Lassen’s wariness, if not his respect, increased considerably.

After another three minutes driving, he stopped the car and cut the motor.

He was now deep into the brown boulder-strewn slopes of the hills and a good forty miles from the city. Somewhere within the next two or three miles he decided, Jackson would be lying in wait.

Lassen leaned forward and began to manipulate his search instruments. Within three minutes he picked up a heart-beat and, a few seconds later, a respiration pattern.

Carefully he triangulated the position, picked up the rada-binoculars and studied the rising slopes to the left of the highway. Hum, yes, prone between the two large boulders at-the top of the slope. Not a very subtle position really, open ground yes, but a more experienced fighter would have chosen a position with limited approaches which could be booby-trapped. Open ground, although providing no cover, made such devices worthless.

Right, distance one mile, two hundred and sixty-four feet, he’d walk out and take this on his two feet.

Lassen prepared himself without haste. He strapped on the thigh holster, adjusted the buckles of the deflector belt and stepped out of the car, carefully locking it behind him.

He gave no thought to the car which had been trailing him. He had already dismissed them mentally as ‘natives’. As such they would not possess weapons worth worrying about, a Corps deflector screen would take care of any type of portable weapon. They might, of course, attempt to sabotage his car. Well, they could try. Kicking aside the charred bodies when he returned would not worry him unduly.

There was a sudden thud and some sort of missile kicked up a spurt of dust at the side of the road.

Lassen shrugged indifferently, left the road and began to walk up the rocky slopes. There was no hurry and in any case he had to wait. The Pheeson pistol, although limited in range, could be fired effectively from inside a deflector screen. At five hundred feet the weapon would make short work of the Jackson and the huge rock behind which he thought he was hiding.

A bullet slapped suddenly into the screen and went whining away into the distance.

Lassen smiled with faint contempt and paused to light a cigarette. He always rather enjoyed this part. In a few minutes no doubt Jackson would switch his weapon to automatic and fire long frantic bursts in a futile effort to stop him.

Another bullet slapped into the screen, then another and another.

At the tenth direct hit a compact mechanism strapped to his wrist began to chatter shrilly urgently.

A little stiffly Lassen raised his left arm and stared at the instrument, a coldness seemed to be rising upwards from the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t possible, it just wasn’t possible.

The tiny finger of the dial refuted the denial with precise indifference, it was already quivering uncertainly on the red danger line.

The coldness in Lassen’s stomach seemed to rise upwards and embrace his heart. The bullets were ‘rigged’, they carried some minute energy-sapping device which drew power away from the screen every time they hit.

With dull resignation Lassen realised he had passed the point of no return. The prey was still beyond the range of his Pheeson pistol and he would be cut down before he could run back. There were no rocks behind which to take cover while he made adjustments and circuit changes to strengthen the screen

He broke into a stumbling run towards the distant rocks, knowing that with this Jackson he had lost.

Dully his mind tried to find reasons. There was nothing capable of breaking a Corp deflector screen, if there was...

He was only beginning to understand when the twentieth bullet penetrated the weakening screen and exploded in his lungs.

Kearsney walked slowly down the slopes and stood staring down at the still body.

In death Lassen seemed to have lost his arrogance and the face was calm and peaceful like that of a sleeping child.

Kearsney shook his head slowly, only half aware of shouts in the distance.

‘Wake up, Dave, over here.’

He turned slowly. On the distant road a figure stood waving by a dilapidated ground car.

‘Over here - over here. We can get you to the ferry with minutes to spare.’

When he reached them, he saw that Hunter was crouched over the wheel and that Dirk was holding the door open in readiness.

‘You killed him.’ Hunter’s voice was awed. ‘You took an Eliminator.’

‘We’ll destroy both cars later,’ said Dirk. ‘If someone follows up on the next ship they’ll have a hard job deducing the real facts. No one on this planet will volunteer information, you can sleep easy on that point.’

Kearsney heard himself say: ‘You’ll have to blow up Lassen’s car, it’s probably booby trapped.’

‘We’ll fix that - get in.’

Kearsney glanced back once as the car rolled swiftly down the winding road. ‘You couldn’t arrange a quiet burial for him, could you?’

‘Burial!’ Dirk stared at him, his expression almost outraged. ‘What the hell for? We don’t want to draw attention to this business when another killer comes. In any case, panzer-grubs will have had the body, including the bones, inside twelve hours. Burial!’ He snorted. ‘What for?’

‘He died in the line of duty, isn’t that enough?’

Dirk laughed harshly. ‘When I start thinking of last rites for murderers I’ll be going soft in the head.’

Kearsney shrugged. He wasn’t getting through and never would. He supposed in a way it was understandable, the outsider saw only one side of the coin. Yet, could they but realise it, up there in those hills lay the body of a dedicated man or, if you preferred it, a hero.

A man whose dangerous business it had been to hunt down the intellectual wild beasts who had somehow evaded the careful psychiatric checks and risen later to threaten the structure of society.

Wild beasts which local authorities were ill-equipped to handle and could not subdue without the loss of many good men and countless innocent people. . Wild beasts who, in the last eight hundred years, had presented an account for eighty-seven million lives.

He realised suddenly that the car had stopped and Dirk was helping him out.

‘Told you we’d do it, you’ve got sixteen minutes.’

Kearsney glanced back at the distant hills. Yes, a hero, selected, as all Eliminators were selected, not for their cold blooded capacity for killing but for their dedication to the race of man.

An Eliminator knew he was doomed from the moment he signed the necessary papers.

There was no short-term-office in the Eliminator Corps for, after the first few killings, he was too mentally shocked to retire with his own conscience.

After a few more, he had passed the point of no return and become to believe in his own God-like immunity.

Throughout the Empire there was no task so demanding and no walk of life so conducive to paranoia. Inevitably the agent moved from latent to positive and became as those he was ordered to destroy.

The Corps, who kept a tight check on its personnel, knew when an agent’s usefulness was past and he was given what appeared to be a routine assignment.

Dully he heard his own voice say: ‘Thank you both, thank you.’

Yes, an assignment which seemed routine but was actually a decoy job. A job like this one with someone waiting at the other end.

‘Yes, yes, goodbye - goodbye -’

The Jackson killer turned slowly and walked towards the waiting ship.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

JOHN WYNDHAM: The Emptiness of

Space

Brian Aldiss’s story Old Hundredth that closed Volume one of this collection came from the centenary issue of New Worlds. It really was a colossal target for a British sf magazine, to have reached one hundred issues (and for that matter any sf magazine - only nine US sf magazines have exceeded 100 issues). To celebrate this event, editor John Carnell assembled a really star-packed issue with all the major names. In fact for the record, here are the titles of the stories in that edition: Sitting Duck, William F. Temple; The Glass of largo, Colin Kapp; The Emptiness of Space, John Wyndham; Unfinished Sympathy, John Hynam; Old Hundredth, Brian W. Aldiss; Prerogative, John Brunner; Greater Than Infinity, E. C. Tubb; Countercharm, James White.

There was also a guest editorial by Eric Frank Russell and a film review by Arthur Sellings. Only two of the contributors are not included in this anthology: the late John Hynam, under which name many may remember him for his BBC radio plays, although he usually wrote sf under the alias John Kippax; and the late John Rackham - who contributed an article The Science Fiction Ethic -and who besides his numerous stories in the British magazines has made a name for himself in Analog in America under his real name of John T Phillifent.

As you see, one of the stories in the contents list was John Wyndham’s The Emptiness of Space, which is included here. During 1958 New Worlds published a series of four connected stories by Wyndham about the generations of the Troon family in expanding the frontiers of space. Specially for the one hundredth New Worlds, Wyndham wrote a fifth story, to my mind the best of the group.

The first book editions of this saga, titled The Outward Urge, only covered the first four episodes, but the fifth was included in a special Book Club edition in 1961, and then in the Penguin paperback edition in 1962. Readers were perplexed that the book was attributed to John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes. Who was Parkes? The interior blurb said that Parkes had confined himself to supplying technical data. But if you look back at Wyndham’s full name as I gave it in Volume One, you’ll notice there the name Parkes Lucas. In The Outward Urge, Wyndham had craftily collaborated with himself!

By the early 1960s, Wyndham’s output was diminishing. A new novel, Trouble With Lichen, appeared in 1960. In July 1963 he married for the first time, a few months after the March 1963 Amazing had carried his new novelette Chocky, later expanded into the novel of the same title, published in 1968. That was to be Wyndham’s last novel. The December 1968

Galaxy carried a new short story, A Life Postponed, and that was the last of Wyndham’s output. He died on March 10th, 1969, aged 65.

Wyndham’s contribution to science fiction is incalculable. His acceptance by all general readers made him a household name, and the word ‘triffid’ passed into the English language. His books have attracted to sf thousands of readers that might otherwise have avoided the genre altogether. When sf historians of the next century look back on the 1900s worldwide, the name of John Wyndham will be high up amongst the leading names on their lists. His work will never be forgotten.

* * * *

THE EMPTINESS OF SPACE

John Wyndham

AT a very tender age my latent passion for all forms of fantasy stories, having been sparked by the Brothers Grimm and the more unusual offerings in the children’s comics and later the boy’s adven-ture papers, was encouraged in the early 1930s by the occasional exciting find on the shelves of the public library with Burroughs and Thorne Smith varying the staple diet of Wells and Verne.

But the decisive factor in establishing that exhila-rating ‘sense of wonder’ in my youthful imagi-nation was the discovery about that time of back numbers of American science fiction magazines to be bought quite cheaply in stores like Wool-worths. The happy chain of economic circum-stances by which American newstand returns, some-times sadly with the magic cover removed or mutilated, ballasted cargo ships returning to English ports and the colonies, must have been the mainspring of many an enthusiastic hobby devoted to reading, discussing, perhaps collecting and even writing, science fiction – or ‘scientifiction’ as Hugo Gerns-back coined the tag in his early Amazing Stories magazine.

Gernsback was a great believer in reader partici-pation; in 1936 I became a teenage member of the Science Fiction League sponsored by his Wonder Stories. Earlier he had run a compe-tition in its fore-runner Air Wonder Stories to find a suitable banner slogan, offering the prize of ‘One Hundred Dollars in Gold’ with true yankee bragga-dacio. Discovering the result some years later in, I think, the September 1930 issue of Wonder Stories seized upon from the bargain-bin of a chain store, was akin to finding a message in a bottle cast adrift by some distant Robinson Crusoe, and I well remember the surge of jingo-istic pride (an educa-tional trait well-nurtured in pre-war Britain) in noting that the winner was an English-man, John Beynon Harris.

I had not the slightest antici-pation then that I would later meet, and acknow-ledge as a good friend and mentor, this contest winner who, as John Wyndham, was to become one of the greatest English story-tellers in the idiom. The fact that he never actually got paid in gold was a disappoint-ment, he once told me, that must have accounted for the element of philo-so-phical dubiety in some of his work. Certainly his winning slogan ‘ Future Flying Fiction’, al-though too late to save the maga-zine from foundering on the rock of eco-nomic depression (it had already been amalga-mated with its stable-mate Science Wonder Stories to become just plain, if that is the right word, Wonder Stories), presaged the firm stamp of credi-bility combined with imagi-native flair that charac-terized JBH’s writings.

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (the abundance of fore-names conve-niently supplied his various aliases) emerged in the 1950s as an important contem-porary influence on specu-lative fiction, parti-cularly in the explo-ration of the theme of realistic global catas-trophe, with books such as The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, and enjoyed a popularity, which continued after his sad death in 1969, comparable to that of his illus-trious pre-decessor as master of the scientific romance, H. G. Wells.

However, he was to serve his writing apprentice-ship in those same pulp maga-zines of the thirties, competing success-fully with their native American contributors, and it is the purpose of this present collection to high-light the chrono-logical develop-ment of his short stories from those early beginnings to the later urbane and polished style of John Wyndham.

‘The Lost Machine’ was his second published story, appea-ring in Amazing Stories, and was possibly the proto-type of the sentient robot later developed by such writers as Isaac Asimov. He used a variety of plots during this early American period parti-cu-larly favour-ing time travel, and the best of these was undoubtedly ‘The Man From Beyond’ in which the poign-ancy of a man’s reali-za-tion, caged in a zoo on Venus, that far from being aban-doned by his fellow-explorers, he is the victim of a far stranger fate, is remark-ably out-lined for its time. Some themes had dealt with war, such as ‘The Trojan Beam’, and he had strong views to express on its futility. Soon his own induc-tion into the Army in 1940 produced a period of crea-tive inactivity corres-ponding to World War II. He had, however, previously established him-self in England as a promi-nent science fiction writer with serials in major period-icals, subse-quently reprinted in hard covers, and he even had a detec-tive novel published. He had been well repre-sented too – ‘Perfect Crea-ture’ is an amu-sing example – in the various maga-zines stemming from fan activity, despite the vicissi-tudes of their pre-and imme-diate post-war publish-ing insec-urity.

But after the war and into the fifties the level of science fiction writing in general had increased consi-derably, and John rose to the challenge by selling success-fully to the American market again. In England his polished style proved popular and a predi-lection for the para-doxes of time travel as a source of private amuse-ment was perfectly exem-plified in ‘Pawley’s Peepholes’, in which the gawp-ing tourists from the future are routed by vulgar tactics. This story was later success-fully adapted for radio and broad-cast by the B.B.C.

About this time his first post-war novel burst upon an unsus-pecting world, and by utili-zing a couple of unori-ginal ideas with his Gernsback-trained atten-tion to logically based expla-natory detail and realis-tic back-ground, together with his now strongly deve-loped narra-tive style, ‘The Day of the Triffids’ became one of the classics of modern specu-lative fiction, survi-ving even a mediocre movie treat-ment. It was the fore-runner of a series of equally impressive and enjoyable novels inclu-ding ‘The Chrysalids’ and ‘The Mid-wich Cuckoos’ which was success-fully filmed as ‘Village of the Damned’. (A sequel ‘Children of the Damned’ was markedly inferior, and John was care-ful to dis-claim any responsi-bility for the writing.)

I was soon to begin an enjoy-able asso-ciation with John Wyndham that had its origins in the early days of the New Worlds maga-zine-publish-ing venture, and was later to result in much kindly and essen-tial assis-tance enabling me to become a specia-list dealer in the genre. This was at the Fantasy Book Centre in Blooms-bury, an area of suitably asso-ciated literary acti-vities where John lived for many years, and which provi-ded many pleasu-rable meet-ings at a renowned local coffee establish-ment, Cawardine’s, where we were often joined by such person-alities as John Carnell, John Chris-topher and Arthur C. Clarke.

In between the novels two collec-tions of his now widely pub-lished short stories were issued as ‘The Seeds of Time’ and ‘Consider Her Ways’; others are re-printed here for the first time. He was never too grand to refuse mater-ial for our own New Worlds and in 1958 wrote a series of four novel-ettes about the Troon family’s contri-bution to space explo-ration

– a kind of Forsyte saga of the solar system later collected under the title ‘

The Outward Urge’. His ficti-tious colla-borator ‘Lucas Parkes’ was a subtle ploy in the book version to explain Wyndham’s appa-rent devia-tion into solid science-based fiction. The last story in this collection ‘The Empti-ness of Space’ was written as a kind of post-script to that series, especially for the 100th anni-versary issue of New Worlds.

John Wyndham’s last novel was Chocky, published in 1968. It was an expan-sion of a short story follow-ing a theme similar to The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos. It was a theme pecu-liarly appro-priate for him in his advancing matu-rity. When, with charac-teristic reti-cence and modesty, he announced to a few of his friends that he was marry-ing his beloved Grace and moving to the country-side, we all felt that this was a well-deserved retire-ment for them both.

But ironically time – always a fasci-nating subject for specu-lation by him – was running out for this typical English gentle-man. Amiable, eru-dite, astrin-gently humo-rous on occasion, he was, in the same way that the gentle Boris Karloff portrayed his film monsters, able to depict the night-mares of humanity with fright-ening realism, made the more deadly by his masterly preci-sion of detail. To his great gift for story-telling he brought a lively intellect and a fertile imagi-nation.

I am glad to be numbered among the many, many thou-sands of his readers whose ‘sense of wonder’ has been satis-facto-rily indulged by a writer whose gift to posterity is the compul-sive reada-bility of his stories of which this present volume is an essen-tial part.

— LESLIE FLOOD

* * * *

MY first visit to New Caledonia was in the summer of 2199. At that time an exploration party under the leadership of Gilbert Troon was cautiously pushing its way up the less radio-active parts of Italy, investi-gating the prospects of recla-mation. My firm felt there might be a popular book in it, and assigned me to put the propo-sition to Gilbert. When I arrived, how-ever, it was to find that he had been delayed, and was now expected a week later. I was not at all displeased. A few days of com-fort-able lazi-ness on a Pacific island, all paid for and count-ing as work, is the kind of perquisite I like.

New Caledonia is a fasci-nating spot, and well worth the trouble of getting a landing permit — if you can get one. It has more of the past —

and more of the future, too, for that matter — than any other place, and some-how it manages to keep them almost sepa-rate.

At one time the island, and the group, were, in spite of the name, a French colony. But in 2044, with the eclipse of Europe in the Great Northern War, it found itself, like other ex-colonies dotted all about the world, suddenly thrown upon its own resources. While most main-land colonies hurried to make treaties with their nearest power-ful neigh-bours, many islands such as New Cale-donia bald little to offer and not much to fear, and so let things drift.

For two generations the surviving nations were far too occu-pied by the tasks of bringing equili-brium to a half-wrecked world to take any interest in scattered islands. It was not until the Brazi-lians began to see Aus-tralia as a possible challenger of their supre-macy that they started a policy of unobtrusive, and tact-fully mer-cantile, expan-sion into the Pacific. Then, naturally, it occurred to the Austra-lians, too, that it was time to begin to extend their eco-nomic influ-ence over various island-groups.

The New Caledo-nians resisted infil-tra-tion. They had found in-depen-dence congenial, and steadily rebuffed temp-tations by both parties. The year 2144, in which Space declared for in-depen-dence, found them still resist-ing; but the pressure was now con-sider-able. They had watched one group of islands after another suc-cumb to trade prefer-ences, and there-after virt-ually slide back to colo-nial status, and they now found it diffi-cult to doubt that before long the same would happen to them-selves when, whatever the form of words, they should be annexed

— most likely by the Aus-tra-lians in order to fore-stall the es-tab-lish-ment of a Brazi-lian base there, within a thousand miles of the coast.

It was into this situation that Jayme Gonveia, speaking for Space, stepped in 2150 with a sugges-tion of his own. He offered the New Caledo-nians guaran-teed indepen-dence of either big Power, a con-sider-able quantity of cash and a prosp-erous future if they would grant Space a lease of terri-tory which would become its Earth head-quarters and main terminus.

The proposition was not altogether to the New Cale-donian taste, but it was better than the alter-natives. They accepted, and the con-struc-tion of the Space-yards was begun.

