many gongs was that, now? He arrived in the control room of Venture Three with his knees threatening to let him down any moment and a fine sheen of sweat on his brow.

"Sorry to crowd it a little," he muttered, and Captain Conway took out his pipe to gesture with it soothingly.

"Perfectly all right, Dillard. You have a full minute yet. Here, take the copilot seat alongside me."

"Copilot?" Dillard's voice threatened to squeak, and Conway grinned, biting on the pipe, which was lit and releasing a thin blue spiral in complete defiance of all regulations to the contrary.

"Quite all right, believe me. Matter of fact the auto-helm will take us all the way. I'm just here in case, and should it come to that we'll have you out of that seat in ample time. But it won't, you know. It's all right." Dillard let himself down into the contoured seat and began flipping the catches on his kit-box. His educated fingers knew what to do without help from his eyes, which roamed restlessly around the control space. Richter, over there by the state and auxiliary console, looked bored and probably was. As First Officer he had answered Dillard's questions this far with patience but was unable to keep his contempt from showing. He probably didn't have any nerves at all by this time, Dillard estimated, clipping the headband into place and adjusting the touch-pads to press firmly against the nape of his neck. Over in the far corner, Lieutenant Rogers, blonde, beautiful and icily aloof, concentrated on her communications board and pretended not to know that he was there at all. She owned the mellow voice that had issued the breakout warning, and was the only other person on the ship Dillard had tried to talk to, apart from Captain Conway himself. He had got exactly nowhere with her. Somehow she had managed to make her neat-fitting all-in-one-piece, black and gold uniform a barrier between them, and he hadn't tried too hard to break it down. After all, he wasn't just along for the ride, or enjoyment.

The black needle on the master clock crept nearer zero. Dillard hoisted his vernier-panel on to his knee and made fine adjustments, switched in the lead-wire to sound.

"You say"—Conway leaned across—"that you don't pick up sounds and pictures with that gear?"

"Not at all," Dillard assured him. "Just for this bit now, excuse me." He depressed a button and spoke into a tiny microphone on the board.

"Control room of Venture Three, about to break out of Pauli-space into norm-space and then go down to landing on Hydro. Den Dillard, recording." He released the button again. "That's all the sound. From here on it's just sensations, my sensations. You know, thrust and surge, free-fall vertigo, spin—those are all straightforward neuro-muscular reactions, of course. But also the wire picks up emotional effects like fear, excitement, tension, from the event itself, and the more subtle sensations of being seated, enclosed in here—this room—and stuff like that." Conway nodded, leaned back to puff his pipe, then shook his head half in wonder, half in disbelief. "Haven't I read about something like this?"

"Not recently." Dillard managed an unsteady grin. " A long time back the idea was written up by a fantasist of the period. Huxley something or other. He called it ‘feelies,' but his idea was to record tactile sensations. This is something a bit different; it's the gestalt reaction to a set of circumstances as they happen. When this is played back through the right equipment the audience will feel everything that I feel." He heard Richter snort, quite distinctly, and felt a flush come to his face.

"It probably wouldn't mean a thing to you, because you've done it a thousand times…"

"That's all right," Conway interrupted. "I can remember my first drop very plainly. Insides like water and wanting to grab hold of something solid to hang on to. You mean you can pick up all that on your gadget?"

"Oh yes. More than you think. Because of me, you see." Dillard made a rueful shrug as he confessed. "Some people are more sensitive than others. They react more. For this job you have to be one of those." Sweat was starting on his face again and he added, in sudden angry complaint, "It's hell, but it's what I'm good at."

Conway nodded, not smiling now. "Sensibilities," he said, "can be the devil, but you can't be an artist without them."

"That's right. That's it exactly."

"And you say this stuff is used in—what d'you call them? —dramatapes?

That's the new ‘total-television' thing, isn't it?"

"Right again." Dillard settled lower as the needle narrowed the gap.

"Background effect. Sound, pictures, music—and sensation!" On that last word there came a vibrant shiver of sound that screamed up and away out of audibility, the whole universe collapsed in on itself into breath-stopping nullity, then exploded silently and instantly into steady solidity again. In the next second a screen flared into light in front of Dillard's eyes, a neat row of pointers lifted up from their stops and heaved. The air was full of busy clicks and whispering relays, then the solid fabric of the ship began to shudder distantly as reaction-drive cut in.

"We'll jockey about a bit," Conway said casually, "to select the best approach, then we'll go down. Queer system altogether, this one. D'you mind if I talk, or will it put you off?"

"Won't make much difference." Dillard gasped, fighting against the assault on his nerves as the seat fell away beneath him, then slammed back and shoved him sideways. "The technicians can always modify the amplification. Will, in any case. Part of the art. You were saying?" He wanted Conway to go on in that casually confident drawl. The hell was with him now. Some people are more sensitive than others. As Conway had said, artists.

Painter, poet, sculptor, musician, all are people who live with their sensibilities close to the skin, who suffer and weep, who laugh, who shake with wonder, at those things which hardier mortals pass by without recognition. Whether it be chemical or mental, or a combination of both, if you have it you can't help it, a curse and a blessing by turns and according to circumstances. Dillard had it, and he suffered now, nine-tenths of him writhing and cringing, and lurched to find an approach pattern. The remaining tenth of him was the hard-won control fraction, that part which stood aside and watched, which kept a chill eye on neural-fluxes and skin-sensor inputs, which nursed the verniers and kept rigidly aloof from the shattering nerve-storm of the rest. It had taken Dillard many years and a lot of sweated suffering to discipline that much of himself. The reward was that he was one of the very best sensor-men in the business. At times like this, that knowledge was only a tenuous consolation for the panic-fear that racked him. He wanted Conway to go on talking.

"As I said"—the ruminating captain chewed on his pipe-stem, cast a skilled eye over the panel, and shook his head —"this is a crazy system. You see the primary there? Sol-type within the standard figures. And there's one inner planet that would pass for Mercury. But there all resemblance ceases. Instead of the second and fourth planet that you'd expect, there's a positive plague of minor moonlets averaging six or seven hundred miles across, and in all sorts of orbits and planes. They fill the spaces where the second and fourth planets ought to be, if you accept Bode's Law, that is, and there must be a hundred thousand of them, at least. Two great gas-giants further out, but they don't concern us. Our problem is that Hydro is lying in third place, where Earth would be, and putting down on it is quite a business. If we had to do it by hand and instruments—" he let the hypothesis hang as if unable to describe just how it would be. Dillard was not surprised.

On the screen before him there came and went spinning spots of light, some close enough to show an appreciable disk, half-cut with shadow, and he was fearfully aware of the groan and grind of the ship as it dodged its careful way in and out between the random hunks of rock.

"Queer planet, too," Conway went on, reaching out to tap a gauge with his knuckles, then leaning back again, satisfied. "Slightly less than Earth in diameter, but about the same in mass, and all water. Warm water, too. A pronounced axial tilt, perfectly circular orbit, and with the tidal effects of all those moon-masses, the water is constantly churning. Pretty shallow in spots, so there's all sorts of tidal inequalities, and a constant vapor-haze, which produces rainbows almost all the time. Queer place altogether."

Dillard tried hard to agree, but "queer" was not the word he would have used at that moment. As the seat fell away under him, then slammed back, and screaming masses of rock slid past the corners of the screen, he was grinding his teeth to keep his last meal down, and praying for the nightmare to end. At times like this it felt to him that his stomach-churning panic must surely extend several feet out from his skin, and it was amazing how those around him couldn't feel it.

"Doesn't seem right," he managed to say, through his teeth, "that a whole planet should be just water."

"Cosmology theories are cheap hereabouts," Conway grunted. "I've heard a few. One expert, so-called, tried to explain to me how, if there was a big enough landmass to create air-temperature turbulence, there would be clouds. I've heard ‘em arguing that there ought to be ice packs at the poles. If you go in for that kind of thing it could drive you crazy."

"Seems a waste. A whole planet, with no chance for life to develop anywhere except in the sea."

"Waste? I suppose you could say that. Doesn't concern me. All I know is that it's a very handy arrangement for us, since all that water down there represents so much fuel for the taking. Ah!" Conway leaned forward again and extended a finger which weaved a bit as the ship still lurched. "That's Hydro now. See it?"

Dillard saw, and just for a moment the sight was enough to take out some of his panic. There against a black-velvet curtain of space studded with star-jewels was a small disk. Three-quarters of it shimmered silver and ice-blue, the dark side rippling with a rainbow halo superimposed on deep dark violet. It grew larger as he watched.

"Your first time. I've seen it a score of times. But it's still a sight. A pity you can't get that on your wire," Conway said.

"Pictures—we can always get those." Dillard forced himself to keep the conversation going. "You can do a lot of things with pictures and sounds. Play tricks with them. All you need is a camera, or a recording machine. But this"—he gulped as the ship seemed to leap and heel in a tight arc—"takes a person. Somebody like me." The standoff fraction of him was aware of the multiple flow of impulses from the nerve-net that were being channeled into the hair-fine ferrite wire that was now sliding steadily between the gaps of a delicate magnet, and an irrelevant quirk of memory brought back the words of his boss, Production-Manager Elmer Basalt, of Epics Incorporated:

"Sure you have delicate artistic sensibilities, Dee-Dee boy, but who can sell those? That kind of stuff is great for the long-hairs, the intellectuals, the high-Q crowd, but who makes a living from them? We have to deliver where the money is, Dee-Dee, and that is where the people are. And what do they want? They want sensation! Hit them in the guts, make their flesh creep, scare the pants off them, that's what they want!" What they wanted called for Dillard, and a handful of others like him, to suffer gibbering fear, blood-chilling terror, palpitations and repeated dread, just to get it on the wire. And it helped not at all to know, with the sane fraction of his mind, that the horrors were largely unreal, invented by his hypersensitive nervous system. Nor did it help any to know that he was special, and sought-after. Rich. At the top of his profession. Basalt's favorite son. None of it helped at all. The ship shuddered, the screen picture jittered and spun, and his insides became one snarled and tangled mass of shrieking primitive terror, while his trained fraction clung grimly to sanity and monitored the things that were pouring into the wire. But now the acrobatics lessened and the visible sky cleared of zooming white chunks. The disk of Hydro grew larger and larger. Conway leaned forward again to tap a gauge and murmur, "That's the hairy part done with, Dillard. Straightforward landfall, now. Not that you can call it landfall, mind you, but you know what I mean. All routine. You can relax." He swung his head aside to grin, and then his grin froze into concern.

"You all right? You look terrible!"

"I feel terrible," Dillard confessed between stiff lips, swallowing and breathing hard as his viscera swirled and settled reluctantly. "Don't mind it, please. This is what I'm for."

"My God!" Conway breathed. "Is this what landsiders want for their entertainment? Blood and circuses? And they say we're civilized at last!

Why the devil d'you do it, man? There must be other ways to make a living!"

"My only talent, Captain. And I have no skills." Dillard gulped, got his breathing steadied, felt the sweat burst out on him now that the tension was easing, and cast his eyes down to the control-panel on his lap. His explanation was true, as far as it went, but it was only a shadow of the reality. There were no words to explain the long years of futility, the hopeless struggle to find some other way of employing his sensitivity in a world where art, any art, had to be explosive, arrogant, stridently crude enough to smash through the barrier of apathy, or cease to exist. Delicacy, sensitivity, those were words without meaning in a culture sated in and numbed by the relentless, never-ending assaults on the senses so essential to an economy of consumption-growth. It had taken him a long time and a lot of grief to discover the one thing he could do really well. He kept his eyes down now, not wanting pity. He became aware of quick movement, saw slim legs shimmering in skintight black metallon come to a halt beside Conway, and a mellow voice saying, casually, "Billet Fourteen, sir."

A rustle of paper-plastic as she put the radio message down, then the slap of soft feet as she went away again. Walking about, even though the ship was still surging and shifting into attitude for drop. Going back, now, to her seat at the radio-console. He could imagine the look on her face. Conway made movements, busied himself punching the information into the auto-helm, then sat back again.

"Handy place, this," he said. "Just right to break the jump-time for Castor, Pollux and Capella. Water-planets aren't all that common, especially this close to Terra." The sub-audible shuddering ceased suddenly and for a sickening moment the ship was in free-fall. Dillard held his breath until, just as suddenly, the shuddering started again. "That's it," Conway declared. "It's all straight down from now on. You'll see the base in a moment. Not that it's much to see."

Dillard forced himself to take an interest in the picture on the screen. Hydro was big enough now to fill all one corner, and as the image swelled still more, automatic focusing adjustments shifted the view, brought him a close-up bird's eye picture of a thing like a giant many-limbed starfish, but the whole was silver-plated metal, the arms were double, like two-tined forks, and each pair that starred out from the center held a gray-green mass like a sausage. That, Conway explained, was the desalination and water-processing plant and fueling station. The gray-green blobby things were huge plastic tanks that floated in the water, and a "billet" was the semi-enclosed space formed by the incurved ends of the retaining arms and the bag itself. Dillard counted eighteen billets, and saw that many of them were occupied. The metal starfish grew huge, became a tracery of girders and struts, with a solid mass in the center.

