The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Volume II: The Sentinel

Arthur C. Clarke

Copyright

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Volume II: The Sentinel

Copyright © 2000 by Arthur C. Clarke

Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2012 by RosettaBooks, LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2012 by RosettaBooks, LLC, New York.

ISBN ePub edition: 9780795329043

Contents

Introduction

The Sentinel

Holiday On the Moon

Earthlight

Second Dawn

Superiority

‘If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth…’

All the Time in the World

The Nine Billion Names of God

The Possessed

The Parasite

Jupiter Five

Encounter In the Dawn

The Other Tiger

Publicity Campaign

Armaments Race

The Deep Range

No Morning After

Big Game Hunt

Patent Pending

Refugee

INTRODUCTION

By the time he was writing the stories in the span of this collection, most of them falling within the early 1950’s, Clarke had established himself as the leading British science fiction writer and perhaps the major figure to emerge in that period between the conclusion of the “Golden Age” Astounding (1945) and the piling-into-print of the new generation associated primarily with Horace Gold’s emergent Galaxy. The most famous story in this second volume, of course, is “The Sentinel” which is the Kubrick film (screenplay by Kubrick and Clarke) in its nascent form but that fame occurred only through a kind of indirection, and the story never found a wide audience other than as a curiosity. “The Nine Billion Names of God”, on the other hand, which appeared in Star Science Fiction 1, the first volume of the first science fiction original series, is famous on its own terms and embodies the originality and the strength of Clarke as noted in the Introduction to the first volume. It is both practical and mystical; it fuses (in Samuel R. Delany’s line long ago) “the desperate and the human with the disparate and the technological” in a way which has always been unique to our genre. The iron, implacable computer is juxtaposed here with the most ancient and resonant of religious mysteries; the monks at their keyboards are a quality of experience imagined here but not to be experienced for decades… and the conclusion is both completely logical and completely mad. As Damon Knight wrote of Henry Kuttner, from deep inside this horrifying story one can distantly hear the distant whoop of its author’s laughter.

The story, so exemplary of the cold polish and hot speculation which identify Clarke, had an impact from its first publication (the early volumes of Pohl’s Star Series were as admired and influential as the concurrent Galaxy Magazine of Horace Gold) and although certain components might seem vaguely distant (and could easily be shifted to the present) the story is chillingly contemporary. Clarke’s short story “The Star” (coming in the third volume) was even better known and won only the third short story Hugo…and in tandem with “The Nine Billion Names of God” it marks the author as one of the very few in literary history who have written more than one absolutely memorable, timeless short stories, the kind of stories like “The Monkey’s Paw” or “His Monkey Wife”, “The Country Husband” or “The Cold Equations simply roll on, indifferent to time, creating their audience and urgency for every succeeding generation.

The marketing history of “The Sentinel” is one which, I have long argued, is of a nature “to give every hack hope”. The Scott Meredith Agency (Clarke’s American agents from the start of his career in 1946) marketing record is deeply instructive: the story was offered to every extant science fiction and fantasy market, declined everywhere, finally sold to the Donald Wollheim edited Ten Story Fantasy…a one-time magazine published by Avon, Wollheim’s employer in 1950. Clarke received $25. It was decades before the story was collected or anthologized; purportedly Kubrick asked Clarke in the mid-sixties if Clarke had anything which might be the basis of a movie script and “The Sentinel” was one of a number of stories offered Kubrick. The world now knows that Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” whose film rights were sold for 1.8 million dollars began life as a multi-reject, published for a penny a word in the bottom magazine Fantastic Universe, but the odyssey of “The Sentinel” might be even more tortuous and its eventual destiny even more bewildering.

Among many science fiction marketing mysteries is this: Why did Clarke, so clearly a major writer, appear in the leading magazines of the 50’s so infrequently? Astounding published nothing of his between “Hide and Seek” in 1949 and “Death And The Senator” in 1961; Galaxy’s offshoot, the Galaxy Novels, published Prelude To Space but Horace Gold paid his short stories very little attention.

I can’t speculate on Gold—Horace was impenetrable to even his favorite contributors—but I have a theory on Campbell; in 1947 Clarke’s “Inheritance” appeared in Astounding and, subsequently it was revealed that it had appeared months earlier in a British publication. Campbell never published material not original to his magazine; in 1954 and again in 1965 it happened inadvertently when a novel appeared from its book publisher before the serialization in Astounding had been completed. (Campbell was infuriated with Scott Meredith both times.) Maybe Campbell enacted what was in his mind a holy retribution. “So much of our field is buried in apocrypha” A.J. Budrys wrote. Perhaps this is only more.

—May 2012: New Jersey

The Sentinel

First published in 10 Story Fantasy, Spring 1951, as ‘Sentinel of Eternity’

Collected in Expedition to Earth

‘The Sentinel’ was written over Christmas 1948 for a BBC competition. (It wasn’t even placed—I have often wondered what did win). I am amused to see that I put the exploration of the Mare Crisium in ‘the late summer of 1996’. Well, we missed that date, but I hope we’ll get there early in the next century. This is the starting point of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The next time you see the full Moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upwards along the curve of the disc. Round about two o’clock, you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain, one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium—the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter—and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our surface vehicles could not cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisium is very flat. There are none of the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking us wherever we wished.

I was geologist—or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic—in charge of the group exploring the southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating down the flanks of those stupendous cliffs, retreating into the empty heart of the Moon. Over the land which we were crossing, the tideless ocean had once been half a mile deep and now the only trace of moisture was the hoar frost one could sometimes find in caves which the searing sunlight never penetrated.

We had begun our journey early in the slow lunar dawn, and still had almost a week of Earth-time before nightfall. Half a dozen times a day we would leave our vehicle and go outside in the spacesuits to hunt for interesting minerals, or to place markers for the guidance of future travellers. It was an uneventful routine. There is nothing hazardous or even particularly exciting about lunar exploration. We could live comfortably for a month in our pressurised tractors, and if we ran into trouble we could always radio for help and sit tight until one of the spaceships came to our rescue. When that happened there was always a frightful outcry about the waste of rocket fuel, so a tractor sent out an SOS only in a real emergency.

I said just now that there was nothing exciting about lunar exploration, but of course that is not true. One could never grow tired of those incredible mountains, so much more rugged than the gentle hills of Earth. We never knew, as we rounded the capes and promontories of that vanished sea, what new splendours would be revealed to us. The whole southern curve of the Mare Crisium is a vast delta where a score of rivers had once found their way into the ocean, fed perhaps by the torrential rains that must have lashed the mountains in the brief volcanic age when the moon was young. Each of these ancient valleys was an invitation, challenging us to climb into the unknown uplands beyond. But we had a hundred miles still to cover, and could only look longingly at the heights which others must scale.

We kept Earth-time aboard the tractor, and precisely at 22.00 hours the final radio message would be sent out to base and we could close down for the day. Outside, the rocks would still be burning beneath the almost vertical sun, but to us it was night until we awoke again eight hours later. Then one of us would prepare breakfast, there would be a great buzzing of electric shavers and someone would switch on the short-wave radio from Earth. Indeed, when the smell of frying bacon began to fill the cabin, it was sometimes hard to believe that we were not back on our own world—everything was so normal and homely, apart from the feeling of decreased weight and the unnatural slowness with which objects fell.

It was my turn to prepare breakfast in the corner of the main cabin that served as a galley. I can remember that moment quite vividly after all these years, for the radio had just played one of my favourite melodies, the old Welsh air, ‘David of the White Rock’. Our driver was already outside in his spacesuit, inspecting our caterpillar treads. My assistant, Louis Garnett, was up forward in the control position, making some belated entries in yesterday’s log.

As I stood by the frying-pan, waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let my gaze wander idly over the mountain walls which covered the whole of the southern horizon, marching out of sight to the east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course, there is no loss of detail with distance—none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and sometimes transfigures all far-off things on Earth.

Those mountains were ten thousand feet high, and they climbed steeply out of the plain as if ages ago some subterranean eruption had smashed them skywards through the molten crust. The base of even the nearest was hidden from sight by the steeply curving surface of the plain, for the Moon is a very little world, and from where I was standing the horizon was only two miles away.

I lifted my eyes towards the peaks which no man had ever climbed, the peaks which, before the coming of terrestrial life, had watched the retreating oceans sink sullenly into their graves, taking with them the hope and the morning promise of a world. The sunlight was beating against those ramparts with a glare that hurt the eyes, yet only a little way above them the stars were shining steadily in a sky blacker than a winter midnight on Earth.

I was turning away when my eye caught a metallic glitter high on the ridge of a great promontory thrusting out into the sea thirty miles to the west. It was a dimensionless point of light as if a star had been clawed from the sky by one of those cruel peaks, and I imagined that some smooth rock-surface was catching the sunlight and heliographing it straight into my eyes. Such things were not uncommon. When the Moon is in her second quarter, observers on Earth can sometimes see the great ranges in the Oceanus Procellarum burning with a blue-white iridescence as the sunlight flashes from their slopes and leaps again from world to world. But I was curious to know what kind of rock could be shining so brightly up there, and I climbed into the observation turret and swung our four-inch telescope round to the west.

I could see just enough to tantalise me. Clear and sharp in the field of vision, the mountain peaks seemed only half a mile away, but whatever was catching the sunlight was still too small to be resolved. Yet it seemed to have an elusive symmetry, and the summit upon which it rested was curiously flat. I stared for a long time at that glittering enigma, straining my eyes into space, until presently a smell of burning from the galley told me that our breakfast sausages had made their quarter-million-mile journey in vain.

All that morning we argued our way across the Mare Crisium while the western mountains reared higher in the sky. Even when we were out prospecting in the spacesuits, the discussion would continue over the radio. It was absolutely certain, my companions argued, that there had never been any form of intelligent life on the Moon. The only living things that had ever existed there were a few primitive plants and their slightly less degenerate ancestors. I knew that as well as anyone, but there are times when a scientist must not be afraid to make a fool of himself.

‘Listen,’ I said at last, ‘I’m going up there, if only for my own peace of mind. That mountain’s less than twelve thousand feet high—that’s only two thousand under Earth gravity—and I can make the trip in twenty hours at the outside. I’ve always wanted to go up into those hills, anyway, and this gives me an excellent excuse.’

‘If you don’t break your neck,’ said Garnett, ‘you’ll be the laughing-stock of the expedition when we get back to Base. That mountain will probably be called Wilson’s Folly from now on.’

‘I won’t break my neck,’ I said firmly. ‘Who was the first man to climb Pico and Helicon?’

‘But weren’t you rather younger in those days?’ asked Louis gently.

‘That,’ I said with great dignity, ‘is as good a reason as any for going.’

We went to bed early that night, after driving the tractor to within half a mile of the promontory. Garnett was coming with me in the morning; he was a good climber, and had often been with me on such exploits before. Our driver was only too glad to be left in charge of the machine.

At first sight, those cliffs seemed completely unscalable, but to anyone with a good head for heights, climbing is easy on a world where all weights are only a sixth of their normal value. The real danger in lunar mountaineering lies in over-confidence; a six-hundred-foot drop on the Moon can kill you just as thoroughly as a hundred-foot fall on Earth.

We made our first halt on a wide ledge about four thousand feet above the plain. Climbing had not been very difficult but my limbs were stiff with the unaccustomed effort, and I was glad of the rest. We could still see the tractor as a tiny metal insect far down at the foot of the cliff, and we reported our progress to the driver before starting on the next ascent.

Hour by hour the horizon widened and more and more of the great plain came into sight. Now we could look for fifty miles out across the Mare, and could even see the peaks of the mountains on the opposite coast more than a hundred miles away. Few of the great lunar plains are as smooth as the Mare Crisium, and we could almost imagine that a sea of water and not of rock was lying there two miles below. Only a group of crater pits low down on the skyline spoiled the illusion.

Our goal was still invisible over the crest of the mountain and we were steering by maps, using the Earth as a guide. Almost due east of us, that great silver crescent hung low over the plain, already well into its first quarter. The Sun and the stars would make their slow march across the sky and would sink presently from sight, but Earth would always be there, never moving from her appointed place, waxing and waning as the years and seasons passed. In ten days’ time she would be a blinding disc bathing these rocks with her midnight radiance, fifty-fold brighter than the full moon. But we must be out of the mountains long before night, or else we would remain among them for ever.

Inside our suits it was comfortably cool, for the refrigeration units were fighting the fierce Sun and carrying away the body-heat of our exertions. We seldom spoke to each other, except to pass climbing instructions and to discuss our best plan of ascent. I do not know what Garnett was thinking, probably that this was the craziest goose chase he had ever embarked upon. I more than half agreed with him, but the joy of climbing, the knowledge that no man had ever gone this way before and the exhilaration of the steadily widening landscape gave me all the reward I needed.

I do not think I was particularly excited when I saw in front of us the wall of rock I had first inspected through the telescope from thirty miles away. It would level off about fifty feet above our heads, and there on the plateau would be the thing that had lured me over these barren wastes. It was, almost certainly, nothing more than a boulder splintered ages ago by a falling meteor, and with its cleavage planes still fresh and bright in this incorruptible, unchanging silence.

There were no hand-holds on the rock face and we had to use a grapnel. My tired arms seemed to gain new strength as I swung the three-pronged metal anchor round my head and sent it sailing up towards the stars. The first time it broke loose and came falling slowly back when we pulled the rope. On the third attempt, the prongs gripped firmly and our combined weights could not shift it.

Garnett looked at me anxiously. I could tell that he wanted to go first, but I smiled back at him through the glass of my helmet and shook my head. Slowly, taking my time, I began the final ascent.

Even with my spacesuit, I weighed only forty pounds here, so I pulled myself up hand over hand without bothering to use my feet. At the rim I paused and waved to my companion, then I scrambled over the edge and stood upright, staring ahead of me.

You must understand that until this very moment I had been almost completely convinced that there could be nothing strange or unusual for me to find here. Almost, but not quite; it was that haunting doubt that had driven me forwards. Well, it was a doubt no longer, but the haunting had scarcely begun.

I was standing on a plateau perhaps a hundred feet across. It had once been smooth—too smooth to be natural—but falling meteors had pitted and scored its surface through immeasurable aeons. It had been levelled to support a glittering roughly pyramidal structure, twice as high as a man, that was set in the rock like a gigantic many-faceted jewel.

Probably no emotion at all filled my mind in those first few seconds. Then I felt a great lifting of my heart, and a strange inexpressible joy. For I loved the Moon, and now I knew that the creeping moss of Aristarchus and Eratosthenes was not the only life she had brought forth in her youth. The old, discredited dream of the first explorers was true. There had, after all, been a lunar civilisation—and I was the first to find it. That I had come perhaps a hundred million years too late did not distress me; it was enough to have come at all.

My mind was beginning to function normally, to analyse and to ask questions. Was this a building, a shrine—or something for which my language had no name? If a building, then why was it erected in so uniquely inaccessible a spot? I wondered if it might be a temple, and I could picture the adepts of some strange priesthood calling on their gods to preserve them as the life of the Moon ebbed with the dying oceans, and calling on their gods in vain.