Since then the island has lived in a curious sym-biosis. In the north are the rocket landing and dispatch stages, ware-houses and engi-neer-ing shops, and a way of life fur-nished with all modern tech-niques, while the other four-fifths of the island all but ignores it, and con-tentedly lives much as it did two and a half centuries ago. Such a state of affairs cannot be preserved by acci-dent in this world. It is the result of care-ful contri-vance both by the New Cale-do-nians who like it that way, and by Space which dis-likes out-siders taking too close an interest in its affairs. So, for per-mission to land any-where in the group, one needs hard-won visas from both auth-orities. The result is no exploi-tation by tourists or sales-men, and a scarcity of strangers.

However, there I was, with an unex-pected week of leisure to put in, and no reason why I should spend it in Space-Concession terri-tory. One of the secre-taries suggested Lahua, down in the south at no great distance from Noumea, the capital, as a rest-ful spot, so thither I went.

Lahua has picture-book charm. It is a small fishing town, half-tropical, half-French. On its wide white beach there are still canoes, work-ing canoes, as well as modern. At one end of the curve a mole gives shelter for a small anchor-age, and there the palms that fringe the rest of the shore stop to make room for a town.

Many of Lahua’s houses are improved-tradi-tional, still thatched with palm, but its heart is a cobbled rectangle surrounded by entirely un-tropi-cal houses, known as the Grande Place. Here are shops, pave-ment cafes, stalls of fruit under bright striped awnings guarded by Gauguin-esque women, a state of Bougain-ville, an atro-ciously ugly church on the east side, a pissoir, and even a mairie. The whole thing might have been imported com-plete from early twentieth-century France, except for the inhabi-tants — but even they, some in bright sarongs, some in Euro-pean clothes, must have looked much the same when France ruled there.

I found it difficult to believe that they are real people living real lifes. For the first day I was con-stantly accom-panied by the feeling that an unseen direc-tor would suddenly call ‘Cut’, and it would all come to a stop.

On the second morning I was growing more used to it. I bathed, and then with a sense that I was begin-ning to get the feel of the life, drifted to the place, in search of aperitif. I chose a café on the south side where a few trees shaded the tables, and wondered what to order. My usual drinks seemed out of key. A dusky, brightly saronged girl approached. On an impulse, and feeling like a character out of a very old novel I suggested a pernod. She took it as a matter of course.

“Un pernod? Certainement, monsieur,” she told me.

I sat there looking across the Square, less busy now that the dejeuner hour was close, wonder-ing what Sydney and Rio, Adelaide and São Paulo had gained and lost since they had been the size of Lahua, and doubting the value of the gains...

The pernod arrived. I watched it cloud with water, and sipped it cau-tiously. An odd drink, scarcely calcu-lated, I felt, to enhance the appe-tite. As I contem-plated it a voice spoke from behind my right shoulder.

“An island product, but from the original recipe,” it said. “Quite safe, in mode-ration, I assure you.”

I turned in my chair. The speaker was seated at the next table; a well-built, compact, sandy-haired man, dressed in a spot-less white suit, a panama hat with a coloured band, and wearing a neatly trimmed, pointed beard. I guess his age at about thirty-four though the grey eyes that met my own looked older, more expe-rienced and troubled.

“A taste that I have not had the opportunity to acquire,” I told him. He nodded.

“You won’t find it outside. In some ways we are a mu-seum here, but little the worse, I think, for that.”

“One of the later Muses,” I suggested. “The Muse of Recent History. And very fasci-nating, too.”

I became aware that one or two men at tables within earshot were pay-ing us — or rather me — some atten-tion; their ex-pres-sions were not unfriendly, but they showed what seemed to be traces of concern.

“It is —” my neigh-bour began to reply, and then broke off, cut short by a rumble in the sky.

I turned to see a slender white spire stabbing up into the blue overhead. Already, by the time the sound reached us, the rocket at its apex was too small to be visible. The man cocked an eye at it.

“Moon-shuttle,” he observed.

“They all sound and look alike to me,” I admitted.

“They wouldn’t if you were inside. The accele-ration in that shuttle would spread you all over the floor — very thinly,” he said, and then went on: “We don’t often see strangers in Lahua. Perhaps you would care to give me the pleasure of your com-pany for luncheon? My name, by the way, is George.”

I hesitated, and while I did I noticed over his shoulder an elderly man who moved his lips slightly as he gave me what was with-out doubt an encour-aging nod. I decided to take a chance on it.

“That’s very kind of you. My name is David — David Myford, from Sydney,” I told him. But he made no ampli-fica-tion regard-ing him-self, so I was left wondering whether George was his fore-name, or his sur-name.

I moved to his table, and he lifted a hand to summon the girl.

“Unless you are averse to fish you must try the bouillabaisse —

spécialité de la maison,” he told me.

I was aware that I had gamed the approval of the elderly man, and apparently of some others as well, by joining George. The wait-ress, too, had an approving air. J won-dered vaguely what was going on, and whether I had been let in for the town bore, to protect the rest.

“From Sydney,” he said reflectively. “It’s a long time since I saw Sydney. I don’t suppose I’d know it now.”

“It keeps on growing,” I admitted, “but Nature would always prevent you from confusing it with anywhere else.”

We went on chatting. The bouilla-baisse arrived; and excel-lent it was. There were hunks of first-class bread, too, cut from those long loaves you see in pictures in old Euro-pean book. I began to feel, with the help of the local wine, that a lot could be said for the twentieth-century way of living.

In the course of our talk it emerged that George had been a rocket pilot, but was grounded now — not, one would judge, for reasons of health, so I did not inquire further...

The second course was an excellent coupe of fruits I had never heard of, and, overall, iced passion-fruit juice. It was when the coffee came that he said, rather wistfully I thought:

“I had hoped you might be able to help me, Mr. Myford, but it now seems to me that you are not a man of faith.”

“Surely everyone has to be very much a man of faith,” I pro-tested. “

For every-thing a man can-not do for him-self he has to have faith in others.

”

“True,” he conceded. “I should have said ‘spiritual faith’. You do not speak as one who is inter-ested in the nature and destiny of his soul — or of anyone else’s soul — I fear?”

I felt that I perceived what was coming next. However if he was inter-ested in saving my soul he had at least begun the oper-ation by looking after my bodily needs with a gene-rously good meal.

“When I was young,” I told him, “I used to worry quite a lot about my soul, but later I decided that that was largely a matter of vanity.”

“There is also vanity in thinking oneself self-sufficient,” he said.

“Certainly,” I agreed. “It is chiefly with the con-cep-tion of the soul as a sepa-rate entity that I find myself out of sym-pathy. For me it is a mani-festation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, For me it is a mani-festation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, modi-fied by the exter-nal environ-ment and influ-enced more directly by the glands.”

He looked saddened, and shook his head reprovingly.

“You are so wrong — so very wrong. Some are always con-scious of their souls, others, like yourself, are una-ware of them, but no one knows the true value of his soul as long as he has it. It is not until a man has lost his soul that he under-stands its value.”

It was not an obser-vation making for easy rejoinder, so I let the silence between us con-tinue. Presently he looked up into the northern sky where the trail of the moon-bound shuttle had long since blown away. With embar-rass-ment I observed two large tears flow from the inner corners of his eyes and trickle down beside his nose. He, how-ever, showed no embar-rass-ment; he simply pulled out a large, white, beauti-fully laun-dered hand-kerchief, and dealt with them.

“I hope you will never learn what a dread-ful thing it is to have no soul,

” he told me, with a shake of his head. “It is to hold the empti-ness of space in one’s heart: to sit by the waters of Babylon for the rest of one’s life.”

Lamely I said:

“I’m afraid this is out of my range. I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. No one under-stands. But always one keeps on hoping that one day there will come some-body who does under-stand and can help.”

“But the soul is a mani-fes-ta-tion of the self,” I said. “I don’t see how that can be lost — it can be changed, perhaps, but not lost.”

“Mine is,” he said, still look-ing up into the vast blue. “Lost — adrift some-where out there. With-out it I am a sham. A man who has lost a leg or an arm is still a man, but a man who has lost his soul is nothing — nothing

— nothing...”

“Perhaps a psychiatrist—” I started to suggest, uncertainly. That stirred him, and checked the tears.

“Psychiatrist!” he exclaimed scorn-fully. “Damned frauds! I Even to the word. They may know a bit about minds; but about the psyche! — why they even deny its existence...!”

There was a pause.

“I wish I could help...” I said, rather vaguely.

“There was a chance. You might have been one who could. There’s always the chance...” he said consolingly, though whether he was consoling himself or me seemed moot. At this point the church clock struck two. My host’s mood changed. He got up quite briskly.

“I have to go now,” he told me. “I wish you had been the one, but it has been a pleasant encounter all the same. I hope you enjoy Lahua.”

I watched him make his way along the place. At one stall he paused, selected a peach-like fruit and bit into it. The woman beamed at him amiably, apparently un-concerned about pay-ment.

The dusky waitress arrived by my table, and stood looking after him.

“O le pauvre monsieur Georges,” she said sadly. We watched him climb the church steps, throw away the rem-nant of his fruit, and remove his hat to enter. “Il va jaire la prière,” she explained. “Tous les jours ‘e make pray for ‘is soul. In ze morning, in ze after-noon. C’est si triste.”

I noticed the bill in her hand. I fear that for a moment I mis-judged George, but it had been a good lunch. I reached for my notecase. The girl noticed, and shook her head.

“Non, non, monsieur, non. Vous êtes convive. C’est d’accord. Alors, monsier Georges ‘e sign bill tomorrow. S’arrange. C’est okay,” she insisted, and stuck to it.

The elderly man whom I had noticed before broke in:

“It’s all right — quite in order,” he assured me. Then he added: “

Perhaps if you are not in a hurry you would care to take a café-cognac with me?”

There seemed to be a fine open-handed-ness about Lahua. I accepted, and joined him.

“I’m afraid no one can have briefed you about poor George,” he said.

I admitted this was so. He shook his head in reproof of persons unknown, and added:

“Never mind. All went well. George always has hopes of a stranger, you see: sometimes one has been known to laugh. We don’t like that.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him. “His state strikes me as very far from funny.”

“It is indeed,” he agreed. “But he’s impro-ving. I doubt whether he knows it him-self, but he is. A year ago he would often weep quietly through the whole dejeuner. Rather depres-sing until one got used to it.”

“He lived here in Lahua, then?” I asked.

“He exists. He spends more of his time in the church. For the rest he wanders round. He sleeps at that big white house up on the hill. His grand-daughter’s place. She sees that he’s decently turned out, and pays the bills for whatever he fancies down here.”

I thought I must have misheard.

“His granddaughter!” I exclaimed. “But he’s a young man. He can’t be much over thirty...”

He looked at me.

“You’ll very likely come across him again. Just as well to know how things stand. Of course it isn’t the sort of thing the family likes to publi-cize, but there’s no secret about it.”

The café-cognacs arrived. He added cream to his, and began:

About five years ago (he said), yes, it would be in 2194, young Gerald Troon was taking a ship out to one of the larger aster-oids — the one that de Gasparis called Psyche when he spotted it in 1852. The ship was a space-built freighter called the Celestis working from the moon-base. Her crew was five, with not bad accom-mo-dation for-ward. Apart from that and the motor-section these ships are not much more than one big hold which is very often empty on the out-ward jour-neys unless it is carrying gear to set up new workings. This time it was empty because the assign-ment was simply to pick up a load of ura-nium ore — Psyche is half made of high-yield ore, and all that was neces-sary was to set going the digging machinery already on the site, and load the stuff in. It seemed simple enough.

But the Asteroid Belt is still a very tricky area, you know. The main bodies and groups are charted, of course —but that only helps you to find them. The place is full of out-fliers of all sizes that you couldn’t hope to chart, but have to avoid. About the best you can do is to tackle the Belt as near to your objec-tive as possible, reduce speed until you are little more than local orbit velo-city and then edge your way in, going very canny. The trouble is the time it can take to keep on fiddling along that way for thousands — hundreds of thousands, maybe — of miles. Fellows get bored and in-atten-tive, or sick to death of it and start to take chances. I don

’t know what the answer is. You can bounce radar off the big chunks and hitch that up to a course-de-flector to keep you away from them. But the small stuff is just as deadly to a ship, and there’s so much of it about that if you were to make the course-deflector sensi-tive enough to react to it you’

d have your ship shying off every-thing the whole time, and getting nowhere. What we want is someone to come up with a kind of repulse mech-anism with only a limited range of opera-tion — say, a hundred miles

— but no one does. So, as I say, it’s tricky. Since they first started to tackle it back in 2150 they’ve lost half a dozen ships in there and had a dozen more damaged one way or another. Not a nice place at all ... On the other hand, uranium is uranium...

Gerald’s a good lad though. He had the authentic Troon yen for space with-out being much of a chancer; besides, Psyche isn’t too far from the inner rim of the orbit — not nearly the approach problem Ceres is, for instance — what’s more, he’d done it several times before.

Well, he got into the Belt, and jockeyed and fiddled and niggled his way until he was about three hundred miles out from Psyche and getting ready to come in. Perhaps he’d got a bit care-less by then; in any case he’

d not be expecting to find any-thing in orbit around the asteroid. But that’s just what he did find — the hard way...

There was a crash which made the whole ship ring round him and his crew as if they were in an enor-mous bell. It’s about the nastiest — and very likely to be the last — sound a space-man can ever hear. This time, how-ever, their luck was in. It wasn’t too bad. They dis-covered that as they crowded to watch the indi-cator dials. It was soon evi-dent that nothing vital had been hit, and they were able to release their breath.

Gerald turned over the controls to his First, and he and the engineer, Steve, pulled space-suits out of the locker. When the airlock opened they hitched their safety-lines on to spring hooks, and slid their way aft along the hull on magnetic soles. It was soon clear that the damage was not on the air-lock side, and they worked round the curve of the hull.

One can’t say just what they expected to find — probably an embedded hunk of rock, or maybe just a gash in the side of the hold —

any-way it was certainly not what they did find, which was half of a small space-ship projecting out of their own hull.

One thing was evident right away — that it had hit with no great force. If it had, it would have gone right through and out the other side, for the hold of a freighter is little more than a single-walled cylinder: there is no need for it to be more, it doesn’t have to conserve warmth, or contain air, or resist the friction of an atmos-phere, nor does it have to contend with any more gravi-tational pull than that of the moon; it is only in the living-quarters that there have to be the com-plex-ities necessary to sustain life.

Another thing, which was imme-diately clear, was that this was not the only misad-venture that had befallen the small ship. Some-thing had, at some time, sliced off most of its after part, carrying away not only the driving tubes but the mixing-chambers as well, and leaving it hope-lessly disabled.

Shuffling round the wreckage to inspect it, Gerald found no entrance. It was thoroughly jammed into the hole it had made, and its air-lock must lie forward, some-where inside the freighter. He sent Steve back for a cutter and for a key that would get them into the hold. While he waited he spoke through his helmet-radio to the operator in the Cel-estis’s living-quarters, and explained the situation. He added:

“Can you raise the Moon-Station just now, Jake? I’d better make a report.”

“Strong and clear, Cap’n,” Jake told him.

“Good. Tell them to put me on to the Duty Officer, win you.”

He heard Jake open up and call. There was a pause while the waves crossed and re-crossed the millions of miles between them, then a voice :

“Hullo, Celestis! Hullo Celestis! Moon-Station responding. Go ahead, Jake. Over!”

Gerald waited out the exchange patiently. Radio waves are some of the things that can’t be hurried. In due course another voice spoke.

“Hello, Celestis! Moon-Station Duty Officer speaking Give your location and go ahead.”

“Hullo, Charles. This is Gerald Troon calling from Cel-estis now in orbit about Psyche. Approx-imately three-twenty miles altitude. I am notifying damage by collision. No harm to personnel. Not repeat not in danger. Damage appears to be confined to empty hold-section. Cause of damage...” He went on to give parti-culars, and concluded: “I am about to inves-tigate. Will report further. Please keep the link open. Over!”

The engineer returned, floating a self-powered cutter with him on a short safety-cord, and holding the key which would screw back the bolts of the hold’s entrance-port. Gerald took the key, placed it in the hole beside the door, and inserted his legs into the two staples that would give him the pur-chase to wind it.

The moon man’s voice came again.

“Hullo, Ticker. Under-stand no imme-diate danger. But don’t go taking any chances, boy. Can you iden-tify the derelict?”

“Repeat no danger,” Troon told him. “Plumb lucky. If she’d hit six feet farther for-ward we’d have had real trouble. I have now opened small door of the hold, and am going in to examine the fore-part of the dere-lict. Will try to iden-tify it.”

The caver-nous dark-ness of the hold made it neces-sary for them to switch on their helmet lights. They could now see the front part of the derelict; it took up about half the space there was. The ship had punched through the wall, turning back the tough alloy in curled petals, as though it had been tin-plate. She had come to rest with her nose a bare couple of feet short of the opposite side. The two of them sur-veyed her for some moments. Steve pointed to a ragged hole, some five or six inches across, about half-way along the embedded section. It had a nasty sig-nifi-cance that caused Gerald to nod sombrely.

He shuffled to the ship, and on to its curving side. He found the air-lock on the top, as it lay in the Celestis, and tried the winding key. He pulled it out again.

“Calling you, Charles,” he said. “No iden-ti-fy-ing marks on the dere-lict. She’s not space-built — that is, she could be used in at-mos-phere. Oldish pattern — well, must be — she’s pre the stan-dard-ization of winding keys, so that takes us back a bit. Max-imum external dia-meter, say, twelve feet. Length unknown — can’t say how much after part there was before it was knocked off. She’s been holed for-ward, too. Looks like a small meteo-rite, about five inches. At speed, I’d say. Just a minute ... Yes, clean through and out, with a pretty small exit hole. Can’t open the air-lock without making a new key. Quicker to cut our way in. Over!”

He shuffled back, and played his light through the small meteor hole. His helmet prevented him getting his face close enough to see anything but a small part of the opposite wall, with a corres-ponding hole in it.

“Easiest way is to enlarge this, Steve,” he suggested.

The engineer nodded. He brought his cutter to bear, switched it on and began to carve from the edge of the hole.

“Not much good, Ticker,” came the voice from the moon. “The bit you gave could apply to any one of four ships.”

“Patience, dear Charles, while Steve does his bit of fancy-work with the cutter,” Troon told him.

It took twenty minutes to complete the cut through the double hull. Steve switched off, gave a tug with his left hand, and the joined, inner and outer circles of metal floated away.

“Celestis calling moon. I am about to go into the derelict, Charles. Keep open,” Troon said.

He bent down, took hold of the sides of the cut, kicked his mag-netic soles free of contact and gave a light pull which took him floating head-first through the hole in the manner of an under-water swimmer. Presently his voice came again, with a different tone:

“I say, Charles, there are three men in here. All in space-suits —

old-time space-suits. Two of them are belted on to their bunks. The other one is ... Oh, his leg’s gone. The meteorite must have taken it off ... There’

s a queer — Oh, God, it’s his blood frozen into a solid ball...!”

After a minute or so he went on:

“I’ve found the log. Can’t handle it in these gloves, though. I’ll take it aboard, and let you have parti-culars. The two fellows on the bunks seem to be quite intact — their suits I mean. Their hel-mets have those curved strip-windows so I can’t see much of their faces. Must’ve — that’s odd ... Each of them has a sort of little book attached by a wire to the suit fastener. On the cover it has: ‘Danger — Perigoso’ in red, and, under-neath: ‘Do not remove suit — Read instructions within,’ repeated in Portu-guese. Then: ‘

Hapson Survival System.’ What would all that mean, Charles? Over!”