"Five and a half miles across," Conway murmured, "and anchored to the seabed with cables. Shallow just there. No more than seven hundred feet or so. Right on the equator. Warm water, warm air. Pretty place." He fell silent as the auto-helm piled on the braking power and everything grew immensely heavy. The screen image shivered and blurred in the heat-waves of the retro-thrust. Dillard groaned as he was squashed down in his seat. Just when he felt he couldn't bear it a moment longer, the crushing weight came off, dwindled to a blessed normal, the shuddering died away, and all was peaceful.

"All over," Conway announced cheerily as the gauges on the board fell back to zero in orderly succession, a faint ping announcing each stage of completion. Dillard groped in his poncho for the handkerchief he had saved for this moment, mopped his face and neck, felt light-headed as he always did immediately after a strenuous "experience," and shifted uneasily in his seat.

"I can still feel movement."

"Naturally. We're afloat." Conway took a reviving puff on his pipe, set his hands to the sides of his chair and said, "Come and take a look at the view from here. From the bridge-walk. Passenger-view is several feet lower, not as good as this. Not that there's much to see." Dillard shucked out of his equipment rapidly and expertly and clipped it away into its box, then rose and followed Conway on wobbly legs. It was obviously part of the captain's verbal small-change to deprecate the appearance of almost anything, but this time his apologies were justified. Apart from the desalination plant itself, there was nothing to see at all except rolling ocean. Take the man-made pyramid of steel away, Dillard thought, and one might just as well have been out at sea anywhere. On Earth, even. Then he corrected that. This sea was a different blue. Just how different he could not have said, but it was. And it smelled different, too.

"Certainly is warm," he said, loosening his poncho-string and shouldering it back to let the faint breeze strike his chest and arms. "How long do we stay here?"

"Twenty-four hours, about. You'll have time to go ashore, if you want."

"Ashore?"

"This way." Conway led him along the walk and around the curve of the ship's hull. "Over there, see? Joytown."

Dillard stared. The thing was about three miles away, perhaps more. It looked, and he shook his head as he strove for images to fit, like a great upturned dish, a dome with many facets, and it glittered in silver and gray and blue, catching the sunlight. It sat, rim to rim, in another dish that lay close to the water, and now that his eyes had adjusted to the strangeness of it, he saw dark orifices at regular intervals all around that lower dish.

"Joytown?" he echoed, only half-understanding. "I looked up this planet just before the trip, but this wasn't mentioned in the literature."

"It wouldn't be," Conway growled. "Officially it doesn't exist. If that sounds crazy to you, well, it is crazy. Look, just now I said the water-plant was anchored to the seabed, and so it is. But it also stands on tubular pylons, telescopic things so that it can go up and down with the tide. That is the way it was planned and built. Now, during the business of settling official rights and authorities and all that stuff, the standard old phrase,

‘territorial rights,' got a thorough airing. You see, somebody has to take a responsible stand for the planet. You have to have some kind of law and order, after all. And it was decided, by a competent international court, that because the water-plant was in firm and permanent contact with solid ground, it qualified as ‘territorial.' So, incidentally, does the Planetary Base and Embassy, over there, see?" Conway extended his arm and Dillard saw, about four miles away in the opposite direction, a slim spire of metal topped by an array of antennae.

"Then some joker, reading the proceedings very carefully, realized that if you had a structure that was just anchored by cables, and was, technically, afloat, you had something that was outside territorial law altogether. It's been done before, of course. Ships on the high seas and all that kind of thing. Responsibility borne by the country of registration, by whatever flag they were sailing under. But here? There's no country to be registered with. That place there is outside any law, or regulation, or anything. And it's a goldmine, or a sink of iniquity, whichever way you care to look at it."

"That's pretty smart," Dillard said and grinned as the implications sank in. "A monopoly, too. I mean, for those who want to get off the ship, there's nowhere else to go. But I imagine most passengers will stay put rather than visit such a place?"

"Don't get me wrong now," Conway said hastily. "It's respectable—in spots. If that's what you want, you can get it. Peace and quiet, and the odd souvenir and so on. But if you fancy something else—well, you name it and they've got it. But it's strictly illegal. Or nonlegal, I should say. As a matter of fact"—and he lowered his voice to a confidential murmur—"we are all in on it. We bring in the stuff for them, supplies, furnishings, food, liquor, and they pay well. Charge plenty too, just in case you were thinking of trying it. Might be an experience for your records, eh?"

"Not that kind." Dillard shook his head. "Bright lights, noise and organized vice leave me cold. I could afford it. I have a healthy ex-card, but it's not my line at all. In any case I have something else to do."

"Ashore? There isn't anywhere else."

"Yes there is." Dillard grinned and led the way back around the bulge to where they could again see the water-plant. "There. I'm going to call on the big boss who runs that lot, one Dr. Edmund Stanley."

"You know him? Friend of yours?"

"Not exactly a friend." Dillard spaced the words carefully. "I used to know him, long ago. I have a few things to tell—"

"Sir!" Richter came into view with a flapping paper. "Would you pass this watch-list now. And the fuel-up orders." Dillard stood back as Conway took and scowled over the business of paper work. He turned to look at the metal pyramid of the water-plant, and thought about Dr. Stanley. They were cold and unkind thoughts. Dillard bore malice to very few people and never for very long, but Stanley was an exception. The score with him was grievous and of long standing. Doing his homework, as he did thoroughly before taking any assignment, he had been stirred to discover that name and to realize that here was an unexpected chance to settle an old score. His memory was dredging up Stanley's sharp-edged and infuriating voice when he became aware of a new note in the murmur between Conway and his first officer.

"Never seen one before, Mr. Richter? I can well believe it. So far as I know they only have half a dozen ships altogether."

"News to me that the Veenies had any ships at all!" Richter growled, and Dillard swung around to see both men staring away to the left, toward Billet Twelve. Then he saw what they stared at, and stared in his turn, because this was a ship quite unlike any he had ever seen. He inserted himself into the conversation with a question.

"Did you say Veenie?"

"That's right, Mr. Dillard, a Venusian ship. Clumsy looking barge. I'll get these orders out right away, sir." Richter strode off. Dillard moved to belly up to the guard rail.

"I'm no expert on spaceships," he said. "All I've seen are those we use on film or projected background shots. And in the newscasts, of course. But I never saw anything like that before. And I didn't know Venus had ships."

"Odd, that," Conway murmured, around his pipe-stem. "Typical though. The way people would rather not know things that are unpleasant. And, of course, the Venusians aren't given to advertising themselves, which is natural. But that's one of their ships, all right. And why not? They discovered this planet. One of their ships was the first one ever to splash down here, and it was the Venusians who built the basic foundations for everything. Water-plant, Port Office, Planetary Base and Embassy—and Joytown."

"You mean—Venus owns this place?"

"No no! That's not on. Earth government wouldn't stand still for that; you know that as well as I do. No, they just found it, laid the foundations, then turned it over to Earth. But they collect a hefty kickback. I can only tell you what I've heard, but it runs something like fifteen percent of all profits, after expenses and taxes. And that is something, when you realize how many ships come in and out of here."

A Venusian ship! Dillard stared, and the story of Venus, as it had been told him in history lessons, made a background to his wonder.

"I wonder what they're really like," he muttered, and Conway chuckled.

"You've heard the stories, I'll bet. You'd be a fool to believe them. Humans don't mutate into monsters in five generations. Of course, when they were deported a century and a half ago it was fashionable for everybody to believe they were monsters already. But they were human then, and they're human now."

Dillard felt a trifle disconcerted and hoped it didn't show. Despite himself he had been thinking of long skinny humanoid "things" with greenish skin and goggling eyes. Only a couple of years ago Epic had done a space-opera tape with creatures like that in it, denizens of a warm planet perpetually swathed in vaporous clouds. The script hadn't said it was Venus, but the implication was there.

"They must have changed a bit," he protested. "After all, five generations in a hot house atmosphere and without UV must have done something to them."

"Why don't you pay them a visit and find out?" Conway suggested, and he spoke half in jest, but the suggestion lodged and caught fire in Dillard's mind. It provoked the twin conflicting emotions of desire and fear. It would be a hell of a scoop to get a sensory recording of the interior of a genuine Venusian ship, and the real "presence" of living, breathing Venusians. But it would be, even in prospect, a terrifying experience too. He could feel the squeamish shivers just thinking about it. It was the trained one-tenth of him that turned eagerly to Conway and say, "Why not? If it's possible. Is it?"

The other nine-tenths of him quailed and shrank away, screaming soundlessly against such a foolhardy undertaking. Conway must have seen something of the turmoil underneath, for his grin faded.

"You really work at it, don't you, son. You'll drive yourself over the edge one of these times. But, if you really do want to go aboard that ship, I might be able to swing it. Can't do any harm to ask, and there's no reason why they would refuse a request from another ship. You want that?" Dillard couldn't back down now. "If you would," he said. "I'd be very grateful. How long will it take? Do I have time to call on Dr. Stanley first?"

"Look." Conway consulted the chronometer on his wrist. "To get to the water-plant laboratory anyway you'll need a hydrofoil—"

"But we're alongside!"

"Yes, but you can't go strolling about the de-sal gear. That's against regs. You'll need a ‘foil. You step inside and ask Lieutenant Rogers to call one for you, on the radio. I'll get a signal off to that ship, and I'll pass the reply along to the 'foil, all right? And good luck. Excuse me!" He stood away to lean over the rail and bawl down to someone far below an adjectival suggestion to shake it up a bit with the qualified hose-pipe. Dillard went inside and over to where Lieutenant Rogers was busy with her radio board. As she looked up coldly he asked, "Miss Rogers, would you call a hydrofoil for me, please?"

"There's one coming alongside right now, Mr. Dillard, requested by one of the other passengers. If you're quick you can catch it. Shall I ask for it to be held?"

"Please!" He nodded. "I'm on my way." And as he turned to run he heard her call out after him, "Gangway Three!"

He hurried, down the ladders and across the connecting-tunnel into the Section Three passenger quarters, and thought as he hastened that it was just his luck, or her luck, whichever you like, that his request should be so very promptly and efficiently granted. He could imagine her saying to herself, "That's how we do it in the Service, civilian!" And just when he had a good legitimate excuse for talking to her!

III

He kept his trivial complaining mood as he trotted down the gangway to water level, as a device to avoid thinking about the awesome thing he had let himself in for, but trivia receded into limbo as he halted there and got this new perspective on things. All at once he felt horribly tiny. The great up-thrust mass of the ship loomed over him from behind. To the right the massive water-bag container bulked grossly. In front of him the twin-hulled hydrofoil surged and strained against the rolling waves. And all the rest was just sea, vast, restless and green-blue. In that moment something of the immensity of it came to him. A whole planet, as big as Earth nearly, and all water! He gulped, eyed the pitching hydrofoil, clung to the rail of the gangway and tried to estimate one heaving motion against another. Just a step, that's all it took. He nerved himself, leaned, stepped off as the foil was rising, and almost fell as his leg gave under the strain. Then he had made it, and was aboard.

The two hulls were flat-topped and easy to walk on, with seats ranged athwart in fours. The pilot, in the stern space, gave him an impatient look and held out a hand.

"Card! Where to, mister?"

"To the desalination plant laboratory." Dillard handed over his credit card, watched it being slotted into the meter and scanned, took it back and stowed it in his pants pocket. The pilot gestured.

"You sit up front. Stay midships. Helps to keep trim." Dillard interpreted that as a request to distribute his weight somewhere along the center line of the craft, and staggered away forward. Then he saw someone else already seated, and remembered, belatedly, that there was someone else traveling with him. She had settled herself on the very front seat. He weaved his way to slip down beside her just as the engines cut in with a cough and roar, and a fine spray-shower rattled off the transparent bow-shield. She gave him one quick glance, then edged fractionally away to give him room.

"Hope I didn't keep you waiting long," he offered. "I got down here as quick as I could." His sideways look told him that he had seen her once or twice before, on the trip, but only at a distance.

"You haven't gained anything by hurrying," she said coldly. "You might as well have waited a few moments for the regular ferry."

"Ferry?" he echoed, not understanding, and she gestured with her arm as if making a sword-thrust. He saw a much larger craft, by the spray-wake a cushion-effect vessel, moving rapidly in toward the gangway they were now leaving behind. And there was a crowd of passengers streaming down the gangway, ready to board the thing. The ferry.

"But that, surely, will be going to Joytown," he objected, drawing the obvious conclusion.

"Where else?" she demanded. "Now you're going to have to wait until the pilot has put me down first."

"But I'm not going to Joytown. I'm going to the water-plant."

"Oh!" Her voice, cold before, became hard now, as she turned around in her seat to stare at him. "You are? May I ask why?"

"I don't see where it's any of your business," he retorted, meeting her stare with a frown. Her eyes were dark blue, very intent, and her face was regular, a trifle too square-jawed for beauty, but attractive. At least, he temporized, it could be attractive without the gimlet-eye stare. Jet-black hair, close-cut and glossy with health, clung like a cap to her head. Her dark blue cape was caught at her throat with a white metal clasp in the shape of a bow. The glitter and the dark cloth emphasized the clear pallor of her skin. Her eyes stayed steady.

"I'm afraid I shall have to make it my business," she said, putting out a hand to grasp the seat-back as the ‘foil began to surge, into the waves.

