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CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

LESTER DEL REY JAMES BLISH

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Order from your bookseller or use the

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The Non-Statistical Man

by

Raymond F. Jones

BELMONT BOOKS • NEW YORK CITY

THE NON-STATISTICAL MAN

A BELMONT BOOK-May 1964

Second printing May 1968

published by arrangement with

Raymond F. Jones and Scott

Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

Published by Belmont Productions, Inc.

1116 First Ave., New York, N. Y. 10021

© 1964 by Raymond F. Jones

Acknowledgments!

"The Non-Statistlcal Man," © 1956, Columbia Publications, Inc.

"The Moon Is Death," © 1953, Columbia Publications, Inc.

"Intermission Time," © 1953, Columbia Publications, lnc.

"The Gardener," © 1957, Columbia Publications, Inc.

Covers Printed in U.S.A. Body Text Printed in Canada.

Contents

THE NON-STATISTICAL MAN.

THE MOON IS DEATH

THE GARDENER

INTERMISSION TIME

THE NON-STATISTICAL MAN.

1

Charles Bascomb was a man who loved figures—the genuine, Arabic kind, that is. Not that he didn’t adequately appreciate the, other kind, too. Mrs. Bascomb was quite good in that department, but Charles had come to take her somewhat for. granted after fourteen years of married life—plus three young Bascombs who had taught him what a great obligation can be implied by so small a number.

Bascomb considered himself a realist, and pointed to his passion for figures to prove it. If an opinion were given —whether on the price of hamburger in Denver, or the difference between the climate of his home town of Land-bridge, and that of Los Angeles, California—he demanded figures and odds.

Yet, in his world of endlessly marching columns of black numerals, there was escape, too. It was clean and cold and precise here. The scatterbrained effusions and emotionalism of Sarah Bascomb were lacking. Charles Bascomb loved his wife, but she was scatterbrained. And the utterly irrational demands of the small Bascombs could not penetrate.

All irrationality was swept aside, and here, and here alone, could be had a clear view of the real world. It would have been difficult for Bascomb to say, if the question had been put to him, which was the real world and which was fairyland. Mrs. Bascomb and the kids were real enough— in their place—but they couldn’t possibly fit in the realm of precise figures, which was the real world.

Fortunately, no one ever asked Mr. Bascomb about this, and it was never pushed into his awareness beyond an occasional fuzzy, gnawing feeling that there should be more congruity between these two areas than there was.

It was generally quite deliciously satisfying to him to know that he could tell, for example—with almost perfect accuracy—how many of the citizens he passed on the street on the way to the station each night, and how many of these would not be alive by the end of the year. He could tell almost precisely how many would be alive in another five years, provided he had their present ages, of course. He could tell how many would die of diabetes, and heart trouble, and cancer.

There was a satisfaction in knowing these things. There was a satisfaction in his work of assembling such information and producing the proper deductions. (He was Chief Statistical Analyst of the New England Mutual Cooperative Insurance Company.) There was a sense of power in it.

But Bascomb believed he was a humble man. The power was in the figures, in the statistical methods which constituted the temple wherein he but served as priest.

At the age of thirty-seven he believed he would serve his god of figures for the remainder of his life. And, certainly, on that morning of April tenth, when one of the Junior Statisticians came to his office, he considered himself safe and secure in the groove he would run in until he himself became a statistic in the Company’s books.

Bascomb looked up and smiled pleasantly as Hadley approached his desk—there was no reason for being otherwise.

“Good morning, Hadley,” he said. “You look as if the week-end treated you well. Mrs. Hadley get over her cold all right?”

“She’s fine, Mr. Bascomb.” Hadley was a youngster, still in his first year of marriage. He shared Bascomb’s passion for figures—Arabic—and hoped to rise high in the firm.

Hadley spread out some long sheets of paper and bent over the desk. “We ran across something interesting last week that I thought I’d like to show you. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“What is it?” said Bascomb.

“District reports of claims in Division 3 show some curious anomalies. In the town of Topworth, we had eighteen claims registered on all types of policies and—”

“That is not an unusual number for a town of that size.”

“No—but here’s the catch. Those policies had been taken out less than six weeks ago, with only two exceptions. Now, here in Burraston we have nine claims—all on policies less than six weeks old, with no exceptions. And in Victorburg—”

“Let me see that!”

Bascomb drew the sheets toward him and adjusted the heavy, shellframed glasses that seemed to grip the sides of his head rather than rest on his ears.

“In Victorburg—twenty seven claims on policies only four weeks old.” He ripped the glasses away from., his face and looked up. “How large is Victorburg, Hadley?” “Only thirty-two thousand, Mr. Bascomb.” He waited, knowing he’d said enough for the moment.

Bascomb bit the tip' of. the earpiece on his glasses and looked down again. He rustled the wide sheets of paper. “This is one of the strangest things I have seen since I’ve been in the insurance business,” he said. “We know that in statistics we sometimes encounter long runs of an anomolous nature, but three cities like this—”

“There are seven altogether,” said Hadley. “I went back and checked over some of our more recent records in the same district. The other four are less pronounced—six to eight each—but they are there.”

“Very strange, to say the least,” said Mr. Bascomb mildly now. “I think I’d like very much to follow up the details and see if any explanation can be found—beyond merely assigning it as an unusual run.”

“I have all the claim papers on my desk.”

“Get me the initial applications also. Was there any consistency shown in the salesmen who wrote the policies?”

“No. About a dozen different salesmen are involved. The only pertinent factor I’ve found is that in these last three towns we have new agencies, which have put on a big campaign backed by our national advertising. But that doesn’t explain, of course, why they should have written policies on which claims were to be made so quickly.”

“No, of course not; get me all the papers available.” Bascomb spent the rest of the morning computing the normal claims expectancy for each of the towns involved. He figured the probabilities of encountering such runs as had come up; he examined in detail the applications of all the policyholders.

On the death claims there was the usual medical certification showing the applicants to be in acceptable health at time of policy writing. Two had died of polio; one in a car accident; four of coronary trouble—that should have been caught! There were two cancer cases—they should have been found, too. Some of the trouble was evidently in the medical department; he’d see that some overhauling was done there.

But blaming the examiners would not dispose of the whole problem, by any means; the accident and liability claims could not be dismissed so easily. There was only one factor of any significance which he was able to discover. Better than ninety percent of the applications had come in through voluntary response to the company’s advertising. They hadn’t been sold by the usual foot-in-the-door salesman Bascomb so thoroughly disapproved of.

That would be worth noting to the sales department!

But, on the other hand, had their advertising suddenly become so much better? He called the advertising manager and asked for copies of whatever displays had been available in the seven towns during the period the policies were sold.

He was interrupted then by some current items that killed the better part of the afternoon. When he finally got around to the advertisements, it was almost time to quit. It would be too rough if he missed the five-seventeen— there would be time enough to get back to this problem tomorrow.

Yet, that would not do, either; there was something too persistently nagging about this, too many “queer” aspects to let the matter alone even overnight. He broke a long standing rule between him and Sarah Bascomb, and stuffed the entire mass of papers into his briefcase to take home.

Sarah Bascomb was well aware that she didn’t live in the same world with her husband, and that made it rather nice, she thought. It would have been exceedingly boring if they both Talked of nothing but expectancy tables and statistical probabilities, or the PTA and young Chuck’s music lessons.

As it was, she thought they got along fine. She listened with honest attentiveness to Charles’ discussions of the ratio of cancer to coronary deaths, and the increase of both over pneumonia and other infectious diseases during the past thirty years. It was so boring as to be absolutely incredible; but she was thankful that there were men like Charles in the world to take care of these particular things—which had to be taken care of, but which no ordinary person would think of concerning himself with.

She was proud of Charles’ ability to deal with such obscure and unpleasant material, and she listened to it because she was in love with him. It didn’t occur to her that it was in any way disloyal to feel it was all very stuffy.

In turn, Charles took an active interest in household affairs—and left all the answers up to her, which was the way she liked it. It would have been intolerable if he’d been one of those men who insist on planning the dinner menu, or picking kids’ dentist, or seeing Mr. Salers down the street when Chuck and the Salers kid had an after-school knock-down, drag-out argument.

Sarah was quite willing and able to take care of these items alone. At thirty-five she was a competent, contented, still good-looking suburban housewife without a cloud on the domestic horizon.

But on this particular April tenth she had been a trifle uneasy all day. There was the feeling that momentous things were about to happen to disturb the complacency of Charles’ life and hers. She often had such feelings and Charles told her they were ridiculous; but over the years, Sarah had sort of kept track of them. She’d discovered that these feelings always meant something, one way or another—especially when they were this strong.

So she was not surprised to see the brief case in Charles’ hand as she watched him from the kitchen window, coming through the breezeway to the house.

She turned, as if she hadn’t seen him, and attended to the noisy sputtering frying of his favorite—liver with onions. She squealed with simulated surprise and pleasure as his arms came about her waist, and he kissed her on the back of the neck.

Then she pretended to notice the bulging briefcase for the first time. “Big business tonight? I thought maybe we could go out to a show at the Centre—?”

Bascomb smiled, shrugged a little, and tossed the briefcase carelessly to a chair across the room. “Nothing very important; just a little problem that came up today—but it can wait. We’ll see the show if you want to. What’s on?”

Sarah shook her head. “Nothing in particular; it’s not that important. I want you to spend the evening on your problem. That is important. And I want you to tell me all about it.”

They settled the problem, as Sarah knew they would, by staying home. And after dinner, she sat very quietly and attentively while Charles tried to explain why it was upsetting to come across such a run of events as had turned up. Try as she would, however, Sarah could not quite grasp the significance of it, or the reason for astonishment.

“You say it might be expected to happen once in a few hundred centuries,” she insisted, “so I should think you’d be glad the time is now, when you are able to witness it.”

Bascomb smiled with tolerance; there was no use trying to make her understand. “It’s just that a fellow doesn’t expect to be around for the event,” he said. “We talk about it, and use it in our figuring; but we just don’t expect to see it.”

“That’s what makes it all the more exciting!” Sarah’s eyes were alight in a way she hoped would make Charles think she understood what he was talking about.

Then her expression grew more somber. “And I think it’s something terribly important, too,” she said. “I feel that it’s something which could mean a great deal to our future, Charles. I know it. Tell me as soon as you find out what it really means.”

Bascomb muttered a growl of exasperation in the bottom of his throat. This was the kind of thing that came close to driving him to distraction—Sarah’s “feelings” that something-or-other was going to happen, or was especially meaningful.

It gave him the shudders when she started talking that way—because the most damnable part was that she was often right. He had started keeping check on it, out of pure self-defense, a long time ago. Her batting average gave him a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“There’s nothing significant for us in this crazy thing,” he said irritably. “It’s just a bunch of policies that came up for claim all at once—when our statistical methods gave us no reason to expect it. That’s absolutely all; it’s ridiculous, darling, to try to read anything more in it.”

“You’ll tell me, won’t you?” Sarah Bascomb said.

Charles accomplished nothing toward a solution of the problem that night. At the end of four hours work, it seemed just as inexplicable as it had when Hadley first mentioned it.

He slept badly, his line of disturbed thought alternating between the problem itself and Sarah’s irrational interpretation of its significance. In the morning he arose and told himself that it was idiotic to allow a small, routine problem of this kind to get so out of hand.

Only it wasn’t small, and it wasn’t routine by any means.

As he sipped his coffee across the breakfast table from Sarah, and with the three youngsters beginning to stir noisily overhead, he said cautiously, “I’ve been thinking that it might almost be worthwhile to have a personal interview with these policyholders, and see if anything can be deduced from firsthand contact with them. Of course, it’s silly to hope for anything definite, but I think maybe I’ll do it.”

He held his coffee cup poised while he waited for her answer. And now he was the idiot, he thought—as if her opinion could be of any possible significance!

Nevertheless, Bascomb waited, head cocked to catch the slightest inflection of her voice.

“I think that’s the most sensible thing you’ve done about the whole problem,” she said. “After all, who could tell you more about why they bought the policies when they did—and how they came to make claims—than the people themselves?”

That cinched it, and Charles Bascomb fumed at himself for asking the question of Sarah. After all, he’d intended doing just this, anyway, hadn’t he? What difference did her uninformed opinion make to him? But then, her comment was a good one; who, indeed, could tell more about the purchase of these policies than the people who’d done the buying?

He called the office and told his assistant, Jarvis, what he was doing and gave him instructions for carrying on.

2

Of the seven towns, Victorburg was closest to Land-bridge, so Charles Bascomb started for there, feeling unfamiliar in heading the car onto the open highway instead of driving to the station. He congratulated himself that these cases had turned up close to the Home Office, instead of halfway across the United States; at the same time, Bascomb told himself once more he was a complete idiot for giving the whole thing this much attention.

He reached Victorburg by ten o’clock, and drove at once to the first address on his list. It was a quiet, treeshaded street that added to the peacefulness of the April morning. He pulled up in front of a neat, white frame house.

Mrs. Davidson; she was the claimant on one of the death cases—Mr. Davidson had died of coronary trouble just three weeks ago. Bascomb wondered if he shouldn’t have gone first to one of the lesser claimants. But it was too late, now. A woman working in the garden at the side of the house had seen him; she was looking up. He got out of the car with his briefcase in his hand.

He tipped his hat as he came up. “Mrs. Davidson? I’m a representative of the New England Mutual Cooperative.”

The woman’s face showed instant dismay. “Oh, dear— I hope there’s nothing wrong now. Your payment came through so quickly, and I was able to pay—”

“No, no—there’s nothing wrong,” Mr. Bascomb said hastily. “Just a routine check we always make to determine if the policyholder has been entirely satisfied with our service.”

“Oh, yesl It’s been more than satisfactory,” exclaimed Mrs. Davidson. “Your payment came through so promptly, and I don’t know what we would have done without it. John went so suddenly, you know. It seems like a miracle that we thought of taking out insurance on him just before it happened. He’d always been so violently opposed to insurance all his life, you know—never would consider it until just now, when it was so badly needed. We didn’t know it was going to be needed, of course.”

“Of course,” said Bascomb. “Our medical examiner passed Mr. Davidson as being in good health at the time of application; otherwise, the policy could not have been issued.

“We share your feelings of gratitude that you were fortunate enough to have the policy in force at the time of Mr. Davidson’s illness. And so you feel you are satisfied with the service our company has given you?”

“Indeed I do!”

“It seems strange there was no earlier indication of your husband’s condition. Hadn’t he ever noticed it before?”

“Never. He was always so strong and healthy; that’s why he despised insurance salesmen so—said they always made him feel as if he were going to die next week.”

“But he did finally change his mind. That is the thing I am most interested in, Mrs. Davidson. You see, we realize we have a service of positive value to offer people; but sometimes, as in the case of your husband, we simply have no means of making them understand it. So naturally, we are most interested to know what finally breaks down a great prejudice against us. You would be doing us a great favor if you could help us in presenting better appeals to other people.” V ,.

“I see what you mean, but I don’t know how I could help you. It just seemed like the thing to do; both John and I felt that way about the same time. It just seemed to be the thing to do.”

Mr. Bascomb felt a trifle numb for a moment. There seemed to be a coldness in the air he hadn’t noticed before. It was as if Sarah were there, standing in front of him.

“You just felt like taking out some insurance?” he said faintly.

Mrs. Davidson nodded. “I don’t suppose that’s much help, is it? But it’s the best I can do, I’m afraid. Surely you know how those things are, though? You get a hunch something ought to be done, without knowing why. That’s the way it was with us. I know it seems silly to most people, but I believe in hunches—don’t you, Mr. Bascomb?”

Bascomb felt that he had to get away quickly. He nodded and picked up the briefcase from the grass where he’d dropped it. “Yes, I do.” he said, backing toward the street. “Hunches are invaluable—especially in matters of this kind!”

He drove partway around the block, and stopped to consider. He was irritated with himself for his reaction to Mrs. Davidson’s talk. What had he expected? A profound selfanalysis as to just why she, as a customer of New England, had chosen that particular policy? Or, rather, why her husband had? _ .

He’d probably get even more of the same kind; it’s what you had to take when dealing with individuals. That was why statistics had to be invented—because people were so unstable and irrational, taken one at a time.

Bascomb wished that he could forget the whole thing right now. But he couldn’t; his encounter with Mrs. Davidson had only convinced him that there must be an absolutely sound statistical explanation for the run of short is policy claims. He started the car and drove to the next address on his list, three blocks away.

Things were better here; the customer was a young physician who had just opened up a small, neighborhood clinic. He had made a liability claim when a patient stumbled on a hose lying across the walk.

“I always feel it necessary to be protected this way,” he said amiably to Bascomb’s question. His name was Dr. Rufus Sherridan. “It’s the only sensible way to look at it.”

“Absolutely,” agreed Bascomb; “it’s the thing we’ve been trying for years to drum into the heads of the public. Be protected. Juries act as if they’re crazy nowadays when they hand out somebody else’s money in a damage suit.”

“As to my making a substantial claim within three weeks of paying my first premium—well, that’s why we have insurance companies, isn’t it?” said Dr. Sherridan, smiling. “I was never able to understand the figures and statistics of how you work these things out, but the idea is to spread the risk of such unfortunate coincidences, is it not?”

“That’s it exactly,” said Mr. Bascomb. “Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, Doctor.” He extended a hand. “I hope you will always find our service as satisfactory as it was this time.”

“I’m sure I shall; thank you for calling,” said Dr. Sherridan.

Bascomb had hoped to contact all twenty seven cases in Victorburg in one day; by five o’clock, however, he had reached only number eighteen. Most of them had been somewhere between Mrs. Davidson and Dr. Sherridan, and Bascomb was exhausted. He longed for his desk and his figures, the world where he knew what was going on.

Number eighteen turned out to be the worst of all, a considerable number of notches below Mrs. Davidson. She was willing to talk for one thing; it took Bascomb almost twenty minutes to get to his critical question.

“Why did we decide at this particular time to buy a policy with your company?” Her name was Mrs. Harpersvirg, and she had a habit of putting her arms akimbo and fixing him with narrowed eyes, head cocked sharply to one side.

“We knew we were going to need it, Mr. Bascomb, That’s why we bought a policy. Oh, I know you’ll say a it person can’t know those things, and it’s true for most people. But once you learn how to realize what’s the right and proper action to take under any circumstance, it’s just like getting a breath of really fresh air for the first time in your life.”

Bascomb leaned back on his heels as she edged toward him. “You have come to such an understanding, Mrs. Harpersvirg?” he asked tentatively.

“You bet! And all I can say is, it’s wonderful! You don’t have to grovel around with your nose in the mud, wondering where you’re going and what’s going to happen next and what you ought to do about it. You can do something about it. Of course, I didn’t believe it when Dr. Magruder said it would be that way; but the way this insurance policy paid off convinced me once and for all. I’m glad you called, Mr. Bascomb. I’ve got to rush now. You can tell your company we’re very happy with their service!”

She banged away and left Mr. Bascomb standing there struggling with his final question: who was Dr. Magruder?

But it was obviously of no importance—probably he was some semi-quack family practitioner in the neighborhood. Bascomb turned and almost fled toward the sanctuary of his car; Mrs. Harpersvirg was the final straw in a day that would exhaust the best of men.

And then, somewhere along the seventy-five mile drive back home, it hit Bascomb like a rabbit punch in a dark alley. The common factor.

In statistics you look for the common factor in order to lump otherwise dissimilar items in a single category. And the common factor here was that each of the policyholders he’d interviewed claimed to have bought in with New England on the basis of a hunch—intuition. From Mrs. Harpersvirg on up to Dr. Sherridan—well, maybe the Doctor could be excepted, but certainly none of the others could.

No high pressure sales talk had sold them; they weren’t attracted by more than cursory interest in the company’s fancy literature and advertising. They had bought simply because they’d felt it the thing to do; almost every one of them had used nearly those exact words.

Intuition—a random factor that ordinarily made no impression on statistical analysis.

These people were making it work!

Bascomb slowed the car at the impact of the thought. He finally pulled off to the side of the road to check his interview notes. The damning words were repeated in every possible variation, but they were there:

“We just figured it was time we ought to have some insurance.”

“It’s hard to say—I guess we were just impressed to buy when we did."

“I don’t know. I felt it was the thing we needed as soon as l heard your company was opening an office here.”

Bascomb closed the book shakily, and resumed driving —slowly. It was tempting to jump to conclusions in a thing like this, but that was absolutely the thing you couldn’t do. There was really no basis for assigning a positive correlation between die short policy claims and the intuitive purchasing by the holders. That was the kind of thing on which a man could trip himself up badly; and he certainly wasn’t going to fall into the trap on this thing, Bascomb told himself. It was an interesting coincidence, but pure coincidence nonetheless—a sound, statistically understandable causation would be forthcoming in due time.

With that comforting thought, Bascomb completed the remainder of the trip and reached home.

Sarah was waiting anxiously, her supper schedule upset by the uncertainty of his time of arrival. She demanded at once: “Tell me all about it, Charles.”

He’d thought he’d brush over it lightly in the telling. Somehow he didn’t feel like describing the exhausting details of the interviews with his wife. But within a couple of hours after supper she had it all—through proper questioning, which was one of the skills in which she excelled.

Even down to Dr. Magruder.

“You mean you went away without even asking who he was?” Sarah demanded.

“It wasn’t important,” said Bascomb, irritated now by the cross-examination. “Besides, she’d already slammed the door in my face.”

“You should have found out about him,” said Sarah thoughtfully looking across his left shoulder. “I feel there’s something important about him. Magruder— I’ve heard that name somewhere. Dr. Magruder—”

She went for the paper on the other side of the living is room and came back, opening it in front of them. “There!” she said. “I thought I remembered.”

Bascomb stared at the four inch, two column advertise* ment indicated by his wife’s Firehouse Red fingernail.

“Are you a living vegetable—or are you living?” it asked. “If you are dissatisfied with life, let Dr. J. Coleman Magruder show you. the way to better health, vitality, and happiness. Half-alive is no better than dead. Hear Dr. Magruder Wednesday night at 8 p.m.—”

“I guess that takes care of the importance of Dr. Magruder,” said Mr. Bascomb with a slight feeling of triumph.

Sarah Bascomb looked thoughtfully at the advertisement for a long time, then slowly closed the paper. “I don’t think so,” she said finally. “I’ll bet that if you go back to every one of those people you talked to today, you’ll find they have taken Dr. Magruder’s course.”

“Nonsense!” Bascomb cried, more sharply than he intended. “That’s ridiculous! What grounds have you got for suggesting such a coincidence?”

“It’s no coincidence, darling; I’m just sure that’s the way it is. What Mrs. Harpersvirg said proves it—”

“It proves no such thing! Just because one flippety female said Magruder—what the devil did she say? I’ve forgotten now, but it doesn’t prove all these people fell for this quack’s line!”

“Ask them,” said Sarah.

He left Dr. Sherridan until last. After all the rest had confirmed Sarah’s hypothesis, Bascomb fought against the final prospect. It was absurd in the extreme even to suppose that Dr. Sherridan had attended quack Magruder’s lectures.

But he had to know.

Dr. Sherridan smiled amiably and waved his hand in disparagement of any significance attaching to his enrollment with Dr. Magruder. “It was mostly for laughs,” he said; “you know how those things go. You work hard all day without much relief from the constant pressure, and something comes up that tickles your funnybone. You go through with it just for kicks, and find you get a whale of a lift out of it; that’s the way it was with this Magruder thing.”

“He’s a complete phoney, of course, a quack?”

“Oh, naturally, but I went along with it all. I even took his pills after I had them analyzed and found out they were genuine vitamins with a harmless filler. Pretty low on vitamins, of course.”

“He has pills?”

“Yes. Several colors for different days of the week.”

“How did you come to—ah, enroll with Magruder in the first place?”

“I found my patients talking about him all the time. He came through here giving his lectures and enrolled most of the females over twenty-five—he’s got a good line, and a nice bedside manner—and one half the neurotic males. Big crowd. So I went down to the first one of his second series to see what went on. That’s how I got in; it was rather amusing, all told.”

“I see. Well, I was just curious. Wife’s become interested, and I wondered if it might be something the police ought to know about. Thanks for your time.”

“Not at all. You might try signing up yourself, if you feel in need of a laugh.”

Before he went back to Landbridge, Bascomb made a check. He didn’t want to have Sarah suggesting it first. And he was right; Dr. Magruder had also been to Topworth and Burraston, and all of the four other cities showing insurance claims anomalies.

He confessed this additional information as soon as he got in the house that evening, in order to forestall Sarah. He should have known better than to try.

“Oh, I could have told you last night that I felt Magruder had been to all those towns; but I knew you’d say it was silly. Anyway, I’m glad you found out. I made reservations for both of us for his full course, starting tonight. We’ll have to hurry, if we’re to get through dinner and everything before we leave.”

He tried to assess his feelings as he stood before the mirror later in their bedroom, trying to adjust his tie. Only two days ago, Hadley had shown him an innocent problem concerning claims anomalies. Tonight, as a direct result, he was signed up for a quack health and development course. A kind of fogginess seemed to develop in his mind when Bascomb tried to trace the intervening steps of this cause and effect relationship. It made no sense whatever.

He wasn’t quite sure why he didn’t put his foot down— even now—and declare the whole thing ridiculous, as it actually was, and refuse to go. It felt almost as if he’d been drawn into a swiftly-moving current from which he didn’t have the stamina to withdraw. But that was ridiculous, too; there was nothing about the whole affair that wasn’t.

Except the cold, unavoidable fact that people by the dozen had bought New England policies and made claims a month or two later.

Charles Bascomb had a sense of cold foreboding as he looked at himself in the mirror now.

3

The doctor had rented the most plush assembly room in the town’s best hotel, and it was filled to the limits of the gray velvet drapes upon its walls. They wouldn’t have had a seat at all if Sarah hadn’t insisted they hurry.

Charles Bascomb glanced about as he sat down, assessing the crowd who had turned out to hear Magruder. They were easily typed: Ninety percent of them were heavily loaded with psychosomatic ills that had already blossomed into heart trouble, cancer, arthritis, and diabetes in two thirds of them. This year they were here to listen to Magruder. Last year it had been Hongi, or something like that, from India; the year before, the sour cream and road tar molasses man; next year somebody else. Always the same crowd, minus the ones who died in between, augmented by the gullible newcomers—

Bascomb felt sorry for them; he wished he could have taken them to his office and shown them his statistics. There was the record of what would happen to this group —and all the Magruders, Hongis, and sour cream men in creation couldn’t change it.

Why was he here—when he had claims anomalies to analyze!

A solid round of applause indicated that the performance was about to begin. Somebody had stepped to the platform and was holding a hand up for attention. Bascomb thought this was Magruder, at first—but it turned out to be only the proprietor of the local health food store, who was sponsoring the course and was about to introduce his star.

He took quite a while, but Magruder finally came onstage. This was a shock. Bascomb had been expecting a barrel-chested, big-biceped character of the kind usually photographed in high society surroundings, with his arms carelessly about the waists of a couple of movie star devotees.

Instead, Dr. Magruder was a rather wizened, pinched-up little man of better than fifty. He peered myopically at his audience through broad lenses and began speaking in scratchy tones that grated on the ears.

Bascomb sat up at attention. This was decidedly different from the show he’d expected. Something was definitely not right about Magruder; he just wasn’t the type of character to be putting on a show of this kind. Bascomb decided to listen.

He would have been better off if he hadn’t, he decided at the end of an hour. With the aid of an incredible pseudo-biochemistry, and large charts that bore no resemblance to any structure in the human body, Dr. Magruder gave out the usual line. He spoke of “corporeal vibrations”, the “ethereal stream”, the “prescience aura”, and a dozen other coined phrases of nonsense. He spoke of the correlating affinities, which his little colored pills were guaranteed to organize within the body, and of the “Cosmic mono-regression” which his set of seventy-five special mental and physical exercises was sure to nullify.

It was sheer gibberish, and the audience ate it up.

Including Sarah.

She beamed happily as she received their copies of the first six of the fabulous exercises and a week’s rainbow assortment of pills.

“You aren’t going to take those things, I hope!” Bascomb whispered.

“Of course I am; and so are you. Don’t you think it’s wonderful that the Doctor has discovered all these things about human beings, that people have been trying to find out for so long?”

“Look, darling—”

“Don’t you just feel the power in what Dr. Magruder says? Don’t you just know he’s right?”

Bascomb gave up and carried the exercise books and boxes of colored pills to the car, as they broke away from the crowd leaving the assembly room.

Following Sarah’s admonition, he took a red and a green pill before going to bed.

These claims anomalies did not constitute the first items of interest which young Hadley had brought to Bascomb’s attention. Because he hoped to rise high and fast in the firm, Hadley had made an exhaustive study of his associates and superiors. It would have surprised Bascomb to know how full the file was which Hadley kept securely hidden at home, and which described the Bascomb eccentricities and foibles as Hadley saw them.

So in accord with the policy he’d adopted toward Bascomb, Hadley approached the following morning about ten o’clock—when,'the morning rush of mail was out of the way—with a news clipping in his hand. “Something curious here,” he said; “I wondered if you might have seen it in the paper this morning.”

He laid it on the desk and Bascomb frowned at it wordlessly. His cold reception of it gave Hadley a start of fear that he might have misjudged Bascomb’s interest in the anomalous, after all.

“At least we can’t blame Magruder for that, anyway,” Bascomb growled unpleasantly.

“Who, sir?” said Brooks politely.

“Magruder. Oh, hell—I’d forgotten you didn’t know anything about him. Forget it. Thanks for the clipping.”

He turned away to his work, but Hadley stood hesitantly by the desk still. “Did you—were you able to make anything out of the claims anomalies I mentioned the other day?”

“No, nothing!” Bascomb snapped irritably. Hadley fled.

Bascomb forgot the clipping until he turned back to that side of the desk again fifteen minutes later; his eyes caught it and he read it through once more.

There was a four inch item about a small town in Minnesota that had finally determined what to do about the TV menace to its children and its culture. On a bright spring Saturday afternoon the citizens had carried their sets down to the town square. There, amid picnic surroundings of fried chicken and peach cobbler, they’d had contests of sorts for various ages—the contests consisting of hurling rocks through twenty-one inch picture tubes from various distances.

Then they’d piled all the sets together and set fire to them. It was reported that there had subsequently been a run on the local library, and that discussion forums and chamber music groups had sprung up all over town.

Bascomb grinned wryly to himself. That was taking the bull—literally!—by the horns and tossing it. He hoped it indicated a trend.

But his statistician’s mind veered back to the essential element in the story, the one which had prompted Hadley to cut it out: the anomaly. When umpteen hundreds of thousands of other communities throughout the land darkened their living rooms at sunset to bask in the hypnotic glow of buncombe until bedtime, why had the single town of Myersville reared up on its hind legs and demonstrated independence of national mores?

Bascomb didn’t know, and he was quite sure he would never find out. His hands too full of Dr. Magruder even to think of tracking down such a remote incident as that in Myersville. But, he repeated fervently to himself, he hoped it was indicative of a trend.

He had reached a standstill in his attempts to analyze the insurance claim anomalies scientifically, according to the principles of statistics; he had to have more data. And while it seemed ridiculous to wait upon Dr. Magruder for that, yet Bascomb had just about decided there was nothing else to do. He knew there could be no connection, but there seemed nowhere else to look for data.

He knocked off a little early for lunch. He had an appointment with an old college friend, Mark Sloane, who had suggested for weeks that they get together when he was in town. He phoned during the morning to announce this was the day.

Bascomb had been close friends with Sloane at one time, and it was nice to see him again—although Sloane had gone into advertising and was now president of his own up and coming firm. That meant they talked of advertising when they got together for lunch.

Sloane greeted Bascomb affably, but there was something lacking, which Bascomb detected at once. They selected a table and Bascomb eyed his friend critically while the menu was being brought.

“You look as if you had a rough trip this time,” he said.

“If you only knew!” Sloane fanned the air in mock desperation. “I’m going to tell you about it—maybe you can help me, too. Seems like a statistician could diagnose the corpse better than anyone else, at that.”

He launched into his troubles after their orders were brought. “We spent two solid months building up this campaign,” he said; “we’d planned to try it in a half dozen Pacific Coast towns and then spread it nationally. We put everything we had into it—all we’d learned in fifteen years of pushing breakfast cereals and cement blocks. And it busted, went completely flat. People walked past the stacks of Singing Suds in the supermarkets as if they’d never hear the name.

“It’s all over the trade. In America, anybody can sell soap, but Sloane and Franklin couldn’t push Singing Suds. Unless we do something quick to show it isn’t a habit, the soap company isn’t the.only one who’ll go on the rocks.