While he waited for the reply Gerald clumsily fingered one of the tag-like books and dis-covered that it opened con-certina-wise, a series of small metal plates hinged together printed on one side in English and on the other in Portu-guese. The first leaf carried little print, but what there was was striking. It ran ‘CAUTION! Do NOT open suit until you have read these instructions or you will KILL the wearer.’

When he had got that far the Duty Officer’s voice came in again:

“Hullo, Ticker. I’ve called the Doc. He says do NOT, repeat NOT, touch the two men on any account. Hang on, he’s coming to talk to you. He says the Hapson system was scrapped over thirty years ago — He — oh, here he is...”

Another voice came in:

“Ticker? Laysall here. Charles tells me you’ve found a couple of Hapsons, undamaged. Please confirm, and give circum-stances.”

Troon did so. In due course the doctor came back: “Okay. That sounds fine. Now listen care-fully, Ticker. From what you say it’s prac-tically certain those two are not dead — yet. They’re — well, they’re in cold storage. That part of the Hapson system was good. You’ll see a kind of boss mounted on the left of the chest. The thing to do in the case of extreme emer-gency was to slap it good and hard. When you do that it gives a multiple injec-tion. Part of the stuff puts you out. Part of it prevents the build-ing-up in the body of large ice crystals that would damage the tissues. Part of it — oh well, that’ll do later. The point is that it works prac-tically a hundred per cent. You get Nature’s own deep-freeze in space. And if there’s some-thing to keep off direct radia-tion from the sun you stay like that until some-body finds you — if any-one ever does. Now I take it that these two have been in the dark of an air-less ship which is now in the airless hold of your ship. Is that right?”

“That’s so Doc. There are two small meteorite holes, but they would not get direct beams from there.”

“Fine. Then keep ‘em just like that. Take care they don’t get warmed. Don’t try any-thing the instruc-tion-sheet says. The point is that though the success of the Hapson freeze is almost sure, the resus-citation isn’t. In fact, it’s very dodgy indeed — a poorer than twenty-five-per-cent chance at best. You get lethal crystal for-mations build-ing up, for one thing. What I suggest is that you try to get ‘em back exactly as they are. Our appara-tus here will give them the best chance they can have. Can you do that?”

Gerald Troon thought for a mo-ment. Then he said:

“We don’t want to waste this trip — and that’s what’ll happen if we pull the dere-lict out of our side to leave a hole we can’t mend. But if we leave her where she is, plug-ging the hole, we can at least take on a half-load of ore. And if we pack that well in, it’ll help to wedge the dere-lict in place. So suppose we leave the dere-lict just as she lies, and the men too, and seal her up to keep the ore out of her. Would that suit?”

“That should be as good as can be done,” the doctor replied. “But have a look at the two men before you leave them. Make sure they’re secure in their bunks. As long as they are kept in space condi-tions about the only thing likely to harm them is breaking loose under accel-era-tion, and getting damaged.”

“Very well, that’s what we’ll do. Anyway, we’ll not be using any high accel-era-tion the way things are. The other poor fellow shall have a space burial...”

An hour later both Gerald and his com-panions were back in the Celestis’s living-quarters, and the First Officer was start-ing to man-oeuvre for the spiral-in to Psyche. The two got out of their space-suits. Gerald pulled the dere-lict’s log from the out-side pocket, and took it to his bunk. There he fastened the belt, and opened the book.

Five minutes later Steve looked across at him from the opposite bunk, with concern.

“Anything the matter, Cap’n? You’re looking a bit queer.”

“I’m feeling a bit queer, Steve ... That chap we took out and con-signed to space, he was Terence Rice, wasn’t he?”

“That’s what his disc said,” Steve agreed.

“H’m.” Gerald Troon paused. Then he tapped the book. “This,” he said, “is the log of the Astarte. She sailed from the Moon-Station 3 January 2149 — forty-five years ago — bound for the Asteroid Belt. There was a crew of three: Captain George Mont-gomery Troon, engineer Luis Gom-pez, radio-man Terence Rice...

“So, as the unlucky one was Terence Rice, it follows that one of those two back there must be Gompez, and the other — well, must be George Mont-gomery Troon, the one who made the Venus landing in 2144

... And, inci-den-tally, my grand-father...”

“Well,” said my companion, “they got them back all right. Gompez was un-lucky, though — at least I suppose you’d call it un-lucky — any-way, he didn’t come through the resus-ci-tation. George did, of course...

“But there’s more to resus-ci-tation than mere revival. There’s a degree of phys-ical shock in any case, and when you’ve been under as long as he had there’s plenty of mental shock, too.

“He went under, a young-ish man with a young family; he woke up to find him-self a great-grand-father; his wife a very old lady who had remarried; his friends gone, or elderly; his two com-panions in the Astarte dead.”

“That was bad enough, but worse still was that he knew all about the Hapson System. He knew that when you go into a deep-freeze the whole meta-bolism comes quickly to a com-plete stop. You are, by every known defi-nition and test, dead ... Corrup-tion can-not set in, of course, but every vital process has stopped; every single feature which we regard as evidence of life has ceased to exist...

“So you are dead...”

“So if you believe, as George does, that your psyche, your soul, has indepen-dent exis-tence, then it must have left your body when you died.”

“And how do you get it back? That’s what George wants to know —

and that’s why he’s over there now, praying to be told...”

I leant back in my chair, looking across the place at the dark opening of-the church door.

“You mean to say that that young man, that George who was here just now, is the very same George Montgomery Troon who made the first landing on Venus, half a century ago?” I said.

“He’s the man,” he affirmed.

I shook my head, not for disbelief, but for George’s sake.

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

“God knows,” said my neighbour. “He is getting better; he’s less distressed than he was. And now he’s beginning to show touches of the real Troon obsession to get into space again.

“But what then? ... You can’t ship a Troon as crew. And you can’t have a Captain who might take it into his head to go hunting through Space for his soul...

“Me, I think I’d rather die just once...”

<<Contents>>

* * * *

COLIN KAPP: The Teacher

As science fiction has developed over the decades, science has, in fact, taken a back seat. The emphasis has swung from scientific endeavour to the effects of science upon society. But there always will be a place for the hard-core science fiction story, and one of its most popular aspects is that of the scientific problem: namely a mystery that can only be solved by logical application of strict scientific principles. One of the best British exponents of this theme is Colin Kapp.

For many years a technician working on chemical aspects of electronic research and manufacture, Kapp is now an independent consultant in the printed wiring field, and brings all his vocational knowledge to bear in his fiction. His first story, Life Plan (New Worlds, November 1958) was widely praised, and his follow-up, Survival Problem (April 1959) cemented his position as an author to watch. The theme of that tale, inter-dimensional travel, reappeared with even more stunning effect in Lambda One (December 1962) which has since been adapted for television.

With The Railways Up On Cannis (October 1959) Kapp introduced us to his team of Unorthodox Engineers, scientists who have unconventional ways of solving seemingly impossible problems. They reappeared in The Subways of Tazoo, a fairly natural sequel, and then in the particularly fascinating The Pen and the Dark, the apparently insoluble Getaway From Getawehi, and the cleverly original The Black Hole of Negrav, all in New Writings.

The lack of a regular British market drove Kapp to the American magazines, where fortunately his work appears frequently. His special technique for realism has brought him much success especially with his two recent novels, Patterns of Chaos (1972) and The Wizard of Anharitte (1972), both originally serialised in If. Several shorter pieces have also appeared in America as did his own favourite choice, The Teacher, the cover story for the August 1969 Analog. Kapp says:

‘The Teacher has two themes. Firstly, when - not if - man meets the other inhabitants of the stars, our technical sophistication will, hopefully, be matched by an equal expertise in the social sciences. We know that contact of a lower order of culture with a higher invariably destroys the former. This is a principle we may need to keep firmly in mind in order to preserve ourselves or to protect others from our influence.

‘Secondly, The Teacher makes the point that the discovery of the wheel and the development of “hammer and fire arts” are not necessarily a prerequisite for the development of a civilization. An electro-chemical based civilization is a perfect possibility. If you doubt it, remember that even on Terra the chemical primary cell came well before the dynamo, and the unique abilities of metal forming by electrolysis (electroforming) provide many of the highest-precision parts needed by our own technology. Also a crown for the Prince of Wales.

‘Curiously, though, when starting to write The Teacher I had none of this in mind. I was having fun with descriptions of doing what were for me - familiar things in an alien place and in an alien way. I think this is the way a story should be conceived - the exploration of the intriguing simply because it is intriguing. If The Teacher also had something to say, that was serendipity. The real purpose of writing it was trying to share a little of that private place where only I may enter the realms of my own imagination.’

* * * *

THE TEACHER

Colin Kapp

‘Scorpid! Scorpid!’ The cry of alarm echoed the panic back from the rock-slime of the roof. ‘Scorpid in ten tank!’

There was good reason behind the fear. The scorpion’s body was as long as a man’s forearm and equally as thick. And it was deadly. Its savage mandibles snapped open and shut like the snicker of a machine tool, with the capacity of cutting through a centimetre of steel. Its tail, equipped with a murderous post-anal sting, lashed about in frenzy, splashing the vat acids many metres into the air.

Undeterred by the poisonous liquor into which it had fallen, the scorpid began to swim lunging circles around the great vat, looking for a way of escape. Its body arched dangerously as it attempted to project itself over the overhanging edge or to gain a hold on the protrusions. The workmen edged back, knowing the instantaneous death which could follow the creature’s liberation on to the floor. The winchman, waiting his opportunity, quickly drew the plating mandrels from the tank to prevent the scorpid’s escape by climbing the rope or cathode connections. The circular anode yoke was axed from its supporting cables, and slid quietly with its burden of anode metal into the depths of the vat. Now the creature was confined, unless it could manage to leap the overhang on to the vat surrounds. With practice and with the spur of hunger it would learn to do even that.

The workmen were soon prepared. New stocks of oil-soaked brands were hauled up from the oil pits and laid with ends adjacent round the perimeter. A fire-boy touched the brands into flame with long strokes from his firing sticks.

Soon the circle of fire ringed the entire vat, allowed no crevice through which a scorpid might penetrate. A further supply of brands was arranged to replenish the first when they became exhausted. Then the shouting, sweat-soaked men did all that they now could do - wait and hope.

OrsOrs, the overseer, checked to make sure the emergency arrangements were complete before he gave the next instruction:

‘Find someone fetch the Gaffer.’ This was very much a job for a volunteer. Although the divisions between day and night on the surface of Tank made no difference in the deep caverns, daytime on the surface drove all manner of creatures into the shielding dark of the higher galleries. To fetch the Gaffer at this time of surface noon would be a difficult and dangerous assignment. It was a job suited only to a fleet runner and one who knew exactly the blackspots of the noon caves. OrsOrs would have gone himself, but his responsibilities tied him to the deep levels. In any case, to fetch the Gaffer at such a time was a job for a younger man and one without dependants.

Jo Jo was the obvious choice. The name was not his own. When working, all of them used given names invented by the Gaffer, whose alien tongue could never handle the forked aspirations of the ritual language from which all keep names were derived. Jo Jo was less of a volunteer than a nominee, but he raised no complaint when hands thrust him forward. His normal duties were those of fire-boy, and he was used to running the caverns with a flaming brand. Divested of his apron and rubber boots, he stood with all the nakedness of his forefathers. OrsOrs judged the boy had the physique and the stamina necessary. Whether he also had the courage and the skill needed to make the noon journey was something that only time would show.

‘Find the Gaffer, Jo Jo. Tell him there scorpid in tank ten. The making of rocket projector tubes is stop. He mus’ come at once.’

The youth looked uncertain.

‘Are you sure he’ll be willing come through noon caves?’

OrsOrs frowned. ‘He’s a Terran. He’s not likely meet with anythin’

more formidable than himself.’ This was a stony jest, which raised a murmur of agreement from the onlookers. ‘Anyway, he’s never failed us yet. Say OrsOrs sent you. He will find way to come.’

Jo Jo nodded. He took three oil brands, fastened two at his waist with rope, and lit the third. He took also a short axe. Standing at the tunnel’s entrance he turned and raised his torch in farewell. The fine muscles of his naked body were so accentuated by the angle of the light that he looked more god-image than a man. Then he was gone, the swift flame receding into the tunnel as he ran.

Once he was alone, Jo Jo began to re-examine his own feelings about the trip and his ability to survive it. For the most part, the lower tunnels and galleries were rock-strewn and damp and inclined to slime treacherous to running feet. A man falling here could easily break a limb or his head, and once he had fallen it could well be days before he was discovered. Jo Jo slackened his pace and began to concentrate on footholds. Better to arrive slowly than not, to arrive at all.

Twenty minutes took him to the foot of the air shaft, where the great ropes drew iron cages to the other levels and where the giant leathern bellows strained in their shackles like the guts of some gigantic reptile. The caves near the air shaft were places that Jo Jo feared. They were chemical rooms and mixing rooms, newly installed since the Gaffer’s coming. The men who sweated in the black heat of these foul holes were prone to strange diseases and shortages of breath and tumours of the skin. Jo Jo hurried past as though the very draught entering the corridor might have the power to contaminate him. Because of places such as this, Jo Jo felt a strong resentment against the Gaffer even though, as OrsOrs was constantly reminding, without the Gaffer they could never hope to win the war against the reptiles.

He came to a rising passage. Jo Jo lit the second brand from the first, and threw the latter away still only half consumed. Although such wastage was a crime, he knew that in the galleries ahead he would need a steady light. He might get the chance to kindle one more brand on the journey, but he could scarcely hope for time to kindle two.

The passages became drier as he ascended, and the slight natural draft against his skin told him of the random chimneys connecting to the surface. At this point his main danger lay in the shards of fragmented quartz which lay like daggers in the sandy floor. To pass them uninjured called for skilled footwork and precise muscle control. He held his torch high to catch each bright reflection, placing his feet miraculously on to softness with each running step. But he knew that to make a mistake and sever a tendon, or even to cut a foot and bleed severely, could be fatal in the hours until surface darkness when OrsOrs would come this way himself to fetch the Gaffer.

It took him half a painful hour to reach the first of the noon caves. With aching thigh muscles and his back coated with dust and running sweat, he paused for a moment at the threshold. The galleries before him were too vast to be lit by a torch. Only his foreknowledge of the route could guide him to the tunnel’s entrance at the other side. Now he would be forced to go slower in order to avoid collision with the bushes of razor crystal, yet not too slowly lest a footburner be drawn from its lair and wait with phosphoritic breath to burn his legs into stumps downward from the knee. At the same time he must travel watchfully, lest he rake his scalp on the stalactites descending from the roof - yet the noise and light of his passage would attract to his path all manner of scorpids and snappers and ghosts and things with wings and claws and webs of acridness and fright.

Before him, the things in the gallery sensed his presence and saw his light and began to mutter and flutter and move before him. He knew he must not stay to consider further. Holding his torch aloft, he began to run.

The beasties in the cave were more than usually active. Caught in the suddenly advancing light, the majority of them scattered from his path. Some, like the spiny needleball, curled into defensive knots, so well camouflaged on the sandy floor that he had to concentrate in order to differentiate between them and safe foootrests. Here and there a snapper chattered at his heels with jaws that would have stripped the flesh from the bone had he not been able to outrun the fortuitously stumpy legs that carried them.

At the crystal forest he was forced to slow in case his arms brushed the razors hanging like leaves on the silvern crystal trees. Here the fleshy beasts, like snappers, kept well clear of the silicon barbs. Only the horn-shelled and armoured animals dared to form lairs in the deadly glades. Of these few could move fast save for the scorpids, who never hesitated to attack anything which crossed their paths, although they seldom bothered to pursue. In common with this kind, Jo Jo feared scorpids more than he feared the reptiles on the surface. If none were in his path, he might get through. But if he came across one directly...

With trepidation he made his way through the silvern glades, fearfully thrusting his torch at every moving shadow. He kept his eyes alert for the proximity of the glassy leaves, the mere touch of which could sever an artery or gash the flesh beyond repair. In this way he encountered only a couple of armoured night-pods, relatively harmless, who scattered with heliophobic haste from the illumination of the torch. He was almost out of the forest before great danger struck.

From a rock waist-high. amidst the crystal bushes a scorpid launched itself directly at his side. Although he had his axe, Jo Jo had no time to use it. He struck at the scorpid wildly with his torch arm in a simple reflex action. At the normal velocity with which a scorpid moved he would have stood no chance. By pure accident the heavy fibre of the torch caught the moving scorpid body in midflight and deflected it in a long arc into the middle of a crystal bush. The bush erupted in a flurry of fractured blades. Jo Jo caught his breath and waited for the scorpid to re-emerge. Something hit the ground at his feet, and he panicked and beat at it with his torch several times before he gained the realization that the body which had fallen was already in the throes of death. By some miracle the razor leaves of the tree had penetrated the interstices in the scorpid’s protective plates and severed its throat. Now it lay in a fluid pool of its own life blood, twitching with nervous reaction but incapable of attack.

Jo Jo raised his torch again, and ran.

Within minutes he gained the end of the first gallery and was in the tunnel which connected with the second. Here the dryness and barrenness of the rock gave poor living to the beasties from the surface. Apart from the cave-crawlers and the occasional stinging bumble-bugs, he was safe from attack. Neither the crawlers nor the bugs could stand the sight of fire, and he took advantage of the respite to light his third torch from the second and to carry both before him while the second remained alight.

The next gallery was larger than the one through which he had passed, and contained no crystal forest. Here, however, both stalactite and stalagmite turned the path through many wild contortions and thereby slowed the pace. This was a favourite haunt of the footburners, who played tag around the rocky columns and waited to snort their phosphorous-laden breath on any unwary flesh which happened to pass within their compass. To some extent to bear a light here was a disadvantage, because a footburner’s phosphorescent snout was more clearly seen in darkness. But there were other beasties, some even as yet unnamed, against whom light was the only protection.

Warily Jo Jo threaded his way around the mineral pillars; occasionally running when a snapper chased his heels; occasionally slowing to avoid raking his head on an unexpected stalactite. Always his eyes were alert for a footburner’s snout. Though he saw several in the-distance, he was fortunate that none came close.

Then crisis! Breaking through a natural arch he was concentrating on the ground and nearly walked into an acidtail. Only the slight hum of wings warned him of the danger in time. Poised on a hundred delicate wings, the acidtail was directly in front of him, its tail of marvellous, corrosive lace draped fully across his path. OrsOrs had shown him how the threads of an acidtail’s plumage could etch deeply into the glaze on earthen pots and was used by potters as an instrument for making decorations. He knew also that the acid liquors exuded from the threads gave rise to deep and painful wounds and sought through the flesh to rot the bones beneath.