"I don't see why. Who are you, and what business is it of yours that I want to visit the water-plant laboratory?" Dillard could feel a cold wall of defense around her, and a sense of hard power that went strangely with her amply feminine form.

"My name is Mara Hunt. The water-plant is very much my business, mister—?"

"Dillard. Den Dillard."

"Mr. Dillard. I am on my way to take up a post as Dr. Stanley's assistant. He is the scientist in charge of the desalination plant laboratory."

"I know. He's the man I want to see."

"Indeed!" The defense wall was almost tangible now. "What are you, Mr. Dillard, a newsman?"

"Hardly." He slapped his kit-box affectionately. "I'm a sensor-man. Not that it has anything to do with anything. My business with Stanley is purely personal and private. Needn't concern you at all."

"I find that hard to believe."

"That's up to you." Dillard ducked as a running wave spouted foam up against the plastic shield, and began to feel mild irritation. The same gust of wind caught her cape and sent it fluttering back over her shoulders, to re-veal a torso as pale as her face but beautifully contoured. The odd contrast added to his irritation. A woman with a figure like that, but cold and ruthless, didn't seem right to him. Out of his irritation he said,

"You're not all that easy to believe yourself, Miss Hunt. Assistant to Dr. Stanley? I checked up on this business as far as I could before coming this far, and the way I heard it, Stanley's appointment is one of those things, a sinecure. Figurehead. People who crave a little peace and quiet to do some personal research and get paid for it, those are the kind who land a job like that. Right? So for what would Stanley need an assistant?" As far as he could tell she wasn't shaken in the least by his veiled accusation. If anything the glint in her eyes grew harder.

"You're not a scientist," she said, "so it's rather pointless trying to explain. But, truly, Dr. Stanley has run into something exciting in the field of water chemistry and needs assistance. If only to keep worries and routine chores off his mind while he works."

Dillard was tempted to retort, "I am neither a worry nor a routine chore," but instead he muttered, "I'm going to see him anyway. To talk to him for a few minutes. You going to try and stop me?" That remark earned him the kind of smile he could well have done without. There was mirth in it, of the kind that an adult might feel when faced with a truculent child. It said, more plainly than words, that she could brush him aside without exertion, if she wanted to. But she said, mildly, "Very well, see him, so long as it is only for a few minutes." Then she turned her face forward and stared into the breeze, letting it ripple her cape stiffly back over her shoulders. Snubbed and smarting, Dillard looked away, and found himself staring full at the mysterious Venusian ship, now slipping past as the small craft circled it to reach the inlet lane to the water-plant center. That ship looked enormous from here, on the water level, and he felt a cold chill as he remembered what he had let himself in for. It loomed hugely, totally different in shape from anything he would have classed as a spaceship. It was hard to believe such an awkward thing could fly at all.

Venture Three, now, like any other cargo-and-passenger ship, was of the triple tube construction, three mighty cylin-ders joined by a set of Y-sections, where cargo, human or otherwise, rode in reasonable comfort, lifted, powered and driven by the drive-and-power unit which was a slimmer cylinder up the center. You could think of it as engine and crew quarters, plus cabins all around, and it was a logical arrangement. Police, military and courier ships, of course, were just the one cylinder. But this Venusian wasn't even a cylinder at all, nor anything remotely like it. Dillard scratched his memory until it yielded up the term he wanted. Teardrop, that was it. An upended drop, like a huge metal pear standing on its stem. He scowled up at it, trying to rationalize the design in his mind as the ‘foil scuttered by.

Drive, he knew, consisted of fusion-power plant, reaction-mass for the uncomfortable business of planet-fall, and Pauli-drive for the space-bending leaps in between stars. And the drive unit as a whole, plus the auxiliaries, had to lie along the center of gravity of the whole thing. So, in this ship, it must run right up the middle like a core, but you couldn't tell that from the bulging top-heavy outside. This thing seemed to wallow in the water like some obscene growth. And yet, he mused, it had buoyancy, much more than Venture Three, which would have submerged almost out of sight had it not been for the magnetic girdle that held it up. Dillard nodded to himself as the answer came. Buoyancy was a logical thing to build into a ship that had to land and take off from the swampy semiliquid surface of Venus. And for a water-planet like this, too. He recalled Conway saying that Venusians had discovered and opened up this planet. And why not? A place like this would be more homelike to them than to any ordinary human.

That phrase led his thoughts into a shivery byway. Just how un-human were the Veenies, after five generations? He'd never seen one, nor had anyone of his acquaintance. Were they really monsters? Conway hadn't thought so.

"Ever see a Venusian ship before, Mr. Dillard?" Mara Hunt's cool question broke in on his thoughts, and he turned to see her blue eyes mocking him.

"No. I didn't even know the Veenies had ships until Captain Conway told me. You seem to know." Her expression stayed scornful, and a wild notion came to him. "Just so I won't put my foot right in my mouth," he said, "you're not one of them, are you?" Now for the first time he saw the ice break. She laughed, and he was astonished at the transformation.

"I am not, Mr. Dillard. Nor are you. I've met quite a few Venusians, and you obviously haven't, or you wouldn't have said that."

"You mean, they really are different from us? I've heard all sorts of things. Who hasn't? But if you've actually met some—are they really tall and skinny with hairless heads and green skin?"

"I said you weren't a scientist." She laughed again, delightfully, and shook her head. "They are as human as you or I. And why not? After all, it is only one hundred and fifty years since we put them away on Venus." The "we" rankled suddenly. "Not me!" he denied. "Oh, by association, if you like. I will own that kind of guilt, for what it's worth, but I am not responsible for what my predecessors did all that time ago."

"Not as a person, no," she agreed. "But then, neither were the individual persons of that time responsible. They never are. The guilt slips away onto the anonymous shoulders of some government or group, always. Mankind, as an abstraction, can and does commit crimes that no individual would ever dream of. And, as you say, it was a long time ago. You are not guilty. And those people there"—she pointed a sword-like arm again, at the towering ship—"are not responsible, either. But they have to live with it. They are the descendants of those people we banished all that time ago. They have suffered. You can't expect them to shrug it off quite as easily as you do."

"Suffered?" he echoed, stung by her mockery. "Come now, they survived, didn't they? They should have been executed for what they did, no doubt of that. Never before can there have been a criminal group so well aware of what they were doing. And when they were rounded up they admitted guilt, expected to be executed. But no, they were dumped on Venus with ample survival gear, and left. And they survived. So let's not go too strong on the suffering!"

"You said that very well," she retorted, still scornful. "Even on Earth, where the various races of men have learned to live in the most unlikely spots, the mild temperate areas are still favorite. A man can live in the desert, on top of a mountain, or among ice and snow, but at what cost?

And it's worse just as soon as he knows there are better places. When he knows he is being robbed. The Venusians were robbed, and they resent it. They have learned to live with it, just as their deported ancestors learned to live with perpetual humidity and swamp-heat, in half-darkness, but you can't expect them to like it, and they don't."

"But they've adapted now, surely?" he insisted, unwilling to surrender all his myths of queer people.

"I said you were no scientist." She was openly laughing at him now, and he had time to marvel at how attractive she could be, even while her scorn irritated him. "In five or so generations no true adaptation is possible. But there has been a degree of selection-pressure, which is not quite the same thing. As a result, Venusians—and I have met and spoken to many—tend to be leaner than average. You can't carry a lot of body-bulk when you have little or no opportunity to dissipate body-heat by surface evaporation. They tend to be extremely fit and healthy, in a smoothly efficient way. They are pale, with bleached hair, because they encounter virtually no ultraviolet. Because of constant humidity and a lessened rate of oxygen exchange they tend to be deep-chested, with a large lung capacity, and low-pitched voices. They swim as much and as readily as we walk. And they have large violet eyes."

She added the final sentence in a flat calm tone that caught him for a moment. Then he snorted.

"You're putting me on. Big violet eyes?"

Her lip curled in a derisive grin. "You'd be an easy man to confuse, Mr. Dillard, if such was my intention. In fact that last item is absolutely true. And fascinating. Geneticists, those few who have been able to observe the phenomenon, are highly intrigued. Sight is the youngest of the senses, and, it seems, the most flexible. I've heard a number of theories, but without a flow of volunteers for study they will remain just that. Apparently the human eye does have a capacity to detect ultraviolet, and as there is virtually none at surface level on Venus, their eyes have become considerably more sensitive to what little there is. We are violet-blind by comparison."

By now they were far away from the ship that had started the whole subject, and circling around the stark end of a steel arm, to enter a long and dark waterway, bounded on both sides by the great bulks of plastic water-tanks, and roofed over with spidery grids of girder-work. At the far end, standing back from a metal platform and landing steps stood a tall round tower of bright chrome steel. At the very top the chrome gave way to windows. The ‘foil slowed now as it made its way in and alongside the steps. The two passengers rose and went back to the stern end to dismount.

"You'll hang on for me," Dillard said. "I don't expect to be more than about half an hour."

"Right. What about you, Miss?"

Mara Hunt gripped her traveling-case firmly, extended her card and said, "Check me out. I expect to be staying here." Getting her card back from the machine she stepped ashore and strode away toward the tower, leaving Dillard to follow. The landing platform had a slope, and then a barrier with a door, beyond which was dark and weed-smells, and round tunnels leading off in many directions. He squinted through one in passing and saw a stretching expanse of catwalks and pipes. All around this dark enclosure were curving pipes, color-coded in some systematic way that meant nothing to him, and a great number of massive wheel-valves, each with its motor and buttons. There was no one in sight, but the whole structure shook delicately to the throb of some mighty machine laboring somewhere nearby. Right in the center of the cavern stood a polished curved surface and elevator gates. Dillard felt relief at the sight. He hadn't fancied lugging his kit-box up several flights of steps, and he was far too attached to it to leave it anywhere about. With her palm on the call-button Miss Hunt asked, "Aren't you going to record anything of this, Mr. Dillard? It must be a novel experience!"

"Not right now. Maybe, after I've done my business with Stanley I'll have a scan over the plant. Depends." The elevator came and they stepped in, sending it skyward.

"You still haven't said why you want to contact Dr. Stanley. Do you know him at all?"

"I once knew him only too well." Dillard had to exert control over his voice, now that the crucial moment was close. "He cost me three years of life, three precious years."

Her fine black brows came down in a hard line of unbelief. "Surely not," she objected. "You must have the wrong man."

"Not a chance. I checked, here and all the way back. Dr. Edmund Stanley was on the Vocational Advisory Board when I came up for assignment to university. Because of him I had to slog through three lousy years of general science. I didn't want it. I said so, good and loud, but he had the casting voice and made a big play about my academic record, and potential, and all the rest of it. I caught it. I suffered, because of him." It was her turn to say, "Oh come, Mr. Dillard. Suffered? Three years of general science couldn't hurt anybody."

"You don't understand, any more than he did."

"That's the oldest craven cry in the world, that nobody understands."

"Go ahead and sneer!" he invited angrily. "Maybe I couldn't explain it myself, at the time. Not properly. But I've grown some since then."

"You're trying to say you're not interested in the facts of life?"

"I knew you didn't understand. Of course I'm interested in things. I was then. I still am. But what he couldn't understand then, and you won't now is that I'm not interested in facts. Not minutiae, details, about things. They only get in the way, for me. I'm curious, just as much as anybody and more than most, but I don't want to know about things. I want to know the thing itself, to see and feel and experience it, not a collection of data and symbols and explanations. Take this elevator. You probably know exactly how it works, a lot of stuff about cables and motors and so on. I couldn't care less. I feel I'm being lifted up, going up. I feel it. I don't care how it is done. I'm sensing what is actually happening…" He caught himself and let the sentence fade as he saw the baffled look on her face. It was quite impossible to explain to her the difference between living and knowing about life. The explanation didn't sound very convincing even to himself. All he knew was that it was true, that Stanley, by insisting on three years of general science for the young Dennis Dillard, had created a monstrous barrier of data between that sensitive soul and the life he wanted to sense directly.

"Anyway," he muttered, "I made it to where I am now despite him."

"And where are you now?"

"Top man in my field," he told her. "I doubt if there are a hundred really good sensor-people altogether. The backwoods are thick with hacks, sure, but the real artists are few. And I'm up around the top, in an income-bracket Dr. Stanley will never reach. And I aim to tell him just that, to rub his nose right in it."

"Dear me!" she murmured. "All this, just to gratify a childish spite?"

"I quote you," he growled. "I had to live through it, and with it, and fight my way out of it. No thanks to him."

"I doubt if he will even remember you."

"You may leave that safely to me," he said. "I'll remind him!" The elevator hissed to a halt, the doors slid open and they moved out into a small but bright hallway, anonymous in muted green plastic. Of three doors, one stood half-open, affording a sight of a domestic interior, an automated kitchen, a dining room and, beyond, a living room. The other doors, closed, bore legends. On one, laboratory; the other, office. Dillard looked, and sniffed.

"This is living?" he demanded caustically. "This dump?‘'

Miss Hunt ignored him. She seemed to be listening for something. Then she moved away to the door marked office, and knocked, waited a moment, then pushed open the door and went in. Dillard stayed where he was. Imagine being stuck in this monastic retreat for two years' service!