“It’s got us scared, Charles; I don’t mind admitting it. We did everything just right, and it was a bust. Do you think you could do anything to help us find out why?”

Bascomb leaned back thoughtfully. He had never sympathized particularly with Sloane’s endeavors, but he understood what it meant to a man to take a heavy business setback like this.

“I can’t do it personally, Mark, but I think somebody in my field could probably do you some good. There are several good men on the West Coast; I’ll give you the names of two or three if you like.”

“I wish you would,” said Sloane morosely. “The worst part of it is not merely people’s ignoring our campaign completely, but the fact that they bought wholesale lots of a completely unknown product called Dud’s Suds. We tried to figure if the name had anything to do with it, but we couldn’t pin it down.”

“Dud’s Suds, we found out, is put up locally and hasn’t spent a nickel for advertising in years. It used to be in the little comer groceries; within the past few weeks, has pushed into the supermarkets—past nice packages like Singing Suds—. It’s put up in a repulsive blue, cubical box that any package man would tell you wouldn’t sell in a million years. That’s what has us more scared than anything else—the fact that we couldn’t buck poor competition like that. We must have done something terribly wrong!”

“Call these men,” Bascomb suggested, passing over a slip of paper with a couple of names and addresses on it. “They both have small polling organizations, as well as statistical services. Let them give it a try.

“There’s one thing I’ve been wondering about since you first mentioned this: which is the better of the two soaps—Singing Suds or Dud’s Suds?”

Sloane moved his hands disaparagingly. “The other people’s soap is better—but what’s that got to do with it?”

There had been other times in his life when Charles Bascomb felt this way, and he didn’t like it at all. It was a vague, undefinable feeling that things were snowballing on him and he was powerless to do anything about it.

The worst part was in not knowing just what was snowballing. He had freely in mind the irritations of the past few days: the short policy claims; the gnawing little news-clipping Hadley showed him, the story of Sloane’s ad campaign that had bungled. But there was something beyond these things—yet somehow connected with each one of them—and he didn’t know what it was. From a national standpoint, there was no possible connection between these events; yet something nagging faintly in his mind suggested there was.

He grew snappier around the office, and Sarah read the signs and kept quiet around the house. She knew something was bothering Charles, and it was something big.

In this mood he went with Sarah to the second of Dr. Magruder’s lectures on Saturday night. More intently than before, he listened to the quack doctor. And more than ever, he was convinced that there was something basically wrong in the show Magruder was putting on. The nub of it was that Magruder just didn’t have what it took to be this kind of spieler. At his age, if he’d been in the racket a long time, he’d have had a smooth, flowing delivery and a patter that would sell com plasters to a fish.

Instead, Magruder clomped along—almost painfully at times—in his rasping voice. He paused frequently, as if uncertain just how to proceed with the group before him. He was not at all at home in what he was doing. He acted more like a ready-to-be-retired college professor.

College professor.

A small trickle of cold started on the back of Bascomb’s neck and moved slowly up to the base of his skull. There was no doubt about it. There was only one place Magruder could have learned a delivery like that: on a college lecture platform.

He sat back during the rest of the discourse, alternately congratulating himself on his astuteness in seeing through Magruder’s deception and berating himself for being so impulsive. No self-respecting professor would ever stoop to such jargon.

At the end of the period, there was a question and answer session. Well-dressed matrons held up their hands without a qualm and asked items like: “If one’s corporeal vibrations are out of phase with the ethereal stream, can they be brought back merely through use of exercise Four—or must the medication be relied on also to accomplish this effect?” "

Magruder seemed pleased, as if the ladies were really getting his message.

Then, after a dozen of these, Bascomb stood up. “I’d like to ask,” he said slowly, “how the reorganization of one’s corporeal vibrations affects his need of life insurance —or of any other kind, for that matter.”

There was a small titter from somewhere behind him, as if such prosaic matters were beneath consideration in the same breath with corporeal vibrations. But from Magruder there was a sudden, dead stillness. Then he removed his spectacles, wiped them carefully, and peered down at Bascomb as if wanting to fix him indelibly in mind.

“Your question is a little advanced for our present discussion,” Magruder finally answered in precise tones; “but for your information I may say that insurance is an excellent form of purchase when one has need of it Otherwise, it is a waste of funds.”

Bascomb nodded profoundly in agreement. “Yes, I would say that it is,” he said. “I have another question: would you say that one with properly-phased corporeal vibrations would be likely to spend much time watching television?”

Again Magruder did a faint double-take and peered at Bascomb. “Your question is almost irrelevant,” he said, “But not entirely. As with most instruments of mass communication, television finds man in the astonishing position of having vast resources for exchange of intelligence, but no intelligence to exchange. Until this situation is corrected I would say the answer to your inquiry is no.”

“One more,” said Bascomb. “Would you say that such a person would be unyielding to the ordinary advertising appeal?”

“The same answer as to your previous question,” said Magruder, “and for essentially the same reason. Now, if we may continue—”

On Monday, without telling anyone—including Sarah —of his intentions, Bascomb hired a firm of private investigators. Within twenty-four hours he had the information he sought. Magruder was indeed a fake; he was actually Emeritus Professor Magruder of Bay City College, a small institution in southern California. He had been head of the psychology department there and had retired two years ago at the age of sixty-five.

B as comb took the information over the phone and promised to send a check to the investigating firm for their services. He hung up, without being aware of having done so, and continued to stare at the facts he had written down. A nightmare parade seemed to be assembling in the far depths of his mind and was already beginning its march along the channels of his cortex.

"Both John and I felt this was the time to take out a policy—you never know when you might need it.”

But they knew!

"There's something in this that could mean a great deal to our future, Charles." That was Sarah. Did she have any inkling of how much it could mean?

"It was reported that Donny Tompkins won the twelve year olds’ slingshot event by putting a rock through a twenty-one inch screen from a distance of one hundred and ten yards.”

"It has us scared, Charles. The other people’s soap is better, but what has that got to do with it?”

How many more? How many more—in a country as big as the United States? He’d only come across a whisper of the anomaly. What would he find if he really looked— He put on his hat and went out to get a taxi for Magruder’s hotel.

4

The professor greeted Charles Bascomb at the door with an extended hand. With the other he dropped a cigaret into an overflowing ash tray. “I’m glad you finally came,” Magruder said. “I waited all day yesterday for you; I had begun to fear I was anticipating too much.”

“It took me that long to run down the dope on you,” said Bascomb. He passed into the moderately untidy room with its thick cloud of stale smoke. He opened a window and looked out.

Finally, he turned. “I know who you are, but that’s about all. I know you are doing something to the business of my insurance company, but I don’t know how. You weren’t surprised by my questions about television and advertising, so I must assume you know what I was referring to. I get cold along the back of my neck and down my spine when I think of what I don’t know about you.

“I don’t believe any of it, of course; it’s too fantastic to believe. But here I am. And you were waiting for me. Now it’s your turn to talk, Professor.”

Magruder smiled and settled back in a chair opposite Bascomb. “You are a blunt man, for a statistician,” he said. “I find the uncertainties of their profession ordinarily extends to their common speech.”

Bascomb eyed him without answering. Magruder seemed to be musing now on something seen through the windows—but this was the tenth floor, and there was only sky beyond.

He didn’t change the focus of his eyes as he said, “Insurance is actually a most reprehensible business, isn’t it, Mr. Bascomb?”

Bascomb decided against rising to the bait.

“Making money from people’s certainty of death or misfortune—a ghoulish business. But then, since your own profession assists this traffic in misery, I suppose it is difficult for you to see it. May I ask, Mr. Bascomb, how many of the capsules you have taken and how many hours of the exercises you have performed?”

Bascomb stirred with vigor for the first time. “That nonsense! Come on, Professor, let’s have the genuine story of what you are trying to do. I’m not one of those fat old matrons in your audiences, remember.”

“But that is the genuine story,” said Magruder. “Because I have somewhat disguised it with a bit of mummery, do you suppose the whole thing is trickery?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Everything I’ve heard so far in your lectures is nonsense—and of course the feeble vitamin pills you dish out are of no importance.” “And that is where you are wrong,” said Magruder. “I must ask you to answer my question if you will, please.” “Oh, I’ve been taking your damned pills!” Bascomb answered irritably. “I have to, to keep peace in the house; you’ve got my wife thoroughly buffaloed with your double talk. I’ve been doing the exercises, too. She insists on it every evening.”

“Good. Then perhaps you can understand something of what I have to say—although it may be a trifle early for full comprehension.

“Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a world, Mr. B as comb, where insurance companies were not needed?”

“Certainly not; it’s ridiculous to even contemplate. Insurance business provides a sound, social need in spreading the risks of modem living. To destroy the insurance business would once again make the individual the prey of all the unforeseen and uncontrollable forces of nature and our complex civilization, from which he is now protected.”

Magruder looked out the window again, as if he had almost forgotten his visitor. Then he said at last, “Doesn’t it seem curious to you that modem man, with all his tremendous technological accomplishments, should still be in such great need of protection from these forces?”

“No,” said Bascomb; “biology teaches us that man was forced to develop auxiliary protections because of his inherent physical weakness. That’s what’s made him great; out of weakness has come his strength.”

“And what basis is there for such a preposterous assumption?” Magruder showed angry excitement for the first time. “How could Man have reached the top of the evolutionary ladder if he dropped his natural, physical protective devices, one by one, as he developed? Can you think of a hypothesis more absurd than this one? Wouldn’t he, rather, have accumulated survival instruments instead of dropping them?”

“He did,” said Bascomb, “his brain—which enables him to devise any means of protection and development that he needs.”

“And that’s an improvement, I suppose! A device to manufacture out of cmde metal and glass the instruments possessed for fifty to a hundred million years by other species. The swift knows with unerring accuracy die way to go to avoid an oncoming storm, and its temporarily-abandoned young go into hibernation when it comes. But human beings still don’t know which way to duck a hurricane; and the ones caught in it die.

“For fifty million years bats have navigated by sonar. An eel-like fish of the Nile uses true electromagnetic radar. But Man is just now getting around to clumsy mechanical duplicates of these devices. Birds and animals use the polarization of daylight to determine direction and time. Man still hasn’t got a really practical device for duplicating this feat.

“The homing ability of the ‘lower species’ is traditional. We use ‘bird-brain’ as a term of insult—but it takes quite a few tons of iron and glass even to approach a duplication of the functions of a two or three ounce bird brain.” “Are you suggesting, then,” said Bascomb with a superior smile, “that Main should take a backward step and pick up some of the abilities of his distant forebears?”

“Is it anything to boast of that Man lacks the abilities of the lower species?” Magruder snapped. “Actually, they’re not lost; Man doesn’t have to go back. What I’m suggesting is that he merely bring into full play those abilities he has—for he does indeed stand at the top of the evolutionary ladder!

“Man’s homing ability is superior to that of the pigeon, or of the elephant, fish, or bat—which have it in abundance. His natural radar sense excels that of the Nile fish; his sonar is better than that found in bats and rats. And his prescience of disaster far outdistances that of the swift.”

“You mean we have all these mechanisms, unused, within the structure of our bodies?”

Magruder shook his head. “No. The mechanisms we see in the lower species are clumsy experimental models. In Man, Nature has installed the final production model which incorporates all the prior successes without their bugs, as I believe an engineer would say it.

“This final production model we call ‘intuition.’ ” Bascomb choked; for a moment he felt like laughing out loud. He had a flashing vision of Sarah before him— arms akimbo and lips pressed tightly while she exclaimed, “I don’t care what you say, Charles Bascomb, I know what’s right, and that’s the way it’s going to be done!”

It made no difference what ‘it’ was. Sarah’s feeling of just knowing could be applied to anything.

And then Bascomb had a mental picture, too, of Mrs. Davidson and Mrs. Harpersvirg, and Dr. Sherridan.

He permitted only a faint smile as he finally answered, “You believe you have tamed man’s ability to do things by hunch and guesswork?”

“Unreasonable, isn’t it?” said Magruder. “It helps just a little if you use the proper terminology, however. Intuition is a definite, precise faculty of the human organism; evolutionwise, it stands at the peak of all those faculties we have been talking about in the lower species. It supplants them all, and goes beyond anything they can accomplish. And human beings have it. All of them.”

“That’s a large order of unsubstantiated statements.” Magruder’s eyebrows lifted. “I thought I’d given you some rather remarkable evidence in your own field. You want more? Very well, I’ll give you the names of an even dozen people in Wallsenburg where I finished a series of lectures last month. They will buy policies—not necessarily with your company—and will make claims within a month. You’ll find them, if you check; can I give you any more evidence?”

Bascomb shifted uncomfortably. “Let’s say for the moment that I accept your thesis. Why, then, has intuition— particularly among the female of the species—become a stock joke? Why have men, generally, never been able to rely on the intuition they’re supposed to have? How are you able to do anything about making it usable? Surely, these colored pills, and the nonsense you lecture about—” “Did you ever watch a person read with his lips moving, forming every word?” said Magruder. “Irritating as the devil, isn’t it? You want to tell him to quit flapping his chops—that he can read ten times as fast if he’ll go about it right.

“Men don’t always choose to use the maximum ability that is in them; the answer to your question is as simple as that. Men decided a long time ago not to use intuitive powers, and employ something else.”

“What else?” asked Bascomb.

“Statistics,” said Magruder.

Bascomb felt a warm anger rising within him. That was the kind of thing you could expect, he supposed, from a broken down professor turned quack. He forgot his recent interviews for a moment.

“I fail to see any need for an attack on the principles of statistics,” he said. “Statistics enable predictions to be made, which would be impossible otherwise.”

“Predictions about a group,” said Magruder; “not individuals. Consider your own business. Statistical laws enable the insurance company to function, and make a profit for its shareholders. But what does statistics do for the policyholder? Not one damn’ thing!

“Think it over; you’re not working for the policyholder. He’s absolutely defenseless against whatever assessment your statistics tell you is legitimate to levy against him. The individual gets absolutely nothing from your work. The group—the shareholders of the company—are the only ones who benefit.”

“I’ve never heard anything quite so ridiculous in my whole life!” said Basoomb heatedly.

“No?” Magruder smiled softly. “Let’s consider the alternative situation then^-one in which the policyholder is on an even-Stephen basis, so to speak, with the company.

“Suppose he is able to discern—as a number of people you’ve met recently can do—the precise need for insurance which may come his way. He doesn’t need to pay premiums uselessly for twenty or thirty years, and get nothing for them; but when he sees an unavoidable emergency approaching a month or so away, he can take out a policy to cover it. There’s something he can really benefit from!”

“Quite obviously, you don’t understand the principles of the insurance business at all,” said Bascomb. “It would simply cease to exist if what you described were a widespread possibility.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed Magruder, “that is quite true. Insurance would become obsolete as an institution, and would be replaced by common sense planning on the part of the individual. Any remnant of the insurance concept would have to be strictly on a loan basis.

“The same fate will be true for numerous other institutions that operate for the group at the expense of the individual—our concept of education, the jury system and criminal punishment. The advertising business as we know’ it will disappear; mass media of communication will operate only during the infrequent intervals, when there’s something to communicate—”

“You speak as if you considered the Group as some all-powerful enemy the individual must combat for his own survival!”

“To a large extent that is true.”

“To a greater extent it’s absolute nonsense, and the psychiatrists have a word for it.”

“Yes,” Magruder agreed. “They have a word for nearly everything—I wonder what they will call your bankrupt insurance company.”

“I don’t consider that my company is in any danger whatever. I am quite certain that, while your hypotheses are very entertaining, I can eventually find a sound statistical explanation for this sudden run of claims on short time policies.”

“And for my prediction of an additional dozen?” Magruder spread his hands inquiringly.

Bascomb didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “Why were you expecting me to come to see you? Why did you want me to come?”

“Because I need the understanding of men like you. I need men who know what it’s like to be on both sides of the statistical fence, so to speak. 1 thought you were capable of becoming one.”

“I’m sorry you were wrong, and have had to waste much valuable time,” said Bascomb. “I must admit that I have a great curiosity about your insistent attack on statistics. You’ve made no case against it; and certainly it operates well enough—in a society of us non-intuitionists, at least.”

“Which is the only place it will work,” said Magruder. “Admittedly, this concept of intuition is so foreign to our present thinking that it appears to be an approach to insanity. We are so accustomed in our culture to the dominance of Society over Individual that we are unable to realize it as unnecessary.

“No historical era can match today’s demand by the Individual for security and assurance from sources outside himself; no era can match this one for such complete overshadowing of the Individual by Society, the Nation, the Empire—not even ancient times when slavery was an acceptable culture. The slaves would revolt on occasion; the Individual does not revolt today!”

“And so you envision the ultimate anarchy!” Bascomb exclaimed in astonishment. “The wild lawlessness of the individual supreme, unimpeded by the restrictions of government?”

“I have said no such thing,” Magruder said angrily. “Man’s optimum functioning demands his membership in a group. It’s impossible for him to go it alone—on a cultural level, at least. But neither can he function optimally until he invents a society that does not oppress him to its own supposed advantage—until one man’s worth is adequately balanced against that of the entire Society.”

“So our Society is the enemy to be fought then?” Bas-comb thought he had Magruder’s number now, and he was ready to laugh. Being taken in by a mere subversive!

“No.” Magruder smiled now as if reading Bascomb’s thoughts. “No—Man is his own enemy—by misarrangement. He invented Society, and didn’t know he could do so much better; it is up to him to correct his own error.”

Bascomb felt a little wave of cold. He spoke with increased care. “So your objective is to destroy Society? That’s a trifle ambitious, to say the least. There’ve been a good many attempts to do that same thing in the past, but it manages to struggle along.”

“Shocking thought, is it not?” said Magruder. “Well, fortunately, it’s a misconception. My objective is not, of course, to destroy Society, as such, but rather to permit the emergence of a kind of man who will no longer have use for what we call Society.

“Please understand, there’s nothing sacred whatever in the word or the thing we call Society. It’s an invention of mankind—who has as much right to change, repair, or substitute for it as he has with any of his other inventions. First, there was Man; Society came later. Let’s go back and consider the time when there was only Man.

“He was an infant, just learning to read, if you will. And the job was tough, because it required that he be self-taught. He didn’t learn the best way; he learned to read by moving his lips, and he never tried seriously to improve upon this.

“To drop the analogy now for the real circumstances: Man found there were numerous ways of solving problems and* reaching generalizations about the world around him. He could get his own answer on an individual basis and go ahead and apply it, for one way. But he’d already learned that, on a strictly physical level, there was strength in numbers; so he was suspicious of the solitary approach to anything. He developed the method of comparing proposed solutions to problems with his fellows. Sometimes there was a radical difference—the same problem affected different Individuals in widely varying ways. But it seemed like a good idea to stick together instead of going it alone. Compromises were made; the concensus of opinion was taken, and the majority decision accepted by all.

“Thus was bom Society—and with it the art of statistics, the submergence of the Individual in the Group.”

“I don’t know where you learned your sociology, Professor—but if anything like the scene you describe actually occurred, that was the birth of Man’s triumph over a nature he could not combat singlehanded. It was the birth of his realization that the combined effort of many Individuals can accomplish what none of them can do done.”

“No,” said Magruder. “This is not what was bom at that time. A concerted attack on Man’s problems does not depend on his present Society. Cooperation is more easily obtained through much different instruments.

“Without exerting himself to work out such different instruments, however, Man was forced to cling desperately to the tool of his invention, Society. Inherent within it was the concept that the Individual was a servant of the group. In any question of conflicting welfare the Individual expected automatic defeat; sometimes he has fought against it, but never with any heart or expectancy of winning.

“Statistical methods were the obvious intellectual tools with which to manipulate and describe Man as he functioned in Society. The Individual was of no import, so why bother devising a means of accommodating him? In writing insurance policies, it is important to you to know only that one out of a certdn dozen men will die of cancer. Which one is of no concern to you—unless it is yourself or someone for whom you have an affection. In this case, however, you have lost your usefulness to Society as an impartial statistician, and Society will replace you.

“As a method of reasoning, which would fit his Society, Man developed logic—statistical induction of generdizations from many individual instances. It works fine in predicting the characteristics of the group, but no individual instance can be deduced from it.

“But from time to time there have appeared short bursts of a stronger, more subtle, and completely incomprehensible means of reaching a generalization—the one Man bypassed when he invented Society; the non-logical process called intuition.

“Within the framework of our culture it has been impossible to describe, and the conclusions reached could not be defended in any logical manner acceptable to Society.”

Bascomb shifted uneasily. “And now you have corrected these defects?” he said.

“Yes,” said Magruder. “Man can now be taught how to reach generalizations through the method of intuition. And please note that the inductive operation by the intuitive method yields a different type of generalization. The intuitive generalization is of the type of the Natural Law, which, unlike the Statistical Generalization, does permit deduction of individual instances.

“The intuitive method, therefore, is the only one that does an individual any good!”

“And you can no doubt prove as well as teach what you say,” said Bascomb.

Magruder smiled. “The proof, as well as the method, is one which Society is loathe to accept. The pragmatic test —in itself a non-logical method—is the only one applicable. I think, however, it has been applied sufficiently to allow you to reach a conclusion!”

“A man would have to possess a very large dose of sheer faith in order to live by intuition if he could never prove a hypothesis until it had been tried in actual experience.”

“Yes,” Magruder nodded soberly. “I would say that faith is a large component of intuition.”

“There is only one thing you have left out: the mechanism by which these weird exercises of body and mind, and the little colored pills are supposed to restore one’s intuition.”

“That, too,” said Magruder, “is something which can only be tested pragmatically. You understand, of course, that these methods do not restore anything. You have never learned to use intuition in any degree; your wife is considerably more proficient. Yet, comparatively speaking, you are both readers who move your lips. You have to learn to do it by scanning—and the only proof that this is better is in learning it.

“So, if you continue, you will learn how to use your intuitive powers. The little pills contain a shading of vitamins to satisfy those curious enough to analyze them. The active ingredient is the other material which is necessary to subdue the automatic reaction of fear in dropping statistical thinking. This fear is very real and dominating; it says that use of intuition is a defiance of the billions of a man’s fellows who have lived since the beginning of the race. It says they will crush him for daring to step out on his own and be an Individual who does not consult and bow to their wishes.

“Without a proper biochemical compensation of this fear, it would be all but impossible for a man to ever command his intuitive powers. So do not attempt it without use of the pills; it would tear you to pieces.”

“And one final question,” said Bascomb. “If I were to believe all this, and become one of your men who ‘know what it’s like to be on both sides of the statistical fence,’ what use would you make of me?”

“I would ask you to assist in the spread of these methods, particularly among your own professional group, which is among the strongest fortresses that intuition has to attack. Such attack can best be done by someone from the inside.”

“I see.” Bascomb rose suddenly and took up his hat. “It has been most entertaining, Professor; many thanks for your time.”

“Not at all.” Magruder smiled and accompanied him to the door. “I will expect you at the next lecture.”

“It is doubtful I will be there,” said Bascomb. “Quite doubtful.”

5

Bascomb had it in mind to return to the office as he left Magruder’s hotel room, but once out on the street he knew this was impossible. His brain churned with the impossible mixture of fantasy and faintly-credible truth which Magruder had dispensed.

He turned down the street in the direction away from his up-town office and moved slowly, dimly aware of his surroundings, murmuring apologies to his fellow pedestrians with whom he collided at intervals. Finally, he stopped and found an empty bench in Moller’s Park; he sat down, the pigeons clustering expectantly about his feet.

He had nothing to feed them, but their random motion and the sharp whine of their wings served to bring him in closer touch with the present moment.

A decision had to be made and made quickly. There was no use quibbling mentally over what Magruder could or could not do. The critical fact was that he could do something. Charles Bascomb had no doubt of this; he simply could not deny the run of policy claims. How much of all that nonsense about intuition was true Bascomb didn’t know; for the moment he didn’t care. Magruder was far more than a harmless quack; he was a crank—and a dangerous one at that. If his mysterious doings were extended any further, he could actually undermine the foundations of the nation’s insurance business.

He could.

And how much more beyond that, Bascomb didn’t know; there would be tffne enough to find out when Magruder was safely stopped.

He considered going to the police with his story, but almost at once the futility of this was obvious. What desk sergeant, detective, or even police chief would listen to such a tale without being tempted to throw him behind bars for drunkenness?

Magruder had rightly said the only test of his theories and work was the pragmatic one. And until a person had seen actual results, he would be convinced the whole thing was the product of an active insanity.

There had to be a more indirect method.

At once, Bascomb thought of his friend, Hap Johnson, feature writer of the Courier; Hap would understand a thing like this. He would take the obvious view, at first, that Bascomb was drunk; but his innate curiosity wouldn’t let him stop there. Hap was a solid citizen and a respected newspaperman; but he had just enough yen to be the kind of news hero pictured in the movies to be hooked by something like this. Yes, Hap was the man to see, Bascomb decided as he got up from the park bench.

He found his man slapping a typewriter in a small cubicle located just off the Courier city room. The room was full of smoke, the typewriter was very old, and Hap’s hat clung to the back of his head at a sharp angle. These were the affectations he allowed himself in deference to the movie idols he realized that no workaday reporter could ever hope to emulate. Otherwise, he was an excellent newsman.

He looked up as Bascomb walked in. “Charley! Don’t do a thing like that! The roof braces of this firetrap can’t take such a shock. Don’t tell me now—you’ve lost your job; your wife has left you; you owe the company ten thousand dollars you’ve embezzled—”

Bascomb sat down, pushing Hap back into the chair from which he’d risen. “It’s worse,” he said. “I want you to do me a favor—and give me some advice.”

“The advice is easy,” said Hap; “I don’t know about the other part.”

Sketchily, then—without going into Magruder’s complex social theories—Bascomb described the professor as a half-baked quack who could really do some of the things he claimed.

“Call it hypnosis, suggestion, or whatever you want to.” he said, “Magruder exerts some kind of controlling influence over the people who takes his courses. Personally, I think it works through the pills he gives out. Whatever it is, the man is dangerous; he’s radical, subversive, and he is somehow able to lead his followers to accomplish what he wants them to do.

“Right now, he seems to be attacking the insurance companies with an eye to bankrupting them. You’ll say I’m crazy, but I’m genuinely afraid of what he might be able to do if he was able to expand and make a concentrated attack. You can imagine what the results would be if he actually succeeded—financial chaos. He seems to think he can do the same kind of trick with the advertising business and other institutions. He’s got to be stopped.”

Hap Johnson pushed his hat a notch further back on his head and regarded Bascomb thoughtfully. “You’re not a drinking man,” he said, “and I’ve never detected signs of insanity before. So it’s possible there’s something in what you say. “But—” he leaned closer in a gesture of secret confidence—“isn’t it reasonable to suppose you might have been mistaken about the people you interviewed? Overwork, worry about the guy who’s gigging for your job—”

“I’m sure, Hap,” said Bascomb. “I’ve gone over it a hundred times; I’ve plugged every hole.”

Hap drew back. “It’s not the kind of thing you could go to the police with—yet they ought to know about it. Here’s what we can do: you say Magruder is no M. D., so we ought to be able to get him investigated for prescribing those pills of his—practising medicine without a license.”

“I don’t know whether that would stop him or not—”

“It might not stop him, but it would get him some darned unfavorable publicity, if it’s handled right. We could play it from there. I’ll get a ticket to his lecture; you can introduce me, and we’ll see what kind of story he gives me.”

Bascomb neglected to tell Sarah anything about his visits with Dr. Magruder and Hap Johnson; but he caught her eyeing him as if she knew all about it, anyway. It gave him the old, familiar, uneasy sensation. He knew she couldn’t possibly have learned what he’d done, but she had feelings abou;l things; he wished he dared ask precisely what those feelings were.

On the evening of the next lecture she volunteered the information. Bascomb had just told her about arranging for Hap to go with them.

“That’s what I’ve been feeling!” Sarah exclaimed. “It’s been as if tonight were a turning point of some kind. I can’t tell whether it’s going to be good or bad for us—but it depends on something that’s going to happen to Dr. Magruder. And Hap Johnson is responsible! He doesn’t want to come to find out what Dr. Magruder teaches; he just wants gossip for that cheap tabloid he works for, and he doesn’t care who he hurts in getting it.”

“I thought you liked Hap.”

“I used to—until he did this to Magruder!”

“He hasn’t done anything yet,” Bascomb reminded her; “so far there’s nothing but your own slightly overworking imagination.”

Sarah ignored his remark. “Let’s not go tonight, Charles. Don’t take Hap down there; he’ll kill Magruder with what he’ll print.”

Bascomb felt the perspiration starting under his collar. “Don’t be ridiculous, darling; you’re imagining things. I’ve asked Hap along, and he’d think I was crazy if I tried to back out now. Nothing’s going to happen; you’ll see.”

The evening seemed to go smoothly enough in spite of Bascomb’s mixed anxieties. He let his attention be held only mildly by Magruder’s double-talk, and afterwards, when he went up to introduce Hap Johnson the Professor smiled knowingly. Magruder’s face clouded a trifle, however, as he took the reporter’s hand, and Bascomb saw a new tension come at the same moment into his wife’s expression.

Then it was past and Magruder was shaking Hap Johnson’s hand cordially, inviting him back, making an offering of a generous sample of his pills and the circulars describing his exercises.

“This will make me a superman, huh?” Hap asked dubiously as he accepted the articles and examined them.

“Guaranteed!” Dr. Magruder slapped him on the shoulder and laughed jovially. “It never fails when instructions are followed faithfully. Of course,” he added soberly, “I realize you are not sufficiently interested to go along with me to that extent; but I trust that if you write up our little course of lectures here, you will keep in mind that we actually offer nothing at all. Anything that occurs as a result of coming here is due strictly to the student’s own efforts.”

“If that were true,” said the reporter with sudden iciness in his eyes, “it would not be necessary for you to hold lectures at all, would it? The buck isn’t passed as easily as all that!”

On the way home, Bascomb tried to console his wife; he reminded her repeatedly that nothing had happened to verify her fears. Sarah remained unresponsive, apparently accepting as fact that Magruder’s doom was sealed. She felt it, she said.

Bascomb drove carefully, acutely aware of the sense of exhaustion that filled him. It was futile to close his eyes any longer to the fact that Sarah’s feelings corresponded exactly with Magruder’s description of a moderately wellworking intuition.

In the early years of their marriage, he’d laughed at her and shrugged off her hunches and lucky guesses; then he’d begun to keep tab—

There was no question about her knowing Hap’s purpose in coming to the meeting. Bascomb wondered how much she was aware of his own position. She had nothing, but her intuitive knowledge shown bleakly in her eyes, he thought miserably.

He hadn’t quite known, at first, just why he felt it necessary to keep from telling her about his visit with Magruder and Hap. Now he saw the full impossibility of it. Suppose Magruder were right—well, partly right, anyway? Suppose intuition did turn out to be a natural, useful human function that was active in some people and could be developed in others? How could he tell Sarah that Magruder was an evil man—that the faculty she cherished so greatly had to be suppressed with all possible force?

She wouldn’t understand that a sizeable number of intuitive people could literally destroy the civilization and institutions that modem man was dependent upon.

Her intuition was too precious a possession for Sarah to ever believe anything evil could be in it, Bascomb thought; she’d turn against him before believing that.-This thing had a potential that could destroy his very home if he failed to handle it right!

In his attempts to appease her he was more than usually cooperative that night ift doing the routine Magruder prescribed, and in taking the pills. They were brown and orange now.

Sarah’s face did not relax its expression of foreboding.

It occurred to Bascomb, as soon as he reached the office the next morning, that applications might now be coming in from the people named by Magruder in their interview. He was right; six of them were in the morning mail.

He had no actual right to enter the applications department and take a look at the papers before they had even begun to be processed. It was no great offense, of course— it wouldn’t have been to a man other than the kind Dave Tremayne happened to be. Tremayne was head of the processing department. Another man’s casual courtesy was his grudging favor.

Bascomb was well aware of this as he stood with the papers in his hand, scanning them while Tremayne looked on belligerently.

“These will have to be rejected,” Bascomb said as mildly as possible. And for a long time afterward he wondered why he actually said it; there would be no great harm to the company in paying off claims of an additional half dozen short-term policy holders. But that thought was utterly foreign to his mind now. He could see no coursp but the one he was following.

“I thought that was for us to decide,” Dave Tremayne snapped; “since when did the Statistical Department take over those duties?”

“I—I happen to know a little about these cases,” Bascomb said hesitantly. “Friend of mind is acquainted with the town pretty well. He knows these people and is certain there is something that isn’t on the level. This big fire policy for example. Bhuener’s Hardware. It’s a firetrap; I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a claim on it before the month is out—”

Tremayne advanced and took the papers from Bas-comb’s hand. “You can let us worry about that,” he said unpleasantly; “any time I need help from the figures department I’ll let you know.”