I took a dozen steps forward to examine the thing more closely, but some sense of caution kept me from going too near. I knew a little of archaeology, and tried to guess the cultural level of the civilisation that must have smoothed this mountain and raised the glittering mirror surfaces that still dazzled my eyes.

The Egyptians could have done it, I thought, if their workmen had possessed whatever strange materials these far more ancient architects had used. Because of the thing’s smallness, it did not occur to me that I might be looking at the handiwork of a race more advanced than my own. The idea that the Moon had possessed intelligence at all was still almost too tremendous to grasp and my pride would not let me take the final, humiliating plunge.

And then I noticed something that set the scalp crawling at the back of my neck—something so trivial and so innocent that many would never have noticed it at all. I have said that the plateau was scarred by meteors; it was also coated inches deep with the cosmic dust that is always filtering down upon the surface of any world where there are no winds to disturb it. Yet the dust and the meteor scratches ended quite abruptly in a wide circle enclosing the little pyramid, as though an invisible wall was protecting it from the ravages of time and the slow but ceaseless bombardment from space.

There was someone shouting in my earphones, and I realised that Garnett had been calling me for some time. I walked unsteadily to the edge of the cliff and signalled him to join me, not trusting myself to speak. Then I went back towards that circle in the dust. I picked up a fragment of splintered rock and tossed it gently toward the shining enigma. If the pebble had vanished at that invisible barrier I should not have been surprised, but it seemed to hit a smooth, hemispherical surface and slide gently to the ground.

I knew then that I was looking at nothing that could be matched in the antiquity of my own race. This was not a building, but a machine, protecting itself with forces that had challenged Eternity. Those forces, whatever they might be, were still operating, and perhaps I had already come too close. I thought of all the radiations man had trapped and tamed in the past century. For all I knew, I might be as irrevocably doomed as if I had stepped into the deadly, silent aura of an unshielded atomic pile.

I remember turning then towards Garnett, who had joined me and was now standing motionless at my side. He seemed quite oblivious of me, so I did not disturb him but walked to the edge of the cliff in an effort to marshal my thoughts. There below me lay the Mare Crisium—Sea of Crises, indeed—strange and weird to most men, but reassuringly familiar to me. I lifted my eyes towards the crescent Earth, lying in her cradle of stars, and I wondered what her clouds had covered when these unknown builders had finished their work. Was it the steaming jungle of the Carboniferous, the bleak shoreline over which the first amphibians must crawl to conquer the land—or, earlier still, the long loneliness before the coming of life?

Do not ask me why I did not guess the truth sooner—the truth that seems so obvious now. In the first excitement of my discovery, I had assumed without question that this crystalline apparition had been built by some race belonging to the Moon’s remote past, but suddenly, and with overwhelming force, the belief came to me that it was as alien to the Moon as I myself.

In twenty years we had found no trace of life but a few degenerate plants. No lunar civilisation, whatever its doom, could have left but a single token of its existence.

I looked at the shining pyramid again, and the more remote it seemed from anything that had to do with the Moon. And suddenly I felt myself shaking with a foolish, hysterical laughter, brought on by excitement and over-exertion: for I had imagined that the little pyramid was speaking to me and was saying: ‘Sorry, I’m a stranger here myself.’

It has taken us twenty years to crack that invisible shield and to reach the machine inside those crystal walls. What we could not understand, we broke at last with the savage might of atomic power and now I have seen the fragments of the lovely, glittering thing I found up there on the mountain.

They are meaningless. The mechanisms—if indeed they are mechanisms—of the pyramid belong to a technology that lies far beyond our horizon, perhaps to the technology of paraphysical forces.

The mystery haunts us all the more now that the other planets have been reached and we know that only Earth has ever been the home of intelligent life. Nor could any lost civilisation of our own world have built that machine, for the thickness of the meteoric dust on the plateau has enabled us to measure its age. It was set there upon its mountain before life had emerged from the seas of Earth.

When our world was half its present age, something from the stars swept through the Solar System, left this token of its passage, and went again upon its way. Until we destroyed it, that machine was still fulfilling the purpose of its builders; and as to that purpose, here is my guess.

Nearly a hundred thousand million stars are turning in the circle of the Milky Way, and long ago other races on the worlds of other suns must have scaled and passed the heights that we have reached. Think of such civilisations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of Creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness we cannot imagine, the loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts.

They must have searched the star-clusters as we have searched the planets. Everywhere there would be worlds, but they would be empty or peopled with crawling, mindless things. Such was our own Earth, the smoke of the great volcanoes still staining the skies, when that first ship of the peoples of the dawn came sliding in from the abyss beyond Pluto. It passed the frozen outer worlds, knowing that life could play no part in their destinies. It came to rest among the inner planets, warming themselves around the fire of the Sun and waiting for their stories to begin.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun’s children. Here, in the distant future, would be intelligence; but there were countless stars before them still, and they might never come this way again.

So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered throughout the universe, watching over all worlds with the promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been patiently signalling the fact that no one had discovered it.

Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set upon the Moon instead of on the Earth. Its builders were not concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be interested in our civilisation only if we proved our fitness to survive—by crossing space and so escaping from the Earth, our cradle. That is the challenge that all intelligent races must meet, sooner or later. It is a double challenge, for it depends in turn upon the conquest of atomic energy and the last choice between life and death.

Once we had passed that crisis, it was only a matter of time before we found the pyramid and forced it open. Now its signals have ceased, and those whose duty it is will be turning their minds upon Earth. Perhaps they wish to help our infant civilisation. But they must be very, very old, and the old are often insanely jealous of the young.

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have broken the glass of the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait.

I do not think we will have to wait for long.

Holiday on the Moon

First appeared in Heiress magazine January - April 1951

This story was the result of arm-twisting by a charming lady editor for a magazine for young ladies, Heiress. It was published as a four-part serial (January to April 1951) as by Charles Willis. After half a century, I can’t remember why I used a pseudonym—perhaps I was afraid of losing my macho image.

It was a large, brightly lit room with a magnificent view, of which no one was taking the slightest notice. Beyond the wide window, which ran the whole length of one wall, a snow-flecked mountain-side sloped down to a tiny Alpine village more than a mile below. Despite the distance, every detail was crystal clear. Beyond the village, the ground rose again, more and more steeply, to the great mountain that dominated the sky-line and trailed from its summit a perpetual plume of snow, a white streamer, drifting for ever with the wind.

It was a wonderful panorama—and it was all an illusion. The Martins’ flat was in the middle of London, and outside the walls a November fog was curling sluggishly through the damp streets. But Mrs Martin had only to turn a switch and the concealed projectors would give her any view she wished, together with the sounds that went with it. Television, which had brought so many pictures into every home, had made this inevitable, and in these opening years of the twenty-first century most houses could have any scenery they pleased.

Of course, it was rather expensive, but it was such a good way of letting the family get to know the world. Mrs Martin looked round anxiously. At the moment everything seemed a little too quiet for comfort. What she saw was reassuring. Eighteen-year-old Daphne was tuned in to Paris on the TV set, watching a fashion display.

‘Mother!’ she called out. ‘You must see this gorgeous scarlet cloak! I’d love one just like it.’

Michael, who was fifteen, was doing his home-work—or pretending to—and the twelve-year-old twins were in the next room, being audibly thrilled by Grandma’s stories of the London Blitz.

There was a gentle ‘burr’ from the telephone in the next room.

‘Let me answer it!’ shouted Claude.

‘No, me!’ yelled Claudia.

There was a slight scuffle. Then Grandma’s voice could be heard speaking to the operator. ‘Yes, this is Mrs Martin’s flat. I’ll call her. Hilda! It’s a super-long-distance call for you!’

Super-long-distance! It had never happened before, but everyone knew what it meant. Michael looked up from his work. Even Daphne turned her back on the parade of winter fashion.

‘My goodness,’ said Claude, ‘it’s Daddy!’

‘Someone told me,’ said Claudia in a hushed voice, ‘that it costs £10 a minute to put through a call from the Moon.’

‘I hope Daddy isn’t paying for it!’ gulped Claude.

‘Hush, children!’ said Mrs Martin, taking the receiver from Grandma. ‘Yes, Mrs Martin here.’ There was a pause. Then, so clear and close that it gave her almost a shock, her husband’s voice sounded in her ear. It was coming to her across a quarter of a million miles of space, yet it seemed as if he were standing beside her.

‘Hallo, Hilda, this is John! Listen carefully, dear—I’ve only got two minutes! I’ve some bad news for you. I can’t come back to Earth next week as we’d hoped. Yes, I know it’s very disappointing after all our plans, but we’ve had some trouble here at the observatory and I simply can’t get away now. But don’t be too upset—I’ve got another plan that’s almost as good. How would you like to come up to the Moon?’

‘What?’ gasped his wife.

It took nearly three seconds for her husband’s laugh to reach her—three seconds for the radio waves, even travelling at their fabulous speed, to make the journey from Earth to Moon.

‘Yes, I thought it would surprise you! But why not? Space-travel is as safe now as flying was in Grandma’s day. Anyway, there’s a freighter leaving the Arizona port in three days and returning to Earth a fortnight later. That will give you time to get ready, and we’ll have almost ten days here together at the observatory. I’ll make all the arrangements, so be a dear and don’t argue. And I want you to bring along Daphne and Mike. There’s room for them as well. I’m afraid you’ll have to make peace with the twins, somehow—tell them they’ll have their chance when they’re older!’

‘But, John—I can’t…’

‘Of course you can—and think how Daphne and Mike will love it! I can’t explain now, but we may never have an opportunity like this again. I’m sending a telegram with all the details. You should get it in an hour or so. Oh, bother—there’s the signal—I must hang up now. Give my love to them all. I do look forward to seeing you. Goodbye, darling.’

Mrs Martin put down the receiver with a dazed expression. It was just like John. He hadn’t even allowed her time to raise a single objection. But, now she came to think of it, what real objections were there? He was right, of course. Space-travel—at least to the Moon—was safe enough, even though it was still too expensive for a regular passenger service. Presumably John had been able to use his official position to get their reservations.

Yes, John was quite right. It was too good a chance to miss, and if she didn’t go now, it might be ages before she would see him again. She turned to the anxiously waiting family and said with a smile, ‘I’ve got some news for you.’

In the ordinary way, a Transatlantic crossing would have been quite an excitement for Daphne and Michael, since it was something they had done only two or three times before in their lives. Now, however, they regarded the two hours’ flight from London Airport to New York as merely an unimportant episode, and occupied most of the time talking about the Moon clearly enough to impress the other passengers.

They spent only an hour in New York before flying on across the Continent, steadily gaining on the sun, until when they finally swept down over the great Arizona desert it was, by the clock, a couple of hours before the time they had left the flat that same morning.

From the air, the space-port was an impressive sight. Looking through the observation windows, Daphne could see, spread out below, the great steel frameworks supporting the slim, torpedo-shaped monsters that would soon go roaring up to the stars. Everywhere were huge, gasometer-like fuel-tanks, radio aerials pointing at the sky, and mysterious buildings and structures whose purpose she couldn’t even guess.

Through all this maze tiny figures scurried to and fro, and vehicles looking like metallic beetles rolled swiftly along the roads.

Daphne belonged to the first generation that had taken space-travel for granted. The Moon had been reached almost thirty years ago—twelve years before she was born—and she could just remember the excitement when the first expeditions had landed on Mars and Venus.

In her short life she had seen Man set out to conquer space, just as, hundreds of years before, Columbus and the great explorers of the Middle Ages had discovered the world. The first stages of the conquest were now over. Small colonies of scientists had been established on Mars and Venus, and on the Moon the great Lunar Observatory, of which Professor Martin was director, had now become the centre of all astronomical research.

On the Moon’s silent, lonely plains, beneath velvet skies, in which the stars shone brilliantly night and day, with never the least trace of cloud to dim them, the astronomers could work at last under perfect conditions, unhindered by the obscuring atmosphere against which they had always had to fight on Earth.

The next two hours they spent in the space-port’s headquarters building, being weighed, medically examined and filling up forms. When this was all over, and they were beginning to wonder if the whole thing was really worth while, they found themselves in a small, comfortable office, looking across a desk at a rather jolly, plump man, who seemed to be someone very important.

‘Well, Mrs Martin,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I’m glad to say you’re all in excellent health and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t leave in the Centaurus when she takes off. I hope all these examinations haven’t scared you. There is really nothing dangerous about space-flight, but we mustn’t take any chances.

‘As you know, a spaceship takes off rather quickly and for a few minutes you feel as if you weigh a ton—but if you’re lying down comfortably that won’t do you any harm, as long as you don’t suffer from certain kinds of heart trouble. Then, when you’re out in space, you won’t have any weight at all, which will feel very odd at first. That used to cause space-sickness in the early days, but we can prevent it now. You’ll be given a couple of tablets to swallow just before take-off. So there’s nothing to worry about, and I’m sure you’ll have a pleasant voyage.’

He looked at his littered desk and sighed deeply. ‘I wish I had time to go up myself. I’ve only been off Earth once in the last two years!’

‘Who was that?’ asked Daphne, as the waiting bus whisked them away across the desert.

‘That was the Controller of the Space Fleet,’ said her mother.

‘What!’ exclaimed Michael. ‘He runs all these spaceships and never gets a chance to fly in them?’

Mrs Martin smiled. ‘I’m afraid it’s often that way. Daddy says he’s too busy to look through a telescope nowadays!’

They had now left the built-up area and were racing along a wide road with nothing but desert on either side. About a mile ahead they could see the great streamlined shape of the Centaurus, the spaceship that was to take them to the Moon. The giant rocket was standing vertically on a concrete platform, with cranes and scaffolding grouped around it, and its needle-shaped prow pointing to the sky. Even from this distance it looked enormous—Daphne thought it must be almost as tall as Nelson’s column—and with the sunlight glinting on its metal sides it was a beautiful as well as an impressive sight.

The closer they came, the larger it seemed to grow, until when they had reached its base they appeared to be standing at the foot of a great curving metal cliff. A tall gantry had been moved up to the side of the rocket, and they were directed into the maze of girders until they came to a tiny lift just big enough to hold the three of them. There was the whirring of motors, the ground began to drop away, and the gleaming walls of the spaceship slid swiftly past.

It seemed a long way up to the cabin at the nose of the rocket. Daphne paused once on the little gangway leading into the spaceship, and looked down at the ground below and the people standing around, their upturned faces white blobs far beneath. She felt rather giddy, then pulled herself together as she realised she had travelled only the first hundred feet or so of her 240,000-mile journey.

The pilot and navigator were already waiting for them in the little cabin with its mass of complicated machinery and its thickly padded couches. These were wonderfully comfortable and Michael began to bounce up and down on his until reprimanded.

‘Just lie down flat,’ said the pilot. ‘Swallow this pill—you won’t taste it—and take things easy. You’ll feel very heavy when we start, but it won’t hurt and doesn’t last long. One other thing—don’t try to get up until I tell you. Now, we’ve got just ten minutes before we start, so relax.’