There was nothing to be done, he knew that. The desalination plant was virtually self-operating, and what little manipulation there was to do was done by a staff of semiskilled laborers under a technical foreman. Connect, disconnect, check levels and output, make out balance sheets, monthly reports, and pass them along here for Dr. Stanley to initial. And that was all he was for. A figurehead. So all right, he had all day and forever to potter about with research into water chemistry, good luck to it! Dillard couldn't imagine anything he would enjoy less. But what gave him particular joy was his knowledge that this post was regarded as very much a backwater, a convenient slot for some third-rate test tube waver who would never rate anything better. The great Dr. Stanley!

He saw Miss Hunt come out of the office again and cross, with quick strides, to the laboratory door. Again she knocked, then went on in. All at once Dillard felt uneasy. It was too quiet. The place didn't feel right. He put the thought away with the rationalization that it was simply because he was being kept waiting for his moment of triumph, but it came back. He stepped to the laboratory door and looked in. It was full of gadgetry but empty of persons, apart from Miss Hunt, who stood now in the middle of strewn apparatus and was scowling to herself. All at once she marched back to the door.

"There's something wrong," she said, brushed past him and went on to the third and last door. Dillard followed on her heels. The living space, too, was empty. Miss Hunt wasted only a moment in there, then came out, hard-eyed.

"There's something wrong," she repeated. "He's not here. And he should be. Not only is there nowhere for him to go, the rules are quite strict. He is not supposed to quit this space unless he makes special arrangements or leaves some word. I don't like it."

"Maybe he left word with the foreman?"

"It's possible. I'll check." She marched swiftly now back to the office, Dillard following, to see her sit down at the visor-phone and begin dialing. His uneasiness returned tenfold.

IV

Looking over her shoulder he found time to wonder how she came to know such a lot about rules here. That thought led to another. She, from what he had seen, was hardly the assistant type. Much more likely to be dominant. He didn't fancy being Stanley and having to boss her around. As the visor screen opened into activity he was on the point of shifting allegiance, going over to Stanley's side. He was, after all, a man, and probably hated bossy females as much as any other man. The screen showed a jowly-faced man of about forty, registering surprise.

"Jacoby here. What's up, Doc? Uh? Sorry, Miss, thought you were Doc Stanley. Who…"

"I am speaking from Dr. Stanley's office. My name is Mara Hunt. I have just arrived to take up a position as Dr. Stanley's assistant. But he is not here. Have you any idea where he might have gone?"

"He ain't there?" Jacoby scratched his sagging jaw and frowned in bafflement. "He must be. You sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. Unless there are more than three subdivisions here. Laboratory, office, living area. I've checked those."

"That's it, then. But why would he leave? And where would he go?" I'm asking you!"

"Yeah. But—unless he went for a stroll around the works. And why would he do that?"

"Will you make inquiries, please?"

"What kind? Oh!" Jacoby's face struggled to register eager desire to help. "I'll pass the word around the gang to look out for him."

"Do that. And would you please tell me who I should get in touch with, in case this is something serious?"

"Huh?" Jacoby was floored now.

"Who is the supreme authority on Hydro? Law and order?"

"Oh! That'll be the Port Base. It's a radio number. You want Port Admiral Bredon. But what can he do?"

"I'll know that when I ask him. Please make your inquiries and call me back, here." She cut the call vigorously, then expelled a breath of exasperation. "The man's an idiot!" She swiveled her seat around to stare up at Dillard, looking right through him as if he were furniture. "There's something very wrong here. Very wrong."

"Maybe he went for a stroll and fell in the water." Dillard was nudged into facetiousness by the way she ignored him. It got her attention. She drilled holes in him with her blue eyes.

"That was not funny, Mr. Dillard!"

"Not to you. But look, this is a big layout, and why wouldn't he go for a stroll around it? Maybe he wanted a close-up look at one of the…"

"I will repeat, for your benefit." Her tone would have curdled milk. "This plant is sealed; is fully automatic; is so designed that human contact with any of the preparatory stages is avoided, is discouraged. There are a series of monitor stages that permit close examination of any part, a relay of tappings that permit an extracted sample from any stage. There is absolutely no reason whatever for Dr. Stanley to leave this area, even if the rules did not specifically forbid such a thing. It is one of the conditions."

"You mean he couldn't even get away to pay a visit, maybe, to an old friend on one of the ships? After all, I came to call on him!"

"He could leave, but only by arrangement with someone responsible. You don't seem to realize, Mr. Dillard, that this water-plant is vital to Hydro."

"Maybe he left a note of some kind."

"That is extremely unlikely. Jacoby would have known."

"Can't do any harm to take a look. There might be some indication…"

"I shall do that, of course." She surged up from the chair, unfastened the neck clasp of her cape and swirled it into a drape over the chair back.

"But there's no reason for you to linger now, Mr. Dillard. This is my business. I can handle it." As she stood bolt-erect, assuming authority as if by heritage, he was spurred by some irrational demon to oppose her.

"I'll help you," he offered. "After all, Stanley was something to me, too. Not an old friend, exactly, but something."

"Are you deliberately trying to be obnoxious, Mr. Dillard?" She glared, edging forward as if to crowd him out by her physical presence. In that one instant he had the peculiar sensation of being able to see beyond the barrier she had erected between them. As an armor it was chill and unyielding, but inside that was a flame, a tremendous vitality, and he had the irrational conviction that if he did anything to crack that shield her inner self would explode out and consume him in a flash. He knew abysmal fear, and fought it.

"I'm just trying to help," he protested. "What's wrong with that?"

"A blind man will help me to look?"

"I'm not blind. Thanks to your Dr. Stanley, I can even find my way to and fro in a laboratory with some skill."

The phone squealed for her attention. She turned, hit the switch, and sat. Jacoby's face came on, his eyes widening, then shifting upward with a visible effort to concentrate on her face.

"I've checked around," he announced. "All the gang. Not a sign. Never have seen him wandering around, come to that. I have also checked with water-taxi center, and all ships presently on planet. Nothing. You want to call Port Base, now?"

"Not immediately. I want to look around here more. Thank you, Mr. Jacoby. I'll keep in touch." The screen blanked again and she scowled at it.

"That man was agitated about something…"

Dillard chuckled, and she whirled on him abruptly.

"No, wait!" He put up a hand to halt the fierce words on her tongue.

"Don't blame Jacoby too much. Lord knows how long he's been here, or how long since he saw—what you just showed him!"

Her black brows came down in that hard line again, then, all at once, she glanced down at her naked torso and back up at Dillard.

"You don't mean… ? But how ridiculous! We're not back in the dark ages!"

"No? It's my guess you haven't had much to do with people of Jacoby's class, or you wouldn't say that."

"Class? That old myth. Class distinctions went out before you and I were born, Dillard. And don't try to argue with me, either. I have degrees in socio-dynamics."

Dillard drew a breath in readiness for a hot retort, then let it ease out again. What was the use? This, he thought, was what science did for you. All the facts and formulae, the studies, the conclusions—but no actual sense of experience. She had done her social science courses, maybe even some field work to get her diploma or whatever, but she had never been lower-class, as he had. With her background and abilities, she could never know what it felt like to be inferior, insecure, unimportant to anyone, dependent on a web-work of simple values and shallow certainties, needing something to lean on, some given set of "right" things. She would never know, for instance, that unless a woman had inbred self-confidence, tremendous courage, or total innocence, it would be a physical impossibility for her to discard her protective clothing in the presence of strangers. She would never know, because it wasn't in the book, or in any formula, but was something you felt. This was the class that still existed in this so-called classless society, the division between the self-confidently aware and those who were just not up to it.

"Forget it," he muttered, and began unzipping his kit-box. "Where do we start looking first?"

"And what do you think you're going to do?"

"Make a recording, of course."

"A recording of what?" she demanded.

"Of what it feels like," he said patiently, as he clipped the headband into place and snuggled the neck-contact firmly down, "to search through a strange laboratory for clues to a mysterious disappearance. Thing like that is bound to come in handy for all kinds of story-material." She looked unconvinced. "What kind of recording?"

"And you a scientist!" he jeered gently. "Mean to say you don't know?

Back on the boat I told you I was a sensor-man. Didn't I?" He felt a small triumphant glow of superiority. First her socio-dynamic innocence, now this. "My apparatus records, on a wire, all the physiological and emotional reactions I feel during the session. Not pictures, nor yet sounds, except for the lead-signature, which I will now do." He thumbed a switch, held the box close, and recited, "Conducting a search for possible clues to a mysterious, possibly sinister, disappearance. Laboratory interior. Male subject. Also present and assisting, one attractive female personally involved with missing person. Chief stress on curiosity, sense of mystery, novel surroundings. No immediate awareness of personal danger. Den Dillard recording." He released the switch, cocked an eyebrow at her.

"That will cue in the technicians when they come to use the wire. Of course they will boost this or that, play down the other, just as they want it, that's their job. All I get is the raw reactions. Now, you'd better scan this office, and maybe the living section. I'll do the laboratory."

"Why did you say ‘sinister' like that?" she demanded.

"Why not?" he countered, with a shrug. "Any laboratory is slightly sinister, for me. Look, I examine my feelings. I know them, I use them, but I do not analyze and edit them. I'm an artist. It's a poor old word, but it happens to be the only one that fits."

In some strange way it was as if her barriers had come down. She looked at him oddly. "You said ‘attractive,' meaning me. Was that—just for the technicians, or did you mean it? You said Jacoby was bothered because he saw me—uncovered. Does that affect you, too?" He looked her up and down deliberately, not unkindly, all the way from her glossy black hair to her glossy shoes where they showed from skin tight dark blue pants, and back up again, taking in all her sculptured contours. He saw a faint pink start up under his scrutiny.

"Of course I'm affected. Whether you've stopped to think about it or not, that's what it's for, isn't it?"

She started a denial but he put up a palm. "Maybe not in any deliberate sense, no. But you register on me just by being here. Just as I register on you. So I react. How I react is something else again, is up to me. But, because I am what I am, I'm aware of reacting. Most people pretend not to notice, or try to ignore, things they can't handle. Not me. It's my job!" He frowned over the futility of language, caught at an analogy. "Look, a man who writes a cookbook, with all the specific details, is a scientist. The man who takes the book and from it concocts a tasty dish, is a technician. But neither one is a cook. A cook is one who just goes ahead with the ingredients and processes, by feel, and produces a tasty meal. Who does it. A scientist knows what. An artist knows how. You can't mix ‘em." All at once she smiled, and it was a totally different smile from any that had gone before. "Your world is completely alien to me, Dillard, but I'm obliged to you for trying to enlighten me. And flattered. I've been complimented before, but never quite like that." The unguarded moment lingered just a breath longer, then she switched, briskly, to efficiency. "All right, you take the laboratory. I don't know what you're looking for, but if you see anything unusual, call me."

The laboratory was easily the largest room of the three, with two long benches splitting it into three slices, and a shorter bench taking up almost all the far wall space under a solid bank of glass windows. Dillard spent a long moment staring out of those windows, out over the pipe-and-girder pyramid of which he was now the apex. Venture Three over there. The Venusian ship on the left. Away in the distance, Joytown. Other ships lying still. Far away over there the spike-spire of Port Base headquarters. And where was Dr. Stanley? Somehow, as he swung away from the window and began surveying the sparkling glass and chrome, it didn't seem to matter anymore to Dillard. His desire to confront his one-time teacher with his present success seemed childish now. Adjusting his input controls with the casual ease of long experience, he started a methodical tour. Most of the hardware was familiar enough to be given names, and he had no intention of lingering over it anyway. If Stanley had left any clues at all, they would more likely be among the paper work in the filing pigeonholes which lined the outside walls. So he moved fairly briskly along the benches, going through the motions of stopping to inspect every now and then, simply to gather the skin-sense effects of being close to complex glassware and gadgetry.

The equipment showed all the signs of being under the control of a tidy and orderly mind. Dillard found his thoughts wandering despite himself. Odd about Miss Hunt. Highly intelligent and educated, yet utterly naive about subjective matters. Oddly, too, that was true of so many women. One tended to accept the old assumption that the female was closer to unconscious and intuitive matters, but it wasn't true. He'd discovered that for himself. You take, for instance, that matter of dress. By tradition it was a woman's subject, and yet not one woman in a thousand had any real feel for it. They went as fashion dictated, hoping to put on or take off some attribute or other along with this, that, or the other arrangement of clothes. And it wasn't like that at all. The effect, the charm or otherwise, was inside, and it came through no matter how much, or how little, a woman wore. There she was, now, in nothing more than a tight-fitting pair of dark blue pants. And she had a shape to catch your breath. But that's all it was, a shape and a movement. Like an elaborately beautiful lamp, not switched on.

Dillard halted, shook his head, then found what it was that was catching his attention. Water trickling, gently and steadily. He looked, and saw a thin stream of water jetting from a pipe and trickling into a basin. An oversight, among such orderliness. He put out his hand, looking about for the tap-source, intending to shut it off. Then he came fully alert and stared. There was no tap. He traced the pipe back with his eye. It was the drain-outlet for a glassite tank. One wall of that tank was a grayish silver screen, square, about nine inches a side, with the water forming on it constantly like heavy sweat, then coagulating and running down into the bottom of the tank. Running away. But where was it coming from? He moved a step or two, to get beyond that screen, where he could see the other side. And it didn't make any sense at all.