He should have known it was worse than useless, Bas-comb told himself. He looked at Tremayne and turned away; then he stopped and faced the department head again. “It wouldn’t look at all good,” he said, “if you got another half dozen claims within a month of granting the policies. Your short-termers are beginning to stick out on the charts.”

“What do you mean by that?” Tremayne demanded. But his belligerence had subsided now.

“I’m advising you to turn down those applications,” Bascomb said. He walked away to his own department.

It wasn’t a logical thing to do, he thought, as he reached his own desk once again. It could cause a lot of trouble either way it fell—whether the prediction turned out right or wrong. And Dave Tremayne was just the kind to milk it for all the trouble it was worth.

He was rather hopeful of hearing something from Johnson regarding the reporter’s impressions and plans concerning the campaign agannst Magruder. But he heard nothing at all that day, nor the next. A sense of loneliness assailed him. He wanted somebody to talk to about this thing, but there was nobody at all to give him companionship under this burden. Sarah continued moody and cool and convinced of the approach of disaster.

6

Hap Johnson called on the succeeding day, and he had news. “This bird is more clever than you’ve given him credit for!” he said. “It’s no wonder the previous chemical analyses showed a harmless filler supporting a few vitamins in his pills.”

“What do you mean?” said Bascomb.

“I had five different outfits run tests on these pills before I found the answer. They all gave the same story you already had. Then I asked Joe Archer, who runs toxic checks for the police department, to look at them. He got it in a minute, just by looking at the other guys’ results.

“They were right. The pills are about as potent as dried carrots—individually; but put them together in the combinations and succession Magruder prescribes and you’ve got something!”

“What?” asked Bascomb.

“Joe couldn’t give me the answer to that, but he said it was obvious these chemicals would combine in the body, and with the body chemicals, to form some items only slightly less potent than dynamite.”

“We really ought t0 have a case against Magruder then,” said Bascomb. Peculiarly, he thought, there was no sense of elation or triumph at all, now that defeat of his enemy was in sight.

“That’s the devil of it,” said Hap; “I’m not so sure we have. That’s where Magruder has been so clever. The things he has actually been prescribing are inconsequential. I’m not so sure we could pin him down on the basis of the fact that his pills recombine inside the human system to form new and more potent drugs. He could argue he’d never prescribed or administered those; and, technically, he’d be right.”

“But it would ruin him even if the courts had to agree with that argument; and that’s all I’m interested in,” Bascomb replied. “Can’t your friend, Archer, give us enough basis for a complaint to the District Attorney.”

“He said it ought to be made known, at any rate. It would help if we could get some witnesses who could swear they’d been injured by the pills. Why don’t you talk to Joe yourself, and see if you can round up any such witnesses? You know who’s been taking in these lectures; in the meantime I’ll put a gentle word in the paper to start the ball rolling.”

Charles Bascomb agreed and hung up. From what he’d seen, however, he doubted that it would be possible to get any of Magruder’s followers to complain against him. They were a devout bunch—all those he’d seen, anyway.

A doubting weariness came over him again as he sat there staring at the black shape of the telephone. How in Heaven’s name had this all begun? How had he become so involved in a senseless, unbelievable tangle like this?

Why was he the only one, out of the hundreds who’d contacted Magruder, who understood the threat of Magruder’s work? It was as if the Professor had singled him out, as his greatest potential enemy, to show him exactly what he could do. And Bascomb remembered that Magruder had said this was just what he had done—in order to recruit Bascomb’s aid. But surely Magruder hadn’t actually believed he’d accept the validity and desirability of the Professor’s work!

That was the dilemma presented by the whole thing. To recognize it as a threat, Magruder’s claim had to be accepted as valid. A hundred times a day, Bascomb had to ask himself again if he accepted this. And because of what he had seen, his answer was still a forced, unwilling yes.

And if so incredible a work was valid, could it not function for good instead of harm? This also gnawed unceasingly in Bascomb’s mind. But Magruder’s own words had answered this. He was out to change the face of society in a destructive manner.

It wasn’t just that he was selfishly thinking of the insurance business, Bascomb reminded himself; Magruder seemed bent on attacking the whole bright world of statistical science, and all the institutions founded upon it.

And this Bascomb could not countenance; his own private world had no other foundation. In statistics a man could know what to expect of the world. Destroy this, put existence on an individual incident basis, and what was left? A nebulous faith in unconfirmed beliefs about how things ought to turn out—

Then he thought again of Sarah and felt lost.

His world had already been shaken too vigorously.

He didn’t go to Joe Archer; there seemed to be no point in it yet. He continued with the pills and the exercises, and went to another lecture. There, he looked for possible witnesses against Magruder, and knew that the quest was futile, even before it started. These people never turned on their messiahs; even if one failed them, there was always the next season, and the next—

That was the day the first of Hap’s articles appeared in the paper. He indicated he was going to do a series analyzing the weird cults and health panaceas and mental improvement fads that proved sucker traps for the sick, neurotic part of the populace which was in need of genuine help.

It began mildly enough, as Johnson had promised; but Bascomb was more than ordinarily amazed at the man’s genius, because he could see where Hap was going. He began, not by antagonizing those who were following such phoney panaceas, but by sympathizing thoroughly with their search for assistance—which was so difficult to find in a brutal civilization that cared only in token measures for the sick or improvident individual.

He promised to follow up with stories of the frauds who preyed upon such people. It was a terrific build-up for the time when he was ready to let go at Magruder. Reading it, Bascomb felt the matter had already passed from his hands. Magruder was, at the mercy of Hap Johnson—and the newspaper-reading public.

Bascomb felt later that he should have been prepared for the event that occurred the following day. (He was eventually to do a great deal of Monday morning quarterbacking over this period of his life.) But when he went to the office, he was still prepossessed of the thought that power to act in the Magruder matter had passed from him.

He was called almost as soon as he arrived to the office of Famham Sprock, Second Vice-president of New England. Sprock was a small, mealy old man who had been by-passed sometime ago for the top post in the Company. He had been relegated to office administration, even though it was known that all who felt his judgement would suffer for his failure.

Sprock looked at Bascomb through seemingly-dull eyes as the statistician entered the room.

“You sent for me?” Bascomb said, trying to make it as little like a question as possible.

“I’ve had a most unbelievable complaint about you,” said Sprock. “It seems too incredible to even act upon it, to believe that one of our Family would act in such a manner. Yet I am forced to believe that the accusation is well founded.

“I am told that you have assumed to step over the line of your authority in this office, and presume to dictate to your fellow officers in the conduct of their affairs. You have demanded that Mr. Tremayne refuse to act favorably on certain applications, so it is said. Is this true, Mr. Bascomb?”

“Yes.” Bascomb nodded his head. And suddenly he felt himself shaking all over; this weazened old fool could actually destroy him if Sprock took it into his silly head. He could deny Charles Bascomb the world of facts and figures and clean, cold statistical reality. Why hadn’t he minded his own business?

“Why, Mr. Bascomb?” said Sprock.

Bascomb took a deep breath and wearily recited the occurrence of the anomalies from beginning to end, leaving out all reference to Magruder, of course.

“All you have said is a matter of serious concern, and one we should well pay attention to,” said Sprock. “But it has nothing to do with your presumption in the matter of advising Mr. Tremayne.”

“I have said that the policy applications I referred to are of the same class as those previously mentioned; they will also be followed by quick claims.”

Sprock rose and came around the side of his desk. “Mr. Bascomb, that is a thing you could not possibly know!”

Suddenly an old, latent fury seemed to spring alive inside Bascomb’s mind. What was this shriveled idiot trying to tell him? He knew—he knew beyond all question of doubt that what he said was true. It didn’t matter that Magruder had predicted it. Magruder had nothing to do with this positive, insistent knowledge that burned in his mind.

He knew, in and of himself, that those policies would turn out as he said. And Sprock telling him he couldn’t possibly know—

As suddenly as it had arisen, the rage died, and Bascomb found himself smiling at the little man and sensing a strange pity for him.

“I have discovered something new,” said Bascomb quietly. “It—it is a recent statistical development on which I have been working for some time. It is a formula that enables me to predict when we are due for a run of policies such as this. They occur every once in a while, you know; my formula tells me that this is ready to occur again.”

“I don’t believe it!” snapped Sprock; “such a thing is impossible. Why if it were true, it would—it would change the entire aspect of our business. I warn you, Bascomb— and this is the last and only time I will do so—I want no repetition of this kind of occurrence. I will not tolerate it in my organization. A repetition means a complete and permanent severance of your relations with this Company. Do I make myself clear, Bascomb?”

“Yes,” said Bascomb. He turned to the door as Sprock dismissed him. But he turned, with his hand on the knob. “I would suggest, however,” he said, “that you get a list of those applications from Mr. Tremayne. Within thirty days there will be claims on every one of them!”

Back at his desk, Charles Bascomb felt a tremendous sense of release, quite unlike anything he had ever experienced before—an elation at having stood up to Sprock. He had a momentary feeling of not being afraid of Sprock any more—or of New England—or of any other force that might be able,to shake him from his niche.

It died in a renewed consternation over what he’d said. Why on Earth had he indented the lie he told Sprock, the lie about a mathematical invention that would predict unfavorable runs? Well, there had to be something to cover his previous statement about knowing positively there would be claims on these particular policies.

And then the full force of what he’d said hit him. He’d said he knew. And it was true. He wasn’t just taking Magruder’s word for it, he knew. As if trapped in a comer by a persistent enemy, he tried to evade this sudden fact, to turn his back upon it and refuse to admit all its appalling implications.

But escape was impossible. He sat there, feeling stunned, then slowly embraced the unwanted knowledge.

This was it.

This was intuition.

It was the way Sarah felt, he supposed—only she felt it on almost any connection. No wonder she thought him a blockhead when he couldn’t understand how she could be so sure of a wholly illogical assumption!

It was the way the policyholders felt, too, the ones he’d interviewed. And they had been right.

It was impossible to take up the thread of his work as he had planned it before receiving Sprock’s call. He got up and went over to the unabridged dictionary open on its stand in the comer by the window. He turned the pages to intuition.

"Perceived by the mind immediately, or without the intervention of any process of thought,” he read. In very recent times he would have made an extremely bad pun on that definition.

"Quick perception of truth, without conscious attention or reasoning—truth obtained by internal apprehension, without the aid of perception or the reasoning powers.”

That last one was closest to it, he thought, but even so, it was extremely deceptive—written by a man who hadn’t the faintest concept of intuition. For there could be no obtaining of truth without perception; of that, Bascomb was quite sure. There had to be contact. He didn’t know how he could explain his contact with the matter of the six policies which he knew would shortly have claims on them, but somehow there was contact.

He closed the book. The definitions had been written by a statistician, not an intuitionist, he thought wryly; and that was no help at all.

He took his hat and walked out of the office, leaving word with Miss Pilgrim, his secretary, that he’d be back after lunch.

He had no definite goal in mind. He wanted merely to get away, to try to get some self-evaluation of the thing that had happened. He half expected the experience to dim as he got out into the clear spring air and faced the reality of the city with all its movement and noise and color. But there was no change at all.

He stopped at a street comer, waiting for the green light. He drew himself up to full height and sniffed deeply of the air, which was only moderately loaded with carbon monoxide at this time of morning. Why had he let a thing like this shake him so? People had hunches all the time; it was quite an ordinary thing, after all, when you stopped to think about it. He had no reason to feel apologetic, because he’d finally had one for the first time in his life.

But it wasn’t any good. He knew he’d have lived out his full fourscore and ten without ever experiencing a genuine hunch, if it hadn’t been for Magruder. All his life he’d laughed at hunches, and at the people who depended upon them for important decisions in their lives. Now, with one of his own, he felt like an unlucky prospector who’d sour-graped himself into believing there was no ore—only to come upon the biggest strike of all.

He stopped again in the middle of the block, and stepped back against the store fronts, a sudden new burden upon him. His face paled.

It was his habit to watch the crowds on the streets. Sometimes he counted a hundred of those going past in the opposite direction and estimated with a shallow regret that twenty five of them would feel the death-grip of cancer. As many more would give way to failing hearts.

There would be diabetes, infections, and accidents in decreasing proportions.

This always made him a little sad. Now, for the first time, he recognized how much he’d exulted in this private knowledge, and how superior he’d regarded himself because of it. It had been a power over his fellows—as if he, personally, were responsible for their fate.

With horror, he recognized something new. The passers-by were no longer an amorphous, faceless stream; they had become a procession of individuals.

That woman in the red coat standing by the baby carriage—

As if in a nightmare, he found himself moving across the sidewalk toward her. “That tumor—” he said in a mild, hesitant voice; “it’s so small now, it could probably be removed before metastasis—”

She stared at him in a moment of fright, then reassured herself by a glance at the passers-by. “I don’t know you,” she said with cold contempt, not at all alarmed.

Bascomb realized in dim horror what he had done. He touched his hatbrim and glanced nervously about. “I beg your pardon,” he said, backing away. “You will see your doctor, though, won’t you—?”

His withdrawal gave her added courage. “I oughta call a cop! In broad daylight, too. And a woman with a six-months old baby—can ya beat that?”

His heart was pounding heavily as Bascomb turned in full retreat. He rounded the comer and stopped in front of a cigar store window, watching the reflections in the glass to make sure he wasn’t followed by an angry, insulting policeman.

When he was able to breathe easier, he faced the pedestrians again with the new awareness he possessed of his fellow men. Intuitively, he could correct the crude, statistical knowledge he’d been content with up to now. How ridiculous it was to be content merely with how many when it was possible to know which ones.

He glanced up sharply to the man standing next to him. The stranger was looking absently at a box of high-priced cigars, but his face was drawn into a warp of indecision.

“It won’t work,” Bascomb said quietly. It was almost impossible for him to keep from speaking. “The deal is rigged,” he said, “and they’re waiting for you to walk into the trap.”

The man’s face paled and then grew scarlet with rage. “What do you know about it?” he demanded. “Who are you?” He advanced threateningly and Bascomb was sure he’d have laid hands on him if the sidewalk hadn’t been crowded.

“I’m a friend,” said Bascomb in haste, backing again from this new encounter. “Take my word for it and don’t sign the contract.”

Then he darted away with a speed that shocked his system. The stranger attempted a short pursuit, but gave it up as ridiculous in the heavy pedestrian traffic. His mind was made up, however; though he would not have admitted it, the fantastic warning had tipped the decision for him.

Bascomb slowed as he found the steps of the Public Library, but he went up, two steps at a time. In the reading room, he settled by the window, keeping an eye open for signs of pursuit.

He had done a foolish thing. He would not pull that kind of stunt again. At least he’d try not to—the sudden impact of this sure, certain knowing was difficult to resist.

7

For almost two hours Charles Bascomb sat there, apparently just staring through the window. But his mind was burning with the fury of the effort to evaluate the change within himself. He saw all his past life as a dark, empty grayness—a feeble reliance on somebody else, who relied on somebody else— If a man was wrong in statistical Society he could always fall back on his group, his school, “that’s what they taught me”, his insurance company, “everybody knows that”, his firm—the bigger the cushion, the better.

It seemed impossible that that life was only as far away as this very morning, when he’d left the house, and that vision had come within these few hours.

It wasn’t that sudden, of course. Magruder’s pills and exercises had been working on him for days, now. Perhaps it took something like the encounter with Sprock to jar his intuitive faculty into action. At any rate, he would never be the same again. His life could never be the same.

The most immediate thing he had to take care of was calling off Hap Johnson’s newspaper campaign against the Professor. After that, there would be time enough to determine what his relationship with Magruder would be.

But he already had an inkling of what would be necessary. '

He found Hap in the Courier office looking unchanged from the time of his last visit. The reporter looked up, pleased as he saw Bascomb’s face. “Pretty good story to start off with, don’t you think?” he said. “The switchboard has taken seventy or eighty calls on it already. Most of them giving us kudos.

“It was a good story,” Bascomb said, taking a seat by the worn desk. “It will have to stop, however.”

“What—?”

Bascomb nodded. “I have found out something I didn’t know before. Magruder is no fake; his stuff works.”

“You said that before. The idea was to keep it from working.”

“On me, I mean. I’ve found out how to use it in a different way than Magruder intended; it can be used constructively, not the way Magruder is doing.”

Hap frowned in suspicion and puzzlement. “I don’t get this,” he said. “You mean you want to have things all love and kisses between you and Magruder now, and promote his phoney self-development course instead of fight it?” Bascomb shook his head. “I haven’t quite figured out what ought to be done about Magruder. He’s a crackpot— there seems no getting around that fact. Probably a senile condition; he’s retired from the university you know. I suspect the full story is something like this: He stumbled on some bio-chemical concoction that would enormously improve a man’s mental abilities—actually induce a genuine intuitive ability. He probably tried to sell his associates and superiors on it and was laughed at for his trouble. That would naturally sour him on all efforts to promote it honestly and professionally, so he became embittered and turned to his self-development business to promote it under cover.

“But with a difference. Where his initial impulse was no doubt to use his discovery for the benefit of mankind, he’s now determined to destroy everything he can as a revenge for the rebuff by his colleagues.”

“Which is a good enough reason why we should continue to blast him,” said Hap.

Bascomb shook his head. “No; in doing that, we would be running the risk of destroying the discovery itself. We can’t take the chance; it’s too valuable. The first thing necessary is to preserve Magruder himself until we can obtain control of his discovery and make sure it will be used properly. Then we can take steps to see that Magruder is prevented from taking out his bitterness against society; it’s absolutely necessary to withdraw our attack on Magruder now.”

Hap’s look of suspicion deepened. “I don’t see it. You are only theorizing about Magruder’s background; and all I can see is that his system has been pretty effective— in taking you over onto his sidel What makes you think that this intuitive thing is all to the good if it’s used right— and that you can handle it better than Magruder?”

Bascomb told him about the morning’s incidents with Sprock and the strangers on the street. He tried to describe his new outlook on the world.

“O.K. Tell me something about me,” said Hap in quick challenge.

“Why, yes—” Bascomb said hesitantly. “You—”

He stopped.

“Go on,” said Hap. “Should I take a bus or a taxi home tonight? Will it be safe enough to come to work tomorrow?”

Bascomb tried to speak. Nothing came. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” he said at last. “I haven’t got it fully, and in a way I can control all the time. It’s just at certain times, and certain circumstances; you’ve got to understand that, Hap.”

“All I can see is that Magruder’s got you over on his side. For my book, he’s a dangerous charlatan who needs to be stamped out; and that goes double in view of what he’s done to you. I don’t know how he engineered such a switch, but you aren’t the same man I knew a few days ago.”

Bascomb tried again, from the beginning. But there was nothing he could say to convince Hap Johnson of his changed point of view—or rather, of the harmlessness of it.

The reporter stood up as Bascomb approached the door to leave. “I’m going to fight Magruder, because I think he’s a menace to decent, ordinary-thinking people,” he said.

“And if you go over to his side, Charley, I’m going to fight you, too.”

There was no hint of friendship in his eyes.

“I see,” said Bascomb slowly. “Well, thanks, anyway, Hap; maybe we’ll get together on this thing before it’s over.”

He tried to assess Hap Johnson’s intense hostility as he went out to the street again. The more he thought about it, the more incredible it seemed. Hap hadn’t even been that hostile toward Magruder originally; he’d more or less gone along routinely, seeing Magruder as a crank to be suppressed. Now Bascomb felt that the reporter had become his own personal enemy because of the attempt to call off the campaign. He shook his head and gave up the problem for the present.

His inability to put on a demonstration for Hap troubled him, but he felt his explanation had been right. He had something that was growing within him; it couldn’t be forced or pushed. It had to come at its own rate, and he was willing to give it time. But he couldn’t afford to be backed into a comer like that again until it was fully matured.

Finally, he wanted desperately to talk to somebody who could understand him. He thought momentarily of Magruder himself, but that was out. He felt that he and the Professor were going to be very bitter enemies over exploitation of intuitive processes, and only one of them could survive that straggle.

There was no one—except Sarah.

He glanced at the clock on the comer. She’d be startled to see him coming home in the middle of the day; and old Sprock would run a fever if he ever found out—perhaps even fire him. Somehow, that was becoming less and less important as the day went on.

Sarah greeted him with a smile, opening the door before he was halfway up the walk. “I thought you’d be on the earlier train,” she said.

Bascomb stopped, then smiled back at her; he should have known.

They sat in the living room, and he told her about the events of the morning. He told of the interview with Sprock, and the sudden burst of intuitive knowledge that overwhelmed him. He told of the encounters with the strangers on the street, just as he’d told it to Hap Johnson. And he described the reaction of the reporter.

Sarah listened responsively, as if it were all something she’d heard before and had expected to hear again; but when he was through Bascomb realized that he hadn’t come home merely for the purpose of telling her these things. He arose and stood by their modem picture window overlooking the landscaped back yard. There was still a great deal to say and he wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

“It must be that a statistician is essentially a coward,” he said finally. “I’ve spent my life running—fleeing as hard as I could from contact with individual factors. I don’t know why; maybe it was because I felt helpless in the presence of an individual—whether it was a figure or a human being.

“But in dealing with groups, and predicting their behavior—there was power in that!” He turned to Sarah, facing her motionless figure across the room. “Can you understand that, darling? Can you understand what it meant to be able to comprehend a mass of individuals when I was completely frightened by the randomness of a single one?”

“Yes—I can understand it,” Sarah said softly.

“Now, it’s gone,” Bascomb went on in a low voice. “The terror of an individual is gone—and so is the sense of power over any group whose action I can predict. It’s more than my professional career that’s involved; it’s the basic postulates of my whole life. I can quit hiding behind my ridiculous little rows of black figures, my summations, my media, my extremes. I can quit being the absurd fool I have been all my life!”

Sarah shook her head. “If you had been a fool, you would never have been able to see what you have been doing. You have merely gained sight which you never had before—and you mustn’t forget that you still live in a world of the blind.”

“How close am I?” Bascomb said. “You’re so far ahead of me—can you tell me how close I am to getting full use of my intuitive capacity so that I can depend on it?”

Sarah shook her head. “I can’t even see the end of the road for myself; sometimes I think there may not be any. It may be like a skill that can grow and increase as long as you live. And I’m not so far ahead of you, either; not really. I never had very much; I was just willing to trust and use what I had. It works that way. The more you use it, the more reliable it becomes.”

He crossed the room and sat down beside her again. He told her his feeling about Magruder and his theoretical explanation for the Professor’s behavior. “Magruder’s found something with the potency of atomic energy—and he’s using it to light a bonfire. It has to be taken out of his hands and put to proper use. That’s my concern now—but I feel the need of more development for myself before trying to take it away from him.”

“I think you’re right in wanting to exploit his discovery, but I’m not sure Magruder’s activities are entirely in error. After all, he brought it to your attention through these methods.”

“Yes, but a direct approach would have been a whole lot more effective; and any good results are only incidental. His basic purpose is destructive. He told me so, himself.”

“What are you going to do?”

Bascomb shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought maybe you could help me there. I try to think ahead on it, but I get nothing but fog and fuzz. I can’t seem to grasp any plan of action for myself. I don’t get that intuitive feel about anything except that I must protect Magruder from Hap Johnson right now, in order to save his discovery.

“Later, there can be lectures, courses, a school maybe —not the kind of thing Magruder has been doing, but a straightforward presentation showing what his actual discovery is and what it can do. That’s the approach we’ll make, I think.”

“But there’ll be effects that will startle and shock people—”

“We’ll prepare them; we’ll lay it on the line and let them know exactly what to expect—not sneak up on them without any warning the way Magruder is doing.”

“What about such things as your insurance business? It will be bankrupt in time.”

“That’s the obvious conclusion, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the right one—for the simple reason that insurance company people can also have the same advantage.”

“It would be a stalemate then,” said Sarah. “People would apply for policies only when they needed them, and the insurance companies would turn them down on the basis of knowing claims would soon be made.”

“It would turn into a kind of savings and loan institution,” Bascomb answered. “People could plan far enough ahead for coming emergencies. Insurance companies could cover them by accepting savings, and malting loans for amounts beyond them—such loans being repayable in some manner. It’s the only way it would ever work.”

“But so many other things, too. There’ll be the public schools, the courts and juries.” She gave a small gasp. “There’s Zad Clementi Charles—”

Bascomb’s mind shifted to thoughts of the alleged kid-nap-murderer, whose trial had been headline news in their town for weeks. “Clementi—?” he said. Then the sad, sure intuitive awareness made itself felt in his mind. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s Clementi; he didn’t do it, but they’ll take a vote on it and decide to hang him for it. Twelve good men and true—in the statistical world you can multiply ignorance by a constant and get truth.”

Sarah had straightened, her eyes staring through the window to the garden beyond. “We could help,” she said in a whisper, “if we knew the right answer—”

Bascomb shook his head. “I can’t get it; there’s only the fog and fuzz. Have you got it?”

Sarah shook her head bitterly. “No—I don’t know how to reach it yet. I wonder if it will be like this always—so many things you know exist, just beyond your fingertips?”

8

In a kind of fierce desperation, they returned to Magruder’s manuals during the following evenings. They swallowed the green and orange and yellow and brown pills with conscious intensity, as if this would increase the potency of the chemicals.

They attended Magruder’s lectures and drank up every precious word he spoke. Bascomb tried to shear through the overburden of wordage and digest the meat; Sarah refused to worry about this, taking it all at face value.

The children had been aware of some kind of strange, extracurricular activity on the part of their parents for some time. Now the sense of intensity grew somewhat frightening to them; but Charles Bascomb was not ready to admit them to an understanding of what was being attempted. He didn’t know how he could make them understand fully enough to keep from resenting it. And then at other times, he wondered if they might already understand too well.

His own development progressed at a rate that was pleasing to Bascomb in spite of his impatience. After the first violent shock of becoming aware of intuitive powers, he restrained himself on the streets and on the train and wherever he had casual meeting with hordes of his fellow men. He steeled himself to, walk by men who were dying and to sit near those who were headed for inevitable disaster—disaster and death that might be turned aside by even a small degree of insight.

The revolution in his own life he began to see in appalling proportions. He’d known that changes would be necessary; but the early estimates were revised upward in a continually widening spiral. He began to know periods of genuine fear as he saw the gap widening between the future and the past—but he would not have turned back, even if it were possible.

He had not changed his initial estimate of Magruder’s person and methods, or the necessity of restricting his activities, but preservation of the discovery was the all important concern right now; and anything that would lead to this end was fair enough.

He called at Magruder’s hotel two weeks after the discovery of his own rising intuitive powers.

Magruder, by that time, had been brought under indictment for practising medicine without license—as a result of Hap Johnson’s articles and a complaint based on Joe Archer’s analysis of the colored pills. Skillfully, Hap had built up a powerful attack against all quacks and charlatans in the health and mental development field; and without leaving his paper open in any way for libel, he had directed public attention and sentiment towards Magruder and his course of lectures.

The Professor opened the door after Bascomb’s first knock. “I was waiting for you.”

And suddenly the enormity of his incredible oversight hit Bascomb between the eyes. How could he combat or deceive in any way a man who had the intuitive ability that Magruder must have? It was an impossibility!

How could he have overlooked this simple fact? And yet he had overlooked it completely.

“Are you feeling ill?” Magruder asked solicitously. “Can I get you anything?”

Bascomb shook his head. “I’m all right; just need to sit down. Over here by the window will be all right.”

Magruder nodded and escorted him to the chair, then took one for himself. “It’s good to see you again. I’ve been aware of you at the lectures, but you always get away so quickly I don’t have a chance to even say hello.” “I’ve been reading about your trouble,” said Bascomb a little thickly.

“That! It’s nothing; it occurs all the time. All I have to do is make a delaying action until I finish the lectures. Then I’ll pay my fine and be on my way.”

“Do you think you’ll get by with a fine?”

Magruder frowned, his wrinkled face contorting like an old apple. “These newspaper articles have a rather unusual skill, coupled with an extraordinary amount of venom. I confess they do worry me, somewhat; you didn’t know what you were starting.”

Bascomb remained quite still. Was there anything Magruder didn’t know?

He had admitted worry over the outcome of the indictment, however—as if that were still hidden from him. Bascomb wondered how it could be, what limits there were to intuition, anyway.

Bascomb said carefully, “I’ve changed my mind since our last meeting.”

“I know,” Magruder answered almost impatiently. Bascomb swallowed hard. The only possible direction was straight ahead, regardless of what Magruder “knew”.

“Then you must also know that my own intuition has begun to function,” he said. “I didn’t understand what you were talking about before; now I do. I want to go along with you.”

“I know that, too,” Magruder repeated, nodding. “I’ll be delighted to have you, of course. There is only one additional item we need mention: the price.”

“You said nothing about price.”

“When we talked before, you weren’t interested enough as a member of a statistical society. Your present job; it’s going to cost you everything that has value to you to warrant my quoting it. But now you need to know that your career as a statistician—”

“I expected that.”

“Your name; your position in the community; your home—everything, in fact, except your family. You have good fortune, indeed, in your wife.”

Bascomb paled. “I don’t understand,” he murmured,. “You can’t; not now. Understanding will come later. The important thing is that you are ready to begin. You value sufficiently the power of intuition to be willing to pay the price of everything Statistical Society offers. There is no doubt about that, is there?”

Bascomb looked across at the enigmatic Professor in staring silence. Nothing in his whole life had prepared him for so fantastic a conversation as this one. What did Magruder mean? How much did he actually know? If he could be so positive about some things, and yet have doubt about others, it was obvious he did not have hundred percent intuition. And one of the things he seemed not to know was Bascomb’s own private intentions in this matter. If that were true—and Bascomb felt almost certain of it—then this talk of a fantastic “price” was just that—fantastic.

He had to gamble on it. He nodded his head slowly and said, “There is no doubt about it. I am ready to begin.” “Excellent!” exclaimed Magruder. He got to his feet energetically. “There are a good many things I have to show you. This indictment business is going to interfere considerably, and you can be a great help to me within a short time—”

Hours later, Bascomb had a substantial lead in the direction he wanted to go. Magruder gave no sign of doubting Bascomb’s good faith, or sensing his real purpose.

He explained the source of his medication—a small private capsule company—and gave Bascomb authority to place orders with a letter of introduction that would validate those orders. He admitted the false front of gobbledygook pseudo-scientific terms in his lectures.

“That’s the way it has to be done,” he said confidentially. “The public would never swallow the actual facts. They’d rather have corporeal vibrations and ethereal streams, than try to understand that men made a mistake in the dawn of history which we now have to correct.”

“But what kind of teaching is that?” Bascomb demanded in spite of himself. “How can they ever learn what intuition really is by such methods?”

Magruder glanced sidewise at him. “How does a baby learn to see, or to smell, or to feel? Intuition’s like that. First order functions can’t be taught. They are blueprinted in the germ plasm from ages past, and the psyche reads the plans in the dark schoolroom of the womb. There, it learns how to make its own heart beat, and when it comes into the world, how its eyes are to function—and its lungs, stomach, and intuition. No—you don’t teach those things.”

“But what do you do, then? Something happens—something happened to teach me how to use intuition.”

“Did it? I think not. You learned how yourself—after I assisted in removing some of the obstacles imposed by a Statistical Society. The exercises free the imagery mechanisms of your mind, teach your body that it need not abhor certain inherent functions. The pills react biochemically to inhibit the fear component attached to these functions. A wholly artificial fear, you understand, which has been laboriously attached by Society.

“That is all that is possible to do. Teaching is a greatly over-rated activity. It is obviously nothing more than extracting an agreement—sometimes to good ends, sometimes to bad. But it’s always applied to second order effects, the use of a function—not the function itself.

“Self-learned items such as breathing, heart circulation, intuition, artistic creation, and ten thousand others can be suppressed by forces which may be stronger than the urge to live and grow. If the suppression has not already caused the death of the body—or the soul—it may be possible to remove the suppression, but still the organism must do its own learning in the first order field of living, growing, creating.

“In our activity we do nothing but remove the suppressors.”

Bascomb made no comment. He cringed slightly before the Professor’s reflection on the many years spent in achieving his place as a scholarly statistician; but it was heavy going following the physiological and psychological theories into which Magruder now plunged. Bascomb tried to stay with it, taking copious notes to refresh his memory and to check against standard texts later.

When the interview was finally over, Bascomb felt he was well on his way. Reaching the street after leaving Magruder’s suite, only one puzzle remained to plague his mind insistently.

The price.

Magruder saw disaster ahead for him; but nothing could be clearer than Bascomb’s own intuitive knowledge that he was on the right track—and Sarah verified it wholeheartedly. '

Could two people, with functioning intuitive powers, get opposing answers to the same problem?