He stopped, uncertain suddenly of what move he ought to make. To retreat back into the line of disturbed creatures behind him was unthinkable; to circumnavigate the acidtail was impossible without a long detour from known paths; to attempt to advance was to invite a peculiarly painful form of death. It was then that he became aware of the footburner closing in behind him. His only relevant weapon seemed to be his firebrand, though he had never heard of its use against an acidtail. However, this was no time to be bound by custom. Almost without thinking he thrust the flame into the acid lace. There was a brief flare, accompanied by a shriek such as the ghosts of ancestors were held to give. The crippled acidtail fell like a wounded bumble-bug, covered with lines of fire. Unthinkingly Jo Jo leaped straight over the fallen beastie into the darkness beyond. Almost at the same time the path behind him grew brilliant with the flare of the exhalation of the footburner.

Jo Jo landed on soft sand, amazed to find himself unhurt. Unexpected contact with a stalagmite knocked the torch from his hand, but he did not dare return to retrieve it. Then he distantly saw the yellow light of the annex which led to the Gaffer’s tower. Heedless of anything which might now lie in his way, Jo Jo fled through the darkness in a tide of panic.

Then he was safe. The floor and walls of the annex tunnel were slightly corrugated, and stung his feet with invisible needles. No creatures would follow him into this place, so this was a pain he did not mind. The golden-yellow illumination was so intense it hurt his eyes, but no dangerous flying thing or bumble-bug would brave its radiation. Nothing more than stupid sun flies ever reached the screens. It was somehow characteristic of the Gaffer that he would play a creature’s foibles against itself and yet leave unimpeded access to his quarters for those he wished to see. On all same, Jo Jo could think of no other place so easily entered by a man yet so repellent to the beasties.

The Gaffer must have had warning of his coming because he was waiting at the end of the annex tunnel, his small, browned, terran face crossed with inquiry.

‘Jo Jo? What the devil brings you through the noon caves?’

For once Jo Jo forgot to be overawed by the Gaffer’s presence. Finding the man alone, he was very obviously human and, therefore, fragile. This threw a new light on the god-man from the stars. In fact, he was more approachable than OrsOrs, who was permanently worried by production problems and had not the kindly wisdom of the master technician from Terra.

‘If you please, Gaffer, OrsOrs send me. There’s scorpid in ten tank.’

The Gaffer scowled with sudden displeasure, his lean Terran face creasing across the tops of his eyes. ‘So there’s a scorpid in number ten. What of it?’

‘Please, OrsOrs wants you come.’

The Gaffer pursed his lips as though in sudden anger. Then he checked himself. ‘I was damnwell afraid of that!’

‘Afraid of scorpid?’ The surprise slipped through in Jo Jo’s voice. He knew from birth that Terrans were afraid of nothing.

‘No, not of scorpids... Of dragons rather.’

He caught Jo Jo’s piteous, questioning look and smiled. ‘You don’t understand me, Jo Jo. Perhaps one day you will. But let me ask a question: Of OrsOrs and I, who has had the most experience in killing scorpids?’

Jo Jo struggled with his answer, not wishing to offend. The Terran rescued him from his embarrassment.

‘Yes, you’re right, Jo Jo. The answer is OrsOrs, of course. So why did he send for me?’

When he thought about it, Jo Jo found the second question unanswerable. On the face of it, sending for the Gaffer had seemed such a logical thing to do that no one had questioned it. But when he tried to examine the logic, the point escaped him.

Meanwhile the Gaffer fussed about his instruments as though loath to leave them, then began to prepare himself for the journey. When he was ready he turned back to Jo Jo.

‘Where are your boots?’

‘In deposition cave, where I left them.’

‘But why did you leave them?’

‘Because wearing-boots-man cannot run the noon galleries.’ Jo Jo answered this as though the point was self-evident.

‘But Jo Jo,’ said the Gaffer patiently, ‘wearing-boots-man doesn’t need to run through the noon galleries. He can walk.’

Thinking about this, Jo Jo had to admit that the Gaffer was probably right. Most of the dangers in the galleries - the footburners, the snappers, the shafts of quartz, and the needleballs, were dangers to the feet. Given a pair of long yellow boots such as the Gaffer always provided, a man could choose his own pace according to the emergency. Of the things that were of harm to the body directly, almost all could be warded off with a blazing brand if you had the leisure to turn and face it out.

The Gaffer threw him a new pair of boots and put on a pair himself. He took a powerful handlamp from the clip by the door. After a moment’s thought he also took up a sticklike instrument with a metal spike at one end and a black box beneath the handle.

‘Come, Jo Jo! Let’s see what we can do for OrsOrs.’

‘You want torches?’

‘No, I have the lamp.’

Jo Jo put his hand in front of the lens. ‘It isn’t burn,’ he objected. ‘You can’ defend yourself with tha’.’

‘No,’ said the Gaffer. ‘But I don’t expect to have to.’

The Terran’s manner showed none of the tension which Jo Jo felt about returning across the disturbed noon galleries. The Terran carried little about him other than his stick, and it was obvious that he intended to make the journey at no more than walking pace. It was an example of the terrible assurance that the universe must adapt to suit the Terrans, since they did not intend to adapt to it. The endpoint of this philosophy should have been arrogance, but the Gaffer was more of a father-figure, always with the iron hand well concealed in a leathern glove. Jo Jo sometimes wondered just how terrible the iron hand of a Terran could be, seeing what he could accomplish with a mere stroke of the leather.

Seeing that for once he had the Gaffer to himself, Jo Jo felt bold enough to ask some of the questions which had been puzzling him. At the first widening of the way he forsook his deferential position at the rear, and drew up to the Gaffer’s side. Having gained this vantage point he became suddenly afraid of his own audacity. He blurted out his first question in a way he instantly regretted.

‘Are you God?’ asked Jo Jo.

The Terran footsteps faltered for a moment, then continued.

‘Far from it, Jo Jo.’ The Gaffer’s voice was kind.

‘Do you work for him then?’

‘Again, no.’ In fact, from some of the jobs I get, I sometimes wonder if I’m not an agent for the opposition.’

The answer was inscrutable to Jo Jo, but the Terran seemed to be a little amused, so the youth continued in a bolder vein.

‘Is a rocket terrible?’

‘To those who have no defence against it, yes.’

‘Would a rocket be terrible against Terran?’

‘Providing he knew you had one, no.’

‘If he knew, what would he do?’

‘Laugh until his pants fell down, I guess. Then, if he thought you were a danger to him, he’d kill you. If you weren’t he’d just go on laughing.’

‘Why?’ This was a leading question, and the crux of Jo Jo’s perplexity.

‘Why? Because a Terran has access to weapons many millions of times more powerful. He could, if he wished, destroy this whole world in a second, the sun in minutes, and most of the stars you see in a matter of hours or years.’

‘Is that what it means to be Terran - have the power to kill every thing?’

‘I’ve never thought of it that way,’ said the Gaffer. ‘We always think of ourselves as builders and creators. But now I come to think of it, you do have a point.’

The focused beam of the Gaffer’s handlamp was probably a thousand times more powerful than the illumination from Jo Jo’s torch had been. With wide sweeps of arc, the Gaffer explored the roof of the gallery, revealing features which Jo Jo was sure no member of his own race had ever seen before. The entire cave was surmounted by banks of stratified crystal which shone with a thousand faceted mirrors, like transient stars. As the beam probed the far regions, Jo Jo became aware for the first time of the true proportions of the gallery. It was far smaller than his imagination had painted it. Thus gaining perspective, he lost a considerable amount of his fears.

Jo Jo realised with something of a shock that the Gaffer was more interested in the physical characteristics of the gallery than he was in the presence of the beasties. Such naivety seemed to verge on the insane. Jo Jo constantly leaned to deflect the lamp back to their immediate path so as to reveal the terrors underfoot. This exercise seemed to amuse the Terran somewhat, and he finally handed the lamp to the fire-boy.

‘You carry the lamp for me, will you, Jo Jo?’

Jo Jo accepted the offer proudly, marvelling at the solid, compact feel of the apparatus which was pressed into his hand. Like a child with a new toy he surveyed the path before them, delighted with the way the beasties fled from the intense beam into the cradling darkness. He could appreciate, now, that so bright a source of light was a very effective weapon against would-be attackers. It was suddenly no mystery to him that the Terran could walk through the noon caves with relative impunity, whereas Tanic’s natives trod here in fear of their lives.

Before them snappers and needle balls fled into the shadows, and bumble-bugs and ghosts and acid-tails stirred in a scurry of wings out of the range of the revealing brilliance. Only a footburner squatted doggedly in their path, squinting its small eyes malevolently and slavering its gross, corrosive juices. The Gaffer extended his pointed stick close to the creature’s face. From the spiked tip a long tracery spark appeared, searching out the footburner’s eyes with a thin, tinkering discharge. The footburner screamed with agony and fled from the scene, leaving bright phosphorescent pools as, witness to its involuntary spasm.

Treading warily over the phosphoritic excretion, Jo Jo became convinced of the Gaffer’s wisdom in insisting on the wearing of boots. He anxiously probed the shadows with the lamp, expecting the footburner to have retreated into a position of ambush, but the beastie had fled far, and was probably in hiding.

‘You didn’t kill him then?’ he asked.

‘Heavens, no!’ The Gaffer’s reproof was mild. ‘Live and let live unless you both need the same territory. It’s a good motto. I merely tickled him with a high-tension electrical discharge. Plenty of volts but no current. Painful but not deadly.’ He raised the stick and let the sparks play idly on to his fingers. ‘It seeks out the softer, moister parts of the body because the spark goes for the point of lowest electrical resistance. There’s no beast alive that could stand and face it, yet it couldn’t kill anything. Simple, humane, and very inexpensive.’

‘Are you always so worried for your enemies?’

‘Usually.’ The Gaffer’s voice was alive with amused cynicism. ‘It’s mainly our friends who tend to get hurt.’

Something in the Gaffer’s manner made Jo Jo feel suddenly afraid of the species who were so confident of their power to destroy that they could afford to show compassion for those who might destroy them. What the Terran had said about their friends was more difficult to understand.

With the handlamp it was easy to pick a more direct route through the columnar jungle and easy to avoid a colony of footburners, who scattered from the advancing light. The occasional snappers who rushed at them were almost casually turned by the Gaffer with his stick. Despite the Terran’s apparent assumption that traversing the noon gallery was no more than an interesting stroll, they reached the connecting tunnel in record time.

In the tunnel Jo Jo resumed his questions.

‘Gaffer, you came here to help us fight reptiles?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you help us?’

‘Firstly, because you’re a species so like Terran humanity that it’s impossible to believe we have not come from common stock - though we’ve no idea how this could be so. Secondly, although you are technically the dominant species on Tanic, an ecological imbalance has given crucial advantage to the reptiles. Either we help you, or we allow you to become extinct in a century or so. We hate species to become extinct - especially when they’re human like ourselves.’

‘But what you gain from helping us?’ Jo Jo still felt his earlier question was unanswered.

‘Gain?’ The question obviously took the Terran by surprise. ‘I don’t think we gain anything - except perhaps a mild feeling of satisfaction. But when you set that against the cost of an operation like this, it’s a pretty expensive way of gaining satisfaction.’

‘How expensive?’

‘All the wealth of all your elders and chiefs who have never lived couldn’t buy the power needed to drive one of our ships from Terra to Tanic.’

‘Ships? You have more than one, then?’

‘There are six in orbit around Tanic at the moment. The three survey ships will soon go home. The others, two supply ships and a cruiser, must wait for me.’

At the entrance to the second gallery they came across a scorpid. Sixteen incredibly agile legs, mandible that could break steel, and a mobile’s sting capable of dispatching a dozen men. It sat malignantly in their path, its eye stalks undeterred by the brightness of the handlamp.

Jo Jo found his mind suddenly crossed with a hint of heresy. Though he feared the scorpid, he was almost glad to see it contest the Terran for right of way. While he had a strong regard for the god who was becoming human, he was beginning also to develop a sense of affinity with the creatures of his own world - and a growing apprehension about the race who were so confident of themselves that they could afford to be kind to their enemies.

The scorpid was wary but unmoving. Not normally nocturnal in its habits, its eyes were equipped with irises well able to compensate for the brilliance of the handlamp. It reared up, its breath hissing through its terrible beak, its sting whipping the air with increasing agitation. The Gaffer stood stock still, regarding his pretentious foe with a look more of admiration than of concern.

‘Move along, old feller! I don’t want to hurt you, but I’ve a great respect for that sting of yours. Besides which, you’re standing in my way.’

Experimentally he pointed his stick at the scorpid’s head and moved forward. The long electric arc struck towards the scorpid’s eye stalks. The scorpid, reacting faster than they could follow, hurled itself in fury at the spike, tearing it from the Gaffer’s hand and severing the electrode with one single crush of its beak. Then it reared up, spitting fury, its legs clawing the air, preparing to launch itself at the handlamp and the quaking Jo Jo who held it.

There was a whip of leather as the Gaffer’s hand drew something from his belt. This was followed by a blaze of light and a rapid series of explosions which were so powerful and unexpected that Jo Jo was deafened and robbed of the power of speech for many seconds after. The scorpid literally exploded in front of them. Fragments of its flesh hit the tunnel at all angles and fell ridiculously back to the floor.

The Gaffer returned an instrument to his waist and turned to the shocked fire-boy, whose nerveless hands still held the lamp as though he were a wooden image.

‘Sorry, Jo Jo! I should have warned you. Not something I like doing, no indeed! A bit hard on the ears in a confined space like this.’

In Jo Jo’s shocked mind two points were paramount - the absolute decimation of the scorpid, and the facile reason for the Terran’s reluctance to use his fearful instrument. The latter factor was so greatly at variance with the Gaffer’s odd notions of humane defence that the fire-boy’s mind took an intuitive leap which brought him suddenly face to face with the terrible iron hand of Terra. For a moment the knowledge filled him with terror.

‘What did you use on the scorpid?’ he asked at last.

The Terran hand produced the instrument again.

‘Only an old-fashioned automatic pistol. Bit of a museum piece really but it has its uses.’

‘Is that what Terrans use kill animals?’ Jo Jo examined the blued-steel artifact without comprehension.

‘Not very often.’ The Gaffer was frowning as he returned the pistol to its holster. ‘More often they use it to kill each other.’

Jo Jo retreated into silence then. The Gaffer retrieved his stick and tested it. Although the end had been completely severed by the scorpid’s jaws, the metal core still obliged with its characteristic spark. They moved on into the crystal forest. Snapper and needle-ball scuttled hastily to either side, still apparently reacting from the shock of the firing of the Gaffer’s weapon. The occasional snappers who dared enter the forest to rush at their heels received a discouraging shock from the electric stick and fled on stumpy legs slapping their stumpy tails behind them.

In the bright illumination of the handlamp the razor bushes were even more marvellous than Jo Jo had supposed. Millions upon millions of crystal platelets shimmered on ranks of skeletal trees, moved by an unseen unfelt wind. The regular track, he soon discovered, was by no means the safest route to follow. The Gaffer pointed new ways through which a man could pass without fear of accidentally brushing against the barbarous blades. Jo Jo reflected that the Terran in months had gained a better knowledge of the noon caves than his own people had acquired in their entire history.

This prompted Jo Jo to consider his people’s place in the scheme of things. Certainly they were above the beasties, yet below the Terrans. The Terran was a humanitarian - providing it did not conflict with his own safety and convenience. But when something stood in his way he was terrible and ruthless. So how far up the scale did the Terran rate the natives of Tanic? If they displeased him, would he not be equally terrible with them? And, if he could command destruction on any scale, why did he not direct it against the reptiles if he was sincere in his intent to help?

‘Do your ships have rockets?’ asked Jo Jo suddenly.

‘Far more powerful weapons than rockets, I’m afraid.’

‘But no use against reptiles, eh?’

The Gaffer began to frown. ‘So many questions, Jo Jo. What’s bothering you?’

‘I was thinking that if you already had plenty rockets up there, why don’

you use them on the reptiles? Then we need no’ to have make-men-work in the chemical rooms in order to make our own.’

‘It’s not that easy, Jo Jo. I could win your war for you in a week. But I don’t dare do so.’

‘Why no’?’

‘Because for your own sakes you have to win it yourselves. I am already doing far more than I should.’

For a long time Jo Jo trudged in silence, trying to resolve the meaning of this curious phrase. Then: ‘I don’ understand tha’, Gaffer.’

‘No,’ said the Terran. ‘I scarcely expected that you would.’

Jo Jo seemed to lose interest then. He fell sullenly behind all the way down the descending passages which led to the air shaft. Only when the acrid vapours from the mixing rooms made the air sting their nostrils, did he speak again.

‘I still don’ see’ why we have let-men-kill themselves in there, when you could give us all the weapons we need.’

‘I could give you everything but self-respect,’ said the Gaffer quietly. That you can only give to yourselves. It isn’t the winning that counts. It’s the fighting that fits a species for survival. If I killed all the reptiles tomorrow, you don’t know how utterly it would destroy you also. There are far worse things to tear a man apart than the claws of a lizard.’

‘Like what, Gaffer?’

‘Like the spawn of the dragon, for instance,’ said the Terran, and refused to answer more.

When they reached the deposition cave the air was thick with smoke from the burning brands. So far the scorpid had been contained, but its growing desperation had lent it amazing turns of strength. Twice it had gained the tank rim and twice been forced back into the process liquor. Such was its frenzy that next time it reached the rim it would probably escape, despite the fire.

Swiftly the Gaffer summed up the situation, then seized a metal net on the end of a long pole, used for recovering fallen anode metal from the tank. Savagely he kicked a path through the fire ring and made his way through to stand on the vat surround. OrsOrs followed him, plainly perplexed by the Gaffer’s action. Realisation brought a sharp cry of alarm.

‘Don’ be dumbchild, Gaffer! You know wha’ tha’ devil capable of.’

The Terran did not answer. Thoughtfully he watched the scorpid orbit on the surface of the liquid. When he judged the time to be right, he struck. The net took the scorpid fairly, and lifted it from the tank. Somebody screamed. OrsOrs cursed and rushed for a machette. The Gaffer held the pole resolutely horizontal, apparently uncertain what to do with his prize now it had been gained.

The scorpid had its own ideas on the situation. With machinelike rapidity its jaws tore the metal net apart. Then, with an agile flick of its tail, it leaped up and grasped the pole. Without pause it twisted, and like a streak of fury it raced towards the Gaffer’s hands.

It did not complete its journey. A man’s pace away from the Gaffer both scorpid and pole were severed by one blow from OrsOrs’s descending knife. The bisected scorpid fell beside the vat, its muscles still moving but incapable of any action save that of dying. OrsOrs watched it warily for a long time, knife poised, as though he believed in resurrection. Then he straightened himself and turned to face the Gaffer. His brow was streaming with sweat.

‘That was very dumbchild thin’ you do, Gaffer. Not even fire-boy attemp’ catch scorpid in net.’

‘I did.’ The Terran remained unmoved. His eyes were watching OrsOrs closely.

‘Then you’re no’ afraid of death?’ OrsOrs was critical.

‘It was a calculated risk.’

‘If I had not been quick, it would have killed you.’

‘That was part of the calculation. Why did you ask me here, OrsOrs?’

‘To kill scorpid.’

‘Yet you have better skill with a knife. You’re more familiar with the ways of a scorpid. It’s your natural enemy.’

‘When I want light I call fire-boy. When somethin’ need liftin’ I call winchman.’