He knew what he was looking at. That wasn't the problem. In common with almost everyone else of his generation, Dillard knew something of the Yatsu-Kono desalination process. He remembered, wryly, that Stanley had carefully omitted to assign him a paper on that, because it was so fundamentally easy. And this thing was a miniature model of the plant. The duplicate of it stood in every high school laboratory on the face of the Earth. The reverse of the condenser screen, where he was now staring, was a dark mass of allotropic carbon-on-copper, shimmering under a maze of hair-fine silver threads of a printed circuit. And the whole thing stood boldly on a solid block of clear plastic. Fine! But where was the input?

Dillard scowled, scratched his jaw, walked back to stare, then came to his second position again. As far as his memory served, this was almost exactly half as thick as the conventional unit ought to be. There should be as much again, on this side, with a water supply of some kind. He stared, in imagination hearing the thin acid of Stanley's voice saying, "Don't just stare, boy! Explain!"

"The hell with it!" he grumbled and moved on. Some new refinement or other, no doubt. Just the sort of thing Stanley would delight in. His mind pulled up for him all the details he had so unwillingly learned so long ago. Water, the wonder substance, had become one of those examples so dear to the heart of science-philosophers, a perfect instance of one chance discovery leading to a whole new insight into a whole clutch of problems. Water, the weird stuff that everyone took for granted except those few who tried to explain it. The only substance, for instance, that becomes less dense when it changes from liquid to solid. And at the other end of the scale it was equally perverse. You heated it and it got hotter, up to a point. But beyond that point it got no hotter at all, no matter how much heat you poured into it. Instead it transformed into a gas, at the same temperature!

You called that "latent heat," in order to have a name for something you couldn't explain.

And so on, until the late nineteen sixties, when certain scientists began investigating the notion that perhaps liquids have structure. At this same period there was a terrific pressure to discover some cheap and efficient way of desalinating water, because the whole of human civilization was facing an acute shortage of this hitherto taken for granted commodity. Then the key breakthrough, in the Yatsu-Kono laboratories, by a couple of scientists who were innocently investigating the precise nature of osmosis—or why does a water molecule eagerly migrate from a weak solution into a dense one through a suitable membrane? The answer they found—or refound—was that water is not just simply H O, but is in fact a 2

long chain polymer of the same basic formula, linked into complex knots by a strange and little-understood thing called the "hydrogen bond." And then all sorts of oddities started falling into place. This was why water had such a high boiling point, for instance. By analogy it should have been slightly lower than a similar liquid, hydrogen sulphide, which has a higher molecular weight, yet it was one hundred and sixty degrees higher! That was where all the heat went. And why it expanded on freezing, because the knotted skeins of polymer had to straighten out and regularize into crystals. And this, also, was why a long chain molecule could slip through a permeable membrane like an eel, whereas a compound molecule had bumps and knots in it. And, of course, by this period in the history of science, there were people who knew quite a lot about polymerization and its effects. So, in very little time after, there was a well-developed technology for stripping the bumps away from water—otherwise to be called desalination. And, as a stupendously serendipitous bonus, if you knew how to depolymerize water—and they did—you got, for free, quite a lot of energy released. Water to drink. Water to burn! The ideal fuel.

The facts rattled around in Dillard's head, threatening to spill over into the second advent of space flight, socio-ecological revolutions, the banishment of the Wicked Politicians to Venus, and he growled under his breath. Facts! What the hell did he want with facts? Epic Dramatapes were paying him to get emotions, sensations, reality—not textbook data!

He came to the end of the bench and went one step beyond before his laggard eye telegraphed a message. He went back. There was the other half of the Yatsu-Kono unit, as innocent as if there were nothing wrong with it. There, now, was the steady run of seawater going into the separation chamber. But no outlet. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that it was going in here, and coming out over there, with some thirty feet of thin air in between! Dillard glared at the offensive thing for ten seconds, then snarled and stalked away. It was exactly the kind of childish trick he might have expected from a confirmed Torquemada like Stanley. Again in memory he heard that high-pitched infuriating voice saying, "Don't just stare, Dillard. Look! See it. Engage the brain and never mind the subconscious!"

"Maybe the old fool did fall in the water and drown," he muttered, and was angry enough to hope it was true. He came to a halt in front of a solid array of notebooks, labels stuck along their spines and inscribed in some kind of private symbology. He took one at random, more for something to keep his fingers busy rather than from any desire to find anything. That intention had long since faded. He riffled the pages idly, then turned to the flyleaf to check. There was a heading in angular script: Artifacts native to Hydro. Some notes, descriptions, theories.

Dillard read it again, was just beginning to grasp the implications when Miss Hunt's voice intruded, from the region of his right shoulder.

"What have you got there?"

"Just a notebook. Some nutty theory, it sounds like, about a planet-sized Atlantis. You find anything?"

"Nothing at all." She took the notebook from his hand and looked at it, turning over a page or two. "How much of this have you read?"

"Enough. I'm not all that interested in the whacky workings of Dr. Stanley's mind, thank you. And if he left any kind of forwarding address, I didn't see it. What do you do now?"

Her barrier had returned. She chilled him with a blue stare, slid the book back in the gap it had left on a shelf, and said, "I don't think that really concerns you, Mr. Dillard. I'm obliged for your help, but I think it's time you went. Remember, you have a hydrofoil waiting for you."

"That's right, I do. Well, see you around sometime."

"I doubt it. I understand Venture Three lifts off for Castor tomorrow. And I have enough work here to keep me busy for quite a long time."

"I suppose," he agreed, switching off his equipment and shedding it with quick movements. "Matter of curiosity, Miss Hunt. Just what was old Stanley working on, here?"

"Nothing very spectacular." She kept her bleak stare. "Just further research into water chemistry. May I correct a small point, Mr. Dillard. I would estimate your age about the same as my own. Thirty-ish? For your information, Dr. Stanley is forty-seven. Hardly old! He was twice your age when you were a student, admittedly, but it's about time your outlook matured a little, don't you think?"

"Why don't I grow up, eh?" He grinned at her, no longer cowed by her assumed superiority. "In my book a person is as old as his habits. One of mine is the firm conviction that I do not yet know all the answers, and that I still have a lot to learn. I doubt if I'm likely to do it here, or from you. Goodbye now. Have fun!"

All the way out, into the elevator and down, he was engrossed in studying his own reactions to Miss Hunt. She was physically attractive. He was attracted, in that sense. She was intelligent and competent. He was impressed, in that sense. But she was also insensitive and conceited. Aggressive. Critical. And yet, somehow, he felt sorry for her. He couldn't shake the notion that she was afraid of something. As he ran down the steps to the ‘foil he had to grin at his own fancies. It must be this equipment, he thought, beginning to get me turned on! That was not altogether fanciful, either. According to reports from other experienced sensor-gatherers it seemed that frequent exposure to the minute electrical stimulus had the effect of sharpening up the sensory network, toning up the nervous system until they were aware of and reacted to things an ordinary person would never notice.

"Hey!" the hydrofoil pilot hailed him, dispersing this intriguing flow of speculation. "Your name's Dillard, ain't it?"

"It is. Why?"

"Got a radio-call for you. Fifteen minutes ago, from Captain Conway, Venture Three. Made a note of it."

"I think I can guess what," Dillard said, all his confidence draining away out at his feet.

"It said," the pilot read off, ignoring the guess, " ‘All arranged your visit Venusian ship, compliments, Conway.' All right?"

"I suppose so," Dillard said dismally.

"You want me to take you there now?"

"I suppose you might as well." Dillard stood by the pilot, listened to the engine roar into life, and wondered, as he always did, why he had to pick this kind of living. It was insane. He was the hypersensitive nervous type, automatically building horrid phantasms about anything new and strange, so he had to go and get himself famous for always running into something new and strange. And recording it.

All his fine talk about being an artist came back hollowly now. But—this was no more than a repetition of what always happened just before a recording session, and trained reflexes drove him on as if they were something separate and apart.

"All right if I sit back here with you?" he asked, and the pilot shifted over a fraction in silent assent. "Know anything about Venusians?" he asked, seeking company in his misery. The pilot snorted.

"I've seen ‘em. Not close to, mind, but I've seen 'em. You want to go aboard that ship, and I'm taking you, but better you than me, brother!"

"What's there to be afraid of?" Dillard retorted perversely. "They're just as human as we are."

"Not the way I heard it. Nor by the look. Long skinny green beggars. No hair to speak of. No clothes, either. And would you just look at that ship!

Human?"

"Oh, I don't know," Dillard argued. "Isn't that just a lot of idle talk?

After all, just because a man's umpteenth greatgrandfather was exiled to Venus for some political misdemeanor, that doesn't make him a fish!"

"Idle talk, huh?" The pilot advanced his throttle now that the ‘foil was clear of the channel, and the small craft began to bounce over the waves in a long-radius arc. "That's history, mister, and it was no political whatdycallit, either. Dictatorship of the elite, that's what they were planning. The big-domes in charge, sitting back and getting fat, and everybody else slaving away for them like a lot of termites. They wasn't even human then, if you ask me, never mind about now!" Dillard sighed. This was the way the story had been tailored, by all kinds of media, to suit the masses. Epic Dramatapes had contributed their share to the universal canard, so he had no real reason to feel angry, but he did nevertheless, because it wasn't true. Those people hadn't planned anything like enslavement of the masses, quite the reverse. Quietly, with determination and insight, they had prepared their coup. They were going to unite the highly intelligent of all races into one coherent body. Yes, an elite, if you liked the term, but a responsible elite. A group with a master-plan to really put scientific potential to work, to create, at last, the perfect ecology, where machines and technology would do the drudgery automatically. Abundance for all, no longer the survival-need to work, a chosen handful to steer the whole thing, and all the extended resources of modern computer-wisdom to insure a stable and viable whole. Dillard had called it a political misdemeanor, and it was, because it aimed to bypass the politicians, and they didn't like that, when they found out. And so the Anarchists, as they had been called, were caught and proved guilty. No feat, that. They were only too willing to confess, to explain their plan, confident that it would be immediately approved once known. But the politicians, the statesmen—and the news media, too—destroyed that faith. In a world without strife and conflict, without grief and horror, with no injustice, no war or threat of war, what future was there for the politician, the statesman, the great newspaper? And so the Anarchists were tried, condemned, and deported to Venus. Water-power had happened along just in time to make it possible. Dillard smiled wryly, and let it go. He had neither the time nor the ability to correct the pilot's version, now sanctified by a century of repetition and acceptance.

And then he forgot it entirely as the bulbous silhouette of the Venusian ship began to loom up ahead. His nerves tightened again. The fear, so recently elbowed out of consciousness, came back anew. The ship itself was enough to tickle the nerves along his spine. It bulged. It looked incredibly top-heavy. Around its girth, just below the maximum spread, a series of dark ports seemed to stare down at him balefully and his hyperactive imagination peopled those blind holes with shivery monsters. Down in the slow-tapering stem there was a conventional hatch, and a conventional ladder extending down to a pontoon that floated on the choppy surface. Dillard shortened his attention in to that reassuring sight. The pilot eased his engine as the ‘foil headed in to the pontoon.

"You'll wait for me again?"

"How long you going to be?"

"Hard to tell," Dillard muttered. "I'd say about half an hour."

"All right. I'll be back in half an hour. But I'm not waiting there, mister. I don't like your friends."

Dillard had to be satisfied with that. He stood up, stepped off, and before he could catch his balance the hydrofoil was roaring away in a tight sweep, out to sea. The pontoon heaved under his feet. The seaweedy smell was queasily strong just here. He stared up at the enigmatic hatch, a tall black oblong in the slime-green hull, and felt horribly alone. Practical considerations drove his fingers to get out and put on his recording gear and cut the lead-in.

"About to go aboard and inspect a Venusian spaceship, at anchor on Hydro. Den Dillard recording."

Green fear melted his bones, attacked his balance, so that the platform under his feet seemed to heave enormously. The small, pragmatically practical part of him stood off and lashed him with its cold sanity, commanded him to stop making like a jelly and get up there. He went, striding heavily up the treads and hoping his shivering didn't show. He knew that this overpowering dread was worth its weight in platinum wire to him, but that didn't lessen it at all.

The hatchway was dark. As he hesitated before stepping in he saw that it was bathed in a reddish glow. Forcing his imagination away from thoughts of blood, he rationalized hurriedly. Miss Hunt had said "sensitive to ultraviolet," so this red tint must be some kind of compensation against the bright sunlight outside. He went in, treading across the air lock space, and came face to face with a monster. His throat closed and his knees locked as he stared up at the man who waited there. Man? Six foot three, he stood, and he had the usual arrangement of arms and legs, and face, but there the similarities ended. The face was square and bleak, like nothing so much as one of those weird Easter Island heads, and maybe the eyes were deep purple but they might have been any color, under those red-black lenses he wore. Hairless, not even eyebrows, and his only garment a glossy black plastic loincloth. Dillard glanced down hastily and corrected himself. Shoes also, glossy black things that ended snugly just above the ankle. Over and above everything else was a sense of otherness, of complete and unmoving stillness. A man of stone, but breathing. Dillard summoned his reserves and went forward two steps. The stone-man made a harsh throat noise that could hardly be speech, but Dillard chose to accept it as such, having no choice.

"I'm Dennis Dillard," he said, hardly recognizing his own voice. "I have permission to visit you."