The answer was obviously no—provided there was any validity to intuitive knowledge at all. That left two possibilities: Magruder’s intuitive power was less than Bascomb’s own; or Magruder had no knowledge whatever of Bascomb’s real intentions—and this made the difference in their view of the future.

Bascomb contented himself with this latter answer; he wasn’t entirely satisfied with it, but there was no other in sight. And he knew he was right in what he was doing. There was no question of it, no sliver of doubt.

He had decided that Hap Johnson’s articles could be useful, after all, in keeping Magruder too occupied to pay too close attention to Bascomb’s failure to follow instructions—if only it didn’t turn heavily against the discovery itself.

Bascomb was thinking this the next morning when he opened the paper and Magruder’s picture slapped him in the eye. The Professor had been arrested during the previous afternoon. He had not put up bail—which was set at an unreasonably high fifteen thousand dollars. He was securely in jail.

The news was disconcerting. Bascomb hadn’t wanted anything like this to befall the Professor; yet it put him safely out of the way, and left a free hand to inaugurate a sane program. It would be all to the good as long as it restrained the professor’s destructive activities—without destroying his discovery. It seemed to Bascomb a good indicator that he, not the Professor, was right. He had an intuitive feeling that this was so; it meant he had to get started—and quickly.

There was the question of Bascomb’s job with New England. At first, he had considered leaving it forthwith—but that was mere crude logic that led to such a conclusion. Intuitively, now, he recognized the necessity of remaining.

First of all, he needed the money it provided. But in addition, the company represented an institution he had come to love; he didn’t intend to see it scuttled. The obvious course was to take a hand in the inevitable transition. Men like Sprock would need a great deal of help during that difficult time.

As soon as he reached the office that morning, Bas-comb requested Hadley to make a check on the batch of policies he’d warned Tremayne and Sprock about. There was no waiting; Hadley had the information already at hand, having started a one man project to discover anomalies.

“Five of those you mentioned have made claims,” he said, and was pleased at Bascomb’s resulting smile. But on second thought his pleasure turned to wonder. How could Bascomb have known what ones to ask for?

“Get me the papers,” said Bascomb; “I want to add them to my study.”

He checked them over. It would have been nice if the remaining one had come in, but this was good enough. One death claims; two accidents, and two liabilities. He took the sheaf of papers and walked down the hall to Sprock’s office.

The vice-president glanced up belligerently as the secretary ushered Bascomb in. “I was about to call you,” he said. He ruffled a handful of papers in front of him and lowered bushy eyebrows. “It’s time we did some more talking.”

Bascomb’s heartbeat quickened a trifle, and then he knew that Sprock already had a report on the claims. He hadn’t ignored the prediction, after all!

Smiling, Bascomb took the offered chair. “I think we both have the same thing in mind,” he said.

“All right, talk!” The vice-president commanded.

“I wasn’t honest with you when I was here the other day,” said Bascomb with deliberation. “I told you I had predicted these claims on the basis of a new mathematical formula I had developed. That wasn’t true.”

“Then why did you tell me such a cock and bull story!” Sprock roared.

“Because I felt you wouldn’t be likely to believe the genuine truth. Now that I have the proof I can tell you. I predicted those claims simply because of the ability—in and of myself, without the help of any formula of any kind—to do so. Such an ability is sometimes called intuition.”

“Bascomb, I warned you the last time you were in here—”

“These policy holders have the same kind of ability, that’s why they were able to predict their own immediate need of insurance.”

Sprock’s face clouded even further; his fist clenched the papers to a wad. “You can’t possibly believe I’m going to accept a fool story like that!”

Bascomb waited. He held out the claim papers. “These must be explained,” he said.

Sprock’s silence seemed interminable; he was so immobile he seemed scarcely alive. Only the faint movement of his thin chest and the rapid shifting of his cold blue eyes to Bascomb’s face and back to the papers betrayed animation.

Finally, he spoke again. “Go on,” he said. “I believe you; I have to believe you.”

“There’ll be thousands of these,” said Bascomb. “You are thinking it means the end, if enough people find themselves able to do what these few have done. That’s not necessarily true. I—and others like me—can work from this end, detecting such applications.

“But it means that we must have a new policy; this is what I came to see you about. We’ll have to issue a policy whose benefits are based on the term which it has run. We’ll issue them only to people like these.” He patted the pile of claims. “That will show them the system works both ways and will discourage their attempts to bring a run on us; after that, we’ll need a new kind of program.” In detail, he explained his proposal for a savings and loan system, which would serve the needs of intuitionists and keep the company solvent.

When he was through, Sprock’s expression remained unchanged. “I will take your recommendations under advisement,” he said. “I’ll have to discuss these short claims with our Board. But later, you and I will have much more talking to do about this new-found ability. I think there needs to be considerable explanation about its sudden appearance in epidemic form!”

“Any time that is convenient, sir,” said Bascomb, rising. “I can tell you whatever you wish to know about it.”

He was a trifle disappointed that Sprock did not demand further explanation at the moment but this was overshadowed by his elation at Sprock’s unwilling, yet definite acceptance of the reality of intuition. The first great step had been taken.

Later in the day he took a second, smaller step. He called Hadley in and with a confidential air that thrilled the junior statistician he explained about intuition. Hadley took it with difficulty; he was well on the way to solidification in his statistical mold. But when Bascomb offered personally to teach him the methods of intuition, he expressed effusive thanks.

These were beginnings; but a bold program of expansion was necessary now to take advantage of Magruder’s difficulty, and his own possession of the basic data on intuition.

From Magruder’s secretary—who was now out of a job and didn’t care much about the Professor’s affairs in the first place—he obtained a list of those registered for the course of lectures. He prepared a letter explaining that he was in a position to explain Magruder’s difficulty with the law and replace the hocus-pocus of his lectures with an honest exposition of the principles of man’s intuitional powers and how to attain them.

He prepared a second letter which went to a large, select group of personal friends, business associates, and clients of New England. In this he outlined the occurrence of anomalies in human wisdom and insight and explained briefly the role of intuition in men’s affairs. He invited them to attend a series of discourses and instruction on how to improve their personal intuitive abilities.

He changed the location from Magruder’s meeting place in order to eliminate as much as possible all association with the Professor’s quackery and nonsense. He was going to give out the data in a strictly scientific, straight-from-the-shoulder manner that would be bound to appeal to people of intellect and logical thinking. People who could understand the tremendous responsibility toward society, which was involved in obtaining use of the intuitive faculties of the mind. With such a class of people initially in possession of full intuition there would be no risk of the panic and ruin that Magruder’s program was deliberately designed to induce.

He felt good about the whole thing; it was intuitively correct. Sarah agreed that it was. Her only worry was in regard to Magruder. “We ought to do something to help,” she said. “After all, he’s the one responsible for bringing these principles to light. We owe him for that. And those newspaper articles are getting people so inflamed against him that he’s liable to get a sentence of twenty years in jail, for things he didn’t have the remotest chance of doing.”

Bascomb himself was still uncertain about the position of Magruder. It warned him, too; particularly since there was no intuitive insight either of them could get regarding him. .

“After this thing gets rolling,” he promised. “I’ll have a talk with him and see if something can’t be done. I’ll see Cummings, the D.A., too. I used to sit next to him at Club.”

Bascomb was quite aware that he was going to distribute pills just as Magruder had done, which was the immediate cause of Magruder’s arrest. But he knew there was no risk to himself in this. In the Professor’s case it had been just an excuse to lay hands on him; with a straightforward approach there would be no such complication.

9

Charles and Sarah Bascomb were elated by the sight of the first night crowd filling up the hall. Logic had told them they were getting a place much too big. But it was just right.

The crowd was divided about equally between Bas-comb’s friends and business people, and the group from Magruder’s course. Bascomb was continually surprised by his own lack of apprehension concerning the reactions of both groups. It would be difficult to wean Magruder’s people away from corporeal vibrations; and he knew the business people would not take kindly to the idea that statistics was a feeble tool to be used only in the absence of a more profound and positive intuition. Yet he felt completely secure in what he was about to do.

The feeling persisted, even when Hap Johnson walked in and took a seat at the rear of the hall. Bascomb admitted to himself he was shaken when he looked out and saw the reporter’s entrance. He hadn’t invited Hap, and had no idea how he had got wind of the meeting. But it didn’t matter, he thought; nothing that the Courier might print could possibly alter the intuitive assurance he felt.

He stepped out between the curtains on the platform. He was aware of the stares of surprise, curiosity, challenge, and occasional contempt. He smiled confidently and held up a hand to quiet the perfunctory applause.

“It was probably no small surprise to those of you who know me,” he said, “to read my invitation to this gathering. I am gratified that so many of you took the trouble to accept and be here tonight.

“What I have to say will sound strange to all of you. Some of you will be thoroughly outraged—even as I was when I first encountered this information. I hope no one will be so outraged or disbelieving that he will consider it beneath his dignity to test the validity of these facts for himself—also as I have done.”

Gingerly, then, as if edging carefully into cold, deep water, Bascomb spoke of the historical evidence for the existence of intuition as it might be familiar to his audience. He modified Magruder’s exposition considerably, omitting the Professor’s far-fetched theories that went back to the dawn of civilization. He reminded his listeners of instances which they could believe, in which intuition had proven superior to all other forms of knowledge as a basis for action.

They listened, but he could see they weren’t liking it. Magruder’s group was obviously contemptuous of so prosaic a term as intuition; they wanted strong meat— corporeal vibrations. The business people were disgusted; Bascomb could read in their faces the thoughts he himself had had, not so long ago.

Somehow he wasn’t getting it over; he was trying to be reasonable and scientific, but his listeners were cold to his exposition.

“How much would it be worth to know,” he said, “which one out of many possible lines of action was most likely to succeed? How much would it be worth to know which man out of a group could best do a job—or which product out of many thousands was not up to specified quality? You who are executives, personnel managers, quality control experts—what would it be worth to you to have infallible insight in your profession instead of mere assurance that your error will not be greater than a stated amount?

“Statistics can never give you anything more than this assurance. Intuition, properly applied, can give you positive knowledge.”

In his backward-looking moments he never quite understood why he dared the argument he brought up next. Certainly, his planned discourse didn’t call for it; but the apathy of the group made him a little desperate, he thought afterward.

“Think of the significance in our judicial processes,” he said. “We never know in many instances whether a man is actually guilty of a crime or not. We take a ballot and vote him guilty or innocent, and our concept of justice and our lust for vengeance are satisfied.

“We have seen in recent days how this functions in our own city. We have voted a man guilty of the worst possible crime. There were good, sound, logical reasons for such a vote. He was a poor, unlettered devil who aroused no one’s sympathy, so who could regret if an error were made? Besides, he was the janitor in the apartment house where the victim lived, and she was found stuffed in the furnace to which only he was supposed to have access.

“But I know that Zad Clementi is innocent of this crime!”

For sheer emotional reaction, he might as well have set off a charge of dynamite in their midst. There was no physical response, but he felt the hostile flare in their minds like a bright, silent flame.

There was not a man or woman in the audience who didn’t believe Zad Clementi was a justly condemned murderer.

Bascomb recognized his error the moment he closed his mouth, and he was appalled. Whatever had caused him to bring up such an argument? He was acting like a fool, letting their apathy rattle him; where was his intuitive assurance regarding his course of action?

It was there, silent, reassuring, commending him for having done well.

And for the first time since it came, he began to doubt.

He was not doing well; he had made a blunder that had alienated his listeners beyond all repair.

But he tried to make repairs. For another full hour he tried valiantly to convey something of his own sense of faith in the intuitive powers of Man. With that faith so severely shaken, however, he had no ability to persuade others.

When some of those in the back rows began getting up to leave, he knew his chance was gone.

Not all of them were ready to walk out on him, however. Some wanted to talk it over, and insisted on the scheduled question and answer period. They didn’t want to know about the methods of gaining intuitive understanding; they wanted to tell him what they thought about the things he’d already said.

It grew boisterous and vicious; he left the platform in defeat.

As if he had forgotten where he lived, or didn’t want to go there, he drove through town and along its outskirts and suburbs in a mazelike pattern. Beside him, Sarah remained silent, waiting for him to be the first to speak.

He did, finally. He said bitterly, “How do you suppose I ever got suckered into a thing like that? I must have been crazy the past few weeks—completely off my nutl Intuition—!”

“You don’t believe it’s real any more?” asked Sarah quietly.

“As real as it’s always been—a chance hunch now and then. With just as much chance of being wrong as right!”

“What about the policies?”

“What about them? I’ll find that statistical formula I bragged about to Sprock and explain them! The ones that won’t fit—well, the old idea of a hunch is as good as any explanation. I’ll buy it. But what a fool Magruder made out of me, with his Yogi tricks and slick performance! I’ll bet he isn’t even Magruder—”

“What about Myersville?”

“Who knows—it has nothing to do with this.”

“And Sloan and his soap failure?”

“He’s probably got his trouble ironed out by now.” “And you felt it so strongly yourself—that it was real and this was the way to go.”

Bascomb’s lips compressed tightly before he answered. “I’ve seen the same thing in backwoods religious meetings, too.”

“I still feel somehow that tonight was not a loss,” said Sarah.

“It wasn’t,” Bascomb answered grimly. “It put me back on the track. What if I’d quit New England first? But there’s still Sprock.” He grimaced painfully. “Tomorrow I have to see Sprock and do the Most Humble Grand Salaam.”

He never got the chance; he suspected he wouldn’t when he saw the paper before breakfast the following morning. The international news was light, and his own picture was on the front page, neatly framed by Magruder’s on one side and Zad Clementi’s on the other.

The caption declared: “Mathematician Computes Clementi Innocence.”

The story described him as a disciple of Magruder, taking over the Professor’s work while the latter languished in jail, unable to provide bail on charges of medical practise without license. It told in great detail and with considerable accuracy the things Bascomb had said about intuition and the possibility of gaining skill in its use.

The story was written by Hap Johnson.

Near the end, Hap said. “All this reminds your reporter about the old story of the tired bailiff who was asked to go out for about the nine hundredth time to get the belaboring jurors something to eat. He’s the one, you remember, who came back with eleven meals and a bale of hay.

“Well, we can all be thankful that a certain insurance statistician wasn’t on the Clementi jury. We’ve had clean-cut justice done on this case, a thing our courts and the citizens of Landbridge can be proud of. But we’ll tell you: if anyone still cares to make a gift of a bale of hay at this particular date, your reporter will see that it’s properly delivered.”

It sent a stunning wave of hurt through Bascomb as he read it. Hap Johnson had been his friend. This bitterness was something he did not understand; he gave up trying.'

On his desk, when he reached the office, there was a note for him to appear in the office of vice-president Sprock. Bascomb caught furtive glances of those beyond the glass walls of his office as he read it. Obviously they’d seen the morning papers.

Hadley hadn’t, apparently, for he came in brightly, almost on Bascomb’s heels. “Here’s the last of the policies you asked about, Mr. Bascomb,” he said. Bheuner's Hardware Store. It burned to the ground last night.”

That must have been in the second section, which Bascomb hadn’t read. He stood staring, long after Hadley had left, at the two papers on his desk: the order from Sprock, and the claim from Bheuner. The hardware man hadn’t lost any time, he thought.

But it would do no good to call it to Sprock’s attention now; his case was lost, as far as New England was concerned. He left the claim paper on his desk and walked slowly down the hall.

The Vice-President was surprisingly direct and to the point. He outlined briefly the history of the insurance business, particularly that of New England. He dwelt at moderate length on the sacredness of the obligations incurred by the Company in behalf of the Policyholders. He went most heavily into the personal qualifications required of the ones chosen to stand vigil over that enduring trust.

But the thing of greatest significance was his parting shot: “I shall see to it personally, Bascomb, that no firm in this field ever considers your name on its roster without knowing the true facts of your fantastic attempts to besmirch the entire insurance institution in America! Intuition! Good-day, Mr. Bascomb.”

He returned along the hall to his own office. Blackballed; he had no doubts that Sprock would and could do it.

He had thirty days coming if he wanted it, but he declined. He told Sprock he’d finish up at once, if that was all right; it was. He turned over his current studies to Wardlaw, Assistant Statistician. He cleaned out his desk and said a stiff goodbye to the office associates who didn’t suddenly have to go down the hall for a break as they saw he was about ready.

That was it. He and New England were through. As he turned his back on the building he was aware that this fact had not sunk thoroughly into all his cells. A certain part of him had no doubt that he would be coming this way again in the morning. It would be a bitter struggle when that certain part attained full awareness.

Sarah was not surprised. They had discussed it at breakfast, and she had told him it was going to happen. He had believed her, but hoped for some miracle to prove her wrong—to prove all her intuitive hunches wrong for the rest of their lives.

It wouldn’t be bad, however, he told her; he’d start looking in the morning. He might have to go farther away, but there wouldn’t be much trouble for a man of his experience. He didn’t tell her of Sprock’s threat.

He did little the next day except write some letters asking for interviews. He went to a public stenographer in town to do this, and came home early—at the height of thirteen-year-old Mark’s wails of rage and discomfort.

These were coming from the direction of the bathroom, where Bascomb found Sarah busy with soap and water and bandages. His oldest boy’s eye was tightly closed. Cuts and bruises decorated the rest of his face and his upper torso.

Bascomb wanted to make it light, but he saw Sarah’s face and changed his intended tone. “What was it all about?” he asked evenly.

Mark glanced up, hesitant; he turned to his mother. “It’s all right,” she said grimly.

“Down at school—said Mark. “All the kids—I told them they couldn’t say things like that and tried to make ’em shut up. But I couldn’t lick the whole school.”

“What were they saying?” Bascomb asked.

“That you are a Communist. They went around singing it kind of: Bascomb’s dad’s a Red man; that sort of thing. Then Art Slescher wrote on the boards in all the classes before I got there: Name a dirty Commie. I got him after school.”

Bascomb looked at Sarah, his face blanched. They didn’t speak.

Later, when the children were in bed, they tried to talk about it. “We can’t go on bucking something like that forever,” Sarah said.

“It won’t be forever,” Bascomb snapped, more irritably than he intended; “I mean, it will die down after while. You knovy how these newspaper stories go. They pin a guy to the cross with scandal, and in a week even his next door neighbors have forgotten about it.”

“Not this.” Sarah shook her head. “It hasn’t even got a good start it’s going to build bigger and bigger. Mark’s experience isn’t the only one.”

“What else?”

“I overheard talk at the store while I was shopping today. Two women on the other side of grocery island. They thought I’d gone away. One mentioned your name. Said her daughter had a friend who’d heard you were caught molesting some high school girls one night that it was no wonder you were defending a man like dementi.”

Bascomb buried his face in his hands and groaned with helpless despair and rage “Such a little thing to begin with—! How in Heaven’s name did it lead up to this? I hope they hang Magruder!” He looked up. “It’s going to be hell to live with while it lasts, but time will make a difference.”

“Not in this.” Sarah shook her head again; “it will only grow worse.”

“Then what are we to do! We’ve got our home here. It’s our community as much as those gossiping old biddies’ —those mentally twisted kids—”

“It’s going to force us out, Charles; we can’t live here any longer. The sooner we prepare to leave, the better we’ll be. Put the house up for sale tomorrow!”

Only then, for the first time in many days, did Bascomb remember Magruder’s strange words, and it hit him like a blow in the stomach. “It’s going to cost you everything—your present job, your whole career—your good name—your position in the community; your home—"

Magruder had said that; and every word of it was coming true.

But there was time and a way to save things yet. “We’re not moving out before a thing of that kind,” he said; “there’re ways of licking it.”

“At the price of our own destruction!”

“It’s always been expensive to fight against insane prejudice, but the world would be a hell of a place to live in if a few of us didn’t try.

“Tell Mark to not get involved in any more fistfights; tell him that when the others accuse me of being a Communist, he’s to agree. He’s to tell them I’ve got a pipeline straight to Moscow. Khrushchev himself appointed me, and I’m planning to wipe out the President and his Cabinet next month.

“Tell the neighborhood biddies the same thing. Walk up and ask their advice on what to do with a husband you catch every week or two with sixteen-year old girls right in your own house. That’ll shut them up after a while.

“And then—we’re staying; we’re staying right here and we’ll find out who did the murder Clementi is accused of. We’ll ram it down their throats until it chokes every one of the lying, sadistic gossipers!”

“We have nothing but an intuitive sense about dementi—sod you’ve rejected that. So possibly the jury- was right, after all.”

Bascomb remained staring straight ahead of him to the figured pattern on the opposite wall; it seemed as if he hadn’t heard her. Then, slowly his lips parted. “No,” he said. “I’ve rejected everything Magruder induced me to believe about intuition, but dementi’s innocence doesn’t depend on that. Our feelings about him were merely random chance, let us say, but logic convinces me we were right in that one thing. I’ve gone back and read the accounts of the trail. The evidence is ridiculous; they haven’t given him a chance. And I think it’s because there’s someone who’s being protected.”

10

It was a noble and virtuous gesture. Bascomb felt Sarah would commend him and agree to stick valiantly by him. Instead, she got up and paused in the center of the room. She gave him a single backward, almost-contemptuous look. “You are being an idiotic fool!” she said. “A pebble can’t stop a fifty ton boulder rolling down a hill.” She strode off in the direction of the bedroom.

A week later, Charles Bascomb was convinced she was right. Mark was in the hospital to get an arm set after it had been broken when the mob piled on him at school. Sarah had been read out of the two ladies clubs she belonged to; and the minister of their Church had informed her he had made different arrangements in the baby-sitting round robin which had been worked out during services. Sarah wouldn’t need to bother with it any more.

Bascomb had found his car painted a screaming red-including all the glass—when he got off the train at the end of the week to drive home. The same night their front windows were broken with slingshots; and when they got up, they found a crude hammer and sickle painted on the front door.

In the city he’d not been able to get a single Job Interview during the entire time.

Bascomb visited the local suburban real estate office in the early morning. By afternoon he had a sale at a thousand dollar loss, which the agent assured him was the best he could do in the light of the jinxed condition of the property.

Once agreeing to defeat, it was impossible for Bascomb to get out too soon. He didn’t know where they were going, but as soon as all arrangements for storage and forwarding of their personal goods had been made he turned the car west. Slivers of red paint still showed next to the rubber gasket of the windshield; but the new paint job on the car symbolized the only thing he was taking with them, hope.

He didn’t know where they were going. He was still stunned by the events of past days. The uncontrolled viciousness and brutality of the attacks against his family were unexplainable. Even the police had expressed apathy toward his complaints. A city had turned against him.

And for what? he asked himself continually, over and over again. There was no rational explanation. His single statement of defense for Clementi had set it off. But that must be only the trigger. Where was the main explosive force of the catastrophe! He didn’t know. All he was sure of was that his townsmen seemed to have suddenly gone insane.

They crossed New York in easy stages, and stopped late that night at a Pennsylvania tourist lodge. Mark’s arm was giving him pain. Neither Chuck, nor Darcie, the youngest, lying across his lap asleep, was enjoying the ride. They were running from a terror that wouldn’t show its proper face.

It was there that they heard the newscast as they turned on the small radio in the lodge.

“Police are looking for a once-respected insurance executive now fleeing with his family from the consequences of an incredible wave of criminal attacks. Charles Bascomb—dark green Buick—six girls all under age—license number—"

“Come on!” said Bascomb. “It must have been on earlier; I noticed the clerk watching closely while I wrote down our license number—”

They turned out of the drive, even as the clerk came out of the office to witness their unexplained departure. Sarah saw him turn and run inside. “He’s phoning the police,” she said.

There was no hysteria, or even despair, Bascomb recalled later as he turned the car onto the highway and kept it moving. A kind of calm seemed to have settled over them all. The children were quiet, and Sarah sat as if she had confidence that Bascomb knew exactly what he was doing.

As if he actually did, he slowed at a dark intersection and turned off on a secondary highway. “We’ll have to keep off the main road,” he said. “This one ought to take us where we’re going.”

No one asked where that was; at the moment Bascomb didn’t think to inquire in his own mind just what he meant by his words. He just kept driving. About midnight he pulled up at a small country crossroads community. A single lighted sign: Hotel shown in the whole village.

“We’ll be all right here,” Bascomb said with assurance; “we’ll try to get some rest and get out early in the morning.

They went south and west, avoiding the main highways rounding the Michigan shore line. No one viewed them with any more suspicion than any ordinary family of tourists; no siren-screaming cars rocketed along side them. Just once did they catch a repeat of the news broadcast mentioning the police pursuit.

When Bascomb abruptly turned the car to a northerly course, he had a momentary impulse to stop and check the road map and ask himself why the devil he was heading this way. But he didn’t stop; he merely slowed for an instant—then stepped on the gas and settled a little more comfortably behind the wheel. He’d known it all along, of course.

Where else would they be going but to Myersville—the town that burned television sets in the square?

They arrived very late. The headlights of the car showed a neat village of white, green-trimmed houses. There appeared to be only a single hotel, and they drew up before it, after driving the length of the town and returning. As they walked into the small lobby a man got to his feet from a nearby leather chair and advanced with outstretched hand. He was smiling broadly.

“I’ve been waiting all evening for you,” Professor Mugruder said.

Sarah Bascomb walked toward him with an answering smile and accepted his hand. But Charles stopped short and stared at the little wizened man who was at the root of all his troubles.

He’d felt there was safety in their flight west. When Bascomb turned north, he knew he’d been subconsciously aware from the beginning that they’d end up in Myersville.

But by no twist of backward calculation could he admit that seeing Magruder was anything but an unexpected shock. Magruder was the last person in the world he wanted to meet.

“How did you get here?” he demanded.

“Flew,” said Magruder easily. “The judge threw out the charges in the preliminary hearing, and let me go the day you left. I tried to get in touch with you, but you were a little too early for me. I knew I’d find you here.”

“And just how did you know that?” Bascomb said belligerently.

Magruder smiled again. “How did you know Myersville was the place to come to?”

He refused to say another word about the subject of their past relationship. While he accompanied them to the dining room, and to a meal that seemed to have been waiting for them, he told about the town, its peacefulness and opportunity for full living, which he was sure they would enjoy. He spoke of other, incidental, things, but the word intuition was not mentioned that night.

He led them directly to their rooms afterward.

“We have to register,” Bascomb explained.

“That has been taken care of,” said Magruder. “After all, we run the place.”

Bascomb knew by then it would be useless to ask the identity of “we.”

The children had never seen the Professor, of course, and had heard his name only when it slipped in their presence. But they struck up an immediate friendship. At the breakfast table the following morning the Professor proved an unexpected adeptness with sleight-of-hand tricks, riddles, and stories that kept the children enthralled.

Bascomb, however, was more absorbed in an inspection of his fellow diners; he was used to seeing occasionally an individual he mentally classified as a “character”— but never in such numbers as this. The hotel seemed to be full of them.

Magruder was watching him, he discovered after a time. The children and Sarah had turned to their meal, and the Professor said, “That’s Shifty you’re watching across the room. He’s a great man in a pool room. While pool isn’t as popular as it once was, he handles dirty pictures, too. That gives him a good following in the highschool crowd, where he specializes in pushing our stuff. The kids think they’ve been on.'a genuine reefer jag when they get through.”

“I’d like to know what the devil you’re talking about,” said Bascomb testily.

“Marty, over there, works the racing crowd. He gives them a system that really sends them flipping—but they pick the ponies right too. They wouldn’t let go of Marty for all the uranium in Utah.

“Then the fellow next to him is Doc Simmons; he’s a chiropractor. Has a nice little practice among neurotic females of the upper bracket in Chicago. Across the table is Doc Bywater—we have a lot of Docs here—who is behind the ads you see in the little magazines sometimes. You know: cure piles in ten days or your money back. Or: prostate sufferers, get relief overnight. That sort of thing. He gives them a dilly of a routine, and, of course, it works one hundred per cent of the time. He’s got a warehouse full of testimonials.”

“It makes absolutely no sense at all!” Bascomb exclaimed.

“All right, then, I’ll tell you.” Magruder had been eating as he talked; now he arose, finished with breakfast while Bascomb hadn’t touched a thing. Bascomb got up with him, however, and went out to the broad porch of the hotel and sat down facing the small unbusy main street of the town.

“Peaceful place, isn’t it?” said Magruder. He pointed to a dark spot on the gravel of the town square a block away “That’s where they burned the television sets; it must have been quite a show.

“But you wanted to know what this was all about, didn’t you? That shouldn’t be very hard, actually, because you already know—”

“I don’t know a thing!” Bascomb cried. “Who are the “we’ you referred to last night? Who are the people you pointed out in the dining room—what’s the meaning of their nonsensical activities?”

“The first thing you need to comprehend,” said Magruder slowly and carefully now, “is that intuition does not provide you with a superman intellect in the logical, statistical world you have lived in all your life.

“Intuition is an entirely different breed of cat, a nonlogical means of arriving at conclusions about the world. Remember that the world and its problems remain the same. Sometimes the answers are the same, too; most of them are considerably better. But the change of method sometimes tends to make the whole picture—the world of your personal inter-relations—all of these often look so different that you think you’ve suddenly dropped down on another world.

“Non-logical has come to be synonymous with irrational or crazy;—a piece of sheer propaganda put out by a system struggling tooth and nail, so to speak, to prevent recognition of another and better system. When shifting from one to the other you may be inclined to discount some of the features of the new.”

Bascomb snorted in disgust. “If you’re trying to tell me I had any sense of intuition at work you can save your breath. The one time I depended on it in full confidence, it nearly destroyed me. It wiped out everything I’ve built up so far—home, job, community relationship. I’m even wanted by the police, I hear. Heaven only knows how that will turn out!”

“No—I think Charles Bascomb knows that it will turn out all right. The hysteria will pass; the charges will be dropped and forgotten. There will be no continued pursuit and harrassment from that quarter.

“I’m quite sure you know also that your intuition did not fail you. It was working accurately to bring you with optimum speed to the new circumstances which will give you maximum satisfaction in life.”

“You’re crazy! I took your pseudo-scientific nonsense, hook, line, and sinker, and determined Iwould base a new life on it. My wife agreed with me. Everything went wrong; you evidently know what happened.”

“And you recall, also, that I predicted this would be the course of events? It had to be. You were following a strongly-working intuitive faculty, and it was leading you along an optimum path.

“There’s one trait of intuition that makes it a little hard for a statistically bred and educated man to stomach. Intuition is completely ruthless. If reaching a certain goal involves a pathway through beartraps and hellfire, intuition makes no allowances for logical objections to these obstacles. It takes you through; that’s what happened in your case.”

“I hope you’re not trying to tell me it was intuitionally desirable that I be. run out of town with my reputation destroyed!”

Magruder nodded. “That’s exactly the case,” he said. “You had accepted your intuitive faculty as a prime motivator at the moment you recognized it actually existed. Not everyone does that, you understand, but you did—hook, line, and sinker, as you say.

“It was therefore very easy for it to assume a very high functioning level, and replace a considerable mass of logical reasoning. But even so, it was still comparatively embryonic in development—with the result that you were somewhat in the position of a man trying to ride two horses wanting to go in opposite directions.

“You permitted intuition to operate, but you tried to evaluate its results logically.”

“An intuitionist has no desire for status in the community, I suppose! No need for a sound, stable reputation and solid family life!”

Magruder grimaced impatiently. “I suppose it’s difficult to shuck off the lifelong habit of trying to generalize from a single specific incident. You’ll learn, however—

“Your case has nothing to do with what intuitionists in general desire or do not desire. For you, your intuition determined an optimum course of action with the precision of Natural Law. For you, not for anybody else. For you.”

“Is there any purpose in it that can be understood by my Simple logical mind, then?” Bascomb asked bitterly.

“Of course. It is simply that you had to be driven out of your niche in a statistical society, or you would not have gone. That represents an almost unbelievable reflex activity of the intuition whichcannot be understood in logical terms. It saw, so to speak, that you were desirous of utilizing intuition; but it also saw that you would never renounce sufificiendy the statistical way of life you had built up so solidly. It saw, therefore, the necessity of destroying the impediment in order to permit you to realize your basic intuitive choice of an intuitive life. So it set up the chain of circumstances—it led youto set them up— to destroy your position in statistical society, and thereby free you for the fuller life you had already chosen but could not otherwise obtain.

“You’ll get used to that kind of operation after while; I’ll admit it shakes you pretty hard die first few times it goes into operation!”

“It’s absolutely—”

Bascomb didn’t finish with the word “insane”, which was on the tip of his tongue. He suddenly sat very still, staring across the quiet Main Street of Myersville. In the vault of his mind, a page seemed to have turned, and a previous opacity was flooded with a brilliance of light. He felt a trembling within the fibers of his being, that was at once both a joy and an apprehension.