‘And when something has to be destroyed, you call a Terran - is that it, OrsOrs?’ The Gaffer was sternly questioning. ‘Is that how you think of us? As destroyers? As interstellar rat catchers and louse removers?’

‘I did no’ say tha’, Gaffer,’ OrsOrs protested.

‘But wasn’t that the way you thought about it?’

Machette in hand, OrsOrs drew himself up to his full height, towering above the Terran’s head. ‘No disrespect you, Gaffer, but I did expect you come with thunder and kill scorpid. Tha’ way is easy.’ His voice and tone were thick with the disrespect that his words claimed to negate.

‘Why?’ asked the Gaffer directly. ‘I could have done it, certainly, but I’m damned if I can see why you should expect it.’

‘Have you no’ proven to us tha’ whatever we can do, Terran can do better?’

The Gaffer blazed with sudden anger. ‘If that’s the lesson you’ve learned, then you’ve deceived yourselves. I came here to help you to stand on your own feet - not to have you ride on mine. I’ve better things to do with my life than to play wet nurse to a bunch of cravens.’

OrsOrs face clouded with wrath and disillusion. His machette hand moved involuntarily, almost as though it wished to cleave the Terran as it had the scorpid.

‘By the ghosts of ancestors! If you were no’ the Gaffer I would have killed you for far less an insul’.’

The Gaffer was unconcerned. ‘You might have tried, OrsOrs, but I don’t think you would have succeeded. Now get those mandrels back into the tank and the anodes reconnected. We need those projector tubes. The mixing rooms have already delivered the filled rockets, and we’re anxious to start testing.’

OrsOrs tried to contain his fury. ‘I know schedule, Gaffer. You don’

need give me detailed instruction - nor would I ask now even if I did need. I think we understand each other?’

‘I hope so.’ The Terran reclaimed his electric stick and carefully inspected his boots which had been overmuch exposed to the heat from the ring of flames. He stooped for his handlamp, then walked away into the tunnel’s entrance without a further word. Jo Jo followed him anxiously, uncertain which side of the schism his loyalties lay.

‘You want a guide, Gaffer?’

‘Thank you, Jo Jo, but I think I know the way.’

‘Then may I walk with you little?’

‘Be my guest.’ The Terran’s anger had subsided completely. Unexpectedly, he seemed to have come out of the encounter in remarkably good spirits.

‘May I ask question?’

‘You never stop asking, Jo Jo. But I’ll answer if I can.’

‘Why did you treat OrsOrs like tha’? Don’ you know he almost worships you?’

‘It was because of that I had to turn on him. I’ve already told you I’m no god. Neither you, OrsOrs, nor anybody must treat me as if I am. Whatever you can do, I can do. And the other way about. You can do whatever I can do -given a little time, a little patience, and a little learning. Only by seeming a little stupid could I make OrsOrs angry. And only when he was angry did he even try to match himself to me.’

‘But you risk your life. You could have kill tha’ scorpid as you did the other.’

‘How the scorpid died was unimportant. What mattered was breaking OrsOrs’s dependence on me. Unless I can do that, it would be better if I hadn’t come.’

‘You mean better had you left us be eaten by reptiles?’ Jo Jo was incredulous.

‘As I have said, Jo Jo, there are worse fates than being eaten by reptiles.’

‘I think I shall never understand the Terran mind,’ said Jo Jo.

‘Then I’ll let you into a secret. There’s no difference between a Terran mind and yours, except that our expertise in death has forced us to acquire a somewhat painful sort of maturity.’

The assembly and testing of the first projector was carried out in one of the smaller noon caves which had been specially cleared for the purpose. At one end the cave narrowed to a horizontal shaft, which widened suddenly into daylight and ended at a ledge some thirty metres above the valley floor.

In all directions the high, purpled crags of the mountains rose up to enclose the valley within a bowl, with here and there a pass or fault giving tantalising glimpses of the wild vistas beyond. The floor of the valley was clothed with a thick forest of vegetation and sprinkled with the tracery of many rills and streams fed from the ice-capped heights. At the lowest point, a great yellow river moved sluggishly against the intrusions of the palmaceous weed which threatened to choke it into a swamp.

It was to this river and to the many others like it that the reptiles came to breed and to drench away their flaking scales. Their domain was centred on the watercourses and on the ecologically rich pastures which lay above the forest and below the sterile peaks. From his aerial surveys the Gaffer probably knew more of the local scene and topography than did any of Tanic’s natives. His cameras and telescopes had pried into territory undisputedly the province of the reptilian kingship. He knew each reptile nest and breeding place on the river. He even knew where one of the old, forgotten cities of Tanic still protruded its ruins through the clay waters of the river’s course. Thus he alone could accurately measure the regression of Tanic humanity and the growing dominance of the reptile form.

From the ledge, even by eye, they could see a pack of hunting reptilian heads. The creatures were walking erect on two feet and a tail, their long necks probing over the vegetable screens searching for sight of prey. Their size and apparent ungainliness were deceptive. When running on all four limbs, a mature reptile could attain speeds of sixty kilometres an hour. Their jaws could cut a man in half with one bite.

The Terran was strangely silent. Through his powerful lenses he viewed an unknown yet familiar scene. Unlike his aerial survey pictures, his present position, barely above the tree ferns and cycads, gave him a sudden sense of perspective and presence. With very little imagination he might have been looking at Earth in Jurassic times. The hunting reptiles were disturbingly reminiscent of the Terran brontosaurus, except that they were fully carnivorous, had the teeth of tyrannosaurus, and a brain cavity approaching that of man himself.

Perhaps for the first time since the exploit had begun, the Gaffer began to feel afraid. The creatures before him belonged to an era predating the evolution of mammals on Terra. His own stance placed him at variance with his environment by about two hundred million terrayears, and the natives of Tanic who pressed his shoulder were scarcely far behind him. It was they, perhaps, who had developed aeons before their time - or was it homo sapiens who had been a late developer in the inexorable march of life from the primeval sea to some unknown mammalian evolutionary end?

From this consideration stemmed the Gaffer’s unshown but almost reverent respect for OrsOrs and his people. With a culture almost ten times as old as Terra’s they had missed the accident of the invention of the wheel, yet still progressed into a mature electrochemical-based civilization despite the fantastic odds of a gross ecological imbalance. The Gaffer was painfully aware that his own technological intervention must cause a radical change in the future development of the entire planet. It was a situation he did not relish, and one which tormented his imagination with possible end points he could never hope to see. His role was purely that of a catalyst in a potent evolutionary reaction.

He turned back to where the rocket projector tube was receiving a loving final polish from the men who made it. Despite the dimensional accuracy inherent in the electro-forming technique, he had spent the night gauging it, uncomfortably aware of the dangers of being a one-man arsenal and armaments instructor. True to form, he had found the critical dimensions of the tube accurate to within several millionths of a centimetre, despite the apparent crudeness of the conditions under which it was made. These tolerances were well beyond the accuracy necessary for the job, and he knew that Tanic’s own rough metrology would suffice when it came to the job of replication without Terran supervision.

The rockets themselves had been completed previously, but not test fired. He took one, fitted it into the projector tube, and returned to the ledge overlooking the valley. With a mixture of fear and anticipation, the Tanic warriors and OrsOrs’s technicians followed him at a safe distance. The Gaffer hoisted the heavy projector over his shoulder and warned those behind to stay well clear of the rocket exhaust. He sighted on a standing shard of granite-like rock, and with a half prayer, pressed the trigger.

An unexpected recoil pressure threw him off balance and warned him of a miscalculation of propellant charge. The rocket, tail spiraling as it carved its way through the still air, passed over the rock shard and continued for another kilometre before it plunged into a rocky grotto.

The impact explosion was gratifying in its effect. Literally tons of rock and detritus were lifted into the air, fragmenting and scattering over a considerable area. Fern trees and cycads were uprooted, snapped and broken. The noise of the explosion split the air like thunder and rolled and echoed many times among the startled mountains. Afterwards the rent earth showed a great bruised scar where Tanic’s first missile had landed.

It was the Gaffer’s conservative estimate that both the propellant and the explosive charge had been at least three times as potent as the modest weapon he had set out to build. He looked back to OrsOrs to see his reaction, and was met by a look of shocked incredulity.

‘What’s the matter, OrsOrs? Wasn’t that what you wanted to see?’

‘Nothin’ like tha’! There should never be anythin’ as fearful as tha’. Suddenly I feel almos’ sorry for devil-reptile ...’

OrsOrs rubbed his ears, still hurting from the unaccustomed shock. He shook his head and turned away in the manner of one who is aware that a page of history is turning under his feet yet can not move nimbly enough to avoid being crushed between the leaves. His companions held no such reservations. Whooping with joy, some were busily swarming down the climbing ropes on the cliff face, running to see the crater. Others were inspecting the projector, marvelling that it had not itself been destroyed in the process. A few, like Jo Jo, clustered with many questions around the Gaffer, like children round a father whom they are still naive enough to believe omnipotent.

Soon the ones who had run out into the valley came running back. There was fear in their shouting voices: ‘Reptiles - see! Reptiles come!’

They bunched in panic at the foot of the cliff, fighting for a place on the climbing ropes. Behind them, reptilian movements in the dense green jungle spoke of a hunting pack scenting man-meat and hungry for a killing. Then disaster struck. A climbing rope, overtaxed with the stress of half a dozen climbing men, snapped near the top. It shed its burden on to the clustered group below. In the midst of the shouting and the screaming one further voice broke the panic into a death-quiet reality.

‘Reptile near! Reptile near!’

Instantly the Gaffer had the projector on his knee, clearing to reload. He had intended to dismantle and inspect for damage prior to re-firing, but the present emergency forced him to take a chance. From the edge of the forest no less than three reptiles broke cover. To judge by the tumult in the brush, at least three more were heading in their direction.

Swiftly the Gaffer hoisted the projector over his shoulder, took careful aim, and fired. Again the rocket went too high and too far, missing the first two creatures completely. By sheer off chance it plunged towards the third. The explosion ripped the reptile to shreds and hurled fragments of carcass back to the very edges of the forest fronds.

The Gaffer reloaded and considered his tactics. With such a widely erroneous instrument he could scarcely hope for this luck to continue. Far better to try to frighten away the two attackers who were still in the field. He aimed deliberately very short of his target in the hope of creating a crater and a blast area which would turn the creatures from their paths.

The projectile fell approximately where he had planned. In the meantime the two reptiles, running parallel, had increased their speed to escape whatever fate had engulfed their rear mate. They topped a slight rise just as the rocket exploded in the hollow before them. Although neither could have been materially hurt by the blast, both must have been affected by concussive shock. They fell against one another while still running, and toppled into the crater. Maintaining his range, the Gaffer managed to put a second rocket on top of them for good measure.

But this was no moment for respite. The knot of injured men at the cliff-foot still remained, despite several relief ropes which had been thrown down to them. Two other reptiles had broken cover and were apparently estimating the carnage of their kind before proceeding. Such was the magnitude of the reptile brain that they established, quite rightly, that the danger lay directly to the front. To avoid this they made first for the cliff edge well to one side, and began a wary sortie under the shelter of the rocky overhang. Attracted by spilled blood, several great toothed-birds took to the air on pteranodon wings, and patrolled the battle area waiting for a chance to settle in the injured.

The Gaffer swore. He had no chance even to see the reptiles advancing under the ledge, let alone destroy them. It was only a matter of time before they reached the group of men trapped at the cliff-foot. With quick decision, he shouted for OrsOrs.

‘Lower me down with the projector and some rockets. I have to get below the ledge to get at them.’

OrsOrs, who had already given the majority of his fallen comrades up for lost, looked at him dubiously. ‘Too late, Gaffer.’

‘Not if you hurry. Get some men here fast.’

‘No!’ OrsOrs stood squarely in his way. ‘Nobody goes down now. Risk too great. Especially we can’ risk you.’

‘Then stand out of my way!’

Angrily he thrust past OrsOrs to the warrior group at the edge of the cliff drop. Jo Jo and some of his associates ran to help. Within a minute, with the projector and six rockets roped to his body, the Gaffer was being lowered through space to the rocky floor.

Almost immediately he regretted the decision. As he spun helplessly on the descending thread the dark shadow of huge leathern wings closed the sunlight from him. An aerial bulk comparable in size with a small airplane screeched across the face of the cliff, creating a draught that swung him and his high-explosive load dangerously close to the rock walls.

Fortunately he was too close against the wall for the avian creature to try to seize him in flight. Below him he could hear quite plainly the blood-cry of the attacking reptiles making slow progress along the broken territory footing the cliff. Then his feet touched the ground. Knife ready, he slashed the yoke which had carried him, and freed his weapon for action. He had scarcely primed and loaded when a reptile broke round the edge of a bluff and came at him full charge. Without the luxury of sighting, the Gaffer swung the projector in the general direction and squeezed the firing trigger. Nothing happened.

Although the firing mechanism tripped, the rocket remained inert. In an instant of panic the Gaffer observed the charging reptile and searched frantically for a way of escape into or back up the cliff. There was none. Savagely he shook the reject rocket from the firing chamber and rammed another one in. By now he was working at point-blank range, and was as much in danger from the blast of his own fire as he was from the reptile’s jaws. He fired at the thundering bulk which seemed almost upon him, then flung himself face down and waited for whatever fate would do to him.

Fortunately the major force of the explosion was taken by six tons of decimating reptile. Even so, the shock was severe enough to concuss him for several minutes. When he was fully conscious he found he was bleeding freely from a scalp wound and had over a dozen cuts and abrasions. Nevertheless he counted himself lucky.

A sudden eclipse of the sun reminded him that the battle was not yet over. Scrambling hastily to his feet he drew the pistol from his hip as the huge, winged creature dropped low over him with all the finesse of a crashing helicopter.

Nerved now to the prehistoric terrors which the day contained, he put two shots into the flying nightmare at places where logic suggested the wing muscles ought to be. The fantastic cry of pain which this act produced was something he knew he would carry to his grave. The creature slipped sideways to the ground in a mortally, horrifying crash landing. Then, with a frightening movement consisting of claw-hops assisted by beats with broken leathern wings, the frantic wounded creature rushed at him, its beak lined with sharp, yellowed teeth. He let it come to within six-paces before one further shot shattered its cranial cavity. The creature flopped to a reluctant death amid the fragments of the shattered reptile.

A noise behind him on the rock face made him wheel in sudden alarm. It was OrsOrs at the bottom of a rope, with a dozen warriors armed with machettes following him. OrsOrs surveyed the carnage uncomprehendingly at first, then his face became crossed with a sardonic smile.

‘Not bad morning’s work, even for Terran, I would imagine.’

The Gaffer smiled wanly. ‘What happened to the other one? There were two under the cliff when I came down.’

OrsOrs shrugged. ‘I expect he knew the Terran killer here. He stand off until res’ of pack catch up. I know you’ve kill five times as many creatures in hour as mos’ men in lifetime, but I still can’ advise you fight full pack from the ground.’

‘How are the men who fell?’

‘Mos’ recovered to cave, thanks to you. Two are dead, but the survivors will want to thank you for themselves. I’ve no doubt the Council of Elders will also be wantin’ feast your name this evenin’. So much bloodshed needs rewardin’.’

‘You sound bitter, OrsOrs. Don’t you want the reptiles killed?’

‘If I had several lives, I’d give them all win tha’ fight. Don’ think I don’

appreciate what you doin’. There would have been twenty widows tonight had you no’ risked your life stop tha’ reptile.’

‘Then what’s your objection?’

‘I seen nearly whole generation slaughtered by no more reptiles than you kill today. Tha’ generation die because we no’ able do what you do usin’

our materials and our techniques. My objection no’ to what you do, but the fact you seem to do it all too easy.’

* * * *

It was several weeks later that the Gaffer found a sheet of Tanic bark paper on his desk in the annex when he came down in the morning. He was quite certain it had not been there the previous evening. He turned it over, not really expecting that he would find a message on it. He found a scrawl in Tanic formal script which he had difficulty in deciphering.

Gaffer

I shout you danger tall as biggest mountain. I cannot spell lest others come and read - which would stir gigantic beasts of trouble. Tomorrow I must tell you anything of help.

There was a hiatus here, as though the writer realised that to identify himself could lead to detection. Instead of a signature, a further phrase was penned at the bottom of the sheets:

I know dragons spawn.

The latter phrase brought a smile of cryptic amusement to the Gaffer’s lips. He transmitted a microstat of the document to the computer files, then dropped the original into the disposal unit. Shrugging his shoulders, he sought his boots, handlamp, and electric stick, and set out for the deposition caves.

The past few weeks had been fruitful. OrsOrs had demonstrated his ability to control the manufacture of both projectors and rockets, and seven Tanic warriors had been trained to use them. The crude effectiveness of the weapons had been demonstrated many times, and the sheer coverage of the blast pattern more than compensated for their inaccuracy when used against such large targets as the reptiles.

The Gaffer’s latest task had been to encourage OrsOrs to divide his chemical and mixing rooms into small, well separated units, so that an accident in one would not destroy the whole facility. He had thus provided, at least in theory, for the continuity of his efforts in Tanic hands. Having been given the weapon and an understanding of its principles and potential, it was essential that the people of Tanic now accept the responsibility for its development and use. It was time for the Gaffer to pull out. One day the weapon was going to be used against men instead of reptiles, and, Terra already had too much blood on its conscience.

With this thought in mind, the Gaffer traversed the noon caves. The galleries were relatively empty of beasties at this hour, since the outer darkness was only just lifting and the nocturnal residents were still braving the rising tides of dawn.

On the lower levels all the activity was human. The chemical and mixing rooms were draughting acrid fumes into the corridors, and pallid-faced men were appearing at the entrances like swimmers surfacing for air. The men in the deposition caves were working furiously. Two more vats were being commissioned for the electro-deposition of rocket cases, and one more dedicated to the forming of trigger mechanisms and fuse components.

The Gaffer searched for a long time before locating Jo Jo in the battery cave. The fire-boy was replenishing the torches over the cable run which carried the power to the deposition shop. Here over six hundred giant batteries, each one a chemical primary cell over two men’s length in diameter and ten men deep, contributed their current to the giant acid-vat accumulators. From the accumulators the stored and balanced power was distributed via the giant cables to the deposition vats which lay in the several caves beyond.

The battery cave was the oldest installation which Tank knew - so old that nobody could tell who had dug and lined the wells or first designed the system. It was said that some of the cells had been in operation for two thousand years or more, unchanged save for the yearly dig-out and re-furbishing. Only the cables, thick, random black snakes across the floor of the cable run, needed renewal and constant attention. It was necessary frequently to inspect their cracking hides and correct the slow but inexorable deformation of the bitumen insulators, which unchecked would allow the conductors to meet and result in a catastrophic short circuit.

The Gaffer appeared not to notice Jo Jo. Both waited until they could come together unobserved before they spoke.

‘You got my message, Gaffer?’

‘I did. Why all the mystery?’

‘The elders held council yesterday. OrsOrs was there speaking against you violently. He thinks your influence is going destroy us.’

‘He’s probably right - it would, if I stayed. Fortunately in a day or two I shall be leaving for Terra.’

‘They won’t allow i’. If you leave you will become a legend - something which grows on re-telling to children. They want prove you are no more near a god than any other man on Tanic.’

‘That’s an easy thing to want, but a difficult thing to do.’