The stone-man spoke again, and it was speech. Dillard recognized it, barely, as the one word, "Visit?" Miss Hunt had said their speech tended to be low-pitched. She had not said that it was almost all scrape and no noise.

"That's right, visit. I want to look around."

"Wait!" This time it was clear, even if it was a sound made simply by passing air through the throat. The Venusian extended a long arm to take up a thing like a flashlight on a cable. Where the light should have come out was a metal grille. He pressed this to his throat and made more of the harsh, nonvocal noises, rapidly. Throat-microphone, Dillard assumed, wondering about the reverse process. Then he saw, as the man moved the grille to press it against his jaw-bone and stare into nowhere. Bone-conduction speaker, he deduced, and wondered what it was about Venusian atmosphere that made such an inefficient device necessary. In a moment the guard put the instrument away.

"Wait," he breathed again. "A guide comes." Dillard waited, speculating meanwhile about perpetual hot humidity and what it would do to electronics. And how else could you have a communication system that had to be totally sealed? It made sense. He stared about, straining to see details in the red glow. The passage ran right and left, that much he could make out, but if the rest of the ship was no better lighted than this part he wasn't going to see much. Maybe his eyes would adjust in a while. He comforted himself with that thought, then started as he heard a soft tread at his side and a low, throaty, purring voice ask, "You are Mr. Dillard, spoken of by the captain of Venture Three

?"

There was a quality to that voice that made him shiver even before he turned to see who was speaking. But not a shiver of dread, at all. A cello note muted through warm honey and furry smooth, it baffled his attempts to analyze even as he half-shrank from seeing the person, who had to be a disappointment after such a delight. But she wasn't. She was perhaps two inches shorter than himself, making her five-ten, and she wore only the black-plastic loincloth and boots like the guard, but she couldn't have been more of a contrast to him if she had spent the whole of her twenty years in trying to do just that. Delicately sculptured, she was lithe and lean where muscle was appropriate, but abundantly curved in other ways. Her hair, pale as silver silk, was caught into a plume that curved forward over her right shoulder, and the skin there, and elsewhere, was so transparently pink in this light that he knew, instinctively, she would be marble white in ordinary daylight. But what caught and held him, after that first comprehensive glance, was her eyes.

They were large, steady, and glowing violet, and they seemed to channel to him a surge of seething aliveness. Where the impassive guard was stone-cold to him, this girl was a flame, a flame that licked into fire as she smiled, her white teeth gleaming against the pink of her face. He caught his breath.

"I'm Den Dillard, yes. If you know about Captain Conway's request, then you know all about me, what I'm here for."

"Not all." The voice again, humming like strings. "I have some small questions. I am AnnSmith. You will come with me, please." She turned and went away ahead of him along a passage that was a slow curve. He assumed that it followed the outer contour of the ship. She seemed to flow, so sleek was her movement, and he felt clumsy by contrast. In a moment she halted and gestured him into a compartment that was also all curves, like a section from a tube. There was a table, cushioned seats, the same red-tinted lighting, and everything covered in glossy waterproof stuff. He became aware of the humidity, and a faintly pervasive, not unpleasant smell of something like pine, or what is popularly called ozone. She sat, and he shrugged back and out of his flared poncho before copying her, but it didn't relieve the humidity much.

"Now, DenDillard," she said, running his name into one long sound, "I know that you are a sensor recorder, and I have heard of such, but I do not know what is involved. Explain, please."

He launched into a mechanical explanation of his apparatus, the while his inner attention was fixed on a host of new sensations. Never before had he been so vividly aware of another person. It was as if she were actually in contact with him, instead of sitting at the opposite side of a table. As if, and he had to hold back from believing it, he could tell what she was feeling. Now, for instance, she was intensely curious—but also fearful.

"If I understand," she said, "you want a recording of what it feels like to be inside a Venusian ship, yes? But why?"

"Because it's my job, my function. I collect recordings of rare and unusual sensory impressions, that's all."

"For what purpose?"

"All sorts of things. First off the wires will be analyzed, typed, then stored against possible use. Then as background."

"Background? What is that?"

Dillard stifled mild impatience. After all, she was alien, in a way. "Did you ever see a dramatape, Miss Smith?"

"AnnSmith," she corrected. "A dramatape. Projected picture-illusions, for entertainment and amusement?"

"That's one way of putting it," he admitted. He had triggered his machine, by force of habit, as soon as he had started up that gangway, with one finger on the cut-out button to skip any dull bits. Now he flicked the switch to off and gave all his attention to finding the right words to explain to her. It was never easy, although he had tried to do it often.

"Look," he said, "the basic thing is pictures, scenes and actions and people doing things. Now, somebody has to work hard to contrive the right kind of scenery, and props, for each scene. Somebody else works out color-schemes, makeup, special effects, costumes, and so on. A storm at sea, for instance. You can't wrap that up and bring it to the studio. But you can take pictures and bring those. You can record sounds, and play them back. And you can, and we do, superimpose music scores to create the right impressions. But this gadget of mine does more. Tell me this—

with your eyes shut, could you tell whether you were indoors or outside?

Close to a solid surface, or stuck in the middle of an open space? High up or low down? In a crowd, or alone?"

"But that," she frowned thoughtfully, "is just sensory clues, like hearing, echoes and…"

"It's not, you know. It is actually skin sensors. Blind people can feel all sorts of things, not by hearing. And that's only part of it. I can feel this ship rolling, just a little, right now. My gadget records that feeling, and other things, and in such a way that the whole sense can be played back for somebody else to feel. If and when this recording is ever used, the audience, every single one, will actually feel they are inside a ship, this ship. You can't do that with words or pictures. I can't tell you how I feel, or what. There are no words for that. But I can feel, and record that feel, for others to share."

She seemed convinced, but he was aware of a small thread of suspicion still remaining. And she asked the inevitable question about sounds and pictures. He reassured her on that. People would never understand, he mused, that faked pictures and sounds were always much more convincing than the real thing. In drama, at any rate. She rose gracefully.

"What do you wish to see?"

"Just a normal interior. You know, where the crew would be in ordinary circumstances. And a scan of the control room, of course. That's where the human interest drama always is. Nothing technical. I wouldn't understand, so neither would the viewers."

"Very well." She moved to a wall and aimed a slim finger at a diagram pasted up there. He came to look, and it was as if he had taken her hand. The diagram was fine-line black, with areas of red. "These you cannot see, are for specialist people, are dangerous." She indicated the red patches, which took up a circular cross section of the interior. As he had guessed, the power-and-drive units lay along the core of the ship, top to bottom.

"I understand," he told her. "That's all right. You just lead on, and I'll follow. And thank you for being so understanding."

The simple courtesy seemed to surprise her. She turned to smile uncertainly at him and engulf him with her warm presence. Then she went away ahead of him, leaving him to follow and wonder over his peculiar impressions. Inside ten minutes he had lost all sense of direction and was following her blindly along and around a maze of curved passages, pausing to peer into oddly shaped spaces, some of which looked like living quarters, others like storerooms. They climbed ladders that were almost vertical. There was no break in the red lighting and the unrelieved yellow and brown tints of everything that wasn't black. His nervousness long gone, he became aware of another growing impression, of incompletion. As if the ship had been rushed together with no regard for final trim, the little details which make for comfort.

"It is not a ship for comfort," she explained, as if picking the thought from his mind. "You have seen workshops and laboratories, store spaces and living quarters. All is intended for practical use. We do not carry passengers, or provide entertainment." Her defensive tone stirred curiosity. Then it came home to him that, apart from the hatch guard, he had seen no one but her.

"I hope I'm not interrupting anything important," he said. "It seems as if everybody is keeping out of my way."

"All are busy with duties," she said sharply, and he knew she was lying, but couldn't understand why. She had to be lying. For all his confusion he had seen space enough, at least, for something in the region of a hundred persons. And they couldn't all be on duty at the same time. So they were keeping out of his way. He wondered about it as he scaled yet another steep ladder and guessed he must be reaching the top of the hull. They are Venusian, he reminded himself. They don't like humans very much. So they are keeping out of the way, and what's so curious about that? But then AnnSmith halted, her arm brushing his as she said, "We are now almost to the control room. You will wait here until I see if it is permitted for you to visit." And as she went away through a hatch he knew there was no dislike there. Not between her and him. He knew that as surely as he knew there was sweat trickling along his arm under the folded poncho he carried there. She was back in a moment, smiling like sunlight in the evening, convincing him still more.

"You may enter and look, but not to distract, because there is work in progress." She reversed, pushed open the hatch and stood aside for him to go in. For some time now he had kept his finger on the cut-off as there was no reaction within him worth recording, but now he let the wire run and used his eyes. He stood in a large chamber, the largest he had so far seen. He was near the roof, which went away from him in a curve like the underside of a dish, and glowed. Not pink, this time, but a cold blue light, almost like sky, and he knew by intuition that this was the viewpoint, the forward screening of the ship. Venture Three, he knew, used something similar, an arrangement of semiconducting surface and image intensifies that served to make a whole area of hull as useful as a window without being in any way frail.

He drew his gaze away from that roof and scanned the chamber itself. It was an enormous bowl, going away down there in regular circular tiers, down into a smaller space that was like an arena, or the focal point of a concert performance. He revised that first impression quickly as he noticed the panels and instrument controls on each tier. And the swivel seats. He boggled a bit at his estimate of how many people this place was designed to hold, all at one time, all functioning. Contrasting that with the apparently casual way in which Captain Conway had allowed a computer, the auto-helm, to bring in his ship, the only conclusion was that this ship didn't have that kind of computer. He tried imagining what it would be like with fifty or more alert people all in action at once, pulling, pushing and twisting various levers and buttons, and it just did not register. Better them than me! He thought, and cast his eyes down to the heart of the chamber, down there in the circular pit.

There were six people, enclosed in a ring-wall of consoles, staring at screens, all silent. Six people obviously engrossed, just to maintain one ship at anchor? Dillard stared, and noted something odd about those six. He half-turned to AnnSmith to ask a question but she, anticipating, shook her head and whispered, "You must not speak, except perhaps like this, very quietly. It is most important not to disturb."

Dillard shrugged it off, returned to his stare. Six people, four men and two women. Three of the men, and both women, were, like the hatch guard, hairless, greenish, lean and stone-cold queer. The one remaining man, though, was enough like AnnSmith to be her brother. As Dillard stared that man looked up, just for a glance, then looked away again, and he had the same deep purple gaze as she had. But then one of the stone-faces raised his head to stare, and this one had no tinted lenses to shield his eyes at all. For all the empty distance between them, Dillard felt the impact of that stare like a knife-thrust. Eyes as pale green and chill as ice-chips transmitted acid hate, a malevolence as immediate and full-throated as a tiger's growl. Dillard shivered involuntarily, tried to hold his own stare against that basilisk glance, and failed. Looking away, he muttered under his breath, "I don't know why you hate my guts, mister, but the feeling is absolutely mutual, believe me!" Mingling with the aftermath of chill came a warm query from AnnSmith.

"You said something?"

"Nothing. Just a reaction. Forget it. Not that I'm likely to. I've never struck anything like this before."

"It will be a good recording for you?"

"It certainly will be unique."

"Unique? What does that mean?" All at once her submerged uneasiness blazed up into consuming fear, stirring him. He wondered if she knew how open her feelings were to him.

"All recordings are unique, in a way. No two places, or experiences, are exactly the same, you know. For instance, I have a recording of the control room ambience of Venture Three, and it is totally different from this." Her eyes were huge now, and smoldering. "Tell me, truly, if you had a recording of this ship, and another one just like it, could you tell the difference between them?"

"Why sure!" he told her. "That's what I meant. Look, back home I have my apartment suite. There must be a hundred exactly like it in the same building, but I know mine, would know it blindfolded, by the feel. Why should that surprise you? It's common enough!"

She didn't answer. He had hardly done speaking before she was off down the circular terraces of the chamber, running lithely, to halt alongside the man with the death-grudge eyes. She stooped over, muttering something. Dillard, completely baffled, watched the pair of them curiously, and ran full-tilt into another ice-cold stare of utter hatred as that stone-faced man looked up once again. The violence of it was fantastic. Dillard got the shattering sense that this man could knock him down with that glance, if he tried hard enough. Then the glaring eyes were averted and AnnSmith came leaping up the levels back to him, her agitation coming before her like a force-field.

"I bring the compliments of Commander Dekron, his hope that you have seen as much as you need, and his request that you leave the ship at once!"

"Was that Dekron, the one you spoke to?"

"Yes. Please, you must hurry."

"All right, but if that's his idea of a compliment, that look, I'd hate to get into his bad books. Lead on!"

She was in a hurry, too. She scuttled along the passageways and down ladders much faster than was comfortable for him to follow, and her agitation was an infection that he had to fight off or feel panic.

"What's all the rush?" he demanded at last, breathless and damp with perspiration, reaching for her arm to slow her down.

"An unforeseen change of orders." She stopped quite still, but it was the stillness of an animal in flight, her arm trembling in his grasp. "We are to take off, soon. A lot must be done very quickly."

He had gathered that much already. Alarms were shattering the air with strident tones, and he saw now several lank and awkward stone-faces hurrying about various errands, "How soon?" he demanded, releasing her arm.