Every word of Magruder’s last statements was true!

He saw it now—and understood how he could not possibly have seen it before. But something within him was aware—the mysterious, fearful thing men called intuition—

He would not have left his niche. He would have done such nonsensical things as promoting the course he attempted; he would have spoken of his find to his friends and associates.

And he would have backed down whenever their ridicule endangered his association with them. He would have valued his place in the community; his security or reputation—everything—above a full exploitation of intuition. He would have remained with New England; he would have remained a Statistical Man.

Something in him saw how it would be. And now he witnessed clearly on the lighted page of his mind the process of that seeing, the intricate course of its illogical flow.

The process that had made him once and for all a NonStatistical Man.

It would be there again, he knew, doing its work out of sight of his living, reasoning awareness. He’d never doubt or mistrust it again. This was the very quality of faith he’d once suggested to Magruder!

“I wouldn’t have left without being driven,” he said slowly, his eyes still staring at the buildings on the other side of the street. “I’ll never lose faith in my intuition again.”

Magruder smiled a bit wistfully. “You’ll need it; but you’ll doubt the truth of your statement when intuition leads you through far hotter hells than anything you’ve seen up to now. And it will. Never doubt that!

“But, eventually, you will have a solid faith that can’t be shaken by anything you encounter. You’ll know by then that intuitive awareness excells crude logic in any basic crisis.”

“It seems wrong,” said Bascomb dubiously, “the way we’ve been talking and thinking about it. Like something outside myself, driving, directing and telling me what to do without any volition of my own. It gives me an uncomfortable feeling to think of it that way.”

“It should, because that’s not the way to think of it. Intuition is not some mysterious little green man in your skull, giving instructions and keeping back data from you.

“Intuition is you—a function of you, just as imagination, logic, or any other functions are. Like the subconscious, it does withhold data from the logic department at times; but that doesn’t signify a separate entity by any means.

“The exact nature of intuition is, of course, still a mystery to us. We’ve only discovered how to restore it and use it to a degree. And like any other faculty, its operation can be improved and developed. What the top levels may be, we don’t know; none of us has reached there, yet.

“You’ll find there are some things intuition is not. Basically, it is a means of knowing things as theydo exist, without particular recourse to the other senses, and relationships as they are and can be, without recourse to involved logic. Apart from this, it isn’t a means of time travel to know everything that’s going to occur in the future down to the end of your life. It does involve a considerable amount of prescience of the immediate future; but this fades exponentially as time increases the quantity of interlocking variables. It’s one of our most valuable properties, however, and one which we’re expanding rapidly.

“Basically, intuition seems to function on the premise of direct contact with the universe. We have to postulate a condition of no distance, and simultaneous contact with all portions of the universe at once, or at least at will. It’s very complex, but we think we’re on the right track.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Bascomb. “One thing I’d like to be able to understand, however, is the viciousness of the attacks on me back home. There was nothing normal about that; nothing I did could possibly explain it. The police ignored my requests for help, and vandals attacked my family at will. All because I defended an innocent man they wanted to kill!”

“No.” Magruder shook his head. “Surely you don’t believe the attack was result of your defense of dementi?” “What else?”

“That’s one thing you must know, or one of the basic purposes of your coming has been lost. Look in your own mind and see if another reason is not apparent now.” Bascomb considered, and the illumination he’d experienced before seemed to bum slowly into brilliance again like a ripening sunburst. “Yes,” he said, “I understand, dementi had nothing to do with it. They thought dementi was the reason; but actually they fought me because of what I’d tried to teach about intuition.”

“That was it,” said Magruder. “The fury of a statistical society breaking out at the appearance of its more desirable rival. You can’t forget, surely, that men have always burned witches, and the few who found wisdom in their words. Prophets have always paid for their gift with their lives, in one way or another. Logic almost won; witches and prophets are few these days.

“You’ll learn even more fully how dependence on Society inhibits a man’s intuitive ability. You havelearned that Society will fight Intuition, tooth and nail; it was absolutely necessary that you learn that lesson well.” “Why?” exclaimed Bascomb. “Wasn’t the knowledge available intuitively, without going through this unpleasant experience?”

“Don’t make the mistake of assuming intuition replaces experience,” Magruder said. “If that were true, we could become ascetics and spend our lives atop a high pole contemplating our belly buttons. Intuition serves to guide experience, not replace it. Intuitive knowledge that your neighbors would react as they did would not, of itself, have served to tear you from your statistical environment —without the actual experience of being subject to their reaction. It would have remained an academic matter, a further deterrent to your breaking away.

“Similarly, you might ask, if people can detect their own need of insurance in advance, can they not change that need entirely? Can’t they avoid accidents headed their way? Sometimes they can—if it is appropriate to their total optimum world-experience for them to do so. Other times they can only prepare to meet the experience in an optimum manner.”

“But all your lecture students aren’t going through what I did!”

“No—you’re different because of what you are to become in this field. The others learn how to use it in their private lives, but they don’t talk about it; their intuition teaches them how to keep out of such jams. Yours led you to it, because of the lesson you had to learn—because you had to know, first-hand, how your neighbors and friends could turn on you with cold, vicious savagery because of this thing.

“You had to see Society mobilizing all the witch burning techniques accumulated over the ages, and realize these still exist; that science has not made them unnecessary, but is sometimes only a milder form of the same thing. You had to know that Society recognizes your possession as a death warrant for itself, that it will fight to the death for its own survival.

“You had to know how truly Man has become poor, little rich boy, sitting in the midst of his wealth of Christmas gadgetry which has become abundant beyond his capacity to use it; and that inside, a slowly crumbling psyche is leaving him a hollow, eyeless shell which will collapse upon the heap of shining gadgetry when his last internal fires are dead.

“But I say logic almost won; the battle isn’t quite over. Logic hasn’t wholly dispelled the society of witches and prophets and sorcerers and soothsayers. Their company has been considerably augmented since our discovery of processes to restore intuitive faculties in spite of the social pressures against them.

“I started five years ago while still at the University. I recruited slowly and carefully, and all of my original people are still with me. We moved about the country later, working at random, developing our methods, improving our means of contact and sheer existence in a statistical society. You have encountered reports on some of our work, we are only beginning.

“Six months ago, we decided on the experiment of taking over a whole community. We chose Myersville because it already had a good stable foundation; you know our results. It’s to be our headquarters for some time to come.

“The general public here is not in on the secret of what, precisely, has happened to them, you understand. They are simply aware that they have decided to change their way of life; that they became fed up with the old one and voluntarily decided to improve. It shocks them now when they go away for a visit. But we didn’t do this. They did— after having experienced release of some of their intuitive faculties, which led them to cease their slavish dependence on Society.

“That’s about the whole story to date. We’re trying to recruit stronger men as time goes on. Our survey of your abilities showed you to be one of the strongest.”

“How could you know that?” Bascomb demanded abruptly. “I was buried, literally buried—in the statistical mass I called living. Why, Sarah’s intuitive bullseyes scared the daylights out of me!”

“We knew that—and we knew why. Your inherent endowment of intuitive faculties is so high that you had to make a choice very early in life: bury them completely, or risk the terror of complete ostracism by the Society which would regard you as an enemy to its own existence.

“There’s nothing shameful about that decision; it’s the one the whole race made in the dawn of its life. It was particularly fortunate that you married a woman like Sarah, who already had some understanding and belief in her own intuitive powers. She will be a great help to us, also.”

“You seem very sure we will go along with you!”

“Do you suppose we would have gone to the trouble we did, if we lacked positive, intuitive knowledge of that fact!” Magruder asked in astonishment.

Bascomb smiled in understanding. There was no argument to offer; he knew the Professor was quite correct. He knew it in the most positive way a man can ever gain any knowledge.

He felt it was the way things ought to be.

THE MOON IS DEATH

You don’t know what age means until you’ve seen the Moon at close range. It’s not like the friendly face of an old man who’s lived a good, full life; it’s the white skeleton of a desert traveler, lost and picked clean by the buzzards. Ten thousand years ago.

They sent two of them down the first trip. McAulilfe and Joe Siddons. McAulilfe was a geologist, and Joe was an electromagnetic field man. Joe supposed that sort of combination was as likely to find the trouble on the Moon as any other, but he would have preferred someone nearer his own line. There was nothing for Mac and him to talk about. Just the trip itself, and neither of them wanted to talk much about that.

It should have been at least a five-man party, Joe told himself. He knew the kind of hassle that could spring up on these two-man patrols, and he didn’t relish the idea of any argument with Mac. The geologist was a big, broadshouldered man who looked more like a stevedore than a pebble chaser.

Joe was big enough to take care of himself in most comers he was liable to back into, but he didn’t want to stir up a hassle with anybody just now. He wanted to find out why nobody had ever come back from the Moon. He wanted to know what had happened to his closest friend, Dr. Radon Harcourt, who had been with Expedition Five.

Mac was handling the controls of the small rocket jumper. His eyes stayed on the glaring sector of the Moon’s disc that lit up the forward port. Joe felt of his straps, and glanced to starboard where the hovering space station provided a jump-off point for this Moon investigation.

He consulted the chart on the panel and pointed ahead of them. “A little to starboard, Mac. That’s the Caucasus Mountains over there. Base Five is somewhere along the foot of them at the edge of Mare Imbrium.”

Mac glanced at the chart for himself and corrected their fall. Above him, the television screen showed the row of officers watching from inside the space station itself, watching every move made by the two men in the rocket. Listening to every word they said.

Buzzards, Joe thought.

He shook the animosity out of his mind. This was a poor way to begin. Nobody could be blamed for Harcourt’s death; not yet, anyway. And nobody had forced him and Mac to come on this trip. They had volunteered to try for a Moon landing.

Men had been trying for twenty years or more. The first rockets naturally aimed for the Moon; they didn’t come back. The flash equipment, the mass of radio components —nothing had ever come out of the Moon to show that the expeditions had landed with the men alive.

There had been eight expeditions altogether before they finally gave up. By that time the atomics were ready, and Mars was as close to a man with a reactor pile as the Moon was to one with a rocket. Man had actually landed and returned from Mars without ever having walked upon the face of the Moon—as far as anyone knew.

The Moon was a jinx, they began to say. Men refused to sign for any new attempts on Earth’s own satellite, while they grasped eagerly for a chance at Mars again, or Venus.

But another Moon trip was finally organized. Expedition Five they called it, because it was the fifth under current operation or consideration. In it were three of the largest atomic ships, and almost two hundred men. Including Radon Harcourt.

None of them were ever seen again.

They had landed; that much was known. There had been messages telling of routine exploration, describing the cold, dead surface of the satellite. But within hours, almost, there came news of some kind of disaster. There were frantic, garbled reports of a division among members of the expedition. And then silence.

It was decided that something had to be done. This was a challenge that could be ignored no longer. The Moon had to be opened to exploration and its mystery solved. For this purpose, a space station, of the type built in an orbit around earth, was erected and towed into place in a Lunar orbit. A thousand specialists were poised to d&-mand an answer concerning the fate of the vanished men.

There were no precedents. Two-man crews in small jumper-rockets were arbitrarily decided upon to open a line of attack. Where hundreds had failed, perhaps two could find a simple answer as to why. McAuliffe and Siddons were the first to go, selected by lot from among the volunteers available.

They were eight miles up now, skimming the barren plain of Mare Imbrium. Joe put his eye to the telescope, searching for evidence of Base Five.

“Got it,” he said suddenly. “Three ships in a triangle with the huts in the center. That’s it.” -

“All right, turnover,” said Mac. His fingers punched down.

Joe steeled himself against the sidewise tug and roll of the rockets as they turned the ship, halting its forward motion in an upward arc, then lowering it slowly on the tail jets. Mac steered carefully to bring them close to the deserted base. The jets blasted a cloud of pumice dust higher than the ship, and the rocket settled into the shallow crater.

Mac switched off the igniters. “End of the line, and nobody’s ever made the return trip. Why do you suppose we were damn fools enough to get into such a predicament as this?”

“There’s no predicament, yet,” said Joe. “As of now we could push the buttons and go right on back to the station.”

Mac looked carefully out the port at the dismal, aged Moonscape visible now as the dust cloud settled. “I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to do just that,” he said. “Just to break the luck of this damned place!”

Their first task was to set up the television transmitters which would keep the base area under surveillance of the officers aboard the space station. They would explore the area in full view of the men aboard the station. When they entered one of the huts, or the abandoned space ships, they were to be out of sight no more than twenty minutes. Their absence for a longer period would be the signal for the launching of a second rocket-jumper, whose occupants would go directly to the spot where Mac and Joe were last seen. And if this did not serve to locate the difficulty, other tricks were in reserve.

In their weighted suits they climbed down the fin ladder and scrambled up the side of the shallow depression blasted by the rockets. Straight ahead were the crags of the Caucasus Mountains, a sunlit bone heap.

At a distance of a hundred feet from the rocket, they turned. Joe spoke. “Joe Siddons reporting to Commander Ormsby. We have rigged the television cameras and are proceeding toward Base Five. Are we in view? Is the alignment satisfactory?”

“Very good,” said Ormsby. “Proceed according to plan.”

The men turned and slogged forward, dust foaming about their feet. Joe could imagine how it was up there on the station—the men crowding the television screens, the relief rocket standing by for emergency—

Mac was a dozen feet away from him, and Joe paused, looking ahead to the bony crags rising out of the plain. The aura of infinite age and desolation was all but tangible. It soaked through the plastic of his suit, and seemed to eat at his bones. Mars was the Garden of Eden beside this.

The Moon was a thousand times older than Earth, he thought.

He saw Mac, ahead of him, stop abruptly and kneel in the dust. The geologist gave a coarse shout over the phones. And then as Joe hurried to him, he lifted a bulky object that had been half buried.

It was a space-suited figure lying face down, arms outspread as if the man had fallen as he walked.

“Take his arm,” said Mac.

Gently, they turned the corpse on its back. Joe brushed the face plate until the slanting rays of the sun lighted the dark cavern of the helmet.

His hand grew still, and the breathing of both men came to a deep pause as they glimpsed the remains of the man who had died in the suit. The head was a shining skull; scarcely a trace of leathery flesh remained. The depths of the eye sockets were naked and white.

“He looks as if he’s been here for a million years,” breathed Mac. “A corpse doesn’t look that way when it quick-freezes—as it would out here. It doesn’t look that way anywhere, after only six months.”

“Maybe the alternate heating by the direct rays of the sun, and the cooling at night—” said Joe. “We’ve never seen a man dead on the Moon before.”

But he didn’t believe it, and neither did the geologist. “It’s not the way he ought to look,” said Mac.

They got to their feet, leaving the figure where it lay. Joe reported briefly what they had found.

“No signs of physical violence?” said Commander Ormsby.

“None that are obvious,” said Joe.

“It will require laboratory tests, of course, to determine if the suit was defective or tampered with, and whether death came by disease or poison. Unless you find something of much greater significance, make it a point to bring the corpse with you when you return.” ..

“Yes, sir,” said Joe.

When we return, he thought. He looked up at the pinpoint of light that was the hovering space station, and at the green disc of Earth,-, Visible on the horizon. He felt cold and lonely and very, very old.

“Come on,” said Mac. “Let’s make a quick tour through the base and get it over with.”

He was feeling it, too, Joe thought, and they had only been on the Moon’s surface a few minutes. How had the men felt after days of watching each other die here, as they must have watched?

They moved on. Ahead were the guardian pillars of the three ships; they were huge—six or eight times the height of the little rocket-jumper. The two men could see the outer lock doors hanging open on two of the ships, but the third was shut up as if prepared for flight. Joe wondered if there had been a wild, last minute attempt to get away that failed.

In the center of the triangle were the pressurized huts, set up for the expedition’s work. Only two of them had been erected before disaster hit—the barracks hut and the Commander’s headquarters.

They chose the barracks hut for initial inspection. The building was of the familiar Quonset type, hermetically sealed and equipped with air locks at either end and two on each side. These were for quick exit or entry of the expedition’s full complement of men, in case of emergency.

The locks on the nearest sides were sealed. “Do you suppose there is still an atmosphere?” said Mac. “Could the machinery be operating yet?”

Joe spread his hands. “There’s no reason why not. I don’t imagine they deliberately turned it off—not even the last guy alive in there. Let’s try the other side.”

They found one lock open on the opposite end, out of sight of the television cameras. Joe queried Ormsby. “We can make an entrance of the barracks through the lock. Do you wish us both to enter, or should one remain in sight?”

“The two of you may as well go ahead,” said the Commander. “Your transmitters won’t work inside the huts, but do not break communication for more than twenty minutes. Remember, the second jumper will be dispatched if you do not appear within that time.”

The two men crawled through the two-foot opening into the outer chamber of the lock. They drew it shut and clamped it against the pressure that might appear when they opened the inner door. Mac approached the valve panel and twisted the handles sharply. Snowy mist fell to the floor as air hissed from the pipes.

“Air,” said Joe, “and warm, to boot—or it would have become completely dry long ago.”

When the hissing ceased, and the film of snow vanished from the floor, Joe undogged the inner door and stepped through into the barracks hall. Mac followed. His sharp intake of breath and muttered curse came over the phones.

The room was a mess. In the bunks lay scores of human remains. Others were sprawled upon the floor, hunched over the tables, or slumped in the few chairs available. And every one was reduced to a gleaming skeleton. Like the one they had found outside, these had only scraps of leather clinging to the bones, showing that flesh had once clothed them.

The two men advanced slowly down the length of the barracks. “It’s like a catacomb,” murmured Joe. “You’d swear they had been here for centuries, instead of six months. Just like the guy outside.”

Mac glanced at a thermometer hanging on the wall and started to unscrew the helmet of his suit. Joe touched his arm. “Better not; it might be some kind of disease that hit them.”

“Germs couldn’t have been lying dormant here on the Moon since Jupiter knows when.”

“They could,” Joe insisted. “Spores out of space, even. We’ll know when the lab men get on this. But we had better stay tight in our suits until we get back to the station and get thoroughly disinfected.”

“Then I vote that we get back. We’ve found what we came to find,” said Mac.

They continued walking slowly to the end of the charnal house of the barracks. The skeletons lay in every conceivable attitude, but it seemed to Joe that the predominant one was helpless collapse in the very midst of some activity. And it seemed that they had been stricken almost simultaneously.

He searched anxiously for some clue to the remains of his friend, Dr. Harcourt. But he knew it was hopeless until the clothing and immediate possessions of all of them could be examined minutely. The skeletons were anonymous in death.

“Suppose we look iri oil’ the Headquarters hut next?” said Joe. “The log might tell how this thing started.”

Mac nodded, but he was scarcely paying attention to Joe’s words. His eyes had been caught by a group of figures slumped about a table near die far wall of the room. Or, rather, by the objects on that table.

He moved closer. There was a small pile of round stones. They were like water worn pebbles, varying in size from peas to walnuts, with a few that ranged as high as three inches in diameter. They had the smoothness of milky quartz, but their outstanding characteristic was a faint yellow phosphorescence.

Mac picked up one of the largest stones and turned it over in his hands. “A strange type of formation to be found on the Moon. I wonder where they were collected. It looks as if the men gathered them as souveniers rather than as part of any systematic sampling.”

He dropped the glowing stone into the pocket of the spacesuit. “It will be interesting to make a chemical analysis when we get back to the station. I doubt that the luminescence comes from any form of radioactivity.”

Joe glanced at the watch dial in the side of his helmet. “We’ve got to get out. Eighteen minutes since we contacted Ormsby.”

They hurried past the strewn skeletons, and into the airlock once more. Outside, they stood in view of the television eye and sent a call to the station. Joe gave a quick report on conditions in the barracks.

“Still no violence?” said Ormsby.

“None,” said Joe. “It must have been disease—spores that may have been dormant for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Everything that comes back from the Moon will have to be thoroughly disinfected. We intend to inspect the Headquarters hut next.”

“We will arrange the disinfection,” said Ormsby. “Select any papers at Headquarters, which you believe might throw light on this matter.”

It was all set now, Joe told himself as they pushed through the pumice dust to the other hut. Nothing but disease germs. No mystery. Just a freak of nature that had almost licked man’s attempt to gain the stars.

Did he really believe that? he thought. Did he really believe it was all as simple as that? The aura of age crept about him and clung coldly to the suit in which he was a solitary prisoner. It wasn’t that simple. It couldn’t be, he admitted in panic. But if not that, then what was it?

He paused and turned as his companion suddenly bent down and began pawing the dust lightly with his fingers. “What the devil are you—?”

Mac straightened and held up an object triumphantly. “I thought I felt them as we walked. The stones—the Moonstones, if you please—they’re all over here, down in the dust.”

Joe bent down and felt around for himself. In a moment he had found three or four of the polished stones. “No wonder they were picking them up for souveniers! They’re as plentiful as shells on a beach. How do you suppose such a formation happens to occur?”

Mac turned the pebble over and shook his head. “That’s one I can’t figure out. Probably it will be very simple when we know the answer, but right now I’d hate to be the one to suggest that there was once an actual lake here that might have polished them with its washing!”

In the Headquarters hut they found the body of Commander Maxwell, leader of Expedition Five. He had been at his desk with the log of the expedition open before him. His fingers had scrawled final, unintelligible lines even as he died.

Mac reached for the book eagerly, while Joe jerked open the drawers of cabinets and desks in the room. There was nothing in these but records of equipment and personnel and schedules of the expedition’s objectives.

Mac gave an exclamation as he read. “Three and a half days,” he said. “That’s all it took, from the time of their landing until this—” He gestured toward the skeletal remains of the Commander.

“Did he have an idea what it was?” said Joe.

“No. A score of men were hit by the end of the first day. Maxwell says it seemed to shrivel them and take all their strength. By the beginning of the third day, all but a handful had it, and they had to quit the work of the expedition completely, with only these two huts erected.

“Then they split up. Some of them tried to capture one of the ships and return to earth. That’s what we heard in the last garbled radio reports. Maxwell thought it was disease, all right, and gave orders that no one was to leave, carrying it home. Two or three dozen men were killed in the battle' that followed. Evidently Maxwell won.”

He slipped the book into one of the sealed specimen bags and deposited it in a pocket of the suit. “That seems to be it. From here on, it’s up to the medicos.”

As they turned to go, they spotted one of the Moonstones resting on top of a cabinet. “Everybody seems to have been collecting them,” said Joe.

They reported again to Commander Ormsby and made their way toward one of the atomic ships for their final inspection before returning to the station in the rocket jumper. They chose the ship with the closed ports because it was evidently the one which had been the scene of the final struggle to get away.

It took a few moments to open the unfamiliar seals, which automatically closed the inner doors of the locks before permitting the outer hatch to open. Once inside, the men observed that the ship, like the huts below, had retained its warm atmosphere intact. They stepped into the corridor that led to the spiral stairway stretching the length of the ship’s axis.

“Why don’t we split up?” said Mac, impatiently. “We’ve found all we need to know. Just a quick glance through the ship will be enough for Ormsby, and then we can get back to the station.”

“Suits me,” said Joe. “I’ll go up and take a look at the control room. You see what things are like on the engine deck.”

Mac grunted agreement and turned away while Joe climbed the stairway. If Mac thought he knew the answer, why was he so anxious to get away? Joe wondered. Why were they both so anxious? He tried to shrug off the unpleasant apprehensions that clung to him.

Without pausing he passed the numerous corridors that turned off to the intermediate levels. On one deck he glimpsed a fallen spaceman with a knife in the skeleton hand. On another level three of them were huddled near the stairway, a sub-machine gun beside them. It had been a battle; what an ending for the expedition that had started so magnificently!

Abruptly the stairway ended, and he was looking down a corridor toward the control-room of the vessel. Even there, he could see a partial view of a figure slumped over one of the control tables. A sub-machine gun lay on the floor beside him. Evidently he had defended himself on the lower levels and come up here, dying at the very moment he was about to set the ship in motion.

Joe picked up the gun and moved it out of the way. And then he observed something else. At the feet of the man was a large sack, heavy with the weight of Moonstones inside it.

Joe whistled softly to himself. Why would anybody have bothered with so many of these at a time when every moment counted in their attempt to escape? He wondered if it were possible that the stones would have some great intrinsic worth back on Earth. Apparently the dead man had thought so, anyway.

As he came closer he saw that the man had slumped and died while writing some notes, even as Commander Maxwell had done. And then Joe stared at the sprawling script in the notebook.

It was the handwriting of Dr. Radon Harcourt.

There was no mistake. Joe was sure he would know that hasty, running hand in hell itself. With regret, and deep reverence, he looked upon the skeletal features that lay twisted inside the spaceman’s crash helmet. He felt a sick longing to do some final thing for his old frend.

He lifted the notebook from beneath the finger bones and began reading. If anyone of the expedition had truly found the cause of tragedy, it would be here in these pages.

"I am alone,” Harcourt had written. "Davis and Galloway dead. I can’t make it any longer. 1 can’t get down to the engine room now. No one of this expedition will take the ship back to Earth, but someday someone will come and find a way to take the stones—and death—to Earth.”

Joe felt a swift coldness at the back of his neck. He glanced down at the heavy sack on the floor, and flipped die pages to an earlier entry.

"I understand what it is now,” Harcourt wrote. “They all think we are dying of some mysterious disease. Maxwell is trying to whip our biologists into a solution. As if they could find the antidote for a new illness that is fatal within hours!

“But we can’t blame Maxwell; we're all in a panic. What they won’t believe is that we’re dying of senility. Our own natural life-processes. I’ve tried to tell them, but they won’t believe me. I understand what is happening. I am an old man; I hav6 aged fifty years in the last twelve hours.

“It is the stones. I found it out by watching the men as they picked them up. I didn’t know at first, but it wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. Just being on the surface of the Moon is enough to be afflicted by them.

“The time-magnets, I call them. I cannot explain them, but I know what they do. They hold a time-field just as a block of steel will hold a magnetic field. When any life, or mechanical motion, comes within very close range of these concentrated time fields, the stones begin to discharge that field. It’s like a magnet discharging when thrust into a flame.

“They must have come out of space—and how fortunate that they did not strike Earth when they came! Through the ages they have partially discharged and made the Moon the ancient thing that it is. All of us have felt this incredible age here. The Moon can not grow any older! And the mass of this field remains undischarged. It has made us old men in a day, and we are dying of old age even as we try to move about our tasks.’’

There was more, but Joe put the notebook down. His face was sweaty, and he took off the helmet of the suit. There was no need to fear germs in the atmosphere now, he thought. He peeled off the outer shell of the spacesuit and sat in the inner lining, staring at the skull of his dead friend. Then he glanced at his image in the polished metal rim of the control panel. His cheeks were thinner and more hollow. There were leathery lines in his forehead, which hadn’t been there when he shaved that morning in his quarters aboard the station.

Old.

He had felt it out in space just looking down at the Moon. He had felt it crossing the dust plain to the base. He had felt it in these ancient corpses that littered the barracks and ships. Six months! These men had died ten thousand years ago.

The sweat kept rolling down the lines of his face. It was Harcourt’s last scrawled entry as he died that held Joe’s mind. Some day men would find a way to take the stones to Earth. Like slow cancer they would begin to discharge their eternal fields of time from wherever they were; only an ancient miracle had kept them from Earth in the first place as they crashed out of space.

Joe knew it would happen. No matter how careful they tried to be, men would find a way. They would shield the stones; they would experiment with them; they would take them to Earth. And death would creep over the planet.

He had to keep it from happening.

Harcourt must have had the same thought. That was why he had seized control of the space ship, which was evidently the only one ready for immediate flight. He had stood armed with the machine-gun and killed them—or held them off until they died in their own old age.

But there was something else.

Why had Harcourt lamented his failure to reach the engine room? What purpose could he have had there? And why had he brought the sack of stones aboard the ship himself?

Perhaps he hadn’t brought them, Joe thought. They might have been captured from some of the others who had taken them aboard. But Harcourt would not have bothered to bring them to the control-room.

There was something missing. A piece he didn’t see.

He thought of Mac, and knew what Mac would do. Mac was a geologist; he couldn’t let the stones alone. Even now he carried one in the pocket of his spacesuit. Mac would try to take them to Earth, Joe thought. He would scoff at Harcourt’s warning and surround himself with so-called precautions.

But the stones would get loose. They couldn’t be allowed to reach Earth ever.

Joe glanced at the dial in the helmet. Fourteen minutes since they had reported to Ormsby; deadline for the next report was six minutes away. What could he do? What could anyone do, he thought in agony, to assure that the stones would never be taken to Earth?

There had been some plan in Harcourt’s mind; Joe was sure of it. He couldn’t get the missing piece to fit. The engine room. The sack of stones.

But Harcourt had died. The siege in the control room had cost him too much time, and he couldn’t carry out whatever plan he had. Yet what plan could possibly exist for making sure the time-magnets would never menace earth?

Joe felt a desperate, choking sensation rise in his throat as he looked again upon the skeleton of Harcourt and heard the distant sound of Mac’s moving up through the ship. He guessed that, th,e geologist had tried to contact him by radio, which had been disconnected when he removed his own helmet. .

It didn’t matter. He and Mac had nothing to say to each other. Soon, they would have nothing to say to anyone, ever.

Motion.

Motion or life, Harcourt had said. These would discharge the time-magnets as a flame would destroy a steel magnet. Enough motion would draw out all the time field and disperse it—

Suddenly, Joe saw it; he knew what Harcourt’s desperate plan had been. He knew how it was possible to free the Earth from the menace that had circled it through the eons in its own satellite.

Mac’s steps were loud on the circular stairway now. Joe glanced at the time. Three minutes. There was no time to argue with Mac, to explain to him, to try to convince him. And in the end, he would probably never be convinced.

Joe picked up the sub-machine gun that Harcourt had used. He sat with it in his lap waiting as Mac’s footsteps sounded in the ship. The geologist reached the top of the stairway and lumbered impatiently toward the control room. Joe met him as he came in from the corridor.

The machine-gun made a ragged thunder within the metal room. And then it seemed infinitely quiet as Mac crumpled to the floor; blood streaming through his shattered helmet.

Wearily, Joe put the gun down and gathered the sack of stones that had lain at Harcourt’s feet. Stepping over Mack’s body, he dragged the sack down the corridor and began the descent of the spiral stairway. Ormsby would even now be giving orders for another rocket-jumper to leave the station. But it would take a full twelve minutes lor the ship to make a landing. He should be able to make it.

It took him eight of those minutes to get the sack to the engine room. It must have been a terrific feat, he thought, for Harcourt to get them to the control room in the first place. It must have been necessary to protect them while fighting off the crewmen in the lower levels.

At last Joe reached his objective and permitted himself a moment’s rest. He stood on the engineers’ catwalk overlooking the massive reactor which provided power for the ship.

Motion, he thought again. There was motion in its ultimate state. Or would be—with the sudden influx of accelerated time-field. Not merely a fraction of a percent of the fissionable material would contribute to the blast; probably close to one hundred percent of the mass would explode at once. In that terrific blast, every time-magnet on the Moon should discharge its field. He wondered just what would happen to the Moon itself. If it contained a percentage of native radioactive materials—

Suddenly Joe felt himself trembling. A weakness was creeping through his limbs. He glanced at his own hands, shocked by what he saw. The skin was withered, and dry, and half-transparent—like the flesh of an old, old man.

He understood. The terrific field from the bag of stones was discharging through him. He laughed a little hysterically as he realized he was dying now of old age. He had never supposed that a spaceman would live so long!

And then he hurled the bag of time-magnets with all his feeble, waning strength. He watched it tumble straight down upon the ship’s reactor.

On earth the explosion was observed. It awoke the sleeping inhabitants of a hemisphere and sent hysterical masses screaming to their cathedrals.

The observatories were shaken with the fury of the inquiries, but they had no answer nor any explanation for die disaster which shattered the Moon and destroyed the space station circling near it.

And shortly they knew that they would never have an explanation; for that was the night when the Moon turned to blood and hung in the sky, a crimson glowing reminder now that man would never set foot upon the half-molten surface of his satellite.

THE GARDENER

Jimmy Correll hated the smell of schools. The papery smell of worn books, the smell of chalk dust and teachers’ perfumes and the oily sweeping compound Mr. Barton brushed over the wooden floors each night. The choking smell of too many sweaty jeans crowded together on these hot, spring days.

This odor of learning flowed through the halls of Westwood High and pooled in the big auditorium wing that would soon be filling for the Friday Assembly. Mr. Barton was already opening the high windows against it. Jimmy put his head through the partly open doorway and watched the custodian’s angular form moving along the wall.