‘Nothing makes more even than blow from long knife.’

‘I see!’ The Gaffer was speculative for a moment or so. ‘Do you know who is going to do this, and when?’

‘OrsOrs. He will ask to take you to our sacred place. All grea’ things on Tanic end there.’

‘How do you know this, Jo Jo?’

‘I am fire-boy for council chamber. I was there.’

‘Then it’s privileged information. What will the council do to you if they find out what you’ve told me?’

‘I would be sent out of the caves into the valley.’

‘Death by reptile, eh? Very well, Jo Jo, knowing this, why did you risk telling me?’

‘Because I can’ agree with i’. The only thing you have done to us is give us a future. Tha’s why you must no’ go with OrsOrs. And-’

‘And what, Jo Jo?’

Jo Jo told him what was on his mind. The Gaffer was silent for a long time afterwards. Then: ‘If I can arrange that, can I count on your help when the time comes - no matter what I ask?’

‘No matter wha’, Gaffer.’

‘Very well! Say nothing of this to anyone. I will tell you what I want you to do.’

‘Do you need do anythin’? Can’t you just go tonight?’

‘I could, but it would solve nothing. You see, basically, OrsOrs is right. So we are going to prove his point for him - but in a way he won’t quite be expecting.’

But even then it seemed as if Jo Jo might be wrong. Two weeks passed without incident, and OrsOrs, though taciturn, was in no way actively hostile. Then came the day of farewell, the day on which council elders received the Gaffer and showered him with gifts and wishes for his future, and the day many of his friends were in tears at the thought of parting. Late that day OrsOrs approached him.

‘Before you leave us, Gaffer, there somethin’ I would like show you something may help you understand us better.’

‘If you say so, I should be delighted to come.’ The Gaffer looked at his watch. ‘But it is getting late and there will not be much time left after. Before I come I must say a few more good-byes. If you can meet me by the air shaft in an hour, I shall be pleased to come then.’

OrsOrs nodded his assent, and parted. The Gaffer moved swiftly, and within the hour he had made his preparations and was back to meet OrsOrs waiting at the air shaft. OrsOrs was silent as he led the way through the almost unused south caves to a point where a sudden turn of rock concealed a door.

‘This is place I wanted show you,’ said OrsOrs. ‘Mos’ men come here only once in lifetime, as part of the ceremony admitting their manhood. Rememberin’ wha’ i’ means to us, I ask you treat i’ as temple.’

‘And refrain from acts of destruction, eh?’ The Terran was cynically amused.

‘Your phrase, no’ mine.’ OrsOrs avoided his eyes. ‘I merely ask you treat i’ reverently. For instance, no’ bear arms in these walls.’

‘I wonder you bother to bring me here if you think me such a barbarian.’

‘You have earned the right come here. Your innovations have given new meanings to our old crafts. You have shown us how make rockets which can kill reptiles, so tha’ we can kill all on Tanic. In fac’, nothin’ after your comin’ can ever be a same again. Your ideas have taken over our history.’

‘I was aware of that danger. It’s the reason I kept my intervention to a minimum.’

‘But you didn’ succeed in I’. The old values are crumblin’ - replaced by nothin’ but uncertainty.’

‘Would you have preferred that I hadn’t come?’

‘Your comin’ was necessary for our survival. But i’s mixed blessing. Before you go I wan’ you also see wha’ you’ve destroyed.’

Instead of querying the accusation, the Gaffer compressed his lips. He undid the broad belt at his waist and allowed it to drop its burden of weaponry to the floor. They entered a foyer where OrsOrs went through a dumb symbolistic ritual with two guardians before they were permitted farther. Then great ornate doors were opened and they were allowed into the gallery beyond.

Here the Gaffer stopped in sudden wonder. In his experience Tanic had essentially a utilitarian culture. Save for the chiefs and some of the prime elders, few possessed articles of great intrinsic value. The concept of riches was virtually unknown, and the most valuable items were invariably the most useful or the most necessary for survival. In this cave, however, lay a true concentration of valuable and artistic artifacts which would have been unique even upon Terra.

The gallery was rare in having a smooth wall structure, and its decoration was fabulously rich and ornate. Its walls were entirely covered with a random lace of metal veins which had obviously been formed in situ, since it followed and emphasised the polished marvels of the rock structure. Even the roof, lit by probably five hundred torches, carried the tender tracery across the vaulted heights to meet and blend with that from the far side. Elaborate canopies, the detailed metalwork of which would have defied Terran sources to duplicate, protected the onlooker from burning oil drips from the high flames. But it was in the alcoves themselves that the true wonders began.

The chalices, trays, furniture, weapons and works of pure art, fabricated in a dozen different metals, were supreme examples of the electroformers art. Almost all were incapable of being reproduced by any of the more conventional techniques of manufacture. Locked solidly into the metal matrices, mineral crystals and precious stones lay in entrapped harmony with their settings in a way which appeared so supremely natural that all other art forms would have seemed contrived and artificial when set beside them. As works of craftmanship, each exhibit could have made its possessor a wealthy man on any home-world. As works of art, they were completely beyond any scale of price.

Dazed by the magnificence of such form and artistry, the Gaffer followed OrsOrs, alcove by alcove, along what appeared to be a descending chronological sequence of exhibits. OrsOrs offered no comment, but waited patiently while the Gaffer absorbed the miracles of one collection before proceeding to the next. In this way they covered the whole cave area. Near the end of the sequence most pretences to artistry had gone. The utilitarian aspect of pots and platters, many somewhat misshapen, was predominant.

The last exhibit was a simple copper bowl.

‘Do you realise wha’ you’ve seen, Gaffer?’

‘I think so, OrsOrs. The history of Tanic in terms of its achievements in the forming of metal.’

‘Then let me add time scale. Tha’ copper bowl is ten times as old as earliest stone-age fragmen’ found on Terra.’

‘It makes me feel humble.’

‘Nowhere near humble as you make us feel. Before you came we believed in ourselves, Gaffer. We kept this museum as record of our doings. Each generation came here to measure themselves up to their forefathers and aim little higher. Think what mockery tha’s become now. The new generations will want only measure up to omnipoten’ Terran.’

‘I’m sorry, OrsOrs. You don’t know how much I’ve tried not to overwhelm you with Terran technology.’

‘By which you made things damnsight worse!’

‘I don’t follow your reasoning.’

OrsOrs looked away. His face was nearly impassive, yet his lips trembled with emotion. ‘If you’d cast no reflection on us. If you’d been a god, we could have accepted what you’ve done. If you’d come with army, we could have told ourselves that our savin’ was due to greater weight of fight. If you’d confused us with science, we’d have been amazed but grateful. But your comin’ here alone gives us no excuse. Tha’s a spiteful arrogance we can’ forgive.’

‘Arrogance?’ The Gaffer was genuinely surprised.

‘ Wha’ else you call i’? One man comes, and by showin’ how use our tools in new way, turns battle that had brought us the edge of extinction. Because Terrans are so arrogantly sure of themselves that one man and a tool kit is all is necessary for salvation of Tanic. Am I right?’

‘You’re not right, OrsOrs. We know from experience that when a relatively undeveloped culture is forced into close contact with a technically advanced one, the lesser one is almost invariably destroyed. To stop that happening to you I had to come alone. I had to do everything by means of word and example, man to man. I had to interfere with your history without setting myself up as a deity. That took a bit of doing, OrsOrs. Even you tended to lean on me.’

‘Because you prove to us how dumbchild we were. Your trouble, Gaffer, you can’ even see yourself as we see you. You so confident you don’ even need the luxury of seemin’ superior. Have you any idea wha’ tha’

doin’ to us?’

‘I have a very good idea. That’s why I’m leaving you now. Given a few years you’ll have forgotten me.’

‘You don’ know your influence. You leave now, your name grow with the blood of every reptile we kill. Like or not, you already out-tower our gods. In a generation you will be our god, an’ people in trouble will pray for the Gaffer to come again. The only thing can save our way of livin’ is prove you are very much a man.’

‘And how do you propose to do that?’

‘I mus’ kill you, of course.’

OrsOrs turned suddenly, the machette concealed in a corner appearing abruptly in his hand as if it possessed a life of its own. ‘I’m sorry about this, Gaffer. But you see why has to be done.’

‘You’re not half as sorry as you’ll be if you try it.’

OrsOrs advanced, the long knife carving patterns of reflected light around him.

‘Isn’ this the lesson you wanted us learn - do as Terrans do? Kill for pleasure? Kill for expediency and principle - not jus’ for necessity?’

‘I warn you, OrsOrs, don’t try it. There’s another way out of this.’

‘Another Terran way?’ OrsOrs spat. ‘No! This is time do something Tanic way.’

He raised the knife and prepared to strike, but his attention was diverted by an unusual movement of the Gaffer’s wrist. Something appeared in the Terran’s fingers - a small capsule. Before OrsOrs could identify his danger a cloud of choking vapour hit his face. His eyes were blinded by a hail of stinging droplets which brought him excruciating pain. Through an anguished haze he still tried to hack at the Terran form, but the Gaffer had deftly slipped from his position. OrsOrs’ descending knife hit some unseen edge of rock, and the shock drove it from his fingers.

The Terran finished the fight with a deft blow of his hand on the back of his opponent’s neck. OrsOrs fell unconscious to the floor, his face a mask of pain and surprise even though his mind no longer registered emotions. The Gaffer straightened and looked round.

‘Jo Jo,’ he said softly, ‘where the devil are you?’

‘Here!’ Jo Jo emerged from behind a canopy support where he had been hiding.

‘Is everything all right?’ The Gaffer noted the troubled look on the boy’s face.

‘I had trouble gettin’ past guardians. One went down when I hit him, but other I had to beat many times before he fall. He bleeds quite a lot.’

‘You’ll learn to do it tidily in time. You’ve got the bags?’

‘Four, as you said,’ Jo Jo threw some soft bundles on to the floor.

‘Will be enough?’

‘Enough for us to carry. Take two and fill them with the best small items from the other side - especially the ones with jewel inlay. I’ll take this side. Work towards the door. Now hurry, or we could get caught.’

For a second Jo Jo looked into the Gaffer’s face with grave speculation, then he turned and began filling the bags with items from the collection with a rapidity that outstripped his mentor. The Gaffer was more selective. He chose his pieces in strict chronological order and ended with a simple copper bowl. They met again at the doorway. As Jo Jo had said, the guardian was indeed bleeding heavily.

‘Where’s the handlamp?’

‘In the crevice to the lef.’

‘Good! I have it. Now we have to leave fast.’

‘Suppose they follow us?’

‘I’m prepared for that. I have some small explosive charges. If necessary we can create a rockfall behind us. Once we get to the ship we’ll be safe.’

The Gaffer retrieved his weapon belt and they began to run the ascending passages, moving awkwardly because of the weight of the bags. As the incline lessened the Gaffer stopped occasionally and looked round. At first there were no sounds of pursuit, and only their own heavy breathing spoiled the silence. Then came a faint noise of many voices shouting, and a rising clamour in the farther tunnels.

The Gaffer caught at Jo Jo’s arm. ‘We seem to have been

discovered.’ He began to study the rock formation of the tunnel, and retreated a short distance before taking the metal cylinders from his belt.

‘Go ahead, Jo Jo, past the next bend. Take the lamp and wait for me there.’

With rising apprehension, Jo Jo did as he was bid. Shortly he was rejoined by the Gaffer, who motioned that they must run swiftly. Then had not gone far before a great explosion rocked the ground around them. A wave of sound and pressure engulfed them and forced them onwards along the path. On all sides the walls and roof seemed to vibrate and resonate with a heavy internal thunder, and large pieces of rock fragmented from the walls and split from the roof. Behind them the cavernous shock of a major rockfall continued its echoes, and certified that the route was closed behind them.

Neither of them spoke, each being too full of his own thoughts and too intent on safely negotiating the difficult paths ahead. With their new knowledge of the noon caves, they passed swiftly through what had previously been a trail, and even the beasties seemed to sense their urgency and their desperation and stayed well clear. Then, after what seemed to be an eternity of running, the welcome yellow light of the Gaffer’s annex showed through the disturbed darkness. Thankfully they flung themselves across the corrugations of the entrance grid and dropped their precious bags inside.

The Gaffer closed the door and did something to the walls which made them hum. Shortly the door opened again of its own accord. Instead of opening into noon-cave darkness, it opened to glazed sunlight. Jo Jo realised with something of a shock that they had been transported from deep in the ground to the top of the beautiful tower which the gaffer called his ship.

The Gaffer pointed out a soft pallet on which the boy might lie, and Jo Jo thankfully sank to rest.

‘Are we safe now, Gaffer?’ He was still worried by the proximity of the noon caves beneath.

‘Quite safe, Jo Jo. As soon as the computers have found us an orbit we’ll be leaving.’ With quiet assurance the Terran busied himself with his instruments. Jo Jo watched him interestedly for a while, then caught up with the significance of the rendezvous with the ships waiting above.

‘Are you sure it will be right for me come with you?’

‘Of course. They’ll send you to school for a while, so that you can learn to live as Terrans do. Then you’ll be free to try for whatever kind of life you wish.’

‘I want be what you are.’

‘It’s a thankless task, Jo Jo. You finish up making enemies even of your friends. When you wield the big stick of Terran technology, you’re riding a pretty potent weapon. You have to develop a sense of responsibility which extends way beyond yourself. You have to do things that you know are wrong in order to make things go right.’

‘Like stealing Tanic sacred things to make them hate you?’

‘Just that. They had to hate me, because in hating me was the only way I could stop them despising themselves. They had to come to despise the Terran image. Otherwise contact with me would have damaged them far more than the reptiles could ever hope to do.’

‘You think you made success?’

‘For a couple of generations, yes. Unfortunately it’s only a palliative. Once they get on top of the reptiles they’ll start to look closely at the weapons and process I left. That exercise will lead them into the scientific method, and from there ten generations or less should get them into space. But the important thing is that they’ll have done it themselves. But it won’t alter the final endpoint. By the time we meet them in space their culture will be virtually indistinguishable from our own. It all becomes so inevitable. That’s the kind of dragon spawn a Terran sows whenever he meets another culture in space.’

Somewhere on the ship a two-note gong was sounding. The Terran went back to his controls and started to key instructions for the ship computer. Glancing out of the window screens he smiled wanly and beckoned to Jo Jo.

‘You see what I mean. OrsOrs’s comrades trying to bring a rocket projector to bear on us. Probably the first time on Tanic that a group of men have co-operated in the attempted destruction of others. Yet in Terran terms it’s the most logical thing to do. Already the dragon spawn begins to ripen. It should only take them about fifty years to get round to their first major war. As I said, there are worse things to tear a man apart than the claws of a lizard - and contact with Terra before a race is ready for it is about the very worst I know.’

A second alarm sounded, mote urgent than the first. The Gaffer secured Jo Jo on his hydraulic pallet, then ran to his own. Slowly the chemical drive came in, building up an incredible intensity of sound and pressures. Majestically the beautiful tower which had been the Gaffer’s home lifted skyward, bearing a startled Jo Jo on the first leg of a fantastic journey which was, in reality, only an acceleration of an already established trend which one day the rest of his race would follow.

Below them another missile, fired by Tanic hands, smashed their erstwhile launching-pit to dust, as the spawn of the dragon ripened in the rays of the Tanic sun.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

ARTHUR C CLARKE: Transit of Earth

Like Colin Kapp, Arthur Clarke is a great exponent of the scientific problem yarn. He is not adverse to attempting the impossible - such as the scene in 2001 where his protagonist finds he has to cross from the capsule to the Mother Ship without a space helmet. That episode, in fact, formed the bulk of his short story Take a Deep Breath (1957). Other such problems occur in his recent award-winning novel Rendezvous With Rama. Since then Clarke has completed his ‘big’ VEL; Imperial Earth, a project on which he was involved for some twenty years!

In the meantime we can content ourselves with the second Clarke selection in this anthology (the first, Jupiter V may be found in Volume One). Since the mid-1960s most of Clarke’s short fiction has appeared outside the regular sf market, notably in the far better-paying Playboy, which published this current story, Transit of Earth, one of Clarke’s own favourites. Here the protagonist faces a really insoluble problem, and accepts that fact. The story echoes all the skill associated with Clarke when weaving an emotional network, and the ending is an inevitable yet as unpredictable as anyone could wish.

* * * *

TRANSIT OF EARTH

Arthur C Clarke

TESTING, one, two, three, four, five.... Evans speaking. I will continue to record as long as possible. This is a two-hour capsule, but I doubt if I’ll fill it.

* * * *

That photograph has haunted me all my life; now, too late, I know why. (But would it have made any difference if I had known? That’s one of those m eaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.)

I’ve not seen it for years, but I’ve only to close my eyes and I’m back in a landscape almost as hostile --and as beautiful --as this one. Fifty million miles sunward, and 72 years in the past, five men face the camera amid the antarctic snows. Not even the bulky furs can hide the exhaustion and defeat that mark every line of their bodies; and their faces already touched by death. There were five of them.

There were five of us, and of course, we also took a group photograph. But everything else was different. We were smiling --cheerful, confident. And our picture was on all the screens of Earth within ten minutes. It was months before their camera was found and brought back to civilization. And we die in comfort, with all modern conveniences --including many that Robert Falcon Scott could never have imagined when he stood at the South Pole in 1912.

* * * *

Two hours later, I’ll start giving exact times when it becomes important. All the facts are on the log, and by now the whole world knows them. So I guess I’m doing this largely to settle my mind --to talk myself into facing the inevitable. The trouble is, I’m not sure what subjects to avoid, an which to tackle head on. Well, there’s only one way to find out.

The first item. In 24 hours, at the very most, all the oxygen will be gone. That leaves me with the three classical choices. I can let the C02 build up until I become unconscious. I can step outside and crack the suit, leaving Mars to do the job in about two minutes. Or I can use one of the tablets in the med kit.

C02 build-up. Everyone says that’s quite easy --just like going to sleep. I’ve no doubt that’s true; unfortunately, in my case it’s associated with nightmare number one...

I wish I’d never come across that damn book...”True Stories of World War Two,” or whatever it was called.

There was one chapter about a German submarine, found and salvaged after the War. The crew was still inside it --two men per bunk. And between each pair of skeletons, the single respirator set they’d been sharing. Well, at least that won’t happen here. But I know, with a deadly certainty, that as soon as I find it hard to breathe, I’ll be back in that doomed U-boat. So what about the quicker way? When you’re exposed to a vacuum, you’re unconscious in ten or fifteen seconds, and people who’ve been through it say it’s not painful --just peculiar. But trying to breathe something that isn’t there brings me altogether too nearly to nightmare number two. This time, it’s a personal experience. As a kid, I used to do a lot of skindiving when my family went to the Caribbean for vacations. There was an old freighter that had sunk 20 years before, out on a reef with its deck only a couple of yards below the surface. Most of the hatches were open, so it was easy to get inside to look for souvenirs and hunt the big fish that like to shelter in such places.

Of course, it was dangerous --if you did it without scuba gear. So what boy could resist the challenge?