"You must be off the ship in five minutes."

"Huh?" He swung his wrist to check, then ran after her. "You can't do that, honey. You can't!"

"But we must be clear for takeoff in five minutes!"

"And what am I supposed to do, swim?" He threw the question at her as he chased her around a corner and down another ladder. "I told that water-taxi to come back for me in a half hour, and it won't be that for fifteen minutes, at least. How do I get off?"

She halted, stopping and spinning so abruptly that he bumped into her, gently, and had to clasp her to avoid a tumble. This close, her eyes were pools of purple deep enough to drown in, and her terror washed over him in a warm wave.

"I had not thought!" she breathed. "Now what shall I do? You must be off the ship. You must!"

"Radio? The hydrofoil is equipped. Call him alongside!"

"Yes. If there is time. Come now, hurry!" She ran again and he ran after, conscious of the slipping seconds and fervently not wanting to become an unwilling passenger on this ship, yet in all the turmoil still finding time to be stirred by the momentary contact with her. Alien. Venusian. All of that, and yet she was the very first female he had ever met to make him feel he would want to know her better. She moved in front of him like a deer. Other women he had known all had sharp edges and minds like fangs, or stood behind barriers and put on impressions, like Miss Hunt, but this girl was as close to him, in some strange way, as his own skin. And the irony of it. As he ran he cursed it. Within scant minutes she would depart into space, and it was a million-to-one shot that he would ever see her again. There wasn't even time to speak, to tell her—what? What was there to say?

He ran, belatedly remembering to snatch off his equipment and stuff it into its box. And here, at last, was the exit hatch. She halted, looking back as he pounded up, all breathless.

"The radio is busy," she said, tragedy clouding her face. "There will be no chance to call your ‘foil."

"Oh! Ah!" he gasped, and then, "Hold on a bit, AnnSmith. I can step off onto the waterworks and wait there for the ‘foil. Eh?"

"No. It is not possible. We are no longer alongside the desalination plant. Look! Already we have moved out into clear water for takeoff!" Following her arm he looked out and down. There was the pontoon, and the end of the ladder, and the rest was open sea. His stomach heaved. As he resisted its upset he turned to her, made a stiff grin.

"I'm sorry, AnnSmith. I hope you won't get into trouble on my account. It wasn't your fault."

"You are sorry—for me?" The fear in her ebbed for just a moment, to give way to wonder. "Why should you care what happens to me?" It was one of those questions no man can ever answer properly, not even with all the time in the world, and he had none. As he groped for breath and words there came a hoarse cry from the guard, and Dillard turned, followed a thrusting arm, and saw the hydrofoil coming across the water at the head of a foaming white wake.

"Looks like I'm just going to make it," he muttered. "I don't know, now, whether I'm glad or sorry. Goodbye, AnnSmith. Thank you for everything. I hope we can meet again sometime."

Then, clutching his kit-box to stop it from banging against his hip, he ran down the ladder onto the pontoon and stood there, balancing, as the

‘foil ran in alongside. The seesaw motion was violent now. Dillard leaned, tried to time one movement against another, stepped off onto the 'foil as it was rising, felt his knee give under the sudden upthrust, tottered aboard in a scrambling heap, and heard the motor rave into power.

"Are you lucky I happened to notice that bolt-bucket getting ready to blow!" the pilot growled. "Don't they use radio at all?"

"Emergency orders, so I was told." Dillard gasped, se-curing his balance and turning to watch the ship as the ‘foil drew speedily away. "I'm grateful. I wouldn't fancy being a supercargo on that."

"Thought you said they was friends of yours?"

"Did I? Well, one of them is. I hope."

"Where to now?" The pilot reverted to his trade, and Dillard frowned, not having thought that far yet. It had been a queer day so far, in some ways a strenuous one. Logic indicated a fast trip back to Venture Three and a rest, but he felt strangely disinclined for it. And there was only one other spot.

"Take me in to Joytown," he said. "I might as well see everything there is while I'm here." The pilot grunted, swung his helm, and Dillard turned to keep the Venusian ship in view, wondering whether he would ever see its like again. And AnnSmith! Never in his farthest-out dreams had he contemplated the possibility of falling for a Venusian girl. But then, never before had he felt such an instant and total rapport with anyone. He could recapture it now, quite plainly, that sense of feeling rier heartbeat, her breathing, the start and tension in every nerve, the lift and pull of muscle to move her arm, turn her head, even the sensation of her smile. Two hearts that beat as one, he thought, and jeered at himself for sounding like a stereotyped Gothic-tape. And yet, it had been like that. All at once reality broke through his mental vision and he stared. The Venusian ship, from here, seemed to be sinking! Settling down into the water. He rubbed his eyes and peered harder. It was no illusion. That ship was lower, several feet lower, than it had been. Then, all at once, the sea boiled in a ring around the tapered base, spray spouted high and the great bulk reared up, surging steadily and strongly out of the sea. Now the spray was steam, and the thin spindly stern lifted clear, spouting yellow fire. The fire spilled out in a sheet over the rolling waves. Sound came, a powerful deep-throated bellow of effort, spearing through the billowing steam. The ship mounted higher, as if dragging herself out of a gluetrap. Higher, and the flame-tail was a rod now, stabbing down.

"There she blows!" Dillard said, and even as he said it the whole scene changed with shattering speed. Around that rod of yellow flame there sprang out a fierce white glare. In one breath the glare lifted, surged up, engulfed the entire bulk of the ship, blotting it out. In the next eye-blink the hovering white fireball erupted outward, changing swiftly from furious white to dark gray, to shot red, to a boiling pall of black through which spindly fragments appeared briefly and fell. The black monstrosity ballooned hugely. Then came the first shock-wave front of the immense explosion. An invisible hand shoved Dillard's chest and the hydrofoil—and an ear-blasting roar followed, stunning his senses. The frail craft leaped and plunged against the shock, the pilot cursing and hauling on his helm. Dillard got a hand-hold and clung. And stared at the boiling black cloud that rolled out and began to disperse over the sea.

"What the hell was that?" the pilot demanded, swinging his craft around to face the disturbance.

"The ship!" Dillard said stupidly. "That Venusian ship. It blew up!"

"It what?"

"It just blew up. One minute it was standing up away from the sea. The next minute it was all ablaze. Then it blew, just like that!" He could barely believe his own words. It was impossible that a whole solid ship, full of people, could go so quickly, so entirely. All gone!

"Got to head back," the pilot growled. "Might be survivors in trouble."

"There won't be." Dillard said it with stunned certainty. "There just couldn't be. There was no time!"

Now he could hear the start up of sirens and hooters from several directions, and saw small craft of many kinds coming furiously over the water to investigate. The first shreds of stinking smoke touched his nostrils, and the hydrofoil lurched and heaved in the swelling aftermath of explosion. It ran back, joined the others who were combing the fumes and swells for anyone who might need help. But there was nothing, nothing at all. Here and there among the drifting trails of smoke could be seen patches of oil-slick, but that was all there was to show that a great ship had been here. Of debris, living or dead, there was nothing. After half an hour of vain search, Dillard said, "I told you. Didn't I tell you?" The pilot nodded, put his hand to his throttle. "I guess you were right, mister. This is a waste of time." The ‘foil began once more to drive toward the distant island-town.

Dillard sat slumped alongside the pilot and let his thoughts sag wherever they could. The whole thing was just too much for him to take in. It was quite a while before it struck him that had he not been lucky enough to get off, he would have gone up with it, and when that idea did come it struck only a faint thrill. But then, on the heels of that thought, came another. It was fantastic that a whole ship could go, just like that, and he would never know how, but wasn't it just possible that he, by being there, had caused somebody to rush something, or make some vital error?

That idea really did squash him down, so much so that the pilot had been talking to him for some time before he realized it and asked for a repeat.

"I said, mister, that I have to report this. And you!"

"Report? Report what? That the ship blew up?"

"No!" The pilot was heavily patient. "Everybody on Hydro knows about it by now. I have to report you. Look, your name and ex-card number are in my slot. I took you aboard. The Venture Three people know that much. And I got you off just two jumps ahead of the disaster. So I have to report that. There will be an inquiry. You understand?"

Dillard thought he sensed something more than just self-protecting routine in the pilot's tone.

"What are you really getting at?" he demanded. "Why the shifty look?

Stars! You don't think I had anything to do with—with that?"

"Now look, mister, I didn't say that. But stand where I am for a bit. You go aboard, with some gadget or other, right? Now, I've been running this water-taxi here more than five years. I've seen maybe a hundred Veenie ships come and go. And I've never once seen a Veenie, not close. Never seen one leave the ship. Never seen anybody go aboard. Nobody. Not till you. Then, off you come all of a gallop, like the devil was on your tail. And then she blows. You add it up and see what you get." Dillard didn't know whether to laugh or curse. He felt stomach-sick. But his pragmatic fraction had to admit the man had a point. The thought that he, Dillard, could deliberately destroy an entire ship—and all those people, alien or not —was insane. But only from one viewpoint, and that was Dillard's own. He couldn't expect anyone else to be sure about it.

"All right," he said wearily, and fumbled with his kit-box. "You have to do your duty as you see it, I suppose. Here, you'd better take this."

"What is it?"

"It's a wire spool. It carries all the recordings I've done today. It is worth quite a bit to me, so look after it, won't you. But it could be evidence of some kind, you never know, and if you have it, and turn it over to whoever you're going to report to, that will at least establish that I haven't faked it in any way. Go on, it won't bite."

"Look, mister, I'm not accusing you of anything!"

"That's just as well, isn't it?" Dillard felt a sudden spurt of anger. "See you don't. Keep that recording safe. Turn it over to the proper authorities. And be careful what you do say, or I'll dig you so deep in trouble you will never get out. You've seen my expense-card, so you know I have enough going for me to be able to do just that."

"I don't want any trouble!"

"Nor me, so we have something in common. Right? Can't this thing go any faster?"

V

By the time the ‘foil had run in and under the nearest projecting rim of the floating island, Dillard realized the word "town" was no exaggeration. The great faceted dome was huge, easily half a mile across, and where the under half of the dish curved down into the water there was all of thirty feet headroom under the rim. What he had seen as slots from a distance now showed as miniature harbor mouths. The air-cushion ferry came billowing out of one just before they slowed to head in, and Dillard glanced back to see another spaceship up there, just a silver dot, readying in for planet-fall. The 'foil slid in and alongside a tiled wall, the pilot checked out on his card, and Dillard stepped ashore. Three more steps upward and he was on a broad, rubberized avenue, stretching before and behind in a long sweeping curve. And here, before he could decide which way to start walking, came a purring scooter in sparkling chrome, towing a wheeled chair after it. He stared, half-angry that the girl driver could be so breezy, beautiful and blonde, after what he had just seen. The machine purred to a halt beside him and the girl swung long legs to the ground and saluted him briskly.

"At your service, mister. Name your pleasure and I'll take you to it, or something better."

He took time to study her, the better to get his feelings under some kind of control. No thought of recording occurred to him here. Sinful delights were not in his line, and this girl, after all, was only doing a job. She was petite and devastatingly endowed, none of it hidden. From the waist down spray-thin silver clothed her, yielding to mid-calf riding boots of the same color equipped with ridiculously large spurs. On her upper half she wore a scanty short-sleeved bolero that was no more than a gesture. It was unfastened. One glance was enough to show that it couldn't be fastened, not to contain what she had to put into it. She would, Dillard thought, have a weight problem very soon. She reminded him strongly of the type of female scenery regularly used to add "interest" to an otherwise insipid storyline. The silver-painted ten-gallon hat on her blonde mop was all part of the illusion.

"Supposing it had been somebody else?" he asked. "Not me. A lady?"

"Hah?" She blinked a moment then grinned broadly, fired her finger straight up like a pistol, and he looked to see the goggle-eye of a scanner watching him. "We have a headquarters," she explained. "The screen gets a picture of anybody coming ashore, and we select out according to who, and what. You look like the direct approach, couple of drinks and a good time, type. So me."

"So wrong," he said. "Maybe not your fault, though. You've heard about the disaster, just now?"

"Veenie ship blew up, so I heard. Say, you must've seen it!"

"I stepped off it about five minutes before it happened." She gave a sudden shiver and seemed to wilt a little, made a shrill and quavering whistle-sound. "You some kind of nut, mister? You went aboard a Veenie ship? Nobody could pay me enough to do that."

"That's your problem. All I'm getting at is that I don't feel like any kind of good time just now. All I want is somewhere peaceful and quiet, maybe something to eat and drink, and time to think. Do you have that available?"

"Why not? What sort of class did you have in mind?" For that question he had no ready answer, but let the problem solve itself by handing over his ex-card. Her flame-red mouth rounded into an

"Oh" of appreciation at sight of his rating.

"Welcome to Joytown, Mr. Dillard. I think I know the very place for you. Climb aboard!" She gestured to the rickshaw-like chair, then grinned. "Or you could mount up behind me, piggyback. No extra charge." She threw a slim leg over her saddle and turned up the voltage on her smile, but he shook out his poncho, slung it over his shoulders and said,

"That chair will do me, thanks."

She looked hurt. "I didn't mean anything, mister, just being friendly. Besides"—she added acutely—"you've never been here before, have you?

And a man like you will be full of questions, I guess. So how can I talk to you if you're sitting right back there?"