Mr. Barton knew the scores of all the games Westwood had played since he came there in ’31. He punched the boys on the biceps, and roared loudly when he won over them in arguments as to who beat whom in which year. Except that he never punched Jimmy’s arm. He spoke softly and tousled Jimmy’s hair. Sometimes Jimmy thought Mr. Barton was the only friend he had—besides Brick Malloy, of course.

He backed from the door and closed it quietly. He wished he could call out and tell Mr. Barton what he was doing, but no one must see him now.

A bell shrilled. The five-minute, between-class period was over. Jimmy raced to the end of the hall and slipped out to the bike rack. He unlocked his own bicycle quickly and sped away from the school yard.

He didn’t stop his frantic pumping until he reached the bridge across Willow Creek, nearly two miles from Westwood High. His breath coming in deep gasps, he got off and walked his bike down the steep slope to a hiding place under the bridge. Then he moved along the bank on which the spring grass was already high, half hiding the old trails. At last he stopped, a half mile from the bridge, under the great, shadowy arms of a willow tree. The grass was shorter here in the shade. Jimmy dropped face down to its green softness.

For a long time he didn’t move. He was safe. He knew it couldn’t last, but that didn’t matter. He was safe for today—Jimmy Correll Day at Westwood High. It would be all over before they found him.

Inside, he felt like crying, but it wouldn’t come. Jimmy Correll Day! They called it his day and gave him an assembly to honor him. And the whole school despised him —all but Mr. Barton and Brick Malloy.

In panic, he thought of sitting up there on the stage while Mr. Mooremeister, the Principal, said fine, flowery things he didn’t mean. He thought, too, of what his disappearance would do to his mother and father, who were going to sit on the stage with him. But he couldn’t help it; they expected too much.

He moved over to the edge of the creek and watched the deep, clear water slide past the bank. This was the spot where Brick had taught him how to fish. Maybe he shouldn’t have come here. If they should ask Brick— But they wouldn’t get around to that until it was much too late. A couple of hours was all he needed.

He took off his shoes and socks and let his feet hang in the cool water. He wished he could make them understand that this was where he belonged, with the Earth and the water and the wild growth along the banks of the stream.

Maybe if they let him alone he could have found a place for himself at school, too, but they wouldn’t let him alone. He was in the first grade a week when they promoted him to third. He stayed there a month. After that, he wasn’t considered as belonging to any particular grade. He just moved from room to room, soaking up everything the books and teachers had to show him.

Now—next Fall—they wanted him to go to the University.

He had won a four-year scholarship from the Martin-dale Electric Company in their annual Junior Scientist Contest. He had submitted his astronomy project and written an essay on Space, the Next Frontier. The judges said it was the best thing they had seen since the contest began.

He hadn’t dreamed it might mean that they wouldn’t even let him finish high school. But Mr. Dunlap, of the Martindale Company, wanted him in the University next Fall. Dr. Webber, President of the University, wanted him also. Dr. Webber had kept an eye on him since the first reports of his genius started coming out of Lincoln grade school.

And Mr. Mooremeister wanted it. Mr. Mooremeister, most of all. He’d be tickled to death to be rid of me, Jimmy thought.

The memory of his first meeting with the Principal was like a hard lump inside Jimmy. It was on the day Mr. Gibbons, Principal of Lincoln, brought Jimmy to Westwood. He was left in the little anteroom while the two men talked. The partition was thick, but that made no difference. Jimmy didn’t need to hear their words to know everything that was in their minds.

He hadn’t been able to do it very long at that time, and it still frightened him a little. It was one of the things he’d never told anyone about. He couldn’t make it work always, either, but now this ability was functioning perfectly. It was as if he were right inside the skulls of the two men.

Mr. Mooremeister groaned in misery when Mr. Gibbons explained why he had come. “Not a cute little boy genius, Gibbons!” he cried. “Anything but that! Our football team hasn’t a single decent quarterback; our English staff is going to pieces. And you want me to wet nurse a little genius!

“Send him down to Smithers at Central. Smithers likes wonder boys who can sit motionless for a day at a time and recite all of ‘Hamlet’ from memory.”

“You’ve got to take him,” Mr. Gibbons said. “He knows more than half my teachers do. He’s in your district; and Webber at the University has an eye on him.”

“Then let Webber take him! I don’t want him!”

“That’ll come in a year or two. But he doesn’t think Jimmy is old enough for University environment right now.”

“Not at nine, but at ten or eleven he will be,” said Mr. Mooremeister sarcastically.

“Yes.” Then Mr. Gibbons was silent for quite a while before he said slowly, “Jimmy’s a queer little cuss. You can’t get close enough to really know him, but somehow I think he’s going to become a very great man. It may turn out that the most valuable thing you or I can do in our otherwise not-very-useful lives is to see that the thing Jimmy has inside him is not smothered before it matures.”

Jimmy couldn’t remember when he first heard the word, prodigy. It was certainly long before his school days, but he hadn’t been concerned with its meaning then. He didn’t suppose he was different from other children.

Now he wondered if he had any chance at all to ever be like them.

He remembered the precise moment he found out there was a difference.

In the first grade, Miss Brown printed “run” on the blackboard that first day of school. She took three ridiculous steps to show its meaning. And in midmorning then, Jimmy rose and solemnly announced: “But I already know how to read. I’ve always been able to read.”

He began a recital of the long list of classics, science texts, and Donald Duck comics through which he’d gone with the patient help and guidance of his father. In the midst of it he stopped. Something like a cold wind swept about his feet; Miss Brown and the children were looking at him, utterly silent.

Instinctively, he understood what he had done. He was a strange one in their midst, an outsider; and they hated him for it.

That was what he felt swirling coldly in that room, he knew forever after. The dark penalty of hate for one who was different. He cried in the night when he got to bed. He cried for the immense, nameless ache that had opened up within him.

His mother rocked him in her arms, and his father said it must have been the excitement of the first day at school. They tried to persuade him to tell what was the matter. But he had no words for it.

He stood at the mouth of the great, empty cavern of his life and saw all the dark, lonely years stretching away into timelessness. But he had not the words for it, then or ever.

He could not remember the beginning of wonder, of his great yearning inquiry about the stars and the Earth, the water and the air, and the things that crawled and swam and flew. It was a magic place, this world to which he had come!

And he had always, from the moment of his birth, been able to know everything he wanted to know about it for little more than the asking. Truly, he could not remember learning to read. At the first glimpse of a printed page he had known. But after that first day of school he never told them, not even his parents, about the things he could do that other boys could not do at all.

He remembered the first time in science class, for instance, when he had been shown a microscope along with the rest of the pupils. It had seemed such a useless object! By narrowing his vision a bit he could see clearly the wriggly amoeba in the little drop of water. But by then he understood he was .the only one in the class who could.

He knew they didn’t understand about the stars, either. He read in his books about great telescopes that men built to stretch their puny vision to the threshold of space. But since infancy—he couldn’t recall the first time—he had strolled in vision across the stifling red sands of Mars. He had picked his way among the ancient ruins and played hide and seek in imagination with the small, brown cubs that scurried there, the only remnants of the proud, fallen race that had built those ruins.

He knew he was the only one who could do these things. And he despised himself for it, for what was the use of such gifts if they shut him in a sealed tomb that kept him out of the life and friendship of his own kind?

So, carefully, he hid all his strange, wild talents as best he could. But he could not hold himself to the pace of his fellow school pupils by any means at his command. It was impossible to camouflage himself as a common dullard.

He knew he wasn’t normal. Sometimes he wondered if he was even human .. .

In that first year of school, Miss Brown spread the word, and Mr. Gibbons came to see Jimmy’s genius for himself. They sent him on, out of the first grade, and that’s the way it began.

He became a kind of celebrated freak, but only Mr. Gibbons showed any genuine liking for him. Other teachers never did. His fellow pupils regarded him with a kind of curious contempt. Jimmy had hoped it would turn out differently when he got to know them. But it took him such a long time to get acquainted, and he was shunted to a new group before he had time to know the last one.

As the gap in ages widened, he gave it up. He never had a classmate for a friend. Not until Brick Malloy.

In the archives of the University there was a bound, typewritten manuscript, a full inch and half thick, devoted to a description and analysis of Jimmy Correll. It had earned its author, Ralph Grosset, a master’s degree in psychology and had given Jimmy a whole summer with someone to talk to.

Ralph Grosset had described in detail Jimmy’s photographic memory and his adult capacity for deductive reasoning, but he had skipped the things Jimmy tried to say about the wonder and the mystery of the universe, and of hating and the loneliness. He didn’t know about these things. He was interested only in preparing a thesis for his degree, and he didn’t really like Jimmy. Grosset feared him a little, almost, and distrusted him.

Jimmy didn’t really expect anything different. He had given up long ago and learned to give coldness for coldness, retreating farther and farther into the clean little world of his own making. But it was lonely there.

It was so lonely that he could stand it no longer.

He drew his legs out of the chill water of the Creek and stretched them in a spot of sunlight filtering through the tree. He lay on his back staring upward at the sky through the net of willows. He was sure of one thing: He wasn’t going to the University next Fall.

He knew what it would be like there. They would laugh when he first came into class and tell him the kindergarten was three doors down the hall. The professors would make a joke of his presence even while trying to reassure him it was normal for eleven year old boys to appear in their lecture rooms. They wouldn’t like him.

And all of them would talk over his head about the ordinary affairs of life, the football games, the dances and the parties, the world he didn’t belong in. They would look through him and around him as if to rid themselves of his presence by sheer disbelief in him.

That’s the way it had been at Westwood. He had been afraid, and the rest knew it instantly and without mercy. They called him “Professor” and “Four-Eyes” until he wanted to scream in rage.

He hated the gym periods most of all. The white, suffocating steaminess of the dressing room made him gasp and go sick with nausea. He hated the smell of sweat and clothes and dirty shoes. The wild, dark hairiness of the surrounding bodies frightened him and made him ashamed of his own baby nakedness.

And the others were ashamed to have him in their midst. Sometimes they kidded brutally about his little white skinny body, but mostly they just pretended he wasn’t there. On the field, of course, when sides were chosen for baseball or soccer, he was automatically the last one left. Nobody ever really chose him. When all the others had been picked and the crowd ran for positions, Jimmy would trail along with the side due to get the last man. .

But in the early Fall .of this year the miracle had happened. Jimmy found a friend. Old Mr. Barton was his friend, of course, but Mr. Barton was everybody’s friend. It was different with Brick Malloy. Brick was a classmate. Captain of the football team.

Jimmy could walk with his head high when he was with Brick. Everybody called out and waved when Brick passed. The greetings were not for Jimmy, but he knew the others were watching as he moved by the side of his friend. There had grown, day by day, a new look in their eyes. At first puzzlement—and now almost acceptance and respect.

Jimmy had not hoped for so much when Brick first came to him. He was rude and bitter as he was to everyone then. Brick seemed not to notice. “I’m in trouble, Jimmy,” he said. “You’re the best man around here for my kind of trouble, if you’d be willing to help me out.”

Jimmy remembered Brick had never called him “Professor” or “Four-eyes”, and he’d never laughed at him in the dressing room. Brick was always so sure of making his own way he never needed to stand in anyone else’s.

“I’m going to flunk trig,” he went on, “unless I get somebody to beat it into my thick head. I don’t have enough time to do it alone. It looks like it’s got to be either football or trig—and the way I’m going it’s not likely to be either.”

Without enthusiasm, Jimmy took on the coaching job. Trigonometry was lucidly clear to him, and he had the knack of making it so for the older boy. Brick offered substantial payment, but at the end of the first week, when the warmth was already growing between them, Jimmy made his own proposal.

“I’m in trouble, too,” he said. “I want to learn to throw a ball halfway straight, so the guys will quit razzing mo in gym. I want to learn how to catch and run. Touch mo these things, will you, Brick?”

They made a deal to exchange coaching, and Jimmy began feeling a measure of control coming into the muscles of his lean body. For the first time he felt his body was his own, with the right to occupy its quota of space. He had a right to the wild playground skills of his companions. Brick respected him and taught him to have respect for himself.

And one day, in this same spot, Jimmy confided the great secret of his agonizing wonder about the universe to which they had come. Jimmy had caught his first fish, and in the sky, the sun was pinking the high cirrus.

They watched the color slowly fading. “Don’t you ever wonder about it?” Jimmy said.

“Wonder about what?”

“Everything. . . 1” And then it came with a burst, the outflow of talk so long held back, because there had been no one to understand it.

“The colors,” said Jimmy, “The colors in the sunrise and sunset, the colors in a rainbow, the blue of the sky. Out in space, away from Earth, the sky isn’t blue. It’s black. Did you know that, Brick? Someday I’m going out there. I’m going to walk on the Moon and see what Earth looks like from there. I’m going to go to Mars before I die.

“I’m going to find out why an atom explodes. Nobody knows that, yet. Not really. They don’t know what fission or fusion really is. They only know a little about how to make it happen. Nobody knows what’s really inside an atom. I’m going to find out, Brick.”

“Sure you are,” said Brick quietly. “You’re going to go farther and faster, and higher and deeper than most men have ever dreamed.”

“What are you going to do, Brick? Wouldn’t you like to go there, too? Down into an atom, or out into space?”

“Me? The trig hound of Westwood High? Dad’s got a place all ready for me in his contracting business. I expect to be a civil engineer, that is if I can ever learn which end of a transit you look into.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“Sure. I grew up on stories of bridges in South America and sewers in Syria. Actually, Dad’s never had an out of stages job yet. His biggest one was a thirty six inch sewer line half way across San Francisco. He had to start too close to scratch. He expects me to build it up; it’s what I want to do.

“And a guy ought to do what he wants to, not what somebody else thinks he ought to. You’ve got a lot tougher climb than I have to get where you’re going. But maybe not, really. You’re starting from a higher jumping-off place than most of us will ever reach after a lifetime of trying.” "

“Is that why they hate me?”

Brick’s eyes widened in astonishment. “So that’s what’s eating you! For the love of Pete, stop dreaming up such crazy ideas. They’d like you well enough if you’d give them half a chance!” .

Jimmy knew that was a lie, of course. Reclining now in the grass where they had once talked, he knew that Brick was just trying to be kind. He had given them a chance until his heart ached with the sickness of longing for their friendship. Still they hated him, and Jimmy was scared of them.

He was too scared to appear for the farce of Jimmy Correll Day Assembly. He was too scared to go to the University next year.

He was too scared to leave Brick.

He wasn’t ashamed of this. For the first time in his life he knew what it was like to walk through the school yard and on the streets of his neighborhood with some feeling of pride and freedom from fear. Brick gave him an honest friendship. It wasn’t shameful to take pride in that— and fear its loss.

Maybe if he stayed at Westwood just this next year— with Brick—he could get up strength enough to go it alone. But if he had to leave now for another world of taunting strangers he would be lost. He would never find his way back to this world of sky and light that Brick had shown him.

He stopped thinking and let time drift while he sucked in Jhe pleasure of the water and the sky, and the gentle fondling of the wind in the grass and the willow branches. And then he knew it had happened, the thing he had known would happen because he was foolish enough to come back to this enchanted place.

Brick was there, standing over him.

Jimmy looked up to his friend’s face. A beam of light through the matrix of leaves blinded him. Brick sat down on the bank. “They’re looking all over for you, Jimmy,” he said.

A hot burning flooded the inside of Jimmy’s stomach.

They couldn’t have searched very long. “Why did you look here?” he said.

“I guess I always knew this would happen,” Brick said slowly. He plucked at the blades of grass on die bank. “I guess I always knew you’d run out when the big chance came along. It’s all you’ve ever done—run away.”

“You can’t taunt me into going back!” Jimmy said numbly. “I won’t go back, no matter what you say.”

“I don’t expect you to. I just thought it would be a good time to tell you what I’ve always suspected: You haven’t got what it takes.”

“I know what I’m doing!” Jimmy moved to a crouching position before Brick, his childish face almost snarling. “Nobody’s going to make me jump through a hoop like a prize dog anymore. Jimmy Correll, the trained pup, is through performing!”

Brick leaned back, smiling cynically.

“Brick—all I want is a chance to stay at Westwood another year.” The words tumbled out of Jimmy. “You don’t know what it’s meant—being able to talk to you and walk around the school as if I have a right to. If I can just hold off one more year maybe I can make it. But I can’t now. Can’t you understand that? Besides—you’ll be going to the University then, too.”

Brick moved away. “Don’t count on me, kid. I left an hour ago. I had thought that if I waited long enough you might show some guts. You were able to learn to catch a fast pitch, and you let me rub your nose in the dirt teaching you to run with a ball. But I guess it takes still more in a pinch like this. You haven’t got it, and you never will.” Jimmy’s face twisted helplessly. “Brick—Brick—”

“It’s about time you got wise to yourself. You can’t hang onto me any longer. You’ve got to get up gumption enough to face things for yourself. Find your own kind.” “Damn you, Brick Malloy—damn you—!”

But Brick had turned and was already vanishing in the high grass along the bank.

The enchantment was gone. Never would this be a sacred, wonderful spot again. Jimmy lay in the grass for long minutes, trying to get it all back again. But he knew it was gone now forever.

He got up and moved along the trail. There was no use staying. When Brick got back to school they’d send somebody after him. His parents, or the Principal, or somebody ...

He came in sight of the bridge and looked up. They had already come. It didn’t seem as if there had been time for Brick to get back and report, but there was a car there on the shoulder of the road, just off the bridge.

Then Jimmy recognized it. The battered old car belonged to Mr. Barton,, the janitor. Surely Mr. Barton wouldn’t be the one to come and bring him back! That would be the final betrayal.

Mr. Barton was waiting on the front seat, smoking a pipe. The door hung open, moving slightly with a creak in the breeze.

The janitor waved a hand as he saw him. “Hello, Jimmy. Want to ride back with me? We can put your bike in the back.”

Jimmy came up to the running board and stared in bitterness. “I guess Brick told everybody what I did.”

“I wouldn’t know; I haven’t seen Brick.”

“Then how did you know I’d be here? Why did you come?”

“I just sort of guessed. And I supposed you were ready to go back by now so I thought I’d drive down.”

Tears started suddenly in Jimmy’s eyes. He leaned forward pleadingly. “Don’t take me back! Drive me away from here somewhere where I’ll never have to come back!”

“All right. We’ll go for a ride if you want to,” said Mr. Barton amiably. “Let’s get your bike up in the back.”

In a few moments the ancient car was chugging down the road away from town and Westwood High. Mr. Barton said nothing, continuing to puff on the pipe between his teeth. Then suddenly Jimmy was pouring it out, the whole-story from the very beginning in the first grade. He told about the loneliness of being different, the hatred from those who were so perfectly normal, the insurmountable dread of facing all his enemies at the Assembly in his honor.

“I’m nothing but a freak!” he cried in anguish. “I’m smarter than any of them in school and nobody’ll be my friend!”

Mr. Barton nodded serenely, then spoke. “You have to decide which of two things you want. Is it the stars and atoms you are always talking about—or is it the backslapping of the guys in school, guys like Tom Marlow maybe, and Jack Foster? You can have one or the other but not both.

“Tom and Jack and the rest of them will never savvy the Jimmy Correll who gets half sick with wanting to be out there in space, walking across the face of the Moon, digging up the ancient cities of Mars. They laugh at things like that because they’re afraid to look so high or so far.

“But they’ll slap you on the back if you give up all that and become like them.”

“I want to be like them! Why can’t I? And keep the other, too? What’s the matter with me that I can’t be like the other guys, so they’ll stop hating me and be friends?”

“You can, Jimmy. Just close your eyes to the things you see, which no one else can. Close your ears to the sounds that only you can hear. Laugh at their stupid jokes. Then you’ll be one of them, and they won’t laugh at you any more. Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” said Jimmy thinly. “I want them to like me and play with me and stop hating me.”

“Wouldn’t you miss watching Ruffy and his friends? Wouldn’t you miss the sunsets on the desert of Loh-Khita?”

Jimmy turned slowly to the old man. A sudden finger of chill traced its way along his spine. He felt cold and frightened all over. “How do you know about Ruffy?” he whispered hoarsely. “How do you know about the desert of Loh-Khita? They’re on Mars!”

Mr. Barton nodded. “Yes, I know. You haven’t answered my question, though. Could you give up those? Could you give up watching the Earthshine from Mare Imbrium and exploring the ruins of the illfated Mars colony on the moon? Would you abandon those ancient vessels standing in the pumice of Mare Serenetatis in exchange for a backslap from Tom Marlow?”

“How do you know about them?’’ Jimmy’s voice was a cry of torment.

“I see them, too,” said Mr. Barton quietly.

“Then you’re—you’re like me!”

“Yes. I can see out there without a telescope. I can see the little things in a drop of water. I can know the thoughts of men before they speak them.”

Suddenly Jimmy was sobbing in deep, sweet relief of all his anguish. “I thought I was alone!” he cried. “I thought I was all alone in the whole wide world!”

“You’ve never been alone,” said Mr. Barton. “Not since the moment of your birth. We have watched over you carefully all the way.”

Jimmy’s crying subsided and he looked up again in wonder and incredulity at the face of the old janitor. “Who?” he said in, a whisper. “Who has watched over me?” ’

“Your own kind. Not. all men are bom blind and deaf and dumb as are the normal people of human society. But there have been many generations of those who are not—and who were crushed and destroyed just as you might have been.

“We are like seeds of forest giants, drifted by the wind to a tangled jungle. The seeds germinate in the viney, strangling growth, but the immature plant is robbed of its sustenance and smothered by the wealth of inferior growth.

“So it is with human beings. A ‘superior’ creature is still an immature creature during childhood and can be crushed by the swarms of normal beings whose potentialities are only a thousandth part of his. You have learned already to submit to those who are less than you are. You have been almost willing to give up your great gifts just to win approval from your classmates.”

“But that was before I knew about you!” Jimmy cried. “It was because I was so lonely. I couldn’t stand it, being the only one—”

Mr. Barton nodded. “I know. That’s the way it was with me. The seedling of even the greatest forest giant requires nourishment and protection during its stage of immaturity. Otherwise, it can survive only if it takes root where no competing cover exists.

“It happened that way to us a few times. That’s how we got our start. Now it’s no longer necessary to wait for that. We do a good job of—let us say, gardening. We hold back the jungle until the seedling gets a growth that will withstand any attack. You might call me a gardener.”

Jimmy continued to stare at his old friend. The things he said began to fall into place, to make sense in his mind. He recalled how it had been. His reading had always been with him. That was an easy one, apparently. But he’d never known microscopic vision before he went to school. He’d seen the deserts of Mars and the white plains of the Moon for longer, though. And his ability to know the thoughts of others was still a stumbling, uncertain skill that was scarcely under his control at all.

He could understand what Mr. Barton meant. He was developing the skills of Homo Superior, but he was still a child, a growing, immature thing. And the adults of Homo Normal—even their children!—were capable of defeating him in his present stage, if he had to go it alone ...

But he wasn’t! He never would be alone again! He looked up to the face of Mr. Barton with tears starting in his eyes all over again. “Tell me about the rest of them,” he whispered. “Where are they? How can I find them?”

The janitor shook his head. “That must wait. You are not ready to be moved yet—to be transplanted, shall we say? You will go on to the University as they desire you to. You will live out your seedling time here where you have been planted. But you need have no fear of what Normals can do. You need have no longing to give up your gifts just to win their friendship. You can be yourself and grow in your own way for there will always be—a gardener—nearby to guide you when the jungle threatens to smother you.”

Jimmy had not noticed until now, but they had driven around by the Creek Loop and were now approaching town again. Westwood High loomed in the foreground. Jimmy felt a pang of regret as he sensed that the interview was closed and Mr. Barton was once more just the high school janitor. With longing, he wondered how many years it would take him to be ready for them to invite him to—wherever they were . ..

Mr. Barton parked the car and got out. “Just about Assembly time, I guess, Jimmy. We’ll have to hurry.”

The sun seemed terribly bright in his eyes and he blinked against it. Walking behind the stooped, slouching figure of the janitor, he wondered for a moment if he’d actually heard the things he remembered or if he’d dreamed them. But it was no dream—Mr. Barton knew Ruffy, and the desert of Loh-Khita.

They entered the building, and all of a sudden Jimmy hated himself intensely for trying to bridge the gap between Tom Marlow and the stars. Tom would grow up to be a truck driver, and would hardly care if the stars shone in the sky or not.

What was it Brick had said? Find your own kind. That was it. That was the secret. Be patient. Lincoln and Westwood were not the whole of creation. Outside, in the rest of the world, were the scattering of others like him, lonely as he was lonely. Someday he would go to them, and his loneliness would be over.

But loneliness was far the most terrible thing in the world. The stars were lonely, too, he thought, and men envy their glory.

He moved through the hall toward the back of the stage. The auditorium was filling and a few of the crowd yelled out as he passed through. “Nice goin’ Professor!”

He scarcely heard the hated nickname.

Then he was in the semidarkness of the stage wings and almost ran into Mr. Mooremeister, who was pacing the stage in agonized indecision. “You—Jimmy!” he cried. “Where in Heaven’s name have you been? Your parents are frantic. We’d looked all over . . .”

“I didn’t feel so good. I had to get away. I’m sorry if I caused any trouble.”

“Trouble . . .” the Principal muttered. He took Jimmy severely by the arm and led him out and up to the office. “Trouble . . .”

His mother and father were there. They made it easy for him. They saw his face, streaked and tearful and grasped his feelings without a word being said. Mr. Mooremeister continued to mutter about the annoyance of the situation.

Mr. Dunlap and Dr. Webber were curious, aware that events were taking place below their level of comprehension.

Jimmy went to the boys’ room to wash and comb his hair. Then he was back on the stage, where the others had gathered, whispering in quiet urgency.

Beyond the curtains the roar of the assembling students almost filled him with the old panic. But he remembered the words of Mr. Barton, and it subsided. He parted the curtains and peered through a narrow slit. In a way, he could feel sorry for them now. He knew where they were going. They would be politicians and jet pilots and engineers.

But none would share his great wonder about how the universe was put together, or his great power to find out. He’d have to make it plain to them, all that he found out. It was still their world as well as his. They had a right to know about it.

Mr. Mooremeister gave a choppy wave of his hand to Mr. Barton, and the heavy new curtain slid open with a hissing of the runners. The Principal marched with a pompous gait to the front center of the stage. Jimmy followed, his head up and eyes bright. The others came behind him.

Everyone remained standing while the band played the school song and the Star Spangled Banner, and Jimmy saw out of the comer of his eye that the rest of the stage had filled. Mr. Lawson was there. He was the physics teacher who sold insurance on the side. Jimmy didn’t know what he was going to do on the program. And then Jimmy’s heart did a triple beat. Brick had come in and was taking his place at the rear of the stage.

He had forgotten that Brick was scheduled to talk. Brick was representing the student body in paying tribute to Jimmy. What a tribute that would be! Brick hated him for a coward now. He had to get to Brick and tell him things had changed, that nothing was the way it had been a short time ago. But there was no chance. Mr. Mooremeister was rising and beginning his speech. “Friends, students, teachers, and parents . . .”

There were quite a few parents in the audience. They were smiling and nodding with pleased expressions in the back rows. Jimmy recognized Mrs. Parks, his Sunday School teacher. Almost all the neighbors on the block had come.

“.. . you know the story of Jimmy Correll,” Mr. Mooremeister’s solemn voice went on. “I don’t have to retell it, though it’s a story that’s worth retelling. I want to say again how proud we are, the city of Murrayton, the schools, Lincoln and Westwood, where Jimmy has attended. I want to say how proud I am to have known and understood something of the genius we are privileged to have in our midst. The genius of Jimmy Correll.”

Jimmy felt he could forgive Mr. Mooremeister for saying these things he didn’t mean, though he wished just a little bit that Mr. Mooremeister did really mean them.

But it didn’t really matter any more. The Principal was just a grown-up Tom Marlow, and Jimmy didn’t have to hate any of them now.

He only had to tell them. He’d have to tell them and make them understand what the miracle of the stars was like. He’d have to touch their hearts and their minds with the incredible glory of the atom, and show them the wonder of space and night and the infinities of time.

Brick was rising now, He came slowly the long way around the rows of chairs and his eyes were steady on Jimmy’s face as he came. Be paused in front of Jimmy and took his hand.

Jimmy swallowed hard and half rose in his chair. “Brick . . .”

He turned and faced the students. “There’s not much anyone like me can say about a guy like Jimmy. The main thing I want to say is that Jimmy has been my friend, and I am very proud of this. I hope I have been a friend to Jimmy. Most of you know what Jimmy has done for me. I wasn’t blessed with an over-supply of brains, and he’s tried to make up the difference during football season. It’s been a wonderful experience for me. I’d like to think of Jimmy as my own kid brother. I like to think of him as one of the closest friends I’ve got.”

There seemed to be an enormous filling and swelling in his chest. He blinked to keep the picture of the audience clear in his eyes. He didn’t see any of the hate now that he had so long believed was there. Maybe it never had been there at all, as Brick had tried to tell him.

This is the way it would always be, though, he thought. He would never find many who would put their arms around him and slap him on the back and laugh at his jokes. They would do this kind of thing. They would put him up before them and give him honors and speeches. It was the only kind of thing they knew how to do for one like him.

He looked down at the individual faces. They were sober and sincere in agreement with the things Brick was saying. They meant the honors they offered. And then Jimmy turned sharply to the man beside him. Mr. Mooremeister had reached out and patted the back of his hand. The Principal’s eyes were on Brick and he was nodding and smiling happily at the boy’s awkward speech.

Then Jimmy felt a burst of overwhelming realization Mr. Mooremeister really meant it, too!

“Jimmy lives in a world you and I don’t see,” said Brick. “He lives in a world of stars and atoms and forces that keep the worlds in place. He dreams of these things while the rest of us—well, I guess while the rest of us dream about the coming Saturday night date or whether we’ll be able to get that new aluminum head for the rod.

“It’s hard to be a friend to a guy like that. He’s always so far ahead of you. I think almost all of you know how hard it is to be a friend to Jimmy . .

No, it isn’t, Brick, he said fiercely under his breath. It isn’t ever going to be hard to be a friend to Jimmy again. He knew now that there were many things Mr. Barton hadn’t told him, many reasons why he had to remain in this place before he joined the others of his kind. He was learning for the first time that it had been as difficult for the Tom Marlows and the Mr. Mooremeisters as it had been for him.

“I’ll show you, Brick. I’ll show all of you, he murmured to himself. I’ll be your friend. Honest I will.

INTERMISSION TIME

1

The party was like a wake; the talk was quiet, the faces of the guests waxy. Some of them regretted coming, John Carwell thought. Some of his best friends. He didn’t blame them; there’s nothing appropriate to say to a man at his own funeral.

Doris had insisted on t^e party, and she was struggling mightily to produce an air of celebration. The trouble was that in her it was real.

She sat at the piano, her fingers playing a twinkling song of springtime. Guests were seated about, or standing in small knots, their attention on her playing. But it might as well have been a funeral march for all the delight reflected in their faces.

John moved silently through the wide doors to the balcony overlooking the garden. In the darkness he almost collided with another figure standing by the railing. He grunted apologetically. “Sorry, George. Didn’t see you standing there.”

The figure of George McCune, concert agent for John and Doris Carwell, moved like a bulbous shadow. “I’m out here weeping,” he said. “That music—it turns me over inside when I think I’m not going to hear it any more.”

He placed a broad fat hand on John’s shoulder. “I’ve said everything; I’ve given you all my arguments. So now I give you my congratulations.

“It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing, you and your sister. A wonderful thing—and the biggest damn’ piece of foolishness I have ever heard of in a life that has been long, and composed of much more than ordinary foolishness. What can I gay to show you how crazy—how utterly damn’ crazy—”

He spread his hands in resignation and clamped them to his side. “Have you tried to show her, John?”

John’s arm went fondly across the agent’s low broad shoulders. “There’s no use making any more talk,” he said quietly. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow Doris and John are but guinea-pigs.”

George puffed violently and pushed himself free of John’s hand. He looked towards the horizon, across the city of life and ruin. “Planet 7,” he muttered. “Human Developments! It’s wonderful that they should take morons and pigs, and make human beings and geniuses out of them; but what in Heaven’s name has that to do with John and Doris Carwell?

“You and your sister have genius now, at your fingertips. With your music you make people happy. Is there any greater genius than this?

“Ah, but we’ve been through this before. Tell me that you have changed your mind and made Doris understand. Just say the one word that will make an old man happy.”

“We leave at noon, tomorrow,” said John.

The notes from the piano were like a thousand tiny bells in the air beside them. The two men listened, and dreamed of a fresh spring world uncharred and overflowing with life.