My favorite rout involved diving into a hatch on the foredeck, swimming about 50 feet along a passageway dimly lit by portholes a few yards apart, then angling up a short flight of stairs and emerging through a door in the battered superstructure. The whole trip took less than a minute --an easy dive for anyone in good condition. There was even time to do some sight-seeing or to play with a few fish along the route. And sometimes, for a change, I’d switch directions, going in the door and coming out again through the hatch.

That was the way I did it the last time. I hadn’t dived for a week --there had been a big storm and the sea was too rough --so I was impatient to get going. I deep-breathed on the surface for about two minutes, until I felt the tingling in my finger tips that told me it was time to stop. Then I jacknifed and slid gently down toward the black rectangle of the open doorway. It always looked ominous and menacing --that was part of the thrill. And for the first few yards, I was almost completely blind; the contrast between the tropical glare above water and the gloom between decks was so great that it took quite a while for my eyes to adjust. Usually, I was halfway along the corridor before I could see anything clearly; then the illumination would steadily increase as I approached the open hatch, where a shaft of sunlight would paint a dazzling rectangle on the rusty, barnacled metal floor. I’d almost made it when I realized that this time, the light wasn’t getting better. There was no slanting column of sunlight ahead of me, leading up to the world of air and life. I had a second of baffled confusion, wondering if I’d lost my way. Then I realized what had happened --and confusion turned to sheer panic. Sometime during the storm, the hatch must have slammed shut. It weighed at least a quarter of a ton.

I don’t remember making a U-turn; the next thing I recall is swimming quite slowly back along the passage and telling myself: “Don’t hurry --your air will last longer if you take it easy.” I could see very well now, because my eyes had had plenty of time to become dark-adapted. There were lots of details I’d never noticed before --such as the red squirrelfish lurking in the shadows, the green fronds and algae growing in the little patches of light around the portholes and even a single rubber boot, apparently in excellent condition, lying where someone must have kicked it off. And once, out of a side corridor, I noticed a big grouper staring at me with bulbous eyes, its thick lips half parted, as if it was astonished at my intrusion. The band around my chest was getting tighter and tighter; it was impossible to hold my breath any longer --yet the stairway still seemed an infinite distance ahead. I let some bubbles of air dribble out of my mouth; that improved matters for a moment, but, once I had exhaled, the ache in my lungs became even more unendurable.

Now there was no point in conserving strength by flippering along with that steady, unhurried stroke. I snatched the ultimate few cubic inches of air from my face mask --feeling it flatten against my nose as I did so --and swallowed them down into my starving lungs. At the same time, I shifted gears and drove forward with every last atom of strength. And that’s all I remember, until I found myself spluttering and coughing in the daylight, clinging to the broken stub of the mast. The water around me was stained with blood and I wondered why. Then, to my freat surprise, I noticed a deep gash in my right calf; I must have banged into some sharp obstruction, but I’d never noticed it and even now felt no pain. That was the end of my skindiving, until I started astronaut training ten years later and went into the underwater zero-g simulator. Then it was different, because I was using scuba gear; but I had some nasty moments that I was afraid the psychologists would notice and I always made sure that I got nowhere near emptying my tank. Having nearly suffocated one, I’d no intention of risking it again.

I know exactly what it will feel like to breathe the freezing wisp of near vacuum that passes for atmosphere. No thank you.

So what’s wrong with poison? Nothing, I suppose. The stuff we’ve got takes only 15 seconds, they told us. But all my instincts are against it, even when there’s no sensible alternative.

Did Scott have poison with him? I doubt it. And if he did, I’m sure he never used it.

I’m not going to replay this I hope it’s been of some use, but I can’t be sure.

* * * *

The radio has just printed out a message from Earth, reminding me that transit starts in two hours --As if I’m likely to forget --when four men have already died so that I can be the first human being to see it. And the only one for exactly 100 years. It isn’t often that Sun, Earth and Mars line up neatly like this; the last time was when poor old Lowell was still writing his beautiful nonsense about the canals and the great dying civilization that built them. Too bad it was all delusion.

I’d better check the telescope and the timing equipment.

* * * *

The Sun is quiet today --as it should be, anyway, near the middle of the cycle. Just a few small spots and some minor areas of disturbance around them. The solar weather is set calm for months to come. That’s one thing the others won’t have to worry about on their way home.

I think that was the worst moment, watching Olympus lift off Phobos and head back to Earth. Even though we’d known for weeks that nothing could be done, that was the final closing of the door. It was night and we could see everything perfectly. Phobos had come leaping up out of the west a few hours earlier and was doing its mad backward rush across the sky, growing from a tiny crescent to a half-moon; before it reached the zenith, it would disappear as it plunged into the shadow of Mars and became eclipsed.

We’d been listening to the countdown of course, trying to go about our normal work. It wasn’t easy, accepting at last the fact that fifteen of us had come to Mars and only ten would return. Even then, I suppose there were millions back on Earth who still could not understand; they must have found it impossible to believe that Olympus couldn’t descend a mere 500 miles to pick us up. The Space Administration had been bombarded with crazy rescue schemes; heaven knows we’d though of enough ourselves. But when the permafrost under landing pad three finally have way and Pegasus toppled, that was that. It still seems a miracle that the ship didn’t blow up when the propellant tank ruptured.

I’m wandering again. Back to Phobos and the countdown. On the telescope monitor, we could clearly see the fissured plateau where Olympus had touched down after we’d separated and begun our own descent. Though our friends would never land on Mars, at least they’d had a little world of their own to explore; even for a satellite as small as Phobos, it worked out at 30 square miles per man. A lot of territory to search for strange minerals and debris from space --or to carve your name so that future ages would know that you were the first of all men to come this way. The ship was clearly visible as a stubby, bright cylinder against the dull gray rocks; from time to time, some flat surface would catch the light of the swiftly moving Sun and would flash with mirror brilliance. But about five minutes before lift-off, the picture became suddenly pink, then crimson -then vanished completely as Phobos rushed into eclipse. The countdown was still at ten seconds, I think we all forgot our own predicament; we were up there aboard Olympus, willing the thrust to build up smoothly and lift the ship out of the tiny gravitational field of Phobos -and then away from Mars for the long fall Earthward. We heard Commander Richmond say “Ignition,” there was a brief burst of interference and the patch of light began to move in the field of the telescope. That was all. There was no blazing column of fire, because, of course, there’s really no ignition when a nuclear rocket lights up. “Lights up,”

indeed! That’s another hangover from the old chemical technology. But a hot hydrogen blast is completely invisible; it seems a pity that we’ll never again see anything so spectacular as a Saturn or Korolev blast-off. Just before the end of the burn, Olympus left the shadow of Mars and burst out into sunlight again, reappearing almost instantly as a brilliant, swiftly moving star. The blaze of light must have startled them aboard the ship, because we heard someone call out: “Cover that window!” Then, a few seconds later, Richmond announced: “Engine cutoff.” Whatever happened, Olympus was now irrevocably headed back to Earth.

A voice I didn’t recognize --though it must have been the commander’s -said: “Goodbye, Pegasus,” and the radio transmission switched off. There was, of course, no point in saying “Good lick.” That had all been settled weeks ago.

* * * *

I’ve just played this back. Talking of luck, there’s been one compensation, though not for us. With a crew of only ten, Olympus has been able to dump a third of her expendables and lighten herself by several tons. So now she’ll get home a month ahead of schedule.

Plenty of things could have gone wrong in that month; we may yet have saved the expedition. Of course, we’ll never know --but it’s a nice thought.

* * * *

I’ve been playing a lot of music, full blast --now that there’s no else to be disturbed. Even if there were any Martians, I dont suppose this ghost of an atmosphere could carry the sound more than a few yards.

We have a fine collection, but I have to choose carefully. Nothing downbeat and nothing that demands too much concentration. Above all, nothing with human voices. So I restrict myself to the lighter orchestral classics: the

“New World Symphony” and Grieg’s piano concerto fill the bill perfectly. At the moment, I’m listening to Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini,” but now I must switch off and get down to work. There are only five minutes to go; all the equipment is in perfect condition. The telescope is tracking the Sun, the video recorder is standing by, the precision timer is running.

These observations will be as accurate as I can make them. I owe it to my lost comrades, whom I’ll soon be joining. They gave me their oxygen, so that I can still be alive at this moment. I hope you remember that, 100 or 1000 years from now, whenever you crank these figures into the computers.

Only two minutes to go; getting down to business. For the record, year 1984, month May, day 11, coming up to four hours, 30 minutes, Ephemeris time...now.

Half a minute to contact; switching recorder and timer to high speed. Just rechecked position angle, to make sure I’m looking at the right spot on the Sun’s limb. Using power of 500 --image perfectly steady even at this low elevation.

Four thirty-two. Any moment, now...

There it is ..there it is! I can hardly believe it! A tiny black dent in the edge of the Sun, growing, growing, growing...

Hello, Earth. Look up at me --the brightest star in your sky, straight over head at midnight.

Recorder back to slow.

Four thirty-five. It’s as if a thumb were pushing into the Sun’s edge, deeper and deeper --fascinating to watch.

Four forty-one. Exactly halfway. The Earth’s a perfect black semicircle. --a clean bite out of the Sun. As if some disease were eating it away. Four forty-five plus 30 seconds. Recorder on high speed again. The line of contact with the Sun’s edge is shrinking fast. Now it’s a barely visible black thread. In a few seconds, the whole Earth will be superimposed on the Sun.

Now I can see the effects of the atmosphere. There’s a thin halo of light surrounding that black hole in the Sun. Strange to think that I’m seeing the glow of all the sunsets --and all the sunrises --that are taking place round the whole Earth at this very moment.

Ingress complete --four hours, 50 minutes, five seconds. The whole world has moved onto the face of the Sun. A perfectly circular black disk silhouetted against that inferno, 90,000,000 miles below. It looks bigger than I expected; one could easily mistake it for a fair-sized sunspot. Nothing more to see now for six hours, when the Moon appears, trailing Earth by half the Sun’s width. I’ll beam the recorded data back to Lunacom, then try to get some sleep.

My very last sleep. Wonder if I’ll need drugs. It seems a pity to waste these last few hours, but I want to conserve my strength --and my oxygen. I think it was Dr. Johnson who said that nothing settles a man’s mind so wonderfully as the knowledge that he’ll be hanged in the morning. How the hell did he know?

* * * *

Ten hours, 30 minutes, Ephemeris time. Dr. Johnson was right. I had only one pill and don’t remember any dreams.

The condemned man also ate a hearty breakfast. Cut that out. Back at telescope. Now the Earth’s halfway across the disk, passing well north of center. In ten minutes, I should see the Moon.

I’ve just switched to the highest power of the telescope --2000. The images is slightly fuzzy but still fairly good, atmospheric halo very distinct. I’m hoping to see the cities on the dark side of Earth.

No luck. Probably too many clouds. A pity; it’s theoretically possible, but we never succeeded. I wish...Never mind.

* * * *

Ten hours, 40 minutes. Recorder on slow speed. Hope I’m looking at the right spot.

Fifteen seconds to go. Recorder fast.

Damn --missed it. Doesn’t matter 00 the recorder will have caught the exact moment. There’s a little black notch already in the side of the Sun. First contact must have been about ten hours, 41 minutes, 20 seconds, E.T.

What a long way it is between Earth and Moon --there’s half the width of the Sun between them. You wouldn’t think the two bodies had anything to do with each other. Makes you realize just how big the Sun really is. Ten hours, 44 minutes. The Moon’s exactly halfway over the edge. A very small, very clear-cut semicircular bite out of the edge of the Sun. Ten hours, 47 minutes, five seconds. Internal contact. The Moon’s clear of the edge, entirely inside the Sun. Don’t suppose I can see anything on the night side, but I’ll increase the power.

That’s funny.

Well, well. Someone must be trying to talk to me. There’s a tiny light pulsing away there on the darkened face of the Moon. Probably the laser at Imbrium Base.

Sorry, everyone, I’ve said all my goodbyes and don’t want to go though that again. Nothing can be important now.

Still, it’s almost hypnotic --that flickering point of light, coming out of the face of the Sun itself. Hard to believe that 3even after it’s traveled all this distance, the beam is only 100 miles wide. Lunacom’s going to all this trouble to aim it exactly at me and I suppose I should feel guilty at ignoring it. But I don’t. I’ve nearly finished my work and the things of Earth are no longer any concern of mine.

Ten hours, 50 minutes. Recorder off. That’s it --until the end of Earth transit, two hours from now.

* * * *

I’ve had a snack and am taking my last look at the view from the observation bubble. The Sun’s still high, so there’s not much contrast, but the light brings out all the colors vividly --the countless varieties of red and pink and crimson, so startling against the deep blue of the sky. How different from the Moon --though that, too, has its own beauty.

It’s strange how surprising the obvious can be. Every knew that Mars was red. But didn’t really expect the red of rust --the red of blood. Like the Painted Desert of Arizona; after a while, the eye longs for green. To the north, there is one welcome change of color; the cap of carbon-dioxide snow on Mt. Burroughs is 25,000 feet above Mean Datum; when I was a boy, there weren’t supposed to be any mountains on Mars. The nearest sand dune is a quarter of a mile away and it, too, has patches of frost on its shaded slope. During the last storm, we thought it moved a few feet, but we couldn’t be sure. Certainly, the dunes are moving, like those on Earth. One day, I supposed, this base will be covered --only to reappear again in 1000 years. Or 10,000.

That strange group of rocks --the Elephant, the Capitol, the Bishop --still holds its secrets and teases me with the memory of our first big disappointment. We could have sworn that they were sedimentary; how eagerly we rushed out to look for fossils! Even now, we don’t know what formed that outcropping; the geology of Mars is still a mass of contradictions and enigmas.

We have passed on enough problems to the future and those who come after us will find many more. But there’s one mystery we never reported to Earth nor even entered in the log. The first night after we landed, we took turns keeping watch. Brennan was on duty and woke me up soon after midnight. I was annoyed --it was ahead of time --and then he told me that he’d seen a light moving around the bas of the Capitol. We watched for at least an hour, until it was my turn to take over. But we saw nothing; whatever that light was, it never reappeared.

Now Brennan was as levelheaded and unimaginative as the come; if he said he saw a light, then he saw one. Maybe it was some kind of electric discharge or the reflection of Phobos on a piece of sand-polished rock. Anyway, we decided not to mention it to Lunacom unless we saw it again. Since I’ve been alone, I’ve often awaked in the night and looked out toward the rocks. In the feeble illumination of Phobos and Deimos, they remind me of the skyline of a darkened city. And it has always remained darkened. No lights have ever appeared for me.

* * * *

Twelve hours, 49 minutes, Ephemeris time. The last act’s about to begin. Earth has nearly reached the edge of the Sun. You could easily mistake it for a small spot, going over the limb.

Thirteen hours, eight.

Goodbye, beautiful Earth.

Going, going, going, goodbye, good---

* * * *

I’m OK again now. The timings have all been sent home on the beam. In five minutes, they’ll join the accumulated wisdom of mankind. And Lunacom will know that I stuck to my post.

But I’m not sending this. I’m going to leave it here for the next expedition -whenever that may be. It could be ten or twenty years before anyone comes here again; no point in going back to an old site when there’s a whole world waiting to be explored.

So this capsule will stay here, as Scott’s diary remained in his tent, until the next visitors find it. But they won’t find me.

Strange how hard it is to get away from Scott. I think he gave me the idea. For his body will not lie frozen forever in the Antarctic, isolated from the great cycle of life and death. Long ago, that lonely tent began its march to the sea. Within a few years, it was buried by the falling snow and had become part of the glacier that crawls eternally away from the pole. In a few brief centuries, the sailor will have returned to the sea. He will merge once more into the pattern of living things --the plankton, the seals, the penguins, the whales, all the multitudinous fauna of the Antarctic Ocean. There are no oceans here on Mars, nor have there been for at least five billion years. But there is life of some kind, down there in the badlands of Chaos II, that we never had time to explore. Those moving patches on the orbital photographs. The evidence that whole areas of Mars have been swept clear of craters by forces other than erosion. The long-chain, optically active carbon molecules picked up by the atmospheric samplers. And, of course, the mystery of Viking Six. Even now, no one has been able to make any sense of those last instrument readings before something large and heavy crushed the probe in the still, cold, depths of the Martian night.

And don’t talk to me about primitive life forms in a place like this! Anything that’s survived here will be so sophisticated that we may look as clumsy as dinosaurs.

There’s still enough propellant in the ship’s tanks to drive the Marscar clear around the planet. I have three hours of daylight left --plenty of time to get down into the valleys and well out into Chaos. After sunset, I’ll still be able to make good speed with the head lamps. It will be romantic, driving at night under the moons of Mars.

One thing I must fix before I leave. I don’t like the way Sam’s lying out there. He was always so poised, so graceful. It doesn’t seem right that he should look so awkward now. I must do something about it. I wonder if I< could have covered 300 feet without a suit, walking slowly, steadily --the way he did to the very end.

I must try not to look at his face.

* * * *

That’s it. Everything shipshape and ready to go.

The therapy has worked. I feel perfectly at ease --even contented, now that I know exactly what I’m going to do. The old nightmares have lost their power.

It is true: We all die alone. It makes no difference at the end, being 50,000,000 miles from home.

I’m going to enjoy the drive through that lovely painted landscape. I’ll be thinking of all those who dreamed about Mars --Well and Lowell and Burroughs and Weinbaum and Bradbury. They all guessed wrong --but the reality is just as strange, just as beautiful as they imagined. I don’t know what’s waiting for me out there and I’ll probably never see it. But on this starving world, it must be desperate for carbon, phosphorus, oxygen, calcium. It can use me.

And when my oxygen alarm gives its final ping, somewhere down there in that haunted wilderness, I’m going to finish in style. As soon as I have difficulty in breathing, I’ll get off the Marscar and start walking --with a playback unit plugged into my helmet and going full blast. For sheer, triumphant power and glory, there’s nothing in the whole of music to match the “Toccata” and “Fugue in D Minor.” I won’t have time to hear all of it; that doesn’t matter.

Johann Sebastian, here I come.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

FRED HOYLE: Zoomen

Back in the early days of science fiction, Hugo Gernsback was anxious that the fiction he published would be informative and thus teach the readers basic science. Consequently many of the early writers were also scientists, and several of today’s practitioners are also fully-fledged scientists, like Britain’s Arthur Clarke, and America’s Isaac Asimov. One of Britain’s most renowned and respected practising scientists is the astronomer and mathematician Frederick Hoyle, FRS. Of Hoyle, Isaac Asimov has said:

‘Hoyle ... is perhaps the most eminent of those contemporary scientists who have written science fiction under their own names.’ For his service to science Hoyle was knighted in 1972.

Fred Hoyle was born at Bingley, Yorkshire, on June 24th 1915. He was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he earned his MA. He is a staff member of both the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, and has been the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University since 1958. Hoyle was responsible for the theory of continuous creation as regards the origins of the Universe, and put his theories into print in his book The Nature of the Universe (1950). He also wrote a valuable text book on astronomy in Frontiers of Astronomy (1955). He was thus a much respected name when in 1957 his science fiction novel, The Black Cloud, was published. It was well received. Ossian’s Ride followed in 1959, but almost certainly his most famous work is A For Andromeda, doubtless due to its initial transmission as a seven part serial by the BBC in 1962.