It wasn’t as easy as all that, Daphne found. That ten minutes seemed to last for ever. She explored the little cabin with her eyes, wondering how anyone could ever learn what all those gadgets and controls were for. Just suppose the pilot made a mistake and pressed the wrong button…

Mother smiled at her reassuringly from the next couch, while Michael was obviously so intrigued by all the machinery that he hated having to lie down at all.

Daphne gave a jump when suddenly an electric motor started to whirr very close at hand. Then things began to happen all over the place. Switches clicked, powerful pumps began to whine, and valves snapped open down in the heart of the great rocket.

Each time she thought, ‘This is it!’, but still they didn’t move. When the voyage finally began, she wasn’t prepared for it.

A long way off, it seemed, there was a noise like a thousand waterfalls, or a thunderstorm in which the crashes followed each other so quickly that there was no moment of silence between them. The rockets had started, but were not yet delivering enough power to lift the ship.

Quickly the roar mounted, the cabin began to vibrate, and the Centaurus began to ascend from the desert, spraying the sands with flame for a hundred yards around. To Daphne, it seemed that something was pushing her down, quite gently, into the thick padding of the couch. It wasn’t at all uncomfortable, but the pressure mounted until her limbs seemed to be made of lead and it needed a deliberate effort to keep breathing.

She tried to lift her hand, and the effort to move it even a few inches was so tiring that she let it drop back on the couch. After that, she just lay limp and relaxed, waiting to see what would happen next. She wasn’t really frightened—it was too exciting for that, this feeling of infinite power sweeping her up into the sky.

There was a sudden fall in the thunder of the rockets, the feeling of immense weight ebbed away, and she could breathe more easily. Power was being reduced: they had almost escaped the Earth’s grip. A moment later silence came flooding back as the last of the motors was cut out, and all feeling of weight vanished completely.

For several minutes the pilot conferred with his navigator, checking instruments and figures. Then he swung round in his seat, smiled at the passengers and said, ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it? We’ve reached escape velocity now—25,000 miles an hour—and you won’t feel any weight again until we’re nearly at the Moon and we start the rockets to slow down.’

He rose from his seat, still holding on to it with one hand, and Daphne saw that both his feet were clear of the floor. Releasing his grip, he floated towards them like something in a slow-motion film. Daphne knew that this sort of thing happened in space, but it was weird to see it before her own eyes. And it was weirder still when it began to happen to her.

It was a long time before she got used to the idea that ‘up’ and ‘down’ simply didn’t have any meaning, and got the knack of gliding across the cabin without hitting the other side too hard, or colliding head-first with the walls. But it was such great fun that several minutes had passed before Daphne suddenly remembered what she must be missing, and dived towards the nearest of the little circular windows set in the wall of the ship.

She had expected to see Earth as a great globe hanging in space, with the seas and continents clearly visible—just like those globes you see in map-sellers’ windows.

What she saw, however, was totally unexpected and so wonderful that it took away her breath. Almost filling the sky was a tremendous, blinding crescent, the shape of a new moon, but hundreds of times bigger. The rocket must have passed over the night side of Earth, and the greater part of the planet was in darkness.

But presently, as she stared at that great shadowy circle eclipsing the stars, she could see here and there upon its face tiny patches of light, and knew that she was looking down upon the cities of mankind, shining like fireflies in the night.

It was several minutes before she could tear her eyes away from that huge crescent and the disc of darkness it embraced. As she watched, the crescent slowly narrowed, for the spaceship was still speeding into the shadow of the Earth. For a few minutes the sun would be totally eclipsed before the Centaurus came racing out into the light again, and only the Moon and the stars would be visible.

The Moon! Where was it? She moved to another window, and there it was, still looking just the same as she had always seen it from Earth. Of course, it wouldn’t be any bigger yet: the journey had scarcely begun. But in the next two days it would slowly grow until it filled the sky and they were dropping down towards its shining mountains and great, dusty plains—towards that strange and silent world that had now become Man’s first stepping-stone on the road to the stars. What would it be like? Who would she meet? Daphne’s excitement was so great that she felt certain this was one night when sleep would be impossible.

It was a lovely dream. Daphne was flying—gliding effortlessly over the ground, able to move as freely as a bird in whatever direction she pleased. She had experienced such dreams before, of course, but they had never been as vivid as this, and even the fact that, somehow, she knew she was dreaming, did not destroy the beautiful illusion.

A sudden jolt broke the spell of sleep and dragged her back to reality. She opened her eyes, stretched herself—and gave a shriek of pure terror. There was darkness all around, and wherever she reached she could feel nothing at all, only the empty air. The dream had turned suddenly to a nightmare: she was in truth floating in space, but helpless, without any power of movement…

The cabin light came on with a ‘click’ and the rocket pilot pushed his head through the curtains round the door.

‘What’s the fuss?’ he said. Then he shook his head reprimandingly. ‘There! And after all my warnings!’

Daphne felt very sheepish. It was her own fault, of course. She had loosened the broad elastic bands that held her in the bunk, and while she had been sleeping she must have gently drifted out into the room. Now she was floating in mid-air, slowly revolving, but unable to move in any direction.

‘I’ve got a good mind to leave you there as an object lesson,’ said the pilot. But his eyes were twinkling as he grabbed a pillow from the empty bunk. ‘Catch!’ he said.

The gentle impact set Daphne moving again, and a moment later she had reached the wall and was no longer helpless. Mrs Martin and Michael had now awakened and were rubbing their eyes sleepily.

‘We’re landing in an hour,’ the pilot explained. ‘We’ll have breakfast in a few minutes, and then I suggest you go to the observation windows and make yourselves comfortable.’

Breakfast was soon finished. In space, because the absence of gravity reduced physical effort to a minimum, one never had much appetite. Even Michael was satisfied with two pieces of toast and a quarter pint of milk, stored in a flexible container so that it could be squirted straight into the mouth simply by squeezing.

Pouring liquids was, of course, impossible where there was neither ‘up’ nor ‘down’. Any attempt to do so would simply have resulted in a very large drop drifting through the air until it reached the wall and spattered over everything.

The Moon was now only a few hundred miles away, and so enormous that it seemed to fill the sky. It was, indeed, no longer a globe hanging in space but a jagged landscape spread out far below. Michael had got hold of a map from somewhere and was trying to identify the chief features in the tremendous panorama towards which they were falling.

‘That’s the Sea of Rains—I think,’ he said doubtfully, pointing to a great plain flanked on two sides by mountains. ‘Yes, you can see those three big craters there in the middle. I wish they didn’t use such funny names—I can’t pronounce them. That biggest one’s Archie—Archimedes.’

Daphne looked critically at the map, then at the landscape below.

‘That isn’t the sea!’ she protested. ‘It’s just a big dry desert. You can see hills and ridges in it—and look at those canyons. Gosh! I hope we don’t fall into one of those!’

‘Well, the map calls it a sea,’ said Michael stubbornly. He turned to the pilot for an explanation.

‘The Moon’s dark areas were all christened “Seas”, hundreds of years ago—before the telescope was invented and we found what they really were,’ came the reply. ‘The names have just stuck and no one has bothered to change them. Besides, some of them are rather pretty. If you look at the map you’ll find a Sea of Serenity, a Bay of Rainbows, a Marsh of Sleep, and many others. But no more questions for a while—I’m busy! Check your safety straps—we’re going to use the rockets in a minute.’

They were now falling directly towards the Moon at several thousand miles an hour and, Daphne knew, the only way they could check their descent was to fire the rockets ahead of them to slow the spaceship down.

The Moon seemed terribly close when, with a roar that was doubly impressive after the long hours of silence, the great motors thundered into life. There was a sudden feeling of returning weight, and Daphne felt herself being pushed down into the padded seat. But the strain was nothing like as great as it had been at the take-off, and she soon grew used to it.

Through the observation window she could glimpse the white-hot pillar of flame which was checking their headlong fall against the Moon, still many miles below. The spaceship was dropping towards the heart of a great ring of mountains: when, presently, the roar of the rockets ceased, some of the taller peaks seemed already to be towering above the ship.

Below was a flat, barren plain, and suddenly Daphne caught sight of a group of tiny, circular buildings. Then the rockets flared out once more, and the scene below vanished in fire and clouds of dust blasted up by the jets. A moment later there was the gentlest of impacts, then silence.

They were on the Moon.

Daphne peered down at the rocky surface beneath. There seemed no one about, but that was understandable, for it would be dangerous to remain above ground while the rockets were in action, and the ground-crew would only now be emerging from shelter. And where were the great mountains she had seen during the descent? Apart from some low hills, the plain on which the rocket was standing was flat right out to the horizon.

Then Daphne realised how close that horizon was; the Moon was a little world (only a quarter the size of Earth, wasn’t it?) and so its surface curved very steeply. The mountain walls of the crater were out of sight below the edge of the plain.

Some strange-looking vehicles were approaching from behind a low range of hills about a mile away. They drew up to the base of the rocket and presently Daphne heard loud clankings and bangings. Then there was a slight hiss of air, and the cabin door opened slowly.

‘Just step through,’ said the pilot. ‘It’s exactly like going down in an Underground lift.’

He was quite right. The Martins found themselves in a small, circular box, a mechanical voice advised them to stand clear of the doors, and they felt themselves dropping down to the ground. When the doors opened again they stepped out—much to their surprise—into the interior of a large motor bus, entirely roofed with thick sheets of transparent plastic.

It was such a remarkable transformation that Daphne wondered how it was done. Then she saw the little lift chamber rising through space again, climbing up the side of the great rocket on an extending arm rather like a fire escape ladder. A moment later it brought down the pilot and navigator, and the bus then set off briskly across the crater floor. It was all very businesslike and methodical, and not in the least romantic.

‘I wonder where Daddy is?’ queried Michael.

‘We’ll be meeting him in the Observatory,’ said his mother, hoping that the luggage was going to catch up with them safely. ‘Look—there it is!’

They had rounded the hills and were driving over an almost level plain, from which great spidery metal frameworks reared into the sky. Daphne would never have guessed that they were telescopes, for there was no sign of the silver domes which were the trademark of observatories on Earth. Of course, it had been silly to expect them; here on the Moon there were no winds or rains, and the most delicate scientific equipment could be left out in the open for ever without the slightest danger of it coming to harm.

The astronomers themselves, however, lived in a brightly lit, underground world fifty feet below the surface of the Moon. To reach it, the bus drove down into a deep cutting, which ended in wide metal doors that opened slowly as they approached.

They found themselves in a chamber just large enough to hold their vehicle, the doors closed behind them, and there was a hiss of air. Then the doors ahead opened, and the bus slid forward into a large underground garage. There was air around them again; Daphne could tell that by the sudden return of sound from the outside world.

‘There’s Daddy!’ shouted Michael excitedly, pointing through the window of the bus.

Professor Martin was waving back at them from the middle of a small reception committee waiting in the corner of the garage. A moment later he had come aboard and there was much kissing and hugging as he greeted his family.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘did you have a nice trip? Nobody space-sick?’

There was a chorus of indignant denials from the seasoned travellers.

‘I’m glad to hear it. Now, come along to my rooms. I expect you can do with a rest and something to eat.’

For the next five minutes Daphne was learning to walk again. The Moon’s low gravity gave her only a sixth of her normal weight, and every step took her a yard into the air. But there was a cure for this—the visitors were all given wide belts to which were attached heavy lead weights. Even with these, they were still abnormally light, but walking was a good deal easier. Daphne no longer felt that the first draught would blow her away.

‘When you get used to it here,’ said Professor Martin, ‘you can leave off the weights; you’ll notice that none of us wears them. It’s simply a matter of practice, just learning not to move too quickly. But when we want to, we can jump all right!’

Without any apparent effort, he shot up to the ceiling, a good twenty feet above, and came falling gently back a few seconds later.

‘But don’t try this sort of thing yourselves,’ he warned, ‘until you’re quite used to it here—or you may land on your head! Now come along and meet my staff.’

Daphne had always assumed—although she couldn’t have said why—that astronomers were usually old men with beards and far-away expressions, caused through too many hours of looking through telescopes. (Daddy, of course, was an exception—he always was.)

She soon found, however, that none of the Observatory staff fitted this description at all. Most of them were in the twenties or thirties, and almost half of them were women. And the expressions of some of the younger men were not at all far-away; quite the reverse, in fact.

After these introductions they followed Professor Martin through a series of wide passages that branched into numerous intersections, bearing such signs as Central Air, Administration III, Medical, Dormitory Block, or intriguingly, Danger! Keep Out! They might, Daphne thought, have been inside some large building on Earth. Only that curious feeling of lightness, which in a few days she would no longer notice, told her that she was now on another world.

Professor Martin’s private suite consisted of four large rooms in the residential section of the colony. They were light and airy, despite the fact that they were so far underground. Mrs Martin took one look at the decorations and decided that something would have to be done about them.

As soon as they had settled down in the flimsy but very comfortable chairs, Professor Martin lit his pipe again and began to blow clouds of smoke at the ceiling, where the pumps of the air-conditioning plant quickly sucked it away.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘it’s nice to see you all here. I’m sorry about the twins, but I couldn’t possibly wangle shipping space for them—and anyway they’re much too young.’

‘You haven’t told us, darling,’ said his wife (and there was an ominous look in her eye), ‘just why you couldn’t come down to Earth.’

Professor Martin coughed nervously. ‘It’s really a most extraordinary coincidence. Two days before I was coming home something I’ve been waiting for all my life happened. We caught a supernova on the rise.’

‘That sounds awfully impressive. Exactly what does it mean?’

‘A supernova is a star that blows up in such a colossal explosion that it suddenly becomes hundreds of millions of times brighter. In fact, for a few days it shines with as much light as a whole universe. We don’t know what causes it—it’s one of the great unsolved problems of astronomy.

‘Anyway, this has just happened to a fairly near star, and by a terrific stroke of luck we spotted it in the early stages, before the explosion reached its peak. So we’ve got a wonderful series of observations, but we’ve all been working flat out for the last few days.

‘I’ve got things organised now, although it will be some weeks before we’ve finished. The nova is slowly dying down and we want to watch what happens as it returns to normal. At its brightest, by the way, it was so brilliant that even down on Earth you could see it in the middle of the day. I expect you heard about that on the radio.’

‘I do remember something,’ said Mrs Martin vaguely, ‘but I didn’t take much notice.’

Profession Martin threw up his hands in mock despair. ‘Something that hasn’t happened for five hundred years—and you don’t notice! A whole sun, perhaps with all its planets, blows up in the most gigantic explosion ever recorded—and it hasn’t had the slightest effect on you!’

‘It certainly has,’ his wife retorted. ‘It’s upset all my holiday arrangements and made me go to the Moon instead of Majorca. But I don’t really mind, dear,’ she continued with a smile. ‘This certainly is a change.’

Daphne had been listening to this conversation with a kind of fascinated horror. The picture of the exploding star—a whole sun, perhaps with inhabited worlds circling round it—was one she could not get out of her mind.

‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘could this happen here?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, could our sun become—what did you call it?—a supernova? And if it did, what would happen to us? I suppose the Earth would melt.’

‘Melt! My goodness, it wouldn’t have time! There’d just be a puff of gas, and it would be gone! But don’t worry—the chances against it happening are millions and millions to one. Let’s talk about something more cheerful. We’ve got a dance on here tonight and I’d like you all to come to it.’

‘A dance? Here on the Moon?’

‘Why ever not? We try to live normal lives, with all the recreation we can get. We’ve a cinema, our own little orchestra, a very good drama group, sports clubs, and many other things to keep us happy when we’re off-duty. And we have a dance twice a day—at noon and midnight.’

‘Twice a day?’ gasped Daphne. ‘How do you ever manage to do any work?’

Professor Martin’s eyes twinkled. ‘I mean twice every lunar day,’ he replied. ‘Don’t forget that’s nearly a month of Earth time. It’s just before noon now, and the Sun won’t set for another seven days. But our clocks and calendars keep Earth-time, because human beings can’t sleep for two weeks and then work for another two without a break! It’s a bit confusing at first, but you soon get used to it.’

He glanced at the clock set high in the opposite wall—a very complicated clock with several dials and three pairs of hands.

‘That reminds me,’ he said. ‘Time we went to the “Ritz”—that’s what we call our canteen. Lunch is served.’

Very late that evening a tired but contented Daphne crept wearily to bed. The dance had been quite a success—once she had learned how to coordinate her movements and avoid soaring, dragging her partner with her.

She had been reminded very vividly of an old film she had once seen in which there had been some ball-room sequences in slow-motion. It had been exactly like that—the same graceful, easy movements. After this, she felt it would never be much fun dancing on Earth again. There was the additional advantage, too, that her feet weren’t aching in the slightest. After all, she weighed about twenty pounds here!

She tried to relax and sink into sleep, but although her body was tired her brain was still active; she had crowded too many experiences into a single short day. And she had met such interesting people, too. Some of the young astronomers—many of them straight from college—had been really very charming and they had all offered to show her round the Observatory tomorrow. It was going to be difficult to make a choice…

Yet Daphne’s last thoughts, when sleep finally came, were not concerned with this underground colony or the people who lived, worked and played here. She saw instead the silent, empty plain that lay burning above her head, blasted by the noon-day sun, although down here the clocks told her it was 12.30 p.m., Greenwich time.

Close to the sun would be the great thin crescent of the New Earth, which would slowly wax until a fortnight later it would be a blinding white disc, flooding all this strange land with its midnight radiance. And scattered all across the black velvet of the sky, shining steadfastly by day and night, would be the countless legions of the stars.

Among them now was a new-comer, slowly fading yet still one of the brightest stars in the sky. Nova Taurus, Daddy had called it—and he had called it a near star, too. Yet that gigantic explosion had occurred when Elizabeth the First was on the throne, and the light had only just reached Earth, travelling at almost a million miles every five seconds.

Daphne shivered a little at the thought of this unimaginable abyss, besides which the distance between Earth and Moon was scarcely a hair’s breadth.

‘Here are your dark glasses,’ said Norman. ‘Put them on as soon as the rockets start firing.’

Daphne accepted them absentmindedly, never taking her eyes from the shining monster that stood out there on the plain two miles away. From the summit of the low ridge on which the observation post was built, she could see almost the whole of the great launching site from which the rockets left the Moon on their outward journey. It was strange to think that although she had travelled in a spaceship herself, she had never before seen one taking off.

The ship standing poised on the sun-baked lava was much bigger than the rocket that had brought her from Earth, and it had very much further to travel. In a few seconds it would be climbing away from the Moon—away even from the Earth and Sun—on its long journey to Mars, now almost a hundred million miles distant.

There was not the slightest sound when those blazing, incandescent jets suddenly erupted from the ship. Almost at once the vessel was veiled by clouds of dust blasted up from the plain, clouds which formed a kind of shimmering mist within which burned an incredibly brilliant sun. With breathtaking slowness, the spaceship rose from the ground and began to climb towards the star-filled sky.

Now it was free from its dust cloud, and Daphne understood why she had been given dark glasses to wear. She could easily believe, as someone had told her, that those rocket jets were hotter and brighter than the sun.

Through the glasses she could follow the slow ascent of the ship and could dimly see the lunar landscape beneath, lit by the reflected glare. Now the rocket was gaining speed; about a minute had passed and it was more than twenty miles high. Daphne took off the glasses and watched the ship dwindle against the stars until, quite abruptly, it vanished. The motors had been cut off; they had done their work, and the great rocket would now coast as silently and effortlessly as a flying arrow on its months’-long journey to Mars.

‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’ said Norman softly. ‘I think the fact that you can’t hear a sound makes it all the more impressive.’

That was perfectly true. Daphne had now been on the Moon for three days, and she was still not used to the idea of living, as it were, on the frontier of a world totally different from anything she had ever known before.

Inside the rabbit-warren of the Observatory there was air, constant temperature—and sound. Apart from the lessened gravity, one might have been on Earth. But she had only to climb one of the stairways leading to the look-out rooms on the surface—and then there was no doubt that she was on another world.

Between her and the hostile lunar landscape was nothing more than a few inches of perspex, and the absolute silence of the Moon lay all around her like an almost palpable blanket. She was an alien here, an intruder in a world to which she did not belong. She felt as a water-spider must do when it ventures into a strange and treacherous element protected by its little bubble of air.

Yet, whenever she could, Daphne liked to spend an hour here, simply looking out across the plain or trying to draw the mountains whose peaks were just visible in the west. Those distant summits, higher than almost any range on Earth, were now ablaze beneath the mid-afternoon sun, although above them the stars were shining brilliantly in the jet-black sky.

Daphne had met Norman Phillips on the night of the dance, and had found him very useful as a guide. He was a young geologist (or selenologist, if one wanted to be accurate) who was not normally stationed at the Observatory but was on leave at the moment from the second lunar base, on the other side of the Moon. The fact that he was off duty gave him a considerable advantage over the other scientists, many of whom would have been quite willing to show Daphne round.

Professor Martin approved of this arrangement, but had been inconsiderate enough to suggest that Michael be included in the party. This proposal had not been received by Norman with any great enthusiasm, especially when he found that Michael did all the talking and wanted to be shown how everything worked.

As a result, the first few trips had been rather slow affairs and Daphne had become bored with technicalities. Fortunately, they had been able to jettison Michael at the Central Control Room, where he had attached himself to the Chief Engineer and since then had been seen only at mealtimes.

Daphne had now sorted out her original chaotic impressions and had acquired a fairly clear picture of the Observatory. At any rate, she no longer got lost when she was alone. For almost twenty years men had been tunnelling and excavating here beneath the floor of the great crater, only a few miles from the spot where the first rocket had landed on the Moon.

In the early days, the colonists had devoted all their efforts to the sheer problem of keeping alive. To avoid the fierce temperature changes between night and day, they had gone underground, leaving only their instruments on the surface. The setting up of the lunar base had been an achievement almost as great as the crossing of space itself. Air, water, food—everything had, in the early days, to be carried across the quarter-million-mile gulf from Earth.

Soon, however, the Moon had started to yield its treasures as the survey parties uncovered its mineral resources. Now the colony could make its own air and for some years had been able to grow almost all its food supplies. Daphne had seen the strange underground ‘farms’ where acres of plants grew with incredible swiftness in a hot, humid atmosphere, beneath the glare of enormous lights.

One day, Norman told her, it might be possible to develop plants which could be cultivated out on the airless surface of the Moon, and then the green carpet of life would begin to spread across the empty plains, changing the face of a world.

Now that the early pioneering days were over, existence in the colony was a little less austere, although by the standards of Earth it was spartan enough. There were quite extensive games and recreation rooms, and although the living quarters were very small they were also extremely comfortable.

What Daphne liked most, however, were the people themselves. They seemed much more friendly and helpful than on Earth, and she didn’t think that was merely because she was the Director’s daughter. Somehow she got the impression that they all felt part of one big family—they knew they had to work together in order to survive at all.

‘Well,’ said Norman with a grin, ‘what are you thinking about now?’

Daphne woke from her day dreams with a start. ‘I was just wondering,’ she said, ‘what it really feels like to live here for a long time. Don’t you ever miss the Earth? Surely you must get fed up with all these bare rocks and that sky full of stars! I know they’re wonderfully—well, dramatic—but they never change. Don’t you sometimes wish you had clouds, or green fields, or the sea? I think I should miss the sea most of all.’

Norman smiled, although a little wistfully. ‘Yes, we miss them sometimes, but usually we’re too busy to brood over it. You see, when you’ve got a big, exciting job to do, nothing else really matters. Besides, we go on Earth-leave every two years, and then I guess we appreciate what the old planet’s got to offer a lot more than you stay-at-homes!’

He gave a little laugh. ‘It isn’t as if we can’t see Earth whenever we want to. After all, it’s there all the time, hanging up in the sky. From this side of the Moon, you can always see your own home town—at least, when it isn’t covered with clouds. Oh, that reminds me—I’ve been able to grab one of the smaller telescopes for you. Let’s go along and see if it’s ready.’

It seemed a little odd that it had taken three days to arrange this. The trouble was that the telescopes were in almost continual use on various research programmes, and there was no time for casual star-gazing. Moreover, the really big instruments were permanently fitted up for photographic work, so it was impossible to look through them even when they were free.

The room to which Norman led Daphne was only just below the Moon’s surface, as they had to climb a flight of steps from the main Observatory level to reach it. It was quite small, and crowded with apparatus in a state of extreme disorder—at least, so this seemed to Daphne. An elderly man with a very worried expression was doing something with a soldering iron to the inside of what looked like a complicated television set. He did not seem too pleased at the interruption.

‘I can give you only thirty minutes,’ he said. ‘I’ve promised Professor Martin to get this spectrum analyser fixed by eighteen hours. What do you want to look at?’

‘What have you got to offer?’

‘Let’s see—ten planets, about fifty satellites, a few million nebulae and several billion stars. Take your choice.’

‘We can’t see many of them in thirty minutes, so let’s start with—oh, say the Andromeda nebula.’

The astronomer looked at the clock, did some mental calculations, and pressed several buttons. There was a faint whirring of electric motors and the lights began to dim.

‘What do I look through?’ asked Daphne, who had seen nothing at all that looked like any part of a telescope.

‘Sit at this desk and use this eyepiece. Focus with the knob on the right—that’s the idea. Got it?’

She was peering into a circle of intense, blackness, across which the stars were moving so quickly that they looked like thin lines of light. Overhead, the great telescope was swinging across the sky, seeking for its incredibly distant target. Suddenly the image steadied, the stars became tiny, needle-sharp points, and among them floated something that was not a star at all.

It was hard to describe, hard even for the eye to grasp. An oval of fiery mist, its edges fading so imperceptibly into the surrounding blackness that no one could tell where it ended, the Great Nebula glimmered like a ghost beyond the veil of the stars.

‘Our neighbours,’ said Norman quietly. ‘The very next universe to our own—yet it’s so far away that the light you’re seeing now began its journey before Man existed on the Earth.’

‘But what is it?’ whispered Daphne.

‘Well, I suppose you know that all the stars are gathered in great disc-shaped clusters—island universes, someone called them—each containing thousands of millions of suns. We’re right inside one of them—the Milky Way. And that’s the next nearest, floating out there. It’s too far away for you to see the separate stars, though you can in the bigger telescopes. Beyond it are millions of other universes, as far as we can see.’

‘With worlds like our Earth in them?’

‘Who knows? At that distance you couldn’t see the Sun, let alone the Earth! But I expect there must be any number of planets out there, and on many of them there’ll probably be life of some kind. I wonder if we’ll ever find out? But let’s come a bit nearer home—we haven’t much time.’

To Daphne, the next half hour was a revelation. Overhead, out on the dusty, silent plain, the great telescope ranged across the sky, gathering in the wonders of the heavens and presenting them to her gaze. Beautiful groups of coloured stars, like jewels gleaming with all the hues of the rainbow—clouds of incandescent mist, twisted into strange shapes by unimaginable forces—Jupiter and his family of moons—and, perhaps most wonderful of all, Saturn floating serenely in his circle of rings, like some intricate work of art rather than a world eight times the size of Earth…

And now she understood the magic that had lured the astronomers up into the clear mountain skies, and at last out across space to the Moon.

Slowly the outer doors of the great underground garage slid apart, and the bus began to climb the steep ramp that led to the surface of the Moon. It still seemed strange to Daphne that the only means of transport on the Moon was something as old-fashioned as a motor-bus, but like many of the peculiar things she had met here it was reasonable enough when explained. Rockets were much too expensive for journeys of only a few hundred miles, and as there was no atmosphere air transport was, of course, impossible.

The big vehicle was really a sort of mobile hotel in which a couple of dozen people could live comfortably for a week or more. It was about forty feet long and mounted on two sets of caterpillar tractors, operated by powerful electric motors. The driver had a little raised cabin at the front, and the passenger compartment was fitted with comfortable seats that became bunks at night. At the back was a kitchen, storeroom, and even a tiny shower-bath.

Daphne looked around to see who her fellow passengers were. Besides her own family there were ten other travellers, most of them—like Norman—scientists going to relieve the staff at Number Two Base. She knew them all by sight, if not by name, so it looked as if there would be plenty of company for the trip.

The bus was now rolling briskly across the crater floor at about forty miles an hour, heading due north. It was easy to make good speed here as the ground was quite level and any obstacles had been bulldozed out of the way when the rough track they were following was made. Daphne hoped that there would soon be a change of scenery; it would get rather dull if it was like this all the way.

Her wish was quickly granted. Far ahead, a line of jagged peaks had now become visible on the horizon, and minute by minute they climbed higher into the sky. At first, because of the steep curvature of the Moon’s surface, it seemed that they were approaching nothing more than a modest range of hills, but presently Daphne saw that ahead of them lay a mountain wall several miles in height.

She looked in vain for any pass or valley through which they could penetrate—and then, with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, she realised that they were attempting nothing less than a direct frontal assault on that titanic barrier.

Ahead of them the ground tilted abruptly in a slope as steep as the roof of a house. There was a sudden deepening in the vibration of the motors, and then, scarcely checking its speed, the great bus charged up the apparently endless, rock-strewn escarpment that seemed to stretch ahead of them all the way to the stars. Daphne gave a little cry of fright as the change of level thrust her back in the seat, and Mrs Martin also looked none too happy as she turned anxious eyes on her husband.

Professor Martin smiled back at his family with a mischievous twinkle. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s perfectly safe—another advantage of our low gravity. Just sit back and enjoy the view!’

It was worth enjoying. Soon they could see for miles, far back across the great plain over which they had been travelling. As more and more of the crater wall came into view, Daphne saw that it was built up in a series of vast terraces, the innermost of which they had now nearly surmounted.

Presently they reached the crest, and turned left along it instead of descending into the valley ahead.