"What do you mean, a man like me? You missed my type once, sister. Don't you ever learn?"

"I reckon to learn something new every day," she retorted cheerfully,

"and mostly by talking to people. You're a newsman, aren't you?"

"No. Sorry. This is not a camera. But you have a point, about learning things. All right, I'll take the piggyback."

"That's real friendly now." She beamed. "Climb on, and don't be scared to hug tight, I don't bruise easily. Ready?" She settled with a wriggle as he clasped her slim middle, and kicked her machine into throbbing life. They growled away along the wide ramp, swooped into a sharp turn and up a steep incline, then swooped steeply again and were out onto a glass-tiled roadway banked with raucous neon-lighted civilization. She kept her foot down and her blonde hair tickled his face as the breeze of their flight pushed it back at him.

"Don't pay too much attention to this bit," she called back over her shoulder. "This is mostly beer-joints, diners, flophouses and gambling dens. Strictly for crewmen and bums. Right now it's only half-alive. Come nightfall it perks up some, but even then it's no great shakes."

"Where are you going to take me?"

"In a minute—whoops!"—she swerved dexteriously to avoid a straggle of pedestrians—"we strike an intersection. Coming up. Hold on tight!" He needed no urging as she put the scooter into a forty-five degree heel to swoop into a four-lane highway. Purely by guess he estimated they were now heading in toward the middle, and she confirmed that as soon as she had jockeyed her way past a few minor roadrunners like single and two-seater cushion cars.

"We're now heading in to Center City. You'll like it. Very exclusive, quiet, nothing but the best. Whatever you want, the best." There didn't seem to be any comment called for, so he kept silent. In a moment or two her head half-turned again and she called, "Blue-true, Mr. Dillard, were you really on that Veenie ship?"

"Of course. Why not? According to what I hear, those ships come in here regularly. There's nothing weird about them."

"You don't mean that!" He felt her lithe young torso stiffen in quick revulsion as she spoke. "I wouldn't go within a million miles of them."

"Mean to tell me"—he let his irritation speak out—"that you've never met a Venusian either? They must come ashore here sometimes!"

"There'd be a riot if they ever did. Monsters!" He snorted, got his retort ready, then let it go. What was the use? It occurred to him to tell her what Conway had said, that the Venusians found and built this place, but he thought better of that too.

"You know," she volunteered, "I always thought there was something queer about that ship."

"Queer? In what way queer?"

"Well, we get Veenie ships in here often enough, it's true, but it's always in and out again, pretty quick. Overnight. But that one has been here more than a couple of weeks now. Just sitting there!" That certainly was queer. From what little Dillard knew of spaceship economy, it was insane. No one in his right mind keeps highly expensive machinery standing idle, and a spaceship is just about the most expensive assembly of machinery possible. To keep one bobbing at anchor for two whole weeks, doing nothing, was unthinkable. He was still trying to think it out in logical terms as the scooter slowed to a crawl and swung off into a quiet side street.

"This is it," she announced, and pointed. "The Hydro Palace. Best in town. You'll like it." He climbed down, waited while she checked his ex-card again, and she grinned as she added, "If you happen to fancy some other place, or want something they haven't got, you just call me. My name's Stella, and that's my trade number. But you don't need to remember it, just ask Fodor. That's the commissionaire. Him, look. He knows me."

Dillard stared up the marble steps to where the uniformed attendant awaited him, then glanced back to Stella and smiled wryly.

"You never know," he said, "I might just do that. Not to take me any place special, just to give me one of your hair-raising rides on that. I hope you're insured?"

"Who, me?" She laughed. "Not on your life. I haven't hit anything yet, and don't intend to. Call me anytime. ‘Bye now! Don't forget my cut, Fodor!"

As she stormed away, Dillard strode up the steps and the doorman threw him a salute fit for a general, at least. Resplendent in velvet-textured blue plastic ablaze with gold facings, he inclined his head graciously and murmured, "What is your pleasure, sir?"

"All I want is a table for one, me. With plenty of peace, quiet, and privacy. And service. Food, drink, the usual things. No entertainment, no diversions, nothing like that."

"Of course, sir. Are you familiar with the procedure for operating mechanical servers?"

"Hm? Oh, yes, certainly."

"Then allow me to show you." With a gracious gesture he pointed Dillard to a handy elevator door, and as the gate slid open he murmured,

"Button Minus Five will deliver you to the Green Salon, sir. I'm sure you will find it exactly what you require."

Five was the last button on a long panel that went up to fifteen plus, and it struck Dillard with just a tweak at his nerves that by the time he got down five levels he would be underwater. Well under. Stepping out as the door opened, his first impression was a strong reminiscence of tropical monsoon, and he frowned, wondering where that had been. Then it came back. In Bombay, when he had been there making a documentary for a travel firm. But there were differences, now that he took a second look. The warm humidity was similar, but India had never been perfumed with mint. Or something like it, at any rate. Nor had it been steeped in an almost palpable green haze. Dillard stepped forward cautiously, expecting some kind of curtain, but the lambent green glow moved with him, and he realized it was some kind of interference screen effect. He nodded gently in praise. This was privacy indeed, to be wrapped in a tinted force-screen. But how did one find —and the question died unasked as there came a gently winking spot of red light, drawing near.

It loomed through the haze and resolved into a mechanical, a mobile attendant-machine, with an upright pole and hooks, a squat chrome and plastic body on tracks, and the red light blinking like a cyclops immediately above a radio grille. It halted a foot away from him.

"Your expense card please, sir or madam," it said gently.

"I'm male," Dillard told it, slotting his card into place. "I require a table and service for one, myself, please."

"Yes, sir. Should you be carrying any burdens, or wish to dispose of any garments or articles temporarily, please employ my hooks. I will proceed as soon as you are ready."

Dillard unloaded his tackle-box and poncho, hooked them, and felt just comfortably warm. "All ready," he announced. "Lead on." It was ridiculous, he thought, how quickly one grew to think of the things as sentient. Expecting it to wheel around and go away. But it merely receded, still watching him with its red eye. He followed, and the curtain of green mist, now deh'cately flavored with citrus, went with them. It was impossible even to guess how big this chamber was. He became aware that he was ravenously hungry and guessed there was some chemical component in the air to help that kind of thing along. He strolled on a floor that was warm sponge and was aware of a winding trail, but saw nothing but the green fog. Then the guiding light halted.

"Your table, sir. Please program your requirements." The light was subtly brighter now, and he saw the low table, and a chair, a long, low, inviting couch of dark foam-surfaced material. He sat, experimented a moment or two until he had a comfortable pose, locked the chair's flexibility to that contour, and then gave attention to the visi-screen the mechanical had extended for his benefit.

"I'll have a caffex immediately, and show me some wines, something dry and light." The list that rippled into view would have done credit to any cellar. Switching to solid food he ordered a meal light in starch and protein, conscious of incipient weight problems, and left it at that.

"Enough for the moment. I'll deal with anything else later; depends how I feel."

There was a click as the table sank into the floor and went away to fill his order. He grinned wryly, remembering the very first time he had encountered this kind of service, and how the table had been stuck because he, not knowing, had his elbow leaning on it and it couldn't move because it had protective circuits designed to avoid harming him. Dillard had been in many robotized restaurants since but never one quite on this scale.

"The green," he demanded, "is it compulsory?"

"What shade would you prefer, sir?"

After a moment's thought he requested a very pale, pearly pink, and got it. He wondered how it would affect somebody sitting close by. From that it was only a step to wondering whether there was anyone close by, or anyone else there at all. The mechanical explained.

"Each patron-area is secluded within its own polarized curtain, sir. There are other patrons present, groups and singles." The table came back laden and Dillard started in, but after the first bite or two he felt something lacking and asked the servitor, "Can you do me some background music?"

It could. He selected thoughtfully and within a few seconds was softly wrapped around by lilt and the illusion of a surrealist ballet. It was well done. He knew something of the technique of hologram-in-the-round with 3D sound effects, and this was equal to anything he had met. They probably had sensor-accompaniment too, if he wanted it, but he chose not to. Those kind of sensations were not for him and he knew it. Music, rhythm and dance were mysteries as far as he was concerned. The sensor-craftsmen in that field got good money, and they earned it. To react evenly and totally on several sense levels simultaneously was exhausting for the operator. It was also insidiously narcotic for the audience, as the pop frenzies of the late twentieth centuiy had proved beyond all doubt. Dangerous stuff. Like white noise, the total effect so overloaded the brain's channels that reason began to totter, and the outcome could be anything. He preferred just to watch. And listen. And eat. But not to get involved.

That thought triggered off the whole piled-up weight of the disaster he had just seen, and about which he had been resolutely determined not to think, until now. Here, alone, he could let the memories boil up. He bit and chewed and drank, filled his eyes with the movements of posturing bodies and his ears with Bartok, and so had something solid to anchor him while the Venusian ship blew itself to fiery death all over again in his mind. The complete devastation of a whole ship was something to stun his mind, but what really hurt was the thought of the people. There must have been a hundred or so of them, and they couldn't possibly have had a chance of survival. Not any of them. Not even AnnSmith. From there, as he went on doggedly chewing and swallowing, came the fearsome problem of responsibility. You could stretch coincidence just so far before it began to strain.

It was no use his rational fraction arguing the point, suggesting, as it did, that he had gone to visit Dr. Stanley also, and something queer had happened to him, hadn't it? Was Dillard feeling any pangs of conscience on that? He wasn't, but it did stir a moment's curiosity, enough to wonder just what had happened to Stanley, and what Miss Hunt was doing about him, if she was doing anything at all. So many strange things, open-ended problems, and no answers. Not only had he no answers, he had no hard notion what, if anything, he ought to do next.

He ended the meal feeling restless, programmed to have the ruins removed and a long, cold whisky sour brought, and sneered at the dancers and music. Dennis Dillard, pawn of fate, a straw in the wind, a nothing man. He poured scorn on himself lavishly, but it helped nothing. In common with most people, Dillard liked to think that he knew why he was doing what, at any given time, but this time it didn't work. All he could grasp was the vague conviction that he was being manipulated in some way that he couldn't understand. At last, in futile temper, he snapped at the mechanical, "Maybe I do need company, after all. What do you suggest?"

"I have a built-in switchboard, sir, if you wish to call someone."

"Such as who? I don't know anyone on this planet. At least, no one who'd be likely to come running at my call."

"We have entertainers available on the premises, sir," the mechanical advised him, after a click that showed it had switched to a new level of circuitry. "I can show you pictures and details." Dillard hesitated. Perversely, he said, "I'd far rather see just who is sharing this solitary jag with me, right now. Can you do that?" This time there were several clicks and a hum or two. Then the robot servitor confessed, in a secretive tone, "I am permitted to show you the occupants of the other tables, with discretion."

"Oh! Are you, indeed? What discretion?"

"You may overlook any table for not longer than thirty seconds. After that period a warning is sounded and the view fails."

"Go ahead, show me."

There was another click, then the music ceased, the ballet dancers faded away and a glowing square hung suspended in mid-air. It was like peering through a drawn curtain. Dillard saw a large, fat-rolling man lolling on his couch, drink in hand, watching a pseudo-space opera. Click, and the man went, his place taken by a not-so-young couple disporting themselves in time to a frenzy of discordant noise they probably thought of as music. Dillard winced. Another click and he sat forward as he saw a dark-haired woman, black-frowning, staring right at him. Mara Hunt. And she had seen him!

"Hold it!" he commanded, as the picture went. "She was looking at me!"

"Possibly, sir, just as you were overlooking her."

"And no warning?"

"It can be circumvented by viewing in discrete periods of less than the permitted maximum."

"Somebody makes rules, somebody else makes holes in them. Be thankful you're just a machine. And mark that one, I may want to come back and do a bit of snooping myself." He considered it rapidly. No reason why Mara Hunt should not be here, of course. Call it coincidence. And maybe she hadn't been snooping at all. He decided to reserve judgment.

"All right, carry on and show me some more," he ordered. Up came another picture, a hole in the pink haze, and this time he caught his breath as if steel fingers had grasped his throat. There, life-large and startlingly near, so that he could almost reach out and touch, was the savage-eyed Venusian commander, Dekron. And, close-headed with him was another stone-face, almost certainly the hatchway guard. But it just couldn't be! The picture winked out and left him staring into nothing, his neck stiff and his teeth locked. With an effort he growled, "Show me that again. Again!"

"Yes, sir. Table-space G-5, two persons in conference, names withheld." The picture sprang into life once more. It was Dekron, positively.

"Take me to that table!"

"I am unable to do that, sir, without the express consent of the occupants beforehand."

"Then get it…"

But the order was not to be obeyed. Dillard's questions had overridden the mechanical's attention to time. A gentle chime shattered the quiet, and in that hanging picture Dekron snatched his head around, and glared, straight at Dillard. Searing hate lashed out from those chill eyes. Dillard cringed back in his chair, then scrambled to his feet. The picture blinked out. He put out a hand in aimless terror, not knowing which way to move, yet wanting desperately to run. The pink glow faded into the standard green haze, and that piled up the panic. Dillard tottered forward, hands out to grope, and a darkness in the green loomed suddenly, became solid, became Dekron with teeth showing in a snarl and his shoulders bulking huge.