Hoyle’s shorter fiction is unfortunately less well known, although a collection of fifteen stories was published in 1967 as Element 79. From that collection comes the following intriguing piece, Zoomen.

* * * *

ZOOMEN

Fred Hoyle

In the second half of July I was able to get away on a two week vacation. I decided to go off ‘Munro-bagging’ in the Scottish Highlands. Hotel accommodation being difficult in the Highlands in the summer, especially for a single person, I hired a caravan with a car to match. Driving north the first day, I got precisely to the Scottish border immediately south of Jedburgh. The evening was beautifully fine. I argued I didn’t want to spend the whole of the morrow driving, if indeed the morrow was going to be as clear as this. The obvious tactic was to be away at the first light of dawn. By ten o’clock I could be well across the Lowlands. Then I could spend the afternoon ‘doing’ one of the southern peaks, perhaps in the Ben Lawers range.

It fell out as I had planned. I reached Killin not much after 10 am, found a caravan site, bought fresh meat and other provisions in the town, and set off for Glenlyon, with the intention of walking up Meall Ghaordie. The afternoon was as fine and beautiful as it could possibly be. I quitted the car at the nearest point to my mountain and set off across the lower bogland. I moved upward at a deliberately slow pace, in part because this was my first day on the hills, in part because the sun was hot. I remember the myriads of tiny coloured flowers under my feet. It took about two hours to reach the summit. I sat down there and munched a couple of apples. Then I laid myself flat on a grassy knoll, using my rucksack for a pillow. The early start and the warm day together had made me distinctly sleepy. It was not more than a minute, I suppose, before I nodded off.

I have fallen asleep quite a number of times on a mountain top. The wakening always produces a slight shock, presumably because one is heavily conditioned to waking indoors. There is always a perceptible moment during which you hunt for your bearings. It was so on this occasion, except the shock was deeper. There was a first moment when I expected to be in a normal bedroom, then a moment in which I remembered that by rights I should be on the summit of a mountain, then a moment when I had become aware of the place where I had in fact awakened and knew it was not at all the right place, not the summit of Meall Ghaordie.

The room I was in was a large rectangular box. I scrambled to my feet and started to inspect the place. Perhaps it may seem absurd to imply that a box-like room needed inspection, particularly when it was quite empty. Yet there were two very queer things about it. The light was artificial, for the box was wholly opaque and closed, except where a passageway opened out of one of the walls. The distribution of the light was strange. For the life of me I simply could not determine where it was coming from. There were no obvious bulbs or tubes. It almost seemed as if the walls themselves were aglow. They were composed of some material which looked to my inexpert eye merely like one of the many new forms of plastic. But in that case how could light be coming out of such a material?

The box was not nearly as large as I had at first thought. The dimensions in fact were roughly thirty by fifty, the height about twenty feet. The lighting produced the impression of a place the size of a cathedral, an effect I have noticed before in underground caves.

The second strange thing was my sense of balance. Not that I found it difficult to stand or anything as crude as that. When climbing a mountain, the legs quickly become sensitive to balance. If I had not just come off a mountain, it is likely the difference would have passed unnoticed. Yet I could feel a difference of some kind, slight but definite.

My explorations naturally led to the passageway, which didn’t go straight for very far. Round a bend I came to a forking point. I paused to remember the division. There were more twists and turns, so that soon I had the strong impression of being in a maze. It gave me the usual moment of panic, of feeling I had lost my way. Then I reflected I had no ‘way’ to lose. Instantly I became calm again and simply strolled where my fancy dictated. The passage eventually brought me back to the large box-like room. There in the middle of it was my rucksack, the rucksack against which I had laid my head on the summit of Meall Ghaordie. I tried several times and always I came back to the box-like room. Although the passages had the semblance of a multitude of branches, this also was an illusion. In fact there were eight distinct ways through the system. I managed to get the time required for a single ‘transit’ of the passageways down to about ninety seconds, so the whole arrangement, if not actually poky, was not very large in size. It was just that it was made to seem large.

I did still another turn through the passageways and was startled on this occasion to hear running feet ahead of me. My heart thumped madly, for although I might have seemed calm outwardly, fear was never very far from my side. Around the corner ahead burst a girl of about eighteen or so clad in a dressing gown. At the sight of me, standing there blocking the passageway, she let out a nerve-shattering scream. She stood for twenty or thirty seconds and then flung herself with extreme violence into my arms.

‘Where are we?’ she sobbed, ‘where are we?’ She went on repeating her question, clutching me with a good, powerful muscular grip. Without in any way exceeding natural propriety, I held her closely; it was a natural enough thing to do in the circumstances. Suddenly I felt an acute nausea sweep through me, akin to the late stages of sea-sickness. The clinch between us dissolved in a flash, for the girl must have felt the same sickness, since she instantly burst out with a violent fit of vomiting.

We both stood there panting. I steadied myself against the wall of the passageway for my knees felt weak.

‘And who might you be?’

‘Giselda Home,’ she answered. The voice was American.

‘You’d better take that thing off,’ I said, indicating the dressing-gown, now the worse for wear from the sickness.

‘I suppose so. I was in a room down here when I came to.’ The girl led the way to a box, precisely square as far as I could tell, opening out of the very passageway. I felt certain I must have passed this spot many times, but there had been no opening before. Giselda Home staggered into the box, moaning slightly. I made to follow but soon stopped. I was only just inside when another wave of sickness hit me in the pit of the stomach. Some instinct prompted me to step back into the passage. As I did so, a panel slid silently and rapidly back, closing off the box. With the double attack I was hard put to take any action, but I did shout to the girl and bang my fist on the panel. If she made any answer I was unable to hear it.

I tried to walk off the sickness by touring through the system of passages, but to no avail. I felt just as rotten as before. At quite some length, for I must have gone through the system many times by other routes before I found it, I came on exactly such a square box as Giselda Home had gone into. With some apprehension I stepped inside it. Two things happened. A similar panel slid closed behind me, and within thirty seconds the sickness had gone.

This box was a cube with sides of about twelve feet. It contained absolutely nothing except a heavy metal door let into one of the walls which opened to a moderate tug. Inside was a volume about the size of a fairish oven, in which I found a platter covered with stuff. Before I could examine it further the nausea started again. This time it seemed as if I too would reach the vomiting stage. Just in time the panel slid open and I staggered into the passage with the irrational thought that I must reach the toilet before my stomach hit the roof. Out in the passage the sickness dropped steeply away. In minutes I felt quite normal again. Then suddenly it started up once more; the panelling opened, as if to invite me back into the box, and once inside the sickness was gone. The process was repeated thrice more, in and out of the box. Long before the end of the lesson I knew exactly what it meant - move in, move out, to orders. From where? I had no idea, but the lesson had done one thing for me. My fears had quite gone. Manifestly I was under some kind of surveillance, a surveillance whose mode of operation I couldn’t remotely guess. Yet instead of my fears being increased, the exact opposite happened. From this point on, I was not only outwardly calm but I was inwardly master of myself.

With the passing of the sickness I felt quite hungry. Apart from a light lunch on the slopes of Meall Ghaordie, my last meal had been at 5 am on the Scottish border. I tried the stuff on the platter in the oven. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, about like vegetable marrow. How nutritive it was I couldn’t tell at all, so I simply ate until I was no longer hungry.

Next I noticed the floor was softer here than it was in the passage or than it was in the big rectangular box. It would be quite tolerable to sleep on. It was harder than the usual bed, but after the first two or three days it would seem comfortable enough. What about a toilet? There was nothing here in the box at all appropriate to a toilet. So how did one fare if taken short with the panel closed? I determined to put the matter to test. I made preparations to use the floor of the box itself. I didn’t get very far, nor had I expected to do. The sickness came, the panel slid by, and within a minute I found a new box opening out off the passage. Stepping inside I discovered one large and one small compartment. The small compartment was obviously the privy, for it had a hole about a foot in diameter in its floor. I made the best use of it I could, wondering what I should do for toilet paper. My thoughts on this somewhat embarrassing subject were interrupted by a veritable deluge descending on my head from above. I hopped out of the smaller compartment into the larger one. Here the downpour was somewhat less intense, about the intensity of a good powerful shower. Within seconds I was soaked to the skin. The shower stopped and I began to peel off my sodden clothes. I had just about stripped when the shower started up again. Evidently it went off periodically, every three or four minutes in the fashion of a pissoir. Stripped naked, I was heartily glad of the downpour, for I had sweated fairly profusely in my walk up the mountain. Clearly the liquid coming down on my head was essentially water but it had a soapy feel about it. I stood up to about half a dozen bouts, in which I washed out my clothes as best I could. Then I carried the whole dripping caboodle back to my box. It would take several hours, I thought, for the heavier garments, particularly the trousers, to dry out, so I resolved to try for some sleep. As I dozed off I wondered what items I might lack for in this singular situation. I had no razor, but then why not grow a beard? By the greatest good fortune I always carry a small pair of scissors in my rucksack. At least I could eat, keep clean, and cut my nails.

I slept much longer than I intended, nearly ten hours. When I awoke I noticed that the box-door, cell-door if you like, was open. Before touring again through the passageways, or patronising the privy with its remarkable drenching, qualities, I tested the metal oven door. A new platter was there, piled high with the same vegetable marrow stuff.

My clothes were snuff dry. So the humidity had to be quite low, as I had thought was probably the case. I trotted along to the showers in my underpants only, for these would easily be dried should I misjudge the pissoir. The panel fortunately was open, it remained open from that time on so far as I am aware, so I waited for the flush, then darted in and darted out before the thing fired itself for the next occasion. At the best of times my mountaineering clothes are distinctly rough. After their recent wetting and drying they were now baggy and down-at-heel in the extreme. I saw no point in putting on my boots and simply went barefoot, rather like a ship-wrecked mariner.

I padded along the passage knowing that sooner or later I would reach the ‘cathedral’, as I had come to think of the big rectangular box. Another box was open, different certainly from mine and different I thought from that of Giselda Home. I was just on the point of stepping inside when a voice behind me said, ‘hello,’ in a foreign accent. I turned to find an Indian of uncertain middle-age standing there. He stared rather wildly for perhaps thirty seconds and reached for support against the wall. To my surprise he went on:

‘It is not the stomach sickness. It is a matter of shock to see you, Sir, for I attended a lecture you gave in Bombay last year. Professor Wycombe is it?’

‘I did give a lecture in Bombay. You were in the audience?’

‘Yes, but you will not remember me. It was a rather large audience. Daghri is my name, Sir.’

We shook hands, ‘You have been in the big room, Sir?’

‘Yes, many times.’

‘Recently, Sir?’

‘Yesterday. That’s to say before I slept. Perhaps ten hours ago.’

‘Then you will find it has changed.’

Daghri and I hurried along the passages until we emerged into the cathedral. On the walls now were a mass of points of light, stars obviously. The projection on to the flat surfaces introduced distortions of course, but this apart we were looking up at a complete representation of the heavens, both hemispheres.

‘What does it mean, Sir?’ whispered the Indian.

For the moment I made no attempt to answer this critical question. I asked Daghri to tell me how he came to be there. He said he remembered walking out in the evening in the Indian countryside. Then suddenly, in a flash it seemed, he was in this big cathedral room. It appeared almost as if he had walked around a corner in the road to find himself, not in the countryside anymore, but right there in the middle of this room, more or less at the exact spot where I myself had wakened.

Accepting that both Daghri and I were sane, there could only be one explanation:

‘Daghri, it must be that we are in some enormous spaceship. This display here on the walls represents the view from the ship. We’re seeing the pilot’s view out into space.’

‘My difficulty with that thought, Sir, is to find the Sun.’ I pointed to the bright patch lighting the entrance to the passageway.

‘That, I think, is the Sun.’

‘Is there any way to make sure of this, Sir?’

‘Quite easily. All we need do is sit and watch. The motion of the ship, if we are in a ship, must produce changes in the planets. We only heed to watch the brighter objects.’

Within half an hour we had it, the apparent motion of the Earth itself, for the Earth-Moon combination was easy to pick out, once you looked in the right direction. Within an hour or so we had Venus and Mars, and already we knew the rough direction we were travelling - toward the constellation of Scorpius. We also knew the approximate speed of the ship, something above two thousand miles an hour. Reckoning the ship to be accelerating smoothly, and trusting to time from my watch, I was able to check the acceleration itself. It was quite close to ordinary gravity, a bit larger than gravity as I calculated it. This might well be the difference I had noticed in my legs right at the beginning.

It was while we were thus watching the display on the walls of the cathedral that the others slowly filtered in, one by one over a period of about five hours. The first to appear was a sandy-haired man going a bit thin on top. He announced himself as being of the name Bill Bailey, a butcher from Rotherham, Yorkshire, and where the hell was he he’d like to know, and where was the bacon and eggs, and who was the bird he’d seen in the bloody showers, half-naked she was but he didn’t object to that, the more naked the better so far as he was concerned. For a badly frightened man it was a good performance. Although I never took to Bill Bailey, the never-ending stream of ribald remarks which issued from his lips served in the months ahead to lighten a thoroughly grim situation, at any rate so far as I was concerned.

There were two other men and four women, making a total of nine captives. Of the whole nine of us only two had been acquainted before, Giselda Home and Ernst Schmidt, a German industrialist. Schmidt and the girl’s father were in the same line of business, meat-packing, and Schmidt had been visiting the Home family in Chicago. He and Giselda had been swimming in the household pool when the ‘snatch’, as I liked to call it, had taken place. Schmidt had suddenly found himself in the central part of the

‘cathedral’, clad only in his swimming trunks. Giselda had found herself in one of the cell-like boxes attired in her dressing gown. Schmidt was pretty mad about the trunks, for obviously there was no chance of him acquiring any decent clothes here. Since we were not permitted to touch each other, since the temperature in the ship was a dry seventy degrees or thereabouts, there really wasn’t any logical reason for clothes. Nevertheless I could see Schmidt’s point. I gave him the anorak out of my rucksack. Although it was no doubt ludicrous, he was glad to wear it.

Jim McClay was a tall wiry Australian sheep farmer of about thirty-five. He had been snatched while out on his farm driving a Land Rover. Then he too was suddenly in the middle of the cathedral. The experience had very naturally knocked a good deal of the spring and bounce out of the man. But the confidence would soon return. I could see it would return by the way he was looking at Giselda Home. She was a natural for the Australian, tall too and well muscled.

Bill Bailey greeted each of the four women in his own broad style. For Giselda Home, in a cleaned dressing gown, it was no more than a terse

‘Take it off, love, come in an’ cool down.’

He didn’t get far with Hattie Foulds, a farmer’s wife from northern Lancashire. To his ‘Come in, love, come right in ‘ere by me. Come in to me lap an’ smoulder,’ she instantly retorted with ‘Who’s this bloody great bag of wind?’

Nevertheless it was clear from the beginning that Hattie Foulds and Bill Bailey made a ‘right’ pair. As the days and weeks passed they made every conceivable attempt to get into physical contact with each other. It became a part of our everyday existence to walk past some spot from which the sound of violent retching emerged. The other women affected disgust, but I suspect their lives would also have been the poorer without these strange sexio-gastronomic outbursts. Bailey never ceased to talk about it, ‘Can’t even match your fronts together before it hits you,’ he would say, ‘but we’ve got to keep on trying. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’

The two remaining women were much the most interesting to me. One was an Englishwoman, a face I had seen before somewhere. When I asked her name, she simply said she had been christened ‘Leonora Mary’

and that we were to call her what we pleased. She came in that first day wearing a full length mink coat. She was moderately tall, slender, dark with fine nose and mouth. A long wolf whistle from Bailey was followed by ‘Enjoy yer shower, baby?’

This must be the woman Bailey had seen. She must have got herself trapped in the deluge exactly as I had done. With most of her clothing wet she was using the mink coat as a covering.

The remaining woman was Chinese. She came in wearing a neat smock. She looked silently from one to another of us, her face like stone. Under her imperious gaze, Bailey cracked out with ‘Eee, look what we’ve got ‘ere. ‘ad yer cherry plucked, love?’

They wanted to know about the stars, about the way Daghri and I figured out where we were going and so on and so forth. As the hours and days passed we watched the planets move slowly across the walls. We watched the inner planets getting fainter and fainter while Jupiter hardly seemed to change. But after three weeks even Jupiter was visibly dimming. The ship was leaving the solar system.

Of all these things everybody understood something. It was wonderful to see how suddenly acute the apparently ignorant became as soon as they realised the extent to which their fate depended on these astronomical matters. Throughout their lives the planets had been remote recondite things. Now they were suddenly as real to everybody as a sack of potatoes, more real I thought, for I doubted if any of us would ever see a potato again, erroneously as it turned out.

Of the Einstein time dilation they could make out nothing at all, however. It was beyond them to understand how in only a few years we could reach distant stars. I just had to tell them to accept it as a fact. Where were we going they all wanted to know. As if I could answer such a question! All I could say was that we had somehow been swept up by a raiding party, similar to our own parties rounding up animals for a zoo. It all fitted. Wasn’t this exactly the kind of setup we ourselves provided for animals in a zoo? The boxes to sleep in, the regular food, the restrictions on mating, the passages and the cathedral hall to exercise in?

My longest conversations were with Daghri and with the aristocratic Mary. Mary and I found that so long as we kept about three feet apart we could go pretty well anywhere together at any time without falling into the troubles which were constantly afflicting Bill Bailey and Hattie Foulds. Quite early on, Mary wanted to know why we were so hermetically sealed inside this place. Animals in a terrestrial zoo can at least see their captors she pointed out. They breathe the same air, they glower at each other from opposite sides of the same bars. Not in the snake house or the fish tank I answered. We look in on snakes, we look in on fish, but it is doubtful if either look out on us in any proper sense. Only for birds and mammals is there much in the way of reciprocity in a terrestrial zoo. Mary burst out,

‘But snakes are dangerous.’

‘So may we be. Oh, not with poison like snakes, perhaps with bacteria. This place may be a veritable horror house so far as our captors are concerned.’

I was much worried about the Chinese girl, Ling was her name, for she had the problem of language to contend with as well as the actual situation. It was also very clear that Ling intended to be harshly uncooperative. I asked Mary to do what she could to break the ice. Mary reported that Ling ‘read’ English but didn’t speak it, not yet. Gradually as the days passed we managed to thaw out the girl to some small degree. The basic trouble was that Ling had been a politician of quite exalted status in one of the Chinese provinces. She had been a person of real consequence, not in virtue of birth, but from her own determination and ability. She gave orders and she expected obedience from those around her. Her glacial attitude to us all was a general expression of contempt for the degenerate west.

Our clothes, while easily cleaned in the showers, became more and more battered and out of shape as time went on. We dressed as lightly as possible consistent with modesty, a commodity variable from person to person. One day Bill Bailey, clad only in underpants, came into the cathedral, threw himself on the floor and said:

‘Oo, what a bitch! A right bitch that. Used to run real cockfights back on the farm, illicit-like. She’d take on any half-dozen men after a fight. Says it used to key her up, put her in tone. That’s what we need ‘ere, Professor, a bloody great cockfight.’

Ling, who was standing nearby, looked down at Bailey.

‘That is the sort of man who should be whipped, hard and long. In my town he would have been whipped for all the people to see.’