It took them nearly two hours to reach the outer rim of the crater—two hours of doubling back and forth along great valleys, of exhilarating and terrifying charges up those impossible slopes. At last the whole of the walled plain lay spread out behind them, while ahead was range after range of broken hills. They could travel more quickly now, for the downward slopes were much less steep than those inside the crater, as was usually the case on the Moon. Even so, it was another two hours before they had finished the descent and reached open country again.

One gets used to anything in time, even to driving across the Moon. At last, the featureless landscape that now flowed uneventfully past lulled Daphne into sleep. She operated the lever that turned her chair into a couch and settled down for the night.

She woke once, hours later, when the tilt of the floor told her that the bus was climbing again. It was quite dark; the blinds had been drawn to keep out the sunlight still blazing from the velvet sky above. Everyone was asleep, and Daphne was not long in rejoining them.

The next time she woke the blinds were up, the sunlight was shining into the cabin, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking coming from the little galley. The bus was moving rather slowly along the crest of a low range of hills, and Daphne was surprised to see that all the other passengers were clustered around the observation windows at the rear.

She went over to the window and looked back across the miles of land through which they had travelled during the night. When she had seen it last, Earth had been hanging low in the southern sky—but where was it now? Only the silver tip of its great crescent still showed above the horizon; while she had been sleeping, it had been dropping lower and lower in the sky.

They were passing over the rim of the Moon, into the mysterious, hidden land where the light of Earth had never shone—the land that, before the coming of the rocket, no human eyes had ever seen.

Millions of years ago, the lava welling up from the secret heart of the Moon had frozen and congealed to form this great, wrinkled plain. In all that time, nothing had ever moved upon its surface; not even the faintest breath of wind had ever stirred the thin layer of meteor dust that, through the ages, had drifted down from the stars.

But there was movement now. Glittering in the sunlight like some strange, armoured insect, the powerful motor-vehicle was racing swiftly towards its goal—the Second Lunar Base, which had been built five years before as headquarters for the exploration of the Moon’s hidden hemisphere. Unlike the Observatory, Base Two was not underground, and when Daphne first caught sight of its buildings they reminded her irresistibly of Eskimo igloos.

They were, so Norman told her, simply plastic domes blown up like balloons and painted silver to conserve heat. Each had its private airlock, and was linked to its neighbour by a short connecting tube. There was no sign of life, but a pressurised tractor—a small edition of the machine in which Daphne was riding—was joined to one of the domes by a flexible coupling rather like a great hose-pipe, wide enough for men to walk through.

‘That’s Joe Hargreaves’s tractor,’ said Norman. ‘He’d just started on a thousand mile circuit before I left. I wonder if he’s found anything interesting.’

‘What was he looking for?’

Norman grinned. ‘I don’t suppose it sounds very exciting, but we’re trying to make an accurate geological map of the Moon, showing where all its mineral deposits are—particularly things like uranium, of course. So we send these tractors all over the place, drilling holes and collecting samples. But it’s going to be centuries before the job’s finished.’

It certain wasn’t as glamorous as the astronomers’ work, Daphne decided, but she realised that it was just as important. And Norman seemed to find it interesting enough, for he was still talking about magnetic surveys and other mysteries of his trade when their bus was coupled up to one of the domes and they walked through the airlock. The flexible connection didn’t fit very well and there was a rather frightening hiss of escaping air, but as no one seemed to worry, Daphne supposed it was all right.

They found themselves beneath a large dome about fifty feet across. The level rock floor was littered with packing cases, pieces of machinery, and all the miscellaneous stores needed for life on this inhospitable world. However, there was not a single human being in sight.

Professor Martin looked a trifle annoyed. ‘Where is everyone?’ he said to the driver. ‘You radioed that we were coming, didn’t you?’

‘They must all be busy in one of the other domes, I suppose, but it’s a bit odd.’

At that moment a small, grey-haired man came bustling breathlessly into the chamber and hurried up to Professor Martin.

‘Sorry we weren’t ready to meet you, Professor,’ he gasped, ‘but something terrific has just happened. Come and see what we’ve found.’

‘That’s Dr Anstey,’ Norman whispered to Daphne. ‘He’s in charge here. A nice chap, but always going off the deep end about something. Let’s see what it is this time.’

They followed the excited little scientist through one of the connecting corridors into the next dome. It was packed with men who looked around as they approached, then cleared a way for Professor Martin. As she followed her father into the centre of the room, Daphne saw that they were approaching a perfectly ordinary table on which was standing a far-from-ordinary object.

At first sight, it resembled a fragment of multicoloured coral from the bed of some Pacific lagoon. No—perhaps it was more like a piece of petrified cactus, strangely coloured with reds and greens and golds. It stood on a slab of rock in which it seemed to be rooted like a stalagmite—but it was easy to tell that it was no mere mineral formation.

It was Life—here on the barren, airless Moon, here on the world which for so long had been the symbol of empty desolation! As she stood in that quiet, yet crowded, room, Daphne knew that she was present at one of the great moments in the history of lunar exploration.

Presently Professor Martin broke the silence. He turned to a grimy, unshaven man who, Daphne guessed, was the leader of the party that had just returned.

‘Where did you find it, Hargreaves?’ he asked.

‘About 60 North, 155 West—just where the Ocean of Eternity joins the Lake of Dreams. There’s a valley about five miles long and a couple of miles wide, and it’s full of these things, acres and acres of them, all the colours of the rainbow. They’re all sizes from a few inches high up to about twenty feet.’

Professor Martin leaned forward and gingerly touched the enigma standing motionless on the table-top.

‘It feels just like rock,’ he said, and there was disappointment in his voice. ‘We’re a few million years too late—it’s fossilised.’

‘I don’t think so,’ replied Hargreaves, shaking his head vigorously. ‘I can’t prove it, but when I was in that valley I somehow knew that these—plants, or whatever you can call them—are alive and still growing. Maybe they grow so slowly that it takes them thousands of years to get this big. They’re like nothing we’ve got on Earth, but I’m sure they’re alive.’

‘Perhaps you’re right; that’s a problem for the biologists to work out. Anyway, congratulations—this is going to make you immortal, because when they give this thing a name they’re sure to call it after you!’

‘Just Joe’s luck,’ said Norman in disgust. ‘The only excitement I ever get on these trips is when my tractor breaks down!’

This discovery had completely overshadowed the visit of Professor Martin and his family, which would otherwise have been quite an important event in the life of the little community. But presently the normal routine was resumed, and the scientists drifted back to their work, with many backward glances at the silent, multicoloured entity that had so suddenly changed all their preconceived ideas about the Moon. They were no longer the only living creatures on its surface, and perhaps—who knows?—there were other and still stranger beings in the hidden places of this mysterious world.

Rather belatedly, Professor Martin introduced his family to Dr Anstey, who still seemed in a somewhat highly-strung condition.

‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he said absentmindedly. ‘How long will you be staying here?’

‘Until the transport goes back, the day after tomorrow,’ replied Professor Martin.

Dr Anstey suddenly seemed to come out of his trance and remembered his duty as a host. He smiled apologetically at Mrs Martin.

‘I’m afraid you’ll find the quarters a little cramped, but we’ve done our best. This is the first time we’ve had visitors here on the back of the Moon!’

Mrs Martin was now becoming accustomed to unusual residences, and was not in the least surprised to find herself ushered into a tiny, first-floor room tucked under the curve of the dome. Set in the outer wall was a small porthole through which one could look to the south across a wide plain, broken at intervals by low, razor-backed hills.

With a sigh of relief, Mrs Martin sank into one of the pneumatic armchairs. It was a little disturbing to think that not only was all the furniture kept inflated by air-pressure, but so also was the very building itself. What would happen if there was a puncture? Presumably the whole place would collapse like a pricked balloon as the air rushed out into space. Oh, well, it was no use worrying…

Perhaps Daphne was engrossed in similar thoughts, for she walked to the curving wall, prodded it gently with her finger, and then, apparently reassured, settled down in the other chair.

Her mother wondered just what effect this trip was having on her. It was easy to tell with Michael; he was in his element and having the time of his life. But with Daphne one could never be quite sure. She seemed to be enjoying herself, yet she was very quiet and scarcely ever made any comments on the surprising things that were happening around her. Perhaps, like so many of her generation, she had learned to take the incredible for granted.

That, as it happened, was scarcely true. The things she had seen on the Moon—above all, her glimpses through the giant telescope of the sky’s countless wonders—were beginning to fire Daphne’s imagination. Now at last she understood that science was not merely an affair of dry equations and dull text-books, but had a poetry and a magic of its own. A new world had been opened up before her—it was a world she could enter if she wished.

She had never realised, until Professor Martin had mentioned it casually, how many well-known women astronomers there had been—right back to the most famous of them all, Caroline Herschel, who had helped her brother Sir William record his observations during the long winter nights, even when the ink was freezing in its well.

In the twentieth century more and more women had made their names in this rapidly advancing field of science, until in some of its branches they had outnumbered the men. All these facts had been quite unknown to Daphne, and they were beginning to fire her with a new ambition.

Two days at the Second Base passed very swiftly. There was, Daphne discovered, a spirit here quite unlike that at the Observatory. Perhaps the fact that the Earth was no longer visible in the sky, giving not only light but a kind of moral support, provided part of the explanation. Here indeed, it seemed, was the true frontier of the unknown—and it was an exciting experience to be living on it.

Almost every day the little pressurised tractors were setting out on their raids into unexplored lunar territory, or returning from earlier expeditions. Daphne attended the briefing of a crew about to leave on a ten-day trip that would cover over a thousand miles. She had once seen a film showing how bomber crews in the Second World War were prepared for their missions. There was the same atmosphere of adventure coupled with scientific efficiency as Norman and his companions consulted their maps and discussed their route with Dr Anstey.

The conversation was too technical for Daphne to follow much of it, but she was fascinated by the wonderful names of the regions across which the expedition would be travelling. When the far side of the Moon had been mapped, men had continued the tradition already set on the visible hemisphere and had used the most poetical names they could imagine for the great plains, while calling the craters themselves after famous scientists.

Before he left, Norman gave Daphne a souvenir to take back to Earth. It was a beautifully coloured mass of crystals growing out of some strange lunar rock; he told her its name, although it was much too long to remember. As she stared at it in fascination, Norman explained: ‘Pretty, isn’t it? We’ve found it on only one part of the Moon—the Gulf of Solitude—and it doesn’t occur on Earth at all. So it’s really unique.’

Then he paused and said awkwardly, ‘Well, it’s been awfully nice showing you around. I don’t think that anyone else has ever seen quite as much of the Moon in such a short time! And—I hope you’ll be coming back some day.’

Daphne remembered these words as, through the observation windows of the dome, she watched Norman’s little tractor disappear over the edge of the Moon on its way into the unknown south. What would he find on this expedition? Would he be as lucky as Hargreaves?

It was still early in the long lunar morning when they began the homeward journey. Professor Martin had finished his official business, and in any case they could wait no longer—they had a spaceship to catch. That was something to be proud of! Not a mere train or a commonplace aircraft—but a spaceship!

Daphne was fast asleep when they finally reached the Observatory. She woke with a start when the steady vibration of the bus finally ceased, and found to her surprise that they were once more back in the big underground garage. Sleepily clutching her suitcase, she followed Mrs Martin back to their old rooms, where she promptly resumed her interrupted slumbers.

Only a few minutes later, it seemed, her mother was shaking her by the shoulder and saying it was time to get up again. Her last day on the Moon had arrived; there was luggage to be packed, farewells to be made and—this was something no one had warned her about—some pills to be taken under the watchful eye of the Observatory Medical Officer. She was going back into a gravity field six times as strong as the one she had now become used to, and the consequences might be unpleasant unless the right precautions were taken.

Even Michael was a little subdued as they entered the garage for the last time to drive out to the waiting spaceship. The great gleaming pillar of metal was standing there on the open plain with the brilliant earthlight flashing from its sides. The tractor drove up to the base of the ship and they prepared to enter the lift that would carry them up to the airlock high above their heads.

Professor Martin was saying goodbye to his wife, and presently he came over to the children.

‘I rather wish I were going back with you,’ he said with a smile, ‘but perhaps you understand now why I came here in the first place. When you’ve had time to sort yourselves out, write and tell me what you thought about the Moon, won’t you? Oh—and one other thing! Don’t be too superior to all your friends when you do get back to Earth!’

Then the metal doors silently separated them, to open again a minute later into the cabin of the spaceship.

To Daphne, it seemed incredible that only a fortnight ago she had entered this cabin for the first time on a distant world called Earth. So much had happened in those days; what she had seen here would colour all her life.

She knew that nothing would ever seem quite the same to her again. Earth was no longer everything that mattered—no longer the centre of the universe. It was only one world among many, merely the first of the planets on which men had lived. One day, perhaps, it would not even seem the most important…

The thunder of the rockets burst in upon her day-dreams and brought her back to the present. She felt the thrust of increasing weight as she sank into her couch, and once again her limbs became suddenly like lead. The massed millions of horsepower safely chained by the gleaming instruments on the control board were taking her home—taking her away from the cold and silent beauty of the Moon.

The crater rings, the dark chasms, the great plains with their magic and mysterious names—all these were falling swiftly away beneath the climbing ship. In a few hours, the Moon would be no more than a distant globe, dwindling in space.

But one day, Daphne knew, she would return. This world, not Earth, would be her home. At last she had found her ambition, although as yet she had breathed a word of it to no one. There would be years of study ahead, but in the end she would join the quest for the secrets of the stars.

Her holiday was over.

Earthlight

First published Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1951

Not previously collected in book form

I am very proud of the fact that the Apollo-15 crew gave this name to a crater which they drove past in their lunar rover. On their return to earth, they sent me a beautiful 3-D map bearing the inscription: ‘To Arthur Clarke with best personal regards from the crew of Apollo 15 and many thanks for your visions in space.’

I

If it weren’t for the fact,’ said Conrad Wheeler morosely, ‘that it might be considered disrespectful I’d say that the Old Man is completely nuts. And not just slightly touched like the rest of the people I’ve met on the Moon.’

He looked balefully at Sid Jamieson, two years his senior on the staff of the Observatory. The latter grinned goodnaturedly and refused to rise to the bait. ‘When you’ve known the Old Man as long as I have,’ he said, ‘you’ll realise he doesn’t do anything like this without a very good reason.’

‘It had better be good! My series of spectrograms was supposed to be finished tonight—and now look at the ‘scope!’

The giant dome that housed the thousand-inch reflector was a shambles, or so a casual visitor would have thought. Even the natives were somewhat appalled by the confusion. A small army of technicians was gathered round the base of the great telescope, which was now pointing aimlessly at the zenith. Aimlessly because the dome of the Observatory was closed and sealed against the outer vacuum. It was strange to see men unprotected by space-suits walking over the tessellated floor, to hear voices ringing where normally no slightest sound could be heard.

High up on a balcony on the far side of the dome the Director was giving orders into a microphone. His voice, enormously amplified, roared from the speakers that had been specially installed for the occasion. ‘Mirror crew—stand clear!’

There was a scurrying round the base of the telescope: then an expectant pause.

‘Lower away!’

With infinite slowness the great disc of quartz, that had cost a hundred million to make, was lowered from its cell to the strange vehicle beneath the telescope. The ninety-foot-wide truck sank visibly on its scores of tiny balloon tyres as it took up the weight of the immense mirror. Then the hoisting gear was released and with a purr of motors the truck and its precious cargo began to move slowly down the ramp leading to the resurfacing room.

It was a breathtaking sight. The men scattered over the floor were utterly dwarfed by the lattice-work of the telescope towering hundreds of feet above them. And the mirror itself, over eighty feet in diameter, seemed like a lake of fire as it reflected the glare of overhead lights. When at last it had left the room it was as though dusk had suddenly fallen.

‘And now they’ve got to put it back!’ grunted Wheeler. ‘I suppose that will take even longer.’

‘That’s right,’ said his companion cheerfully. ‘Much longer. Why, last time we resurfaced the mirror—’ The amplifiers drowned his voice.

‘Four hours twenty-six minutes,’ remarked the Director in a fifty-watt aside. ‘Not too bad. Okay—get her back and carry on.’

There was a click as he switched off the microphone. In a strained and hostile silence the observatory staff watched his small rather plump figure leave the balcony. After a discreet interval someone said, ‘Damn!’ in a very determined voice. The assistant chief computer did a wicked thing. She lit a cigarette and threw the ash on the sacred floor.

‘Well!’ exploded Wheeler. ‘He might have told us what it was all about! It’s bad enough to stop the work of the whole observatory while we get the big mirror out when it’s not due for resurfacing for months. But to tell us to put the blasted thing back as soon as we’ve dismounted it, without a word of explanation…’ He left the sentence in mid-air and looked at his companion for support.

‘Take it easy,’ said Jamieson with a grin. ‘The Old Man’s not cracked and you know it. Therefore he’s got a good reason for what he’s doing. Also he’s not the secretive sort—therefore he’s keeping quiet because he has to. And there must be a very good reason for risking the near-mutiny he’s got on his hands now. Orders from Earth, I’d say. One doesn’t interrupt a research programme like ours just for a whim. Hello, here comes Old Mole—what’s he got to say?’

‘Old Mole’—alias Dr Robert Molton—came trotting towards them, carrying the inevitable pile of photographs. He was probably the only member of the Observatory staff who even remotely resembled the popular conception of an astronomer. All the rest, one could see at a glance, were businessmen, undergraduates of the athletic rather than the intellectual type, artists, prosperous bookmakers, journalists or rising young politicians. Anything but astronomers.

Dr Molton was the exception that proved the rule. He looked out at the world and his beloved photographic plates through thick rimless lenses. His clothes were always just a little too tidy and never less than ten years out of date—though incongruously enough his ideas and interests were often not only modern but years ahead of the times.

He was very partial to boutonnieres—but as the indigenous lunar vegetation gave him little scope in this direction he had to content himself with a somewhat restricted collection of artificial flowers imported from Earth.

These he varied with such ingenuity and resource that the rest of the staff had spent a good deal of fruitless effort trying to discover the laws governing their order of appearance. Indeed, a very famous mathematician had once lost a considerable sum of money because one day Old Mole appeared wearing a carnation rather than the rose advanced statistical theory had predicted.

‘Hello, Doc,’ said Wheeler. ‘What’s it all about? You ought to know!’

The old man paused and looked at the young astronomer doubtfully. He was never sure whether or not Wheeler was pulling his leg and usually assumed correctly that he was. Not that he minded, for he possessed a dry sense of humour and got on well with the numerous youngsters in the Observatory. Perhaps they reminded him of the time, a generation ago, when he too had been young and full of ambition.

‘Why should I know? Professor Maclaurin doesn’t usually confide his intentions to me.’

‘But surely you’ve got your theories?’

‘I have but they won’t be popular.’

‘Good old Doc! We knew you wouldn’t let us down!’

The old astronomer turned to look at the telescope. Already the mirror was in position beneath its cell, ready to be hoisted back.

‘Twenty years ago the last Director, van Haarden, got that mirror out in a hurry and rushed it to the vaults. He didn’t have time for a rehearsal. Professor Maclaurin has.’

‘Surely you don’t mean…?’

‘In Ninety-five, as you should know but probably don’t, the Government was having its first squabble with the Venus Administration. Things were so bad that for a time we expected an attempt to seize the Moon. Not war, of course, but too close an approximation to be comfortable. Well, that mirror is the human race’s most valuable single possession and van Haarden was taking no risks with it. Nor, I think, is Maclaurin.’

‘But that’s ridiculous! We’ve had peace for more than half a century. Surely you don’t think that the Federation would be mad enough to start anything?’

‘Who knows just what the Federation is up to? It’s dealing with the most dangerous commodity in the universe—human idealism. Out there on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are the finest brains in the Solar System, fired with all the pride and the sense of power that the crossing of real space has given to man.

‘They’re not like us Earthbound planet-grubbers. Oh, I know we’re on the Moon and all that but what’s the Moon now but Earth’s attic? Forty years ago it was the frontier and men risked their lives reaching it—but today the theatre in Tycho City holds two thousand!

‘The real frontier’s out beyond Uranus and it won’t be long before Pluto and Persephone are inside it—if they’ve not been reached already. Then the Federation will have to spend its energies elsewhere and it will think about reforming Earth. That’s what the Government’s afraid of.’

‘Well, and we never knew you were interested in politics! Sid, fetch the Doctor his soap-box.’

‘Don’t take any notice of him, Doc,’ said Jamieson. ‘Let’s have the rest of your idea. After all, we’re on quite good terms with the Federation. Their last scientific delegation left only a few months ago and a darn nice crowd they were too. I got an invitation to Mars I want to use as soon as the Director will let me go. You don’t think they would declare war, or anything crazy like that? What good would it do to smash up Earth?’

‘The Federation’s much too sensible to try anything of the sort. Remember, I said they were idealists. But they may feel that Earth hasn’t been taking them seriously enough and that’s the one thing that reformers can’t tolerate. However, the main cause of trouble is this haggling over the uranium supply.’

‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with us,’ said Wheeler. ‘If there is a fight I hope they leave the Moon out of it.’

Molton said thoughtfully, ‘Haven’t you heard?’

‘Heard what?’ asked Wheeler, an uncomfortable sensation creeping up his spine.

‘They say uranium has been found on the Moon at last.’

‘That story! It’s been going around for years.’

‘I think there’s something in it this time. I’ve had it from pretty reliable sources.’

‘So have I,’ put in Jamieson unexpectedly. ‘Isn’t it something to do with Johnstone’s theory of satellite formation?’

‘Yes. You know Earth’s the only planet with any appreciable uranium—it’s connected in some way with its abnormally high density. Most of the uranium’s a thousand miles down in the core where no one can get at it. But when the Moon split off it took some of the core with it—and the remnant’s quite close to the surface here. The story’s going round that it’s been detected by lowering counters down drill-holes and they’ve found enough uranium to make all the deposits on Earth look like very small stuff.’

‘I see,’ said Wheeler slowly. ‘If that’s true the Federation will be asking for increased supplies.’

‘And those nervous old women down on Earth will be afraid to let them have any,’ interjected Jamieson.

‘Well, why should they?’

‘Surely that’s easy enough to answer. Earth’s requirements are static—while the Federation’s are increasing with each new planet that colonised.’

‘And you think the Federation might try to grab any lunar deposits before Earth could get there?’

‘Exactly—and if we are in the way we might get hurt. That would upset both sides very much but it wouldn’t be much compensation to us.’

‘This is just what used to happen a hundred and fifty years ago back on Earth, when gold and diamonds were valuable. Claim-jumping, they used to call it. Funny thing, history.’

‘But supposing the Federation did seize a bit of the Moon—how could they hold it so far from their bases? Remember, there aren’t any weapons left nowadays.’

‘With the legacy of the two World Wars it wouldn’t take long to make some, would it? Most of the finest scientists in the Solar System belong to the Federation. Suppose they took a big spaceship and put guns or rocket torpedoes on it. They could grab the whole Moon and Earth couldn’t push them off. Especially when they’d got hold of the uranium and cut off Earth’s supplies.’

‘You should be writing science fiction, Doc! Battleship of Space and all that sort of thing! Don’t forget to bring in the death-rays!’

‘It’s all right for you to laugh but you know perfectly well that with atomic power it is possible to put enough energy into a beam to do real damage. No one’s tried it yet as far as we know—because there wasn’t much point. But if they ever want to…’

‘He’s right, Con. How do we know what’s been going on in the Government labs for the last generation? I hadn’t thought about it before but it rather frightens me. You do think of the nicest things, Doc.’

‘Well, you asked for my theories and you’ve got ‘em. But I can’t stand here all day talking. Some people in this establishment have work to do.’ The old astronomer picked up his plates and wandered off toward his office, leaving the two friends in a somewhat disturbed frame of mind.

Jamieson gazed glumly at the telescope while Wheeler looked thoughtfully at the lunar landscape outside the dome. He ran his fingers idly along the transparent plastic of the great curving wall. It always gave him a thrill to think of the pressures that wall was withstanding—and the uncomfortable things that would happen if it ever gave way.

The view from the Observatory was famous throughout the entire Solar System. The plateau on which it had been built was one of the highest points in the great lunar mountain range which the early astronomers had called the Alps. To the south the vast plain so inappropriately named the Mare Imbrium—Sea of Rains—stretched as far as the eye could reach.

To the southeast the solitary peak of the volcanic mountain Pico jutted above the horizon. East and west ran the Alps, merging on the eastern side of the Observatory into the walled plain of Plato. It was nearly midnight and the whole vast panorama was lit by the brilliant silver light of the full Earth.

Wheeler was just turning away when the flash of rockets far out across the Sea of Rains attracted his notice. Officially no ship was supposed to fly over the northern hemisphere, for the brilliant glare of a rocket exhaust could ruin in a second an exposure that might have taken hours, even days, to make. But the ban was not always obeyed, much to the annoyance of the Observatory directorate.

‘Wonder who that blighter is?’ growled Wheeler. ‘I sometimes wish we did have some guns on the Moon. Then we could shoot down trippers who try to wreck our programme.’

‘I call that a really charitable thought. Maybe Tech Stores can fix you up—they keep everything.’

‘Except what you happen to want. I’ve been trying to get a Hilger magnitude tabulator for the last month. “Sorry, Mr Wheeler, might be on the next consignment.” I’d see the Director about it if I weren’t in his bad books.’

Jamieson laughed. ‘Well, if you must compose somewhat—er—personal limericks better not type them out next time. Stick to the old oral tradition like the ancient troubadours—it’s much safer. Hello, what’s he up to?’

The last remark was prompted by the manoeuvres of the distant ship. It was losing height steadily, its main drive cut off, only the vertical jets cushioning its fall.

‘He’s going to land! Must be in trouble!’

‘No—he’s quite safe. Oh, very pretty! That pilot knows his stuff!’

Slowly the ship fell out of sight below the rim of the mountains, still keeping on a level keel.

‘He’s down safely. If he’s not there’ll be a record firework display in just about ten seconds and we’ll feel the shock over here.’

With a mingling of anxiety and morbid expectation the two men waited for a minute, eyes fixed on the horizon. Then they relaxed. There had been no distant explosion, no trembling of the ground underfoot.

‘All the same, he may be in trouble. We’d better ask Signals to give him a call.’

‘OK—let’s go.’

The Observatory transmitter, when they reached it, was already in action. Someone else had reported a ship down beyond Pico and the operator was calling it on the general lunar frequency. ‘Hello, ship landing near Pico—this is Astron calling. Are you receiving me? Over.’

The reply came after a considerable interval, during which the call was repeated several times. ‘Hello, Astron, receiving you clearly. Pass your message please. Over.’

‘Do you need any assistance? Over.’

‘No thank you. None at all. Out.’

‘OK. Astron out.’

The operator switched off his carrier and turned to the others with a gesture of annoyance. ‘That’s a nice polite answer for you! Translated into English it means “Mind your own business. I won’t give you my call sign. Good-day.”’

‘Who do you think he is?’

‘No doubt about it. Government ship.’

Jamieson and Wheeler looked at each other with a simultaneous surmise. ‘Maybe the doc was right, after all.’

Wheeler nodded in assent. ‘Mark my words, pardner,’ he said, ‘there’s uranium in them thar hills. And I wish there weren’t!’

II

During the next two weeks ship after ship dropped down beyond Pico and, after an initial outburst of speculation, the astronomers ceased to comment on the sight. Quite obviously something important was going on out in the Sea and the theory of the uranium mine was generally accepted because nobody could think of a better.

Presently the Observatory staff began to take their energetic neighbours for granted and forgot about them except when rocket glare fogged important photographic plates. Then they went storming in to see the Director, who calmed them down as best he could and promised to make the appropriate representations in the proper quarters.

With the coming of the long lunar day Jamieson and Wheeler settled down to the tedious work of analysing the data they had collected during the night. It would be fourteen days before they saw the stars again and could make any further observations. There was plenty to do, for an astronomer spends only a very small portion of his time actually working with his instruments. The most important part of his life is spent sitting at a desk piled with sheets of paper, which rapidly become covered with mathematical calculations or doodles, according to the flow of inspiration.

Though both Wheeler and Jamieson were young and keen, an unbroken week of this was quite enough for them. In the slow cycle of lunar time it was generally realised that tempers began to get frayed around midday and from then until just before nightfall there was usually something of an exodus from the Observatory.

It was Wheeler who suggested they take one of the Observatory tractors and head toward Pico on a voyage of exploration. Jamieson thought it was an excellent scheme though the idea was not as novel to him as to his friend. Trips out into the Sea of Rains were a popular diversion among the astronomers when they felt they had to get away from their colleagues.

There was always the chance of finding something interesting in the way of minerals or vegetation but the main attraction was the superb scenery. Also there was a certain amount of adventure and even danger about the enterprise that gave it an additional charm. Not a few tractors had been lost and although rigorous safety precautions were enforced there was always a chance that something might go wrong.

The almost complete absence of any atmosphere on the Moon had made economical flying impossible since rockets could not be used for journeys of only a few score miles. So practically all short-range lunar travel was done in the powerful electric tractors universally known as Caterpillars or, more briefly, ‘cats’.

They were really small spaceships mounted on broad tracks that enabled them to go anywhere within reason, even over the appallingly jagged surface of the Moon. On fairly smooth terrain they could do up to eighty miles an hour but normally they were lucky to manage half that speed. The low gravity enabled them to climb fantastic slopes and they could if necessary haul themselves out of vertical pits by means of their built-in winches. One could live in the larger models for months at a time in reasonable comfort.

Jamieson was a more-than-expert driver and knew the road down the mountains perfectly. As lunar highways went it was one of the best and carried a good deal of traffic between the Observatory and the port of Aristillus. Nevertheless for the first hour Wheeler felt that his hair would never lie down again.

It usually took newcomers to the Moon a long time to realise that slopes of one-in-one were perfectly safe if treated with respect. Perhaps it was just as well that Wheeler was a novice for Jamieson’s technique was so unorthodox that it would have filled a more experienced passenger with real alarm.

Why Jamieson was such a desperate driver was a paradox that had caused much discussion among his colleagues. Normally he was painstaking and careful, even languid in his movements. No one had ever seen him really annoyed or excited. Many people thought him lazy but that was a libel. He would spend weeks working out a theory until it was absolutely watertight—and then would put it away for two or three months to have another look at it later.

Yet once at the controls of a cat this quiet and peaceloving astronomer became a daredevil driver who held the unofficial record for almost every tractor drive in the northern hemisphere. More than likely the explanation lay in a boyhood desire to be a spaceship pilot, a dream that had been foiled by physical disability.

They shot down the last foothills of the Alps and put into the Sea of Rains like a miniature avalanche. Now that they were on lower ground Wheeler began to breathe again, thankful to have left the vertiginous slopes behind. He was not so pleased when with a colossal crash Jamieson drove the tractor off the road and out into the barren plain.

‘Hey, where are you going?’ he cried.

Jamieson laughed at his consternation. ‘This is where the rough stuff begins. The road goes southwest to Aristillus here and we want to get to Pico. So from now on we’re in country where only half a dozen tractors have ever been before. To cheer you up I might say Ferdinand is one of them.’

‘Ferdinand’ was now plunging ahead at twenty miles an hour with a swaying motion Wheeler found rather disconcerting. If he had lived in an age that had known of ships he might have been familiar with it.

The view was disappointing, as it always is at ‘sea’ level on the Moon, owing to the nearness of the horizon. Pico and all the more distant mountains had sunk below the skyline and the plain ahead looked uninviting as it lay in the blazing sun. For three hours they forged steadily across it, passing tiny craterlets and yawning crevasses that seemed of indefinite depth.

Once Jamieson stopped the tractor and the two men went out in their space-suits to have a look at a particularly fine specimen. It was about a mile wide and the Sun, now nearly at the zenith, was shining straight into it. The bottom was quite flat as though, when the rock had split, lava had flowed in from the depths beneath and solidified. Wheeler found it very difficult to judge just how far away the floor was.

Jamieson’s voice came over the suit radio. ‘See those rocks down there?’

The other strained his eyes and could barely make out a few markings on the apparently smooth surface far below.

‘Yes, I think I see the ones you mean. What about them?’

‘How big would you say they are?’

‘Oh, I don’t know—maybe a yard across.’

‘Hmmm. See the smaller one near the side?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that isn’t a rock. That was a tractor that missed the bend.’

‘Good Lord! How? It’s plain enough.’

‘Yes, but this is midday. Toward evening, when the Sun’s low, it’s the easiest thing in the world to mistake a shadow for a crevasse—and the other way round.’

Wheeler was very quiet as they walked back to their machine. Perhaps, after all, they had been safer in the mountains.

At length the great rock mass of Pico came once more into sight until presently it dominated the landscape. One of the most famous landmarks on the Moon it rose sheer out of the Sea of Rains, from which, ages ago, volcanic action had extruded it. On Earth it would have been completely unclimbable. Even under one-sixth of Earth’s gravity only two men had ever reached its summit. One of them was still there.

Moving slowly over the jagged terrain the tractor skirted the flanks of the mountain. Jamieson was searching for a place where the cliffs could be scaled so they could get a good view out over the Sea. After travelling several miles he found a spot that met with his approval.

‘Climb those cliffs? Not on your life!’ expostulated Wheeler when Jamieson explained his plan of action. ‘Why, they’re practically vertical and half a mile high!’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ retorted the other. ‘They’re quite ten degrees from the vertical. And it’s so easy to climb here, even in a suit. We’ll be tied together and if one of us falls the other can still pull him up with one hand. You don’t know what it’s like until you’ve tried.’

‘That’s true of all forms of suicide. Oh, all right—I’m game if you are.’

Reluctantly Wheeler climbed into his space-suit and followed his friend through the airlock. Jamieson was carrying a small telescope, a long nylon rope and other climbing equipment, which he draped around Wheeler on the pretext that, as he would have to go ahead, his hands had better be free.

Seen from close quarters the cliffs were even more forbidding. They seemed not merely vertical but overhanging and Wheeler wondered how his friend intended to tackle them. Secretly he hoped the whole campaign would be called off.

It was not to be. After a brief survey of the rock face Jamieson tied one end of the rope around his waist and, with a short run, leaped toward a projection thirty feet up the face of the cliff. He caught it with one hand, transferred his grip to the other and hung for a while, admiring the view. Since he weigh only forty pounds with all his equipment this was not as impressive a performance as it would have been on Earth. However, it served its purpose of reassuring Wheeler.

After a while Jamieson grew tired of hanging by one arm and brought the other into action. With incredible speed he clambered up the face of the cliff until he was fully a hundred feet above the ground. Here he found a ledge that was to his liking as it was every bit of twelve inches wide and enabled him to lean back against the rock face.

He switched on his headset and called down. ‘Hello, Con! Ready to come up?’

‘Yes. What do you want me to do?’

‘Is the rope tied around you?’

‘Just a minute. OK.’

‘Right! Up we go!’

Jamieson started to haul in the rope and grinned at the other’s sudden exclamation of surprise as he found himself hoisted unceremoniously into the air. When he had been lifted twenty or thirty feet Wheeler recovered his poise and began to climb the rope himself, so that as a result of their joint efforts it was only a few seconds before he had reached the ledge.

‘Easy enough, isn’t it?’

‘So far—but it still looks a long way.’

‘Then just keep on climbing and don’t bother to look. Hold on here until I call you again. Don’t move until I’m ready—you’re my anchor in case I fall.’

After half an hour Wheeler was amazed to find how far they had risen. The tractor was no more than a toy at the foot of the cliffs and the horizon was many miles away. Jamieson decided they were high enough and began to survey the plain with his telescope. It was not long before he found the object of their search.

About ten miles away the largest spaceship either of them had ever seen lay with the sunshine glinting on its sides. Close to it was an enormous hemispherical structure rising out of the level plain. Through the telescope men and machines could be seen moving around its base. From time to time clouds of dust shot into the sky and fell back to the ground again as if blasting were in progress.

‘Well, there’s your mine,’ said Wheeler after a long scrutiny.

‘It doesn’t look much like a mine to me,’ replied the other. ‘I’ve never seen a lunar mine covered over like that. It almost looks as if a rival observatory is starting up. Maybe we’re going to be driven out of business.’

‘We can reach it in half an hour, whatever it is. Shall we go over to have a look?’

‘I don’t think it would be a very wise thing to do. They might insist on our staying.’

‘Hang it all, there isn’t a war on yet and they’d have no right to detain us. The Director knows where we are and would raise hell if we didn’t come back.’

‘Not in your case, my lad. However, I guess you’re right. They can only shoot us. Let’s go.’

Climbing down the cliff, unlike a similar operation on Earth, was easier than going up it. Each took turns lowering the other to the full length of the rope, then scrambling down the cliff face himself, knowing that even if he slipped the other could easily check his fall. In a remarkably short time they had reached level ground again and the faithful Ferdinand set out once more across the plain.

An hour later, having been delayed by a slight mistake in bearings for which each blamed the other, they found the dome ahead of them and bore down upon it at full speed, after first calling the Observatory on their private wave length and explaining exactly what they intended to do. They rang off before anyone could tell them not to.

It was amusing to watch the commotion their arrival caused. Jamieson thought it resembled nothing so much as an ant heap that had been well stirred with a stick. In a very short time they found themselves surrounded by tractors, hauling machines and excited men in space-suits. They were forced by the sheer congestion to bring Ferdinand to a halt.

‘I suppose we had better wait for the reception committee,’ said Wheeler. ‘Ah, here it comes!’

A small man who managed to convey an air of importance even in a space-suit was forcing his way through the crowd. Presently there came a peremptory series of knocks on the outer door of the airlock. Jamieson pressed the button that opened the seal and a moment later the ‘reception committee’ was removing his helmet in the cabin.

He was an elderly sharp-featured man and he did not seem in a particularly good temper. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped as soon as he had escaped from the confines of his suit.

Jamieson affected surprise at such an unreasonable attitude. ‘We saw you were newcomers around here, so we came over to see how you were getting on.’

‘Who are you?’

‘We’re from the Observatory. This is Mr Wheeler—I’m Dr Jamieson. Both astrophysicists.’

‘Oh!’ There was a sudden change in the atmosphere. The reception committee became quite friendly. ‘Well, you’d better both come along to the office while we check your credentials.’

‘I beg your pardon? Since when has this part of the Moon been restricted territory?’

‘Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Come along, please.’

The two astronomers climbed into their suits and followed the other through the lock. Wheeler was beginning to feel a trifle worried and rather wished he had not suggested making this visit. Already he was visualising all sorts of unpleasant possibilities. Recollections of what he had read about spies, solitary confinement and brick walls at dawn rose up to cheer him.

One of his most valuable assets as a theoretical scientist was his powerful imagination but there were times when he felt that he could do without it. Quite a large portion of his life was spent worrying about things which might happen as a result of the scrapes into which he was continually getting. This looked as if it might be one of them.

Outside the crowd was still gathered around their tractor but it rapidly dispersed as their guide gave instructions over his radio which Jamieson and Wheeler, tuned to the Observatory wavelength, were unable to hear.

They were led to a smoothly-fitting door in the wall of the great dome and found themselves inside the space formed by the outer wall and an inner, concentric hemisphere. The two shells, as far as could be seen, were spaced apart by an intricate webbing of transparent plastic. Even the floor underfoot was made of the same substance. Looking at it closely, Wheeler came to the conclusion that it was some kind of electrical insulator.

Their guide hurried them along at almost a trot, as if he did not wish them to see more than necessary. They entered the inner dome through a small airlock, where they removed their suits. Wheeler wondered glumly when they would be allowed to retrieve them.

III

There was a smell in the air that they did not at once recognise, in spite of its familiarity. Jamieson was the first to identify it. ‘Ozone!’ he whispered to his companion, who nodded in agreement. He was going to add a remark about high voltage equipment when their guide looked back suspiciously and he desisted.

The airlock opened into a small corridor flanked by doors bearing painted numbers and such labels as Private, Keep Out! Technical Staff Only, Dr Jones, Typists and Director. At the last they came to a halt.

After a short pause a Come In panel glowed and the door swung automatically open. Ahead lay a perfectly ordinary office dominated by a determined-looking young man behind a very large desk. ‘Hello—who are these people?’ he asked as his visitors entered.

‘Two astronomers from the Observatory. They just dropped in by tractor. I thought we had better check up on them.’

‘Most certainly. Your names, please?’

There followed a tedious quarter of an hour while the Director took down particulars and finally called the Observatory. Jamieson and Wheeler breathed a sigh of relief when it was all over and everyone was satisfied that they were in fact themselves.

The young man at the imposing desk switched off the radio and regarded the two interlopers with some perplexity. Presently his brow cleared and he began to address them.

‘You realise, of course, that you are a bit of a nuisance. This is about the last place we ever expected visitors, otherwise we should have put up notices telling them to clear off. Needless to say we have means of detecting them when they do arrive—even when they don’t drive up openly as you were sensible enough to do.

‘Anyway, here you are and no harm done. You have probably guessed that this is a Government project, one that we don’t want talked about. Now you are here I suppose I had better explain to you what it is—but I want your word of honour not to repeat what I tell you.’

The two astronomers, feeling rather sheepish, assented.

‘As you know radio communication to the outer planets is carried out in stages and not by direct point-to-point transmission. If we want to send a message to Titan it has to go, for example, Earth-Mars-Callisto-Titan, with repeater stations and all their masses of equipment at each leg of the journey. We want to do away with all that. This is going to be Communications Centre for the entire Solar System and from here we can call any planet direct.’

‘Even Persephone when they get there?’

‘Yes.’

‘One in the eye for the Federation, won’t it be? They own all the relay stations outside Earth.’

The Director looked at Wheeler sharply. ‘Well, I don’t suppose they’ll like it at first,’ he admitted. ‘But in the long run it will reduce costs and give everyone a much better service.’

‘The secrecy, I suppose, is to prevent the Federation thinking of the idea first?’

The Director looked a little embarrassed and refused to answer directly. He rose, made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Well, that’s all, gentlemen. I hope you have a pleasant trip back to the Alps. And please ask your friends to keep away.’

‘Thanks for being so frank with us,’ said Jamieson as they turned to go. ‘We’ll keep it to ourselves. But we’re glad to know the truth, as there are so many rumours flying round nowadays.’

‘Such as?’

‘To be perfectly honest we thought this might be the mythical uranium mine there’s been so much talk about.’

The Director laughed easily. ‘Doesn’t look much like a mine, does it?’

‘It certainly doesn’t. Well, goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

The Director remained standing in moody silence for a while after Jamieson and Wheeler had left the room. Then he pressed the buzzer for his secretary. ‘You’ve recorded that?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re nice chaps. I feel rather ashamed of myself. But if we just sent them away they’d start discussing us with their colleagues—and they might hit on the truth. Now that they think they know it their curiosity will be satisfied and they won’t talk, especially since I’ve asked them not to and they’re the sort who’ll respect a promise. A dirty trick but I think it will work.’

The secretary looked at his chief with a new respect. ‘You know, Chief, there are times when you remind me of that old Roman politician—you know the chap I mean.’

‘Machiavelli, I suppose—though he was a bit later than the Romans. By the way, did the screens detect them all right when they came in?’

‘Yes—the alarms went off in plenty of time.’

‘Good! Then there’s no need to increase our precautions. The only other step we could take is to publicly announce that this part of the Moon is tabu—and the last thing we want to do is to attract attention.’

‘What about the people at the Observatory? There may be more visitors.’

‘We’ll call up Maclaurin again and ask him to discourage these private expeditions. He’s a touchy old bird but I think he’ll play. Now let’s get on with that progress report.’

Jamieson and Wheeler did not return directly to the Observatory, for they were not expected back for a couple of days and there was still a lot of the Moon to explore. Their visit to the dome, they felt, had been something of an anticlimax. It was true that they were sharing a secret and that was always exciting but they could not pretend it was a very spectacular secret.

‘Well, where do we go from here?’ asked Wheeler when the dome had dropped out of sight below the horizon.

Jamieson produced a large-scale photographic map of the Mare Imbrium and pinned it down with his forefinger.

‘This is where we are now,’ he said. ‘I’m going on a circular tour that will really show you some lunar scenery. The Sinus Iridum’s just two hundred miles east over quite good terrain and I’m heading for that. When we get there we’ll go north until we reach the edge of the plain, and then follow the mountains back to the Observatory. We’ll be home tomorrow or the next day.’

For nearly four hours uneventful landscape flowed past the windows as Jamieson drove the tractor across the Sea. From time to time they passed low ridges and small craters only a few hundred feet high but for the greater part of their journey the terrain was almost flat.

After a while Wheeler ceased to take much notice of it and tried to do some reading but the jolting of the machine made it very uncomfortable and he soon gave up the attempt. In any case the only book in the tractor was Maclaurin’s Studies of the Dynamics of Multiple Star Systems and this was supposed to be a holiday after all.

‘Sid,’ began Wheeler abruptly. ‘What do you think about the Federation? You’ve met a lot of their people.’

‘Yes and liked them. Pity you weren’t here when the last crowd left. We had about a dozen of them at the Observatory, studying the telescope mounting. They’re thinking of building a fifteen-hundred-inch reflector on one of the moons of Saturn, you know.’

‘That would be some job—I always said we were too close to the Sun here. But to get back to the argument—did they strike you as likely to start a quarrel with Earth?’

‘It’s difficult to say. They were very open and friendly with us but then we were all scientists together and that helps a lot. It might have been different if we’d been politicians or civil servants.’

‘Dammit, we are civil servants! Who pays our salaries?’

‘Yes, but you know what I mean. I could tell that they didn’t care a lot for Earth though they were too polite to say so. There’s no doubt that they’re annoyed about the uranium allocation—I often heard them complain about it. Their main point was that they had to have atomic power to open up the cold outer planets and that Earth could manage quite easily with alternative sources of energy. After all, she’s done so for a good many thousand years.’

‘Which side do you think is right?’

‘I don’t know. But I will say this—if more uranium does turn up and Earth doesn’t let the Federation have a bigger share of it, then we shall be in the wrong.’

‘I don’t think that’s likely to happen.’

‘Don’t be so sure. As old Mole said, there are a lot of people on Earth who are afraid of the Federation and don’t want to give it any more power. The Federation knows that and it may grab first and argue afterwards.’

‘Hm. Then it’s nice to know that our friends out by Pico aren’t mining the stuff, after all,’ said Wheeler thoughtfully. ‘Ouch—was that necessary?’

‘Sorry. But if you will keep me talking you can’t expect me to avoid all the cracks. Looks as though the suspension wants adjusting. I’ll have to turn Ferdy in for an overhaul when we get back. Ah, that’s Mount Helicon coming up over there. No talking while I concentrate on the driving for the next few miles—the next section’s a bit tricky.’

The tractor turned northward and slowly the great wall of the beautiful Sinus Iridum—the Bay of Rainbows—rose over the horizon until it stretched east and west as far as the eye could see. So overwhelming was the sight that Wheeler was voluntarily silent and sat for the next twenty miles without a word while Jamieson drove the machine toward the three-mile-high cliffs ahead.

He remembered his first glimpse of the Sinus Iridum through a two-inch telescope on Earth many years ago—it seemed scarcely possible that now he was actually skirting its towering walls. What unbelievable changes the twentieth century had brought! It needed a considerable effort to realise that at its beginning man had not even possessed flying machines, still less dreamed of crossing space.

The history of two thousand years seemed to have been crowded into the single century with its vast technical achievements and two tremendous wars. In its first half the air had been conquered more thoroughly than had the sea in all the millennia before.

In its closing quarter the first crude rockets had reached the Moon and the age-long isolation of the human race had ended. Within a single generation there were children to whom the word ‘home’ no longer conveyed the green fields and blue skies of Earth, so swift had been the colonisation of the inner planets.

History, it has been said, never repeats itself but historical situations recur. Inevitably the new worlds began to loosen their ties with Earth. Their populations were still very small compared with those of the mother world but they contained the most brilliant and active minds the race possessed. Free at last from the crushing burden of tradition they planned to build civilisations which would avoid the mistakes of the past. The aim was a noble one—it might yet succeed.

Venus had been the first world to declare its independence and set up a separate government. For a little while there had been considerable tension but good sense had prevailed and since the beginning of the twenty-first century only minor disagreements had disturbed relations between the two governments. Ten years later Mars and the four inhabited moons of Jupiter—Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto—had formed the union which was later to become the Federation of the Outer Planets.

Wheeler had never been to any of these outer worlds. Indeed this was the first time he had even left his native Earth. Like most terrestrials he was a little scared of the Federation though the scientist in him made him admire many of its achievements. He did not believe in the possibility of war but if there were ‘incidents’—as earlier statesmen would have put it—his loyalties lay with Earth.

The tractor rolled to a halt and Jamieson got up from the controls, stretching himself mightily. ‘Well, that’s enough for today. Let’s have some food before I turn cannibal.’

One corner of the tractor was fitted up as a tiny galley but the two explorers were much too lazy to use it and had been living entirely on meals already prepared in the Observatory, which could be heated at the turn of a switch. They did not believe in unnecessary hardships. If a psychologist had examined the machine’s stores he would have been convinced that its passengers suffered from an almost pathological fear of starvation.

Since it was always daylight they slept, ate, argued and drove whenever the spirit moved them. For nearly thirty hours they worked their way slowly along the foot of the Bay’s mighty cliffs, pausing now and then to don space-suits and carry out explorations on foot. They found little but minerals, although Wheeler was greatly excited by the discovery of a peculiar red moss his friend had never seen before.

So little of the Moon had been explored in detail that it was quite possibly new to science and Wheeler pictured himself receiving all kinds of honours from the botanical world. These hopes were rudely shattered by the staff biologist a couple of days later but they were enjoyable while they lasted.

The Sun was still high when they were once again on the Alpine slopes though noon was long past and the thin rind of the crescent Earth was visible in the sky. Wheeler had enjoyed the trip but was getting tired of the cramped quarters. Also he was becoming more and more aware of accumulated aches and pains caused by the bumping of the vehicle over the worst ground any machine could possibly travel.

It was pleasant to get back to the bustle of life in the common-room, even though the same ancient magazines were displayed and the same people were monopolising the best chairs. Very little had happened, it seemed, during their short absence.

The main topic of conversation was the complete breaking off of diplomatic relations between the Director’s young and extremely pretty private secretary and the chief engineer, generally supposed to be her most favoured suitor. This quite outshadowed more important items such as the recent discovery, by an incredible feat of mathematics, that van Haarden’s planet possessed a system of rings like that of Saturn.

And not until they had heard the first news broadcast from Earth did Wheeler and Jamieson learned that the Federation’s latest request for reconsideration of the uranium agreement had been received and rejected. ‘That will make old Mole excited,’ commented Wheeler.

‘Yes—who would have thought the old boy took such an interest in politics. Let’s have a word with him.’

The old astronomer was in the far corner of the room, talking volubly with one of the junior physicists. He broke off when he saw the newcomers. ‘So you’re back. I thought you would break your necks out in the Mare. Seen any mooncalves?’

The references to H. G. Wells’ fabulous beasts was a lunar joke of such long standing that many terrestrials took it quite seriously and thought the creatures actually existed.

‘No, or we would have brought one back for the menu. How are things going?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary as far as I’m concerned. But Reynolds here thinks he has found something.’

‘Think—I know! Two hours ago all my recorders went haywire and I’m still trying to find what has happened.’

‘Which recorders?’

‘The magnetic field strength meters. Usually the field is pretty constant except when there is a magnetic storm and we always know when to expect those. But today all the indicators have gone clean off the graph paper and I’ve been running around the Observatory to find if anyone has switched on something outside in the way of electro-magnetics. I’ve eliminated everything, so it must be external. It’s still on and Jones is trying to get a bearing on it while I come up for a breather.’

‘Sure it’s not a storm? You could find out from Earth—it would have hit them too.’

‘I checked on that—in any case there has been no unusual solar activity so that’s ruled out. Also it’s far too intense and it must be man-made for it keeps going on and off abruptly. Just as if someone’s working a switch.’

‘Sounds very mysterious. Ah, here’s Jones. By the look of him I’d say the Welsh Wonder has found something.’

Another physicist had just hurried into the room, trailing several yards of recording tape behind him. ‘Got it!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘Look!’ He spread the tapes out over the nearest table, collecting some dirty looks from a party of bridge players who were heading toward it.

‘This is the magnetic record. I’ve reduced the sensitivity to one of the recorders until it no longer shoots off the paper. You can see exactly what’s happening now. At these points the field starts to rise rapidly to over a thousand times its normal value. It stays that way for a couple of minutes and then drops back to normal—so.’

With his finger Jones traced the rise and fall of the magnetic field. ‘There are two things to note. The rise isn’t instantaneous but takes just over a second in each case. It seems to be exponential. That’s just what happens, of course, when you switch on the current in an electromagnet. And the fall is just the same while the plateau in between is perfectly flat. The whole thing is obviously artificial.’

‘That’s exactly what I said in the first place! But there’s no such magnet on the Observatory.’

‘Wait a minute—I haven’t finished yet. You’ll see that the field jumps up at fairly regular intervals and I’ve carefully noted the times at which it’s come on. I’ve had the whole staff going through the tapes of every automatic recorder in the place to see if anything else has happened at the same instants.

‘Quite a lot has—nearly all the records show some fluctuations. The cosmic ray intensity, for instance, falls off when the field goes on. I suppose all the primaries are being swept into it so that we don’t receive them. But the oddest of all is the seismograph tape.’

‘Seismograph! Who ever heard of a magnetic moonquake?’

‘That’s what I thought at first, but here it is. Now if you look carefully you can see that each of the little moonquakes arrives just about a minute and a half after the jolt in the magnetic field, which presumably travels at the velocity of light. We know how fast waves travel through the lunar rock—it’s about a mile a second.

‘So we are forced to the conclusion that about a hundred miles away someone is switching on the most colossal magnetic field that’s ever been made. It’s so huge it wrecks our instruments, which means that it must run into millions of gauss.

‘The earthquake—sorry, moonquake—must be a secondary effect. There’s a lot of magnetic rock round here and I imagine it must get quite a shock when that field goes on. You probably wouldn’t notice the quake even if you were where it started but our seismographs are so sensitive they’ll spot meteors falling anywhere within twenty miles.’

‘That’s about the best piece of high-speed research I’ve ever encountered.’

‘Thanks, but there’s still more to come. Next I went up to Signals to find if they’d noticed anything. And were they in a rage! All communication has been wrecked by bursts of static at exactly the same instants as our magnetic barrages. What’s more they’d taken bearings on the source—and with my ranges we have it pinpointed exactly. It’s coming from somewhere in the Sea of Rains, about five miles south of Pico.’

‘Holy smoke!’ said Wheeler. ‘We might have guessed!’

The two physicists pounced on him simultaneously. ‘Why did you say that?’

Remembering his promise Wheeler looked hesitantly at Jamieson, who came to the rescue. ‘We’ve just come back from Pico. There’s a Government research project going on out there. Very hush-hush—you can’t get near the place. It’s a big dome out on the plain, at least twice the size of the Observatory. Must have a lot of stuff in it from what they say.’

‘So that’s what those ships are doing out over the Mare. Did you have a chance to see anything?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Pity—we must take a trip across.’

‘I shouldn’t if I were you. They were very polite to us—but next time I think it might be different. They told us they didn’t want visitors.’

‘So you got into the place then?’

‘Yes.’

‘What a waste. They would let in a couple of dumb astronomers who wouldn’t know a dynamo from a transformer. Now we won’t have a chance.’

‘Oh, I suppose you’ll know all about it some day.’

IV

It was one of those remarks that was to come true sooner than anyone could have expected. For the rumours had been correct—the greatest of all uranium deposits had been discovered on the Moon. And the Federation knew it.

Looking back from our vantage point upon events now safely buried in history we can see the merits of both sides. The rulers of Earth honestly feared the Federation and its revolutionary ideals. The fear was not entirely rational—it was born of a deeper subconscious realisation that Earth’s pioneering days were done and that the future lay with those who were already at the frontiers of the Solar System, planning the first onslaught against the stars.

Earth was weary after her epic history and the effort she had put forth to conquer the nearer worlds—those worlds which had so inexplicably turned against her as long ago the American colonies had turned against their motherland. In both cases the causes were similar and in both the eventual outcomes equally advantageous to mankind.

Only for one thing would Earth still fight—for the preservation of a way of living which, although outmoded, was all she knew. Let us not therefore too harshly judge those leaders who, fearing the mounting strength of the Federation, attempted to deprive it of the metal which would have given it almost limitless power.

For its part the Federation had not been free from blame. Amongst the idealists and scientists, who had been attracted by the promise of the outer worlds, were not a few men of more ruthless breed, men who had long known that a breach with Earth would one day be inevitable. It was these who had planned the research which culminated in the cruisers Acheron and Eridanus and later the superdreadnought Phlegethon.

Those ships were made possible by the invention of the Wilson or accelerationless drive. So universal is the Wilson drive today that it is difficult to realise it was being perfected in secret for ten years before the Solar System learned of its existence. Around that drive the Federation built its three warships and their armament.

Even today little has been revealed of the weapons with which the Battle of the Plain was fought. Atomic power and the tremendous development of electronic engineering during the twentieth century had made them possible. It was never intended that these fearful weapons be used—the mere revelation of their existence would, it was hoped, wring the necessary concessions from Earth.

It was a dangerous policy but one which might have worked had not Earth possessed a superb intelligence service. When at last the Federation put forth its strength, countermeaures had already been taken. In addition Earth had by supreme good fortune just discovered a branch of radiation physics which made possible a weapon of which its opponents knew nothing and against which they had no defence.

The Federation, expecting no opposition whatsoever, had made the age-old mistake of underestimating its opponent.

It was nightfall on the Observatory meridian. All the free members of the staff had gathered, as was the custom, around the observation windows to say farewell to the Sun they would not see again for fourteen days. Only the highest mountain peaks were still catching the last slanting light. Long since the valleys had been engulfed in darkness. The sun’s disc was already invisible. As the minutes crawled by the splendour died slowly on the blazing mountain spires as though reluctant to leave them.

And now only a blazing peak could still be seen, far out over the hidden ramparts of the Alps. The Sea of Rains had been in darkness for many hours but Pico’s inaccessible crown had not yet sunk into the cone of night sweeping round the Moon. A lonely beacon, it still defied the gathering dusk.

In silence the little group of men and women watched the darkness flooding up the great mountain’s slopes. Their remoteness from Earth and the rest of the human race made more poignant the sense of sadness that is the heritage of Man whenever he watches the setting of the Sun.

The light ebbed and died on the distant peak—the long lunar night had begun. When in fourteen days the Sun rose again it would look down upon a vastly different Sea of Rains. The astronomers had paid their last respects to the proud mountain that seemed the very symbol of eternity. When the dawn came it would have vanished forever.

During the next two weeks, there was little relaxation for anyone at the Observatory. Wheeler and Jamieson, who were studying the light curves of variable stars in the Andromeda nebula, had been allotted the use of the thousand-inch telescope for one hour in every thirty. Nearly a score of other research programmes had to be dovetailed according to an elaborate timetable—and woe betide anyone who tried to exceed his allowance!

The dome of the Observatory was now open to the stars and the astronomers were wearing light space-suits which scarcely restricted their movements. Wheeler was taking a series of photometer readings which his colleague was recording when their suit radios