“Doris made the decision,” said John. “Ever since our folks died when we were kids, she’s been the one to come up with the answer—for both of us. She’s older. Things have always worked out the way she said; maybe this will, too.

“I wouldn’t go, of course, if it weren’t for her; but I'd be far less than half the Carwell piano team if I stayed. You couldn’t book me three times a year, alone.”

“Listen, boy!” George almost bounced with sudden inspiration. “You could have them standing in the aisles. I know. I’ve watched you—you’ve got a fire that Doris can never show. Her playing is brilliant—and cold; she’s never let you show the things that are inside you.

“Tell her you’ve decided to go it alone; tell her you’re going to live your life and play your music the way you want to. Then she’ll back down, call this Human Developments thing off, and let you lead the concerts the way you always should have.”

“You know Doris better than that. She wouldn’t back down for the Devil himself, and I’m no Devil!”

“What are you?” George whispered with a sudden bitterness that shocked them both. Then, “Forget it,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, John; let’s go inside.”

“No—I’ll stay out here. It’s Doris’ show, anyway.”

“Always Doris’ show!” exploded George. “But this performance I will not accept. I will persuade her myself. Tomorrow you will play in the auditorium; I will announce it on the radio that you have come to your senses!”

He marched away—squat, resolute, ridiculous, lovable. Marched as if he had not already a hundred times explained to Doris the folly of leaving a career on Earth for the fantastic experiments being run on Venus.

John leaned on the iron railing, staring over the city at the evening star. In a moment he heard the music stop, and the babble of voices. He closed his ears to the debate that fumed again; he was sick of it. They were going, he and Doris. He didn’t understand why; maybe Doris did.

Out there on Planet 7, in the Alpha system, they were trying to make a new man because the old man had failed. Homo sapiens had burned up a world.

In the hundred years since, only a quarter of the Earth had become habitable, and its population was less than thirty millions. A sober, stunned, and bewildered humanity rebuilding amid the ruins.

They had accomplished much in that century. There were cities again; there was space-flight; then overdrive and the stars; and the mutants had been wiped out. There was a single coordinated government that united the efforts of all races and tongues.

It was the ruins that did it, John thought. No matter how drunk or how elated and forgetful man became, he could never get away from the ruins. A thousand years of rebuilding would not cover them all.

But Doris said this was not enough; she said that, in time, men would forget even what the ruins stood for and blast them anew in fresh wars of their own.

Maybe Doris was right. She had always been right, John thought.

He thought of George again. What are you? George had asked. John wished he had some kind of answer to that question. He had seen it before—in the eyes of those who watched him and Doris together.

He couldn’t understand exactly why the question should be asked. It didn’t seem unnatural that he should find his answers to living in the stronger and more brilliant mind of his sister. He felt sometimes as if some blast of energy had shattered all but a minimum of his own thinking circuits, leaving him as dependent as a robot.

He knew the moment when that happened, too—the clay he learned their parents were dead and there was no one in the world but him and Doris. He could remember I lie moment like a great curtain drawing across the portion of his mind where life and initiative and enthusiasm were charted.

He was eight then; Doris was sixteen. It hadn’t done to her what it did to him. She’d had strength enough for both of them, and it had been hers that he’d drawn upon ever since.

So—going to Planet 7—

He had no real hope or feelings in the matter. He felt blank to all the torrent of argument that swirled about him. That belonged to the portion of his mind that had been walled off so long ago. Doris said it was right; his own mind could hold no other opinion.

And he could not answer George’s question, because he did not know how else he could be.

The babble of sound within the room was suddenly split by an angry voice. John looked in at the tall, darkhaired figure of Mel Gordon by the piano.

“Shut up, all of you,” Mel said. “Doris knows what she’s doing. Most of the rest of us haven’t got the guts to think about it, let alone carry it through. Shut up and leave her alone!”

He whirled and strode from the room to the darkness of the balcony. All of them understood the explosion. Mel Gordon didn’t want Doris to go, either.

Mel saw John watching from the balcony shadows. “I’m sorry I blew my stack,” he said.

“We’d all feel a little better if we did the same,” said John. “Did you get a report on your re-application?”

“They turned me down again. Mel Gordon—not even good enough for a guinea-pig. Who knows what will happen when they get through tinkering and tampering, and trying to make homo superior out of you and Doris? Me, they’d have a chance with; but Doris is already what they are trying to find.”

“Have you asked her to stay?”

“I haven’t the right to ask that; no one has. How many of the rest of us know what we want to do with our lives?”

He looked back into the room as the noise of the stirring guests indicated their departure. “I guess I busted up your party. Sorry, John.”

“You didn’t bust it up; they didn’t like coming to this funeral anyway. They understand how you feel.”

“Yeah! Good old Mel—carry the torch high. John, when you get up there, tell her I tried to come, will you? Tell her I tried.”

After the guests were gone, they faced each other in the faintly embarrassing vacuum that surrounded them always when they were alone together. Doris sat again at the piano. Her fingers moved in the melody of a Brahms lullaby, so softly that it could scarcely be heard.

She was the most, beautiful thing that had ever lived, John thought. At thirty she had something of the wisdom of a mother, and of the passion of first love. But she knew neither love nor motherhood, nor would she; she lived on some far, cold plane where human destiny was determined by sheer brilliance of reason, and emotion was unknown. He didn’t understand such a place; he didn’t understand such a mind.

He only knew that Doris was not often wrong.

He was aware that she had stopped playing and was looking at him. There was wistful yearning in her eyes that startled him by its unfamiliarity. “You do think it’s right that we should go, don’t you, John?” she said.

“Sure—it’s all settled; you haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

“No! It’s just that sometimes I wish you could understand how I feel—just a little.”

2

There were almost a hundred volunteers waiting behind the gates of the spaceport, each the nucleus of a cluster of friends and relatives saying last goodbyes. Some of the groups were quiet, waiting for the inevitable; others were stormy pools filled with last minute tears and clinging.

The sky above the port was cloud-specked and shining, as if Earth herself were putting on a last and final appeal to the emigres to think again of what they were abandoning. John watched the little whirlwinds on the field and wondered if the dust of Planet 7 had the hot, dry smell of old forgotten lanes in summertime; if you could imagine faces and horses and ships of the sea in her clouds.

He stood near the center of their group. Even the buzz of human voices was a kind of music, he thought. But he wouldn’t hear these voices—not ever again.

He edged away from Mel’s silent pleading; the bustling, explosive fury of George’s last minute demands that Doris come to her senses; the mumbled congratulations of the two score fellow musicians; the whine of several hundred fans and musical followers.

It was not hard to escape. Attention was on Doris, incredibly beautiful and untouched by the fact that she was leaving Earth today and would never see it again. John felt that none of the talk was addressed to him,

He watched the star-ship slowly moving to its launching-base, towed by chugging tractors that strained like insects against its mass. He tried to look over the heads of the crowd to see others who would be his own companions on the journey.

And then he caught a startling movement of color threading between the islands of humanity.

It was a girl in a flame-red dress. At the gate she stood on tiptoe, clutching the iron bars like an eager child. He strolled to the gate and stood beside her. “If you’re looking for anyone in the crowd, I’m afraid you’ll have a hard time of it, now,” he said.

“Oh, no.” She glanced up quickly. “I’m going to get on the ship. Are you going, too?” Her waves of dark hair trembled and the almost-black pupils of her eyes glistened with light.

Whatever the scientists on Planet 7 considered worth passing on to the future, John hoped they would preserve that light. He had never seen its like before, he thought “Yes, I’m going,” he said.

They watched the big ship. It was motionless now and mechanics scurried ant-like at its base. Hatches opened ponderously.

“Do you think we can help?” asked John. “Do you think humanity a thousand years from now will be better for our going?”

The girl laughed. “I don’t know about humanity a thousand years from now; I’m going to help myself.”

As if his silence reproved her, she turned her head defiantly. “And anyway, I’m humanity! And they don’t care why you go, as long as you have enough of the qualities of a guinea-pig.”

“I wasn’t going to scold you,” he said; “your attitude is refreshing. It’s just that it’s customary to speak with a long face, and in solemn tones, of the great things that Human Developments is doing for the future of mankind.”

“No one connected with the whole thing cares a hoot about the future of mankind a thousand years from now. The scientists are concerned because it’s their business to manipulate guinea-pigs; and they have finally conceived the most colossal guinea-pig show ever dreamed up. "

“The rest of us have our own reasons. Some of us are running away; some are going for the fun of it. And others—well, you’ll see when you get there. It isn’t the noble, self-sacrificing bunch the newsmen like to picture. After all, no one ever comes back to tell what it’s like out there.”

John stared at the girl. She was as challenging as a winter morning. And could she be right? He knew there was no nobility in his going, but what would she make of Doris’ high-minded purposes?

Doris didn’t have to run from anything. Her mind was swift and sharp enough to encompass the whole universe including humanity a thousand years from now. The girl’s swift estimation of her fellow travelers would hardly apply to his sister. He’d have to see that they met aboard ship, he thought.

But now the gates rumbled aside as the guards removed the pin-locks and chains. Slowly, at first—as if almost reluctant to embark upon the course that had been so carefully and greatly planned—the wave of emigres moved over the field, while guards held back the protesting, well-wishing friends and relatives.

John looked back towards Doris and felt the surge of the crowd separate him from the girl in the flame-red dress. “I’ll see you aboard ship!” he called. “I’m in Alpha Colony section.”

Her smile, swiftly receding through the crowd, was wistful. “I won’t be seeing you. I’m going as a Control.”

He found Doris cutting her last ties with Earth carefully and dispassionately. She patted George on the cheek as if saying goodbye to a fond puppy. She gave Mel a cool and sisterly kiss. And then she was taking John’s arm and hurrying him towards the gate.

The ship had a frightening smell. It caught John in the pit of the stomach and he stopped midway along the elevator ramp. It was not the friendly smell of coal or oil or gasoline, but the sharp ozone sting of outer space, and counterfeit worlds where it was unnatural for men to be.

He glanced upward at the great scarred tube. He had seen the shining arcs in the night sky, but he had never been this near to a ship before. He glanced at his own slender white hand resting on the railing and wondered what kind of men could build such ships as these.

“Move along there!”

He closed his mind to wonder and concentrated on the steel deck of the ramp beneath his feet.

In his stateroom, John sat down carefully on the bed near the large main port. He had a sudden curious feeling of numbness as if the whole world were something that was happening to him.

He saw in die west, beyond the city, the mile-wide crater now filled with water, like some pleasant lake with the afternoon sun glistening on it. He couldn’t see the high, electric fence that walled off the entire area as too contaminated for human occupancy. He didn’t know how, but he had a feeling that it concerned him, deeply.

Below the steel column of the ship, the ground—almost two hundred feet away—was littered with moving people, movements at once erratic and purposeful. They were something happening to him, too.

And the girl, the girl in the flame-red dress. She had happened to him.

It had always been that way; it was a little frightening to recognize that all his life things and people had happened to him as if he were a prop on some fantastic stage.

He stood up and tried to shrug off the feeling. He heard Doris, unseen beyond the door of her adjacent stateroom, moving luggage, snapping lids, and closing drawers with shattering efficiency. Things didn’t happen to her; she did the shaping. The world of Doris Carwell was exactly the way she wanted it to be.

Without unpacking, John shoved his hands in his pockets and strode from the room. He made his way through the corridors, unaware of where he was going, half-angry with himself for not knowing. Abruptly, he found himself in the main lounge. The huge hall was dark and, he thought, unoccupied. Then he spotted a familiar flash of color in a far corner.

It was too much to expect, but there she was, the girl he had met at the gate. She was sitting curled up with a plain yellow cat on her lap. Her fingers stroked its ears gently.

He couldn’t have told why it gave him such pleasure to see her. But there was a sudden sense of loss, too, as he remembered her final words. “I hadn’t hoped to see you again so soon,” he said. “Do you mind if I join you and—?” '

“Toby,” she said. “This is Toby; they let me bring him along. I’m not supposed to be down here, but he got away when I took him from the baggage room, and I chased him in here.

“I guess we don’t have very long before take-off, do we?”

“I didn’t understand what you said at the gate,” John said. “What was that about a Control? I’ve heard the word, but it’s always been used like a nasty name.”

“Maybe it is. The recruiting-agent who signed me up said different.” She mimicked: “ ‘You will be giving the same selfless, devoted service to mankind that is being offered by those even in Alpha Colony.’ Anyway, I wouldn’t have come except as a Control.”

“What does it mean?”

“They explained that when a scientist conducts an experiment he performs his work on one batch of material, and leaves another completely untouched in order to compare the two and see what changes are made by his experiment.

“So, on Planet 7 there are colonies of people who live in completely natural circumstances, self-governed and uncared-for, except as they can find subsistence out of the jungle itself. The products of the experimental colonies are then compared with us unfettered Controls to see what the benefits are.”

“I shouldn’t think it would be necessary to set up special Control-colonies on Planet 7; Earth itself should bo sufficient.

“There are too many random factors—social and economic—all of which are too hard to evaluate. At least, that’s the way they explained it to me.”

“But how can you get away from these things out in the Alpha system? The technology is there; people retain their memories and the same social and economic problems exist.”

“On a slightly different level,” she said. “When you’re turned loose in a jungle, and have to scratch with your bare hands for existence most of the extraneous factors are gradually dropped. That’s the word they used, extraneous.” .

John sat back, horrified. “You mean that’s the kind of existence you’re going to for the rest of your life? A primitive jungle-life, with no civilization whatever? It would kill you or make a savage out of you.”

“That’s a thing the scientists want to find out,” said the girl. “They say that’s the way humanity started out, and we have almost completed a full circle. They want to learn at what point humanity should have turned aside in order to have kept climbing.”

“That’s horrible—deliberately turning you into savages in order to test a theory.”

“Well, don’t feel so sorry for me. Exactly what do you think they are going to do to you?”

“I don’t know,” he said in sudden weariness. “I think that I would rather never have heard of Human Developments Project.”

“Then you’d better get off the ship in a hurry,” she said lightly, “because there’s the take-off warning. We’ve got to get to our cabins and on the take-off couch before the next bell. Come on, Toby!”

3

He was sick during the take-off. When they were finally in space he sat up, his head balloon-like and his stomach spinning. He saw Doris leaning calmly by the port, watching the dwindling Earth. For a moment he hated her cool competence and self containment. He would have to be the one to get sick.

“Feeling better, Johnny?” She came over, smiling with the sympathy of a superior creature. “It hit you pretty rough. The steward said they don’t usually go out like that.” .

“I’m all right.”

For the rest of the day he stayed in the stateroom. He watched the fading disk of Earth; the overdrive wouldn’t be keyed in for another day. Even though it gave him a sickening vertigo, he could not resist the hypnotic last look at his home land.

He wanted to forego dinner entirely that evening, but when Doris offered to have the steward bring it to his room, he refused the suggestion. “I can make it to the diningroom,” he said.

He didn’t tell her the one reason he wanted to go; he could scarcely admit to himself that it was only to meet again the girl who wore the flame-red dress and owned a yellow cat. He told himself he wanted to see his fellow passengers, to meet the others who were foolhardy enough to give up all they possessed on Earth for this Human Developments experiment.

He walked slowly through the diningroom, Doris’ hand upon his arm. He scanned the surrounding tables for the one familiar face, but he failed to see her anywhere.

Then he thought he understood. It was a small diningroom, and certainly not all those who had boarded the ship were here. Each colony-group undoubtedly had its own section and facilities; he asked the waiter about it.

The man nodded. “This is Alpha Colony,” he said. “Beta, Gamma and Delta recruits are on the other decks. Is there someone you wish to find?”

He hesitated. “I have a friend—a Control.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the waiter; “surely they must have told you. There’s no communication permitted between Control-colonists and any of the experimental groups— for purposes of the experiment, you understand. You may check with your indoctrination supervisor, sir, if there is any misunderstanding about this.”

There is no misunderstanding, John thought dully. It was just another of the things that were happening to him. And this, he didn’t want. It seemed suddenly of vital importance that he see again the girl in the flame-red dress. He did not even know her name. He could not speak of her or ask about her by name, he thought.

“Don’t you feel like eating?” said Doris.

“I guess my stomach can’t take this yet.”

Shipboard indoctrination-courses were held for each separate group, to acquaint them further with the work of their colony. A Dr. Martin Bronson was supervisor of the Alpha Colony group. John met him the following day, when he came to the stateroom to introduce himself.

He found he was unable to carry out his prepared determination to dislike Bronson. He estimated the man to be about thirty-five, and there seemed a wistful air about him—as if he wished he knew all the answers he was supposed to know.

“I’m acquainted with your music,” he said; “I have all your records on Planet 7. It was pleasant to learn that you and your sister were joining us. I look forward to much more of your music.”

John indicated a chair by the port. “Is that what we are being brought there for? To be court musicians, as it were?”

Instantly he regretted the bad temper of his remark. A shadow crossed the face of Bronson. “You really don’t like music?” he said.

“I’m afraid I really don’t like Alpha Colony, if you want me to be honest. It’s because of my sister that I came, but I had no goal of my own; I’ll try not to be uncooperative in whatever you require.”

“There is very little that we require of you,” said Bronson. “Almost all we ask is the opportunity to watch you live—in the social and physical environment we provide.

“We have a section in Alpha Colony devoted to the study of esthetics; we want you and your sister in that group. It has always been known that esthetic values contributed much to the rise of mankind, but they have never been adequately evaluated.

“You will live in a small communal group where esthetic occupations only are present; all economic needs are provided for you. Within this group, you may live in complete freedom; but you will be observed and your life charted minutely.”

“What are the breeding-aspects of the program?” John asked tonelessly.

“Ugly rumors do get around, don’t they?” said Bronson. “But I’m sure you were told briefly that marriage between members of the group is freely permitted, but not forced. The only restriction is that it must be within the group, because potential partners are those who have the same qualities which we desire to emphasize and study in future generations.”

“How large is this section of Alpha Colony?” •

“There are almost a thousand members in the esthetic section.”

“What are the Control-groups?” said John suddenly. “I’ve heard a little about them, just a little.”

Bronson watched his face in silence for a long time. “Yes,” he said at last, “your diningroom waiter told me you were inquiring.

“Don’t try to see her,” he said abruptly. “Don’t try to see her again!”

John felt the blood heavy in his face. “You are jumping to conclusions,” he said. -

“I hope so,” said Bronson, “but there is one thing that you must not forget; I’m sure this was adequately explained. Once a person embarks upon this journey, there is no turning back; none whatever. Your signature upon a contract with. Human Developments automatically cancels any previous obligations; and all future contracts will be made within the framework of Human Developments. Our restrictions are the minimum required for success of the experiments, but these bounds cannot be overstepped. Do you understand that, John?”

“Yes—yes, I understand that,” John said.

The time spent in overdrive was brief, but once out, within the Alpha system, there were days of rocket-travel, before they would reach Planet 7, the only Earth-type world in this family of planets. Man could reach the stars, now, but the impetus to make much use of this ability had nearly died; the discovery had come late, nearly too late . ..

It was on the ninth day of the journey that John saw the cat—the yellow cat belonging to the girl in the flame-red dress. John saw the animal strolling ahead of him in the corridor leading to his room. He looked around quickly, but no one else was near. Then he called gently. As if in recognition, the cat turned, arched his back, and rubbed against the steel wall. John scooped him under one arm and hurried to the stateroom.

It was stupid, but his hands were shaking, he discovered, as he set the cat down. Momentarily he debated opening the door and pushing Toby into the corridor; but he knew he was not going to do that.

He entered Doris’ stateroom, knowing she was out, because he had just left her with Dr. Bronson on the promenade deck. Searching through drawers he found a piece of wide ribbon. Then he returned to his own room and sat down at the desk, and there he stopped.

What was there to say? And why should he believe she would be interested in hearing any word at all from him? He didn’t know.

He wrote hastily on a small scrap of paper: I don’t even know your name. Mine is John Carwell. Can I see you again?—In the corridor between the main lounge and your deck, a door marked “Crew Only’’ leads to the engineers’ catwalk. I’ll be there after dinner tonight.

His hands were shaking even more as he folded the paper in a small roll and doubled the ribbon over it. He tied a narrow band about the cat’s neck. Then, cautiously, he opened the door and shoved the cat into the empty corridor. “Find her, Toby,” he said. “Go quickly.”

The long, hollow tube at the center of the ship carried the ten thousand wires and pipes that formed the ship’s mechanical nervous-system. It contained an elevator for the use of crewmen, and in each deck there was a small platform for inspection-purposes. A connecting ladder passed between the platforms from one end of the ship to the other.

It was cold in the catwalk tube, and dark. There was a sulphur smell and the faint sting of ozone in the air. John could hear the whine and click of occasional auxiliary motors, and the deep bass note of the ship’s engines.

He waited there in the dim light, knowing himself to be a complete fool. Nine chances out of ten the cat hadn’t even reached the girl’s stateroom with the message about its neck. He had been clawing experimentally when John last saw him; and the tenth chance was that she would laugh and ignore his message completely.

But he was there. He had been there for twenty minutes and he did not know how much longer he would wait. Perhaps until they got to Venus, he thought irrationally.

A oblong club of light beat against die dark with momentary suddenness. John heard the thud of the thick insulated door. He flattened against the wall.

Then his breath caught sharply as he recognized her dim profile and the tilt of her head. She called softly, “John.”

“Over here,” he said.

For a moment they stood facing each other, unable to explain why they had come.

“I wanted to see you again,” he said simply, at last. .

“I was hoping you would,” she said.

And then there seemed nothing more at all to say. In a few more days the ship would land on Venus, and she would go to a savage jungle dwelling, while he would spend the rest of his life in some musical fairyland. It seemed suddenly beyond all reason.

“What is your name?” he said.

“Lora. Lora Wallace.”

“Why did you come? Why are you going to Plant 7?”

“To get away from the dead. Earth’s nothing but a big tomb. We kid ourselves that we are rebuilding there, but we’re not. The Human Developments people know we’re not, but not many others do.

“But don’t think I have any sympathy for Human Developments; the whole Project is on the wrong track. I came to get away.

“Back home it’s the same old thing that has happened a hundred times before. You can’t move from one city to another without a thousand signatures on your papers; you can’t plan a project any more complex than a backyard garden without consulting twenty-five authorities and experts.

“Oh, they’re all so very generous and helpful. And we understand that it is necessary to obey regulations in order to conserve and rebuild the world. But we’re in prison, just the same.

“It got so I couldn’t stand it any longer. Some of my friends joined the Moon colonies; some have gone to Mars. But I didn’t have money enough for either. Becoming a Control-colonist with Human Developments Project was the only way I could think of to get out of prison.”

“Do you think it will be freedom,” said John, “fighting the jungle with your bare hands?”

“Yes,” she said with fierce intensity. “Because no one’s going to care where I go, or what I do, as long as I don’t hurt my neighbor. I’d be willing to bet that, in the long run, the only survivors of Earth’s culture will be the descendants of the Control-colonies on Planet 7. The only way you can build men and women capable of conquering a planet is to give them a problem and let them figure it out, with complete freedom of action.”

“Isn’t that what Earth is doing?” said John. “And in a more civilized way? We have the problem—to make Earth habitable again, to create a stable civilization. Aren’t we doing that with a greater cooperation than hus ever been attained before?”

“No! That’s the same old fallacy that has wrecked n hundred nations. Controls, restrictions, bureaus—these things do not mean cooperation; they meun force. And every application of force is one less freedom for some man.

“I don’t need anybody to tell me what my job is to be; I’ll find my job. I don’t need anybody to tell me where is the best place to live; I’ll find it for myself. And so will millions of others, when they get a chance. And when we get through we’ll have done a far better job than all the boards and experts ever dreamed of doing. If I can’t do it on Earth as a free citizen, I’ll do it on Planet 7 as a Control!”

He was a little embarrassed by the vehemence of her talk, but it was like a glimpse into a new world. A world he somehow suspected he had long wanted to see.

“Tell me why you came,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I haven’t any reason at all for being here; I’ve got to find one. I’ve got to find some purpose for going to Planet 7.”

She shook her head. “You don’t find it that way. Purposes are something you live with for months and years. All the years of your life. It’s not something that comes overnight or with a moment’s dreaming.

“We’d better go back,” she said. “Someone might miss us if we stay too long. Let me go first, and you follow in a few minutes.”

“Wait.” He put a hand on her arm. “Will I see you again?

She hesitated and smiled up at him. “All right. Tomorrow. The same time. Be careful. They mustn’t find out”

4

The indoctrination class next day was endless. Bronson seemed to take particular delight in pointing out the irrevocability of their decision—reminding that there would be no turning back from the course that had been set.

When discussion-period came, John was suddenly on his feet. “What about those who find that they are unable to conform?” he demanded. “What about those who refuse to abide by the rules of the Project?” '

“No one is wasted,” said Bronson. “Rebelliousness is a trait that has been noted through the ages; we have colonies where its value is now being determined. I may say that preliminary investigations show the value of the rebel to society have been vastly over-estimated.”

“But what do you do with them?”

“There are jungle-colonies consisting only of rebels, nonconformists, the individualists who believe they can make their way alone. You may appreciate that the members of this colony do indeed have a rough time of it. Miraculously, however, even they manage to survive; and we shall learn much from their survival.”

“It’s inhuman,” cried John. “You can’t sentence men to an existence like that for the rest of their lives, because they find they have made a mistake in coming here.” “Everyone has volunteered,” said Bronson, “to contribute the remainder of his life and energies to Human Developments. We need the contribution of all kinds. And you must not forget: the rebels get what they want. That is the prime rule of the experiment, to give a man what he wants and find out what he can do with it.”

John sat down, his chest burning and a smothering in his throat. He felt the curious glances of the others in the room as if he had questioned the oracle of the ages.

Attention turned away from him. Other discussion became a meaningless buzz while he sat there thinking. It made no difference to him, he had no intention of rebelling; he was just along for the ride. And yet, if this were so, why did his chest bum and the palms of his hands grow hot and moist?

The name of Lora kept ringing through his mind, and he did not know why all his whirling thoughts centered about the name of this girl. It was because she was so sure, he thought, and he was so unsure.

Somewhere she had found exactly the answer she wanted of life. In this she was like Doris. But how different were her answers from those of his sister! And between the two he could find no answer for himself to still the endless whirling questions in his mind.

Lora.

The name was still in his mind, hours later, as he sat in the stateroom watching the slow swing of stars across the port. The door from his sister’s room burst open suddenly, and Doris strode in and stood before him.

“Martin knows about it!” she exclaimed. “Why in the world did you pull a fool stunt like that?”

He paled. “Like what?” he said.

“You know what I’m talking about. Sneaking down to the Controls’ deck, meeting that girl. I think it’s disgusting, John—utterly disgusting and unbelievable. Martin said he wasn’t going to do anything about it because he didn’t think harm would come of that one visit. But you’ve got to promise that you won’t do such a stupid thing again.

“Who is she? Where did you ever meet her?”

He stood up, his face white and cold. “Doris,” he said thinly, “you will please keep your damned nose out of my business!”

He was still trembling when he reached the rendezvous on the engineers’ catwalk much later. He arrived first and waited a long time thinking that she had decided not to come or had been prevented from coming.

He didn’t know how they had found out about his meeting with Lora, and he didn’t know if he were being spied upon at this moment. In weariness and spiritual exhaustion he didn’t care what they knew, or what they did.

She came at last. It seemed as if her slow, cautious opening of the door consumed an eternity and when she was inside on the platform she remained standing quite still.

“Lora.” He reached out and took her hand and kept it between his own. It was cold as if she had been afraid of something for a long time.

“They know about us,” she said; “did they tell you?”

He nodded in the dim light. “I thought maybe they had kept you from coming.”

“They warned me not to do it again, but they didn’t try to prevent me.”

“Why did you come?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head as if in violent protest against something of which he had accused her. “I guess it was just because I promised.”

“Why did you promise?”

“I don’t know!” Suddenly her hands gripped his arms and she pulled herself against him, her cheek flattened against his shoulder.

“John—John—why did it have to be this way?”

His hands pressed against her back as if to stop the shaking of her body. He stroked the hair beside her forehead. “We’ll go back,” he said; “we’ll make them take us back.”

They stood in the silence and the stillness as if trying to press out this moment to eternity. He thought of it: their standing in the cold and sulphurous chamber with the life of the ship about them. And beyond that the eternal night of space through which plunged the slim tube that encased them and held back the cold death outside.

How far they had come to find this moment. He raised her chin gently with the edge of his hand. “I don’t know anything about you,” he said. “Tell me. I want to know everything that has ever happened to you, every sunrise you have seen, and eyery leaf that has fallen near you.”

She shook her head and tried to di'aw away as if the magic had passed. But he held her.

“There isn’t time for that,” she said. “There’s only time to wonder why we couldn’t have been bom in the same world. You could never understand the harshness of mine—the one I’ve lived in and the one I’m going to. I would suffocate in yours.”

“We’ll find a new one, then,” he said fiercely. “We’ll find one on Earth that will hold us both. I won’t let you go.”

Sudden light from the corridor burst upon them as the heavy door flung open. They clung together spotlighted for an instant and broke apart as Bronson came toward them. Other figures hovered in the doorway.

“You’re making it harder for yourself,” said Bronson. “I’m sorry you didn’t take my advice, John; it will be necessary to confine you to quarters for the remainder of the trip. Please come along now.”

He felt Lora’s hand stiffen momentarily in his, and then release as she moved away.

“We’re going back,” John said to Bronson. “I demand that you send us back to Earth on the next returning ship.”

Bronson shook his head. “I guess you didn’t understand me. There’s no going back; no going back for any of us. In Human Developments you only go forward.”

The central continents of Planet 7 are dry desolation where nothing but the foot-long sand monsters exist. But near the poles are belts of verdure almost a thousand miles in width. At the boundary the ugly sand color shades into living green, and impenetrable forest flourishes beside the barren waste.

All the planet’s moisture finds its way to the hot rivers and lakes of these polar regions. Here the squalid settlements of native life are found; here Earth men have established their Human Developments Project.

In this fantastic jungle, every conceivable Utopian scheme has been laid out, tried and tested for practicability. Projects planned for a thousand years of time measure the effects of environment and the ability of man to conquer the universe by first conquering himself.

Conceived nearly seventy five years ago by Dr. James Rankin, a government sociologist, the project was first considered a wild impractical scheme to get public money to back fuzzy-headed theories. Rankin proposed the idea shortly after the final settlement of the Great War. Out of the conflict had come the discovery of the over-drive; the first flush of enthusiasm sent out expeditions to the Alpha system, where Planet 7 was found, and explored, and mapped. But that was when lethargy began to set in; world-weariness sapped human energies, and the reports were shelved, construction of star-ships dwindled off ...

Rankin proposed the idea that it would take a new kind of man to survive upon the Earth, but no one knew what kind of man that would be, or if he could be found. Moon-colonies and Mars-colonies had been set up, but something was lacking there . ..

Rankin’s idea took hold, and finally, spontaneous acclaim forced its acceptance upon the government of the world; the leaders seemed to sense that it was the last spurt—there wouldn’t be another if this opportunity were permitted to die. Rankin lived long enough to see the first tiny colony estabished in the forbidding jungles of a far world, encircling an alien star.

Theoretically, it might have been done on some other world in our own solar system, but space-travel made all these worlds seem too close; there was something in the psychological appeal of a planet wheeling around another star—something that proclaimed here was a truly new beginning. ..

In three quarters of a century, the Project had increased to cover nearly all of the northern polar band with its various colonies. There was still controversy over the merits of Human Developments. Controversy that was hot and vehement. Demands were made that secrecy be stripped from the Project, and its record and processes be made public. But volunteering as a colonist remained the only way of gaining such information.

It was not a desire to hide its activities from the world, the Project leaders said, but prior knowledge of the activities there had to be kept from contaminating the thinking of those who wished to volunteer as the years passed. Government inspectors were allowed to investigate for evidence of mistreatment or mal-practice; they always gave the Project a clean bill of health, and there,, had never been a lack of volunteers. Those chosen were the result of careful screening to obtain proper specimens for the various environments and sociologies being tested.

John Carwell watched the planet slowly fill the port, replacing the star-specked blackness at which he had stared through five long days of imprisonment.

The ship Sashed across the barren central zones. He watched the wind-tom wastes and crags, which faded gradually into the green of the polar region.

Then quite abruptly the ship was enveloped in mist, spearing through the perpetual cloud-blanket that rotated slowly about the polar bands. John stared at it, never moving from his position at the port, his hands clasped behind him, and head bowed low. There was mist, and the occasional flash of green that broke through. Rain cascaded down the sides of the vessel, foretelling the greeting that Planet 7 would hand them as they emerged from the ship.

He watched it and hated it. That was the only emotion he could find within him. He hated Planet 7; he hated Human Developments. But most of all, he hated himself. He should be taking some wild and violent action to defend his position and win him Lora.

But he didn’t know what such action might be. He couldn’t tear at the very walls of the ship, and he couldn’t smash his white fist into Bronson’s implacable face. It wasn’t that kind of a fist; he was trapped and bound.

The door opened quietly behind him. Doris came up quietly. “We’re coming in. Have you got everything ready?”

“Everything but me.” He nodded toward the jungle now visible through the slanting sheets of rain. “I’ll die out there,” he whispered.

“That’s not where we’re going,” exclaimed Doris. “You’ve seen the pictures; you know what Alpha Colony is like. We’re not going to that jungle. That’s where the Control-colonies are.”

She tried to bite the words off even as she said them. John’s face became even more bitter.

“They’ll send her out there. What kind of fanatics are they?”

“Remember: it’s what she wants,” said Doris kindly. “She volunteered as a Control. There’s nothing you can do. Nothing at all.”

“I’ll find something. I’ll make something to dot”

5

They never felt the wetness of the storm. A covered gangway reached out from the protection of the terminal, and clamped its warm mouth to the hull of the spaceship. Through it the passengers moved into the dry pleasantness of the terminal building. John did not get a glimpse of Lora; his group was herded quickly away under Bronson’s supervision.

At the opposite side of the building they climbed into a bus that sped them across a paved highway splitting the Jungle. Unreality increased for John, as die car nosed through the curtains of rain. It was like going deeper and deeper into a dream—so deep that he might never wake up.

After an hour’s ride they slowed. As they made a sharp turn he caught a glimpse of a vast, shining bubble that seemed to shoulder aside the jungle. Its gentle curvature hinted at staggering vastness. Then they halted at another terminal building at the edge of the bubble.

There was no talk from any of his companions. They marched machine-like into the building, as if they had already consigned away all will and initiative. But he sensed that actually they were as stunned as he by the impact of arrival at their final destination. It had been adventure and daring when they signed their names to the contract binding them to Planet 7 forever; it had been so far away then. Now John and Doris were shown to adjacent apartments once again. He sat down on the luxurious bed and patted it with finality. “So now we’re supermen,” he said.

The bitterness of his voice cut off any response that Doris might have made. She turned away and walked to the windows, drawing aside the expanse of curtains. She gave a gasp as she looked beyond.

“What is it?” Then John saw beyond the window also.

He saw the landscape whose impact was like the sound of some sweet chord struck softly on a great keyboard.

He got up slowly and stood beside Doris. It was ancient Greece; it was an English countryside, the great forests of old Germany. "

“It’s worth it,” said Doris. “It’s worth it, John. We’ll never have to fight this world.”

There were no streets, only footpaths crossing the grassy expanse. No mechanical vehicles could be allowed to break that scene. The. buildings, the houses—they belonged. The whole scene would have been faulty if any one had been removed.

Statuary as glorious as the Age of Pericles was spotted on the vast lawns. Beside this, Earth’s cities as John remembered them were but great slums.

“It’s our home,” Doris murmured, barely whispering. “We’ll never have to leave it; we’ll never have to be tired again.”

There was some strange mood upon her, which he had never seen before, and which he did not understand. It seemed as if he were watching her shed a burden, which he had never known she carried.

But his own could not be dropped. Somewhere in the jungle beyond the great transparent dome that housed Alpha Colony was Lora, unprotected and in savage surroundings.

John was called early next morning for the expected interview with Dr. Wamock, director of Alpha Colony. He was faintly shocked by the initial appearance of the director; Wamock looked like anything but the head of such a group.

He was immense and his eyes were almost hidden in the great roundness of his face. A dead cigar projected from between his fingers. The office was business-like, far removed from the glory that was visible from the apartment windows.

“Sit down, John,” Dr. Wamock said.

A second surprise lay in his voice, which was soft and kindly, and John found himself hastily changing his first estimates.

“Have you ever done anything useful in your life?” said Wamock suddenly.

John hesitated, flushing. “I—I don’t know—”

“That’s good enough. I don’t know if I have, either.

Some people have the most fantastic views of their own accomplishments. I wondered about you.

“We were all pleased to learn you were coming. Papa Sosnic especially. He wants to hear you; hell be around this afternoon.”

“Papa Sosnic?”

“The dean of the group; claims to be the first member. He’s almost ninety years old. He’s looking for the Great Musician and the Great Music before he dies. He claims the colonies are sterile and have never produced any. But you’ll hear all of that from his own lips. Tell me about your music.”

John shrugged. “It has been a living.”

“Is that all? Don’t you like your music?”

He smiled wanly and told Wamock about his childhood with Doris, who had a dream for them both. He told how she had beat him into submission and forced him to endless practice when he was little.

“And so you hate your music,” said Wamock.

“No.” John shook his head. “That’s the strange part of it. I should, but I don’t.”

“Why?”

“That’s hard to say. I’ve never tried to tell anyone, especially Doris; she would never understand why I go on playing.”

“Can you tell me?” said Wamock.

John found himself doing that, without understanding why. Wamock seemed to him as vast in comprehension as in physical body, and John’s feelings spilled.

“The writers, the poets, and the artists have all been men,” he said. “The great ones, that is. A woman can’t be a great artist. But I could never tell Doris that. It’s a man’s way of crying and laughing, and saying that the world is a good and happy place; that’s why he makes music and writes books and paints pictures.

“A woman doesn’t have to do that; she can’t. She has a thousand other ways. But a man is supposed to be a mute dumb animal who never thinks of these things. Some of us stumble onto the acceptable way of saying what we have inside.”

“Your sister,” said Wamock, “why do you suppose she plays?”

John shook his head and smiled. “She doesn’t understand music. She plays through her head—not her heart.”

“She takes the lead in all your work. Why do you let her do that?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t understand if I tried to tell her how I want to play; I guess I’m afraid that no one else would understand either.”

“I think Papa Sosnic will understand,” said Wamock. He arose suddenly and extended a hand. “He will be around to see you and your housing-assignments are being made. We will let you know.”

John felt guilty as He walked back to the apartment. He had said things that should not have been said; he had no right to speak of Doris as he had. But his regret faded before the recurring thought of Lora.

He had almost burst out his problem to Wamock, so strongly had the director invited confidence. But he felt relief now that he had not. Wamock had received Bronson’s report of the incident, of course; but if he chose to ignore it, John could do no better.

But it left him no one at all to speak with about Lora, and in this there was panic and loneliness. From the apartment window he contrasted the Elysian peace of the landscape with the hateful jungle beyond the dome. He had to get Lora out of there, and he had no idea how it might be done.

Doris was out. Papa Sosnic came in the afternoon. He knocked once, birdlike, and entered without waiting for John to open the door.

White-haired and white-bearded, he was a wispy little man as old as an elf. The skin of his hands was like webbing. There was a squeakiness in his voice, but it still held a patriarchal authority.

He introduced himself. “I want to hear you play. I want to know if you are a musician, or just another babbler.”

John smiled in friendly regard for the bustling little old man. “You’ve heard my records,” he said. “You know how I play.”

“But I know nothing,” said Sosnic. “How much of a man’s soul can be put on plastic? And besides, all I’ve heard has been with your sister taking the lead. A wee, timid little boy walking in the shadows where the sun won’t scorch and the rain won’t wet. Sit down and let me hear you play.”

All at once John found himself trembling, ever so slightly, as if a great secret had been found out and he had no place in which to hide.

Then he sat at the keyboard and his fear was gone. He felt in the presence of a friend with whom he could talk as he had never talked before. He began playing softly, a Beethoven Sonata. But after a dozen measures Papa Sosnic threw up his hands.

He almost screeched. “Play! Doris is not here now. Play the music.”

John began again. He held nothing back; he did not play as if Doris were there with her cold, intellectual timing, criticizing his every stroke. He altered the timing, and modulated his touch so that the music no longer drew a diagram with mathematical precision.

It painted a picture now, and told a story. And somehow it became the story of Lora. He sketched the fine sweet lines of her profile as he had seen her in the dim light of the engineer’s catwalk.

He told Papa Sosnic all about it with his music. He told him what it meant to be lonely and what it meant to find an end to loneliness, if only for a moment.

When he was through, there were tears in the old man’s eyes. He sat down and clapped John on the shoulders and kissed him on the cheek.

“You can play, John,” he exclaimed. “You can play.”

They sat at die piano until it grew dark outside. And then, because he could keep it within him no longer, John told Papa Sosnic the real story of Lora, how they had met aboard the ship and separated again without hope of ever seeing each other again.

The old man groaned. “You mean you let her go?” he said. “That you have done absolutely nothing?”

“What could I do? I haven’t given up. I’ll find a way to make them send us back to Earth. But that seems so far away now and so completely hopeless.”

“Why did you let her get away? You could have gone with her. Didn’t you know that? You could have changed your membership from experimental to Control-colony. That’s always the privilege of any who get tired of conditions here; didn’t they tell you?”

John nodded through a numbing haze. “I guess they did,” he said slowly. “I guess it was somewhere in the contract. But you can’t mean that we should have given up and both lived in primitive savagery the rest of our lives! That’s ridiculous!”

Ah,” said Papa Sosnic, “is love ridiculous? And is there anything else that matters? Even your music—that would not matter because it would be with you always in your heart.”

“No,” whispered John. “It wouldn’t work; it would never work. It would destroy us both.”

So far to go,” murmured Papa Sosnic sadly. “You have so far to go, Johnny, before you get out of the shadow. Play for me again, Johnny; let me hear you play again.”

6

John and Doris selected living-quarters near Papa Sosnic’s apartment, from the possible assignments offered them. Doris liked the old musician immediately, and John was pleased. Somehow it seemed very important that she should like him.

John’s quarters were a green-and-gold luxury, in which he was served with robotic precision. Gadgetry in profusion that he had never imagined served his every need. Meal panels served his every taste whim. Silently, and during his absence the place was kept in order and his clothing refreshed. He never saw a single human servant.

It was something of a novelty at first, but it became breathtaking after a few days to realize that this was his for the rest of his life. It was like going to the carnival every day.

He tried to work; he tried to think; he tried to fight his own emotions and plan their solution. And he tried to smother any consideration of the terrible answer that Papa Sosnic had proposed.

To accept that proposal would be to abandon hope forever. The Colonies existed for the fine, high purpose of developing a Man who could survive his own ingenuity. John liked to think that he was beginning to sense that purpose. But the Controls were no more than mere animal standards, by which to measure the progress of Man.

They were necessary to the experiment, perhaps, but there was no escaping the fact that no single Control could think of himself as anything but a blind and obedient sacrifice—his life an utter waste with respect to creation and fulfillment.

He would accuse himself every day of his life, John thought, if he gave up in order to live with Lora in the jungle, only to watch her dwindle and fade, to watch that light in her eyes die away.

Through the years of incessant struggle against the wet and the mold and the night-terrors their love would diminish; it would be replaced by indifference and then by hate. He would rather never see her again than experience that.

He had time now for composition, which had been denied him almost completely by the rigorous concert-schedules on Earth. With whirlwind energy he hovered over the keyboard and writing table, but his mind never forgot the problem of escape. He studied the colony, the administration of it, the schedule of incomings and outgoings. And at last he knew what he could do.

His first composition left him exhausted emotionally and physically. In it he said some of the things he had yearned all his life to say, and now he didn’t know whether he had said them or merely made a fool of himself.

He invited Papa Sosnic over to hear the work when it was finished. The old man was delighted. “I hadn’t supposed you would finish anything so quickly,” he said. ‘‘Perhaps it will do for the Fall concert. Let me hear the piece, Johnny.”

It was dusk again, but he scarcely needed to see the keyboard. His hands moved as if with them he was saying what he had wanted to say all his life.

He started with somber tones of bewilderment and loss. Then the music grew wild with fear and shot through with terror. Suddenly, in the midst of it he felt a thrust of panic. He knew it was bad; he stopped, his hands collapsed on his thighs.

Out of the darkness the voice of Papa Sosnic came softly. “Go on, Johnny—”

After a moment he raised his hands wearily and picked up the music where he had stopped. He went on with a tie of awesome creation. He told of being alive and aware of space and time and planets and suns and of cold and of darkness. He told what it was like to be lonely and what it was like to be glad.

When he finished, he heard no sound at all from the other side of the room. Then there was an abrupt rustling beside him and the figure of Papa Sosnic was sitting beside him on the piano seat.

“It will do, Johnny,” he whispered. “I think it will go very well at our concert. I will schedule it, if I may.”

John shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

“It’s what’s in. your heart, Johnny; and the heart of a man is never bad.”

John got up suddenly and stood at the window, watching the mock twilight, with his back to Papa Sosnic. “Good or bad, I can’t do any more like that. It has kept me from going crazy the last month, but I won’t be here for the Fall concert.”

“Where will you be? Are you going to Lora?”

“Can I trust you? Will you help me?”

“Of course. If it is to see Lora, there is nothing in the world too much to ask. Music is a trifle; Human Developments Project is a puff in the wind compared with the affairs of a man in love. What is it you plan, Johnny’”

“I’m going back to Earth. I’ve got it figured out how to get back on the ship next time it’s in dock. I know it well enough so that I can stow away during the trip. They’ll never find me until it’s too late to turn back anyway.

“I’ve watched the schedule of busses to the terminal. I can get through the gates during the night opening, and I ought to be able to make it on foot to the spaceport in a day at most. But there is one thing I’ll need and that is your help in making an alibi for the following days here, until the ship is well on its way.”

Papa Sosnic nodded. “Of course; I could say that you had gone into the forest to live alone in one of the huts to do some work. That is common, and would not be noticed—if I could keep Doris from guessing. You will not tell her?

“No. I’ll count on you to keep her from knowing. She seems so busy, anyway, that I don’t think she’ll notice.” “And what will you do when you are on Earth?” said Papa Sosnic. “How will that put you closer to Lora?”

“I’ll tell them what Human Developments Project is like. I’ll tell them of the imprisonment and slavery of those who do not bow to the whims of the Project’s managers. I’ll tell the whole world a story it cannot ignore.”

“Slavery?” Papa Sosnic turned his hands upward in a gesture of inquiry. “I see no slavery here. Earth was never so good as this.”

“It’s slavery when you can’t do as you wish—but there’s no use arguing that term. I’ll tell them what I know!”

“Yes,” sighed Papa Sosnic. “You’ll tell them; you’ll spend months and years hammering on official doors with wild accusations that will never get you a hearing. Your life and energy will dwindle away. You will be upon Earth, and Lora will be here. Perhaps when you are both dried husks, with youth and beauty gone, they will let you see each other again. Perhaps.”

John slumped before the shattering logic of the old man. “And so you would have me become a savage, too, and have Lora and I regard each other daily with increasing bitterness while we fight the jungle merely to stay alive.” “There is one other answer,” said Papa Sosnic, slowly. “I have not suggested it because it is such a slim hope. But I would have you try it before taking this wild, stowaway flight to Earth.”

“What is it?” demanded John.

“Was Lora tested for the various Colony qualifications?” “I don’t know. She said she volunteered as a Control.” “Then it might just be possible that she could pass the tests for Alpha Colony. If she could, it would be permissible for her to re-apply and she would probably be admitted—i/ she could pass.”

“She would never do it. For some crazy reason, she hates the thought of the experimental Colonies. The only answer for us is something in between. And the only place to find it is on Earth.”

“She has been in the jungle for a month now. Perhaps she has changed her mind; perhaps it is not so romantic as she thought.”

John turned sharply, decision in his voice. “What can I do?”

“She could be brought here for a period of visiting, and she could be given the examination. It’s worth trying.” “Yes—yes, it’s worth trying.”

John approached Dr. Wamock early the next morning. He laid before the director the entire story, holding back only his own desperate plan to return to Earth—which he still intended to keep as a final resort.

When he was through, Warnock glanced up and smiled crookedly. “And Papa Sosnic told you this would be possible, this bringing Lora here to visit and inspect Alpha Colony to see if she liked it well enough to stay?”

“Provided she could pass the tests. And I’m sure she can do that!”

“I sometimes wonder who runs this colony—me or Papa Sosnic,” said Warnock.

John felt a cold shock traveling slowly upwards from his feet. He realized then that what Papa Sosnic had said could be done was true only in the old man’s own opinion.

“It has never been done before,” said Wamock, confirming John’s sudden fear. “To do so now would come close to shattering the whole plan of the Colony. You don’t understand, and neither does Papa Sosnic, that it must be kept in isolation.”

“Imprisonment,” whispered John, “that’s the word you mean.”

Wamock smiled a little sadly. “It is quite difficult to put over, to you who come here, the basic reasoning behind our experiments. The moment a man becomes a member of our Colonies it is almost impossible to keep him from adopting a sort of persecution-complex; he develops a prisoner’s psychology.”

“Perhaps that is more than a trivial comment on the methods of your experiments.”

“We have rules, yes—but we also realize we are dealing with human beings. I suppose you think I am going to turn down your request. Well, you are wrong. I am going to let Lora come here—if she will, of course; the decision must be hers.

“I am aware of your potentiality as a productive member of the Colony. We already have a dossier on you an inch thick. We want to know what a man like you can do for the future of mankind when given the freedom to develop all that is in him.”

“Freedom!”

Wamock nodded slowly. “You haven’t understood, John. There is freedom here on Planet 7; all you have to do is reach out and take it.”

“But you said the kind of thing I have asked has never been done before.”

“It has never been requested.”

John suddenly relaxed and slumped in the chair and laughed uncontrollably, in spite of the conviction that he felt more like crying. “What is the matter?” Wamock demanded.

John told him then about the wild plan to stow away aboard the starship and return to Earth to conduct a campaign against the Project.

“You couldn’t have gone without our knowing,” said Wamock, “but we wouldn’t have stopped you. You would never have seen Lora again.”

“Did Papa Sosnic know this?”

“Papa knows a great many things which we wonder about. Yes, I think he probably understood this very well. He knew how it would be; Papa Sosnic has done you a great service.”

7

It was three days before he received word that Lora was coming. When the news came it seemed as if it were about someone he had known long ago in childhood, someone who would be changed by the long years between, and whom he would scarcely know. He wondered what they would say to each other when they met.

Lora’s Control-Colony was through the jungle in the opposite direction from the spaceport; it was at the port that it was arranged for him to meet her.

They saw each other across the storm-darkened terminal lobby where the rain smell made it hard to get a full breath of air. He didn’t run toward her as he had thought he would. She was like some long ago acquaintance of childhood, and he wanted time to absorb the fact of her presence.

He had never seen her as she was dressed now. Her clothing was rough, a green tinged leather that confirmed her as part of the jungle itself. Her face was changed, too; it was thinner and had taken on a brownness.

But her eyes were the same. He felt a warmth of gladness rising within him as he came close enough to see that light in her eyes. It was more alive than ever before, he thought.

Then she was near him, touching him, her hand upon his arm. And he still had not found the thing to say.

Her eyes glistened now. “I shouldn’t have come,” she

iso

said. “But I had to; I had to take this chance I thought would never come. The chance to see you once again.”

“I told you I’d never let you go,” he said.

Deep inside him he had really believed this moment would never come, he thought. He had long ago lost the capacity for believing in miracles.

He put his arms about the miracle of Lora and held her close, but it was like,enfolding an impatient bird.

“I shouldn’t have come at all,” she said. “It was a trick, but I knew it was the only chance I’d ever have to see you.”

“What are you talking about?” He drew her close again. “You’re here now, and this is forever.”

“I’m not staying, John; I let them believe I’d take the tests but I won’t. I don’t even want to know that I might be eligible for Alpha Colony.”

His muscles turned rigid, as if time had stopped, and he was cold and hollow inside. He pressed her closer and touched his lips to her ear. “Hush,” he whispered. “Tomorrow we can talk.”

But they didn’t mention it again, neither on the morrow or the next day. Lora stayed with Doris, and John wasn’t sure at all how that would be. He still burned with the too-recent memory of her calling his meeting with Lora disgusting and stupid.

But Doris had changed in the past few weeks, he thought, without his being aware of it. Perhaps it was Bronson. The scientist came often to see them—or Doris —and John supposed this was highly irregular, since it was no doubt a contaminating factor in the eyes of the Project directors.

The change in Doris was evident when John brought Lora to her. The two exchanged glances, as if they had some lone secret that united them against the world. John tried to understand the sad, friendly smiles they offered each other.

Papa Sosnic beamed and kissed her on both cheeks when John brought Lora to see him. She had traded temporarily the crude clothing of the Control-Colony for the exquisite fabrics furnished the Alpha group. Lean and bronze against the white material of her dress, she was quite the loveliest woman in the whole Colony, John knew —and Papa said so.

She loved everything about the house. When they were alone again, she sank down in the soft luxury of a big chair. Through the window she could see the broad, peaceful landscape and the Grecian splendor of the statuary and the men and women playing beside it.

With spread fingers, she held out the skirt of the dress. “I dreamed of something like this when I was a little girl,” she said. “And I never did get it.”

“You’ve got it now,” said John, “for always.”

She glanced through the windows and beyond to the dome that held back the sun and the wind and the stars. She shook her head slowly. “No—I never did like living behind bars; here they are even in the sky!”

He took her about the Colony on the following days, but he had the sick feeling within him that he was losing. He had the feeling of trying to protect a house of sand with his arms, while the waves washed it away despite all he could do.

Lora was delighted with the fantastic gadgetry that served them in the houses, that conveyed their meals from the central, automatic kitchens serving the whole Colony. She was enraptured with the peace of the forest glens through which he led her by the hand. And she stood before the classic statuary groups by the hour while he explained the stories they told.

But she was like a child excited by a visit to a strange and fabulous house. All her delight did not mean that she had accepted it as her own; and this he could not make her believe—that it was her house as well as his own.

Wamock would not give them many more days, he knew; soon they would ask her to take the examinations given to all Colonists of the experimental groups.

In the meantime, there was the concert festival for which Papa Sosnic had arranged the presentation of John’s composition. He had no heart for it, but John agreed to play it in spite of its badness because Papa Sosnic wanted it.

Time and Alpha Colony grew increasingly unreal. He tried to see things from Lora’s viewpoint. He stared at the sky through the protecting dome and wondered why Lora had to see in it prison bars.

Was it any more so than the walls of a house? he asked himself. Why was it so wrong to accept protection and peace and luxury that gave time to devote to his music?

On Earth, he and Doris had been musicians, but they had worked hard at it—as hard as if they were bricklayers— and he’d had no time for composition.

He tried to explain this to Lora the day of..the concert, but she merely laughed. “It would be better if you were a bricklayer by day and a musician by night,” she said.

She seemed to live by a whole set of rules and standards of which he was not even aware. And she refused him the secret of the mystery of her reasoning.

He was going to lose her, he thought, and there was nothing he could do. In a day or two, they would ask her to take the tests and she would refuse. She would return to the jungle. He could go with her if he wished—and die slowly there in her presence. Why did she prefer jungle death to the life that was possible here? he wondered for the thousandth time.

On the evening of the concert she was more beautiful than ever, as if to tantalize him with that which he was about to lose. But the thought baffled him more than ever, for she would lose it, too. In the jungle she would don the green leather jacket and trousers. Never would she look like this again.

The concert was to be held in the central auditorium of the Colony, where all large performances were conducted. John noted distastefully that his name was the very last on the program. A tribute, no doubt, to the neophyte, who could be expected to present something worth only the attention of those who had not already left or yawned themselves to sleep, he thought angrily.

He sat near the front with Lora and Doris, and with Papa Sosnic and Dr. Bronson, whose frequent presence was becoming an increasing source of wonder in the Colony. Until his own number was called, John would sit with the audience.

The program carried a number of names he knew. Names long absent from the roster of artists on Earth, but which had once been great in the halls where John and Doris had played.

The first was one of these, Faber Wagnalls, whose work John had studied intently in the early years. He found himself leaning forward eagerly in spite of his own depression, anxious to hear the new work of this man whom he had not even met since coming to the Colony.

Wagnalls was much older now, and gray, different from the pictures John had seen. He sat at the piano on the spotlighted stage and began playing.

John closed his eyes and listened with all his being. The first notes were strange. It was a new man playing, he thought—not the Wagnalls who had written so long ago upon Earth. John listened to the theme, echoing it in his own mind.

Slowly, it seemed to him as if a cold wind had begun to blow upon his naked body. The music—it was not the great Faber Wagnalls at all. It was a simpering, effeminate tune that pranced and dawdled by turns, and had no loveliness or grace in a single note.

The applause was obviously out of sympathy rather than praise, and John joined in it when Wagnalls was through. But he wondered if it were really merciful to let the old master make such a fool of himself.

He glanced at Doris who returned his look, her nostrils thin and defiant. She knew, he thought, but she wasn’t admitting that there was any bad in Alpha Colony.

Lora caught his eye and grinned maliciously; he wondered exactly why.

The next performance was a group of string instruments. It was mediocre, not as poor as Wagnalls’ performance. John began to wonder when he would hear some of the fine work for which Alpha Colony had been created. Beside what he had heard so far his own would not show so badly, even if it was noisy and brash.

He continued to wonder as the program advanced. He grew sick inside as the parade of inept performers and trivial compositions followed one after the other.

And when his sickness bordered on panic—as if he had suddenly perceived the falsity and trickery of life itself—then he understood.

He understood an infinity of things he had never understood before. He understood himself and Doris, and he understood Lora. He understood why she looked up at the great dome and saw bars in the sky. He understood that the applause for Wagnalls was genuine not in pity.

Dimly, in the midst of panic and understanding, he heard his own name called. He stood up and moved automatically to the platform and sat before the piano.

Then he began to play. And with his playing there came clarity and a new reality. He knew what he had to do.

He tried to tell them with the music. He looked out over the dimly lit faces of the audience. He knew they would not understand, but he told them, anyway. He told them with fury and noise that echoed the anger of betrayal. He told them with a theme of passion and struggle that shocked them.

When he was through there was a moment of silence, and then a scattering of faint applause, followed all too quickly by a scattering of the audience itself. He was left standing almost alone with his few friends as the hall cleared.

Dr. Wamock came up and took his hand. “It was strong meat for our tender people,” he said. “I don’t know anything about music, but I liked that better than the twiddling little pieces I hear so often around here.”

“You know what I have to do,” said John.

“Yes?”

“I’m going with Lora; we’ll leave for the Control-Colony in the morning.”

8

They gathered after the concert at Papa Sosnic’s. Papa wore an air of secret mirth as they walked towards the house under the dome-filtered starlight. Bronson seemed puzzled and half-angry, while Dr. Wamock was an interested spectator of the wholly unexpected events of a play.

Lora and John felt a deep contentment as if they could suddenly see all the way to the end of their lives, and knew they were on the right pathway.

But Doris walked alone, ignoring Bronson’s presence, as if she had been stunned and swept to the edge of grief by John’s words.

When they reached Papa Sosnic’s, she was the first to speak as she separated him from the rest and forced him against the wall. “You don’t mean what you said,” she insisted. “You don’t mean you are giving up all we have gained for a stubborn girl who is afraid to face life!”

“I love that stubborn girl,” he said softly, “and she loves me.”

“Then she can have courage enough to live here like a human being—if she has wits enough. John, you can’t do a crazy thing like this.”

The others had stopped where they stood, held by the anguish of Doris’ voice. They did not want to hear, and could not help themselves.

Lora stepped in from the next room, and heard, but Doris did not seem to care. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep you from knowing how ugly the world can be,” she said to John. “I didn’t want you to know it. When you were a child, you never knew that sometimes the food you ate was stolen, and that I went without because there was not enough for both of us. I showed you how to make yourself great; and we were great artists on Earth. We couldn’t have had more—until we found this.

“And now there’s nothing more to worry about for all the rest of our lives. We’ll be taken care of, and we can work and create to the full extent of all that’s good in us.

“But more than that: we’re not only helping ourselves, we’re helping all mankind. There’ll never be another chance again to become the kind of humans that won’t destroy themselves. If we don’t change we won’t get that chance again.

“It’s like the intermission time between the act of a great play. And we’ve got a chance to change the lines, and rewrite the show—to make sure it doesn’t end as tragedy.

“You can’t throw away your chance to help in that, John. Lora, you can’t ask that of him!”

There was so little he could say now, he thought. He was understanding Doris for the first time in his life. For the first time he saw how the world had looked to her, a place of agony and terror from which she must flee and protect him.

He remembered the day when he met Lora by the gate. She had said that some came to Human Developments because they were running away. He had thought that such a thing could never be said of Doris; yet, it was true. She had run from the struggle of life to the security of Alpha Colony. And he had thought her the strongest of them all.

And now it was Lora who had the strength. She had claimed to be running away, but she was running to life, not away from it.

He took Doris’ icy hand in his and led her to the couch beside which the others stood. “You’ve taken care of me too long, and too well,” he said. “Tonight you heard what comes of men and women who are too well taken-care-of. You have heard the kind of creativeness built without need or want.”

He looked up at Dr.Wamock. “You know the Colony is a failure, don’t you, Doctor?”

Wamock smiled and shrugged. “Papa Sosnic has told me often enough. Myself—I am not a musician, only a sociologist.”

“Alpha Colony is a failure,” said John. “The whole project is a failure—all but the Control-Colonies.

“You have thought you could learn about the greatness of men by splitting them up into groups and viewing only a single facet of life. You can’t do it; you can’t have musicians without truck-drivers and bricklayers. And you can’t have a man who is a musician only. All this dividing, and separating, and splitting-up will reveal nothing, no more than would cutting off an arm or a leg show you where greatness lies.

“Greatness can be viewed only in the whole man. This other won’t work. Every man needs a touch of cussedness, a pinch of damn foolishness, and all the brain stuff he can cram in his head. Strain out any of it and you have only a piece of a man.

“And above all, you can’t make men great by taking care of them. I didn’t understand that until I heard the stupid little performances tonight. You have taken great men and made them weaklings. Faber Wagnalls—it’s enough to make you want to cry.

“The only read greatness a man ever has is the ability to take care of himself, and twist the world to fit his needs. True, we have almost burned it to a cinder in the process, but that ‘almost’ is what makes the difference. We haven’t failed, and we aren’t going to—unless we give up trying to take care of ourselves and create some fatal Utopia. There’s no freedom in the Garden of Eden.

“I almost found that out too late; and except for tonight, Lora might never have pounded it into my thick skull.”

In the light of another day, the Colony seemed a place that John had never seen before at all. They walked slowly toward the terminal building, past the great statuary that was somehow shoddy this morning.

He understood why, and he would have seen it before if he had been a sculptor. The images were but copies —copies made by the faulty memories of men who remembered Earth, but looked forward to nothing.

The lawns and the forest paths were like a child’s toy garden, and the narrow confines under the dome seemed to crush in upon him. He looked skyward—and now he could see the bars shutting out the world and the wind and the rain!

Lora hurried him along, as if she could endure no longer the imprisonment of the Colony. At the terminal building they looked out and saw that it was raining again beyond the dome, the eternal jungle rain. John shivered a little as the wind whipped moisture through the doors.

He looked back at Doris and the others. He felt sorry for them, but there was nothing at all that he could do for them. Doris was white-faced, but calm. He took her in his arms and kissed her.

“Bye, Sis,” he said.

Then they were out in the rain, moving toward the bus that would take them to the beginning of the jungle trail. Lora was laughing, the raindrops splashing on her face, and running down in trickles.

When the history of Human Developments was finally written, he thought, it would be of the descendants of the Control-Colonists, not those of the poor prisoners of Alpha Colony.

Then he caught sight of his own long, white hands and remembered there would be no music in the jungle. His hands would warp with the labor of building shelters and fighting for food. But no music? He suddenly laughed aloud, remembering the words of Papa Sosnic “—it would be with you always in your heart.”

So many things Papa Sosnic knew! John glanced again at Lora’s shining, rain-wet face and turned his own to catch the raindrops on his skin.

Their gentle sting assured him that, at last, he was alive.

THE END

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□ ADVENTURES IN TOMORROW, by Kendell Foster Crossen

Isaac Asimov, A. E. Van Vogt, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Anthony Boucher, Forrest J. Ackerman, Bruce Elliot and 9 more of the world's greatest science fiction authors.    #B75-215, 75¢

□ A PAIR FROM SPACE, by James Blish and Robert Silverberg

First paperback publication of two major science fiction novels—complete. #B92-6I2, 50¢

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Belmont Books, Dopt. 820

1116 First Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10021

Please send me the books I have checked above: Any five 50$ books for $2.00. (One book FREE.) Nine 50¢ books for $3.50. (Two tooks FREE.) Two 60¢ books for $1.00. Single copies list price plus 10$ postage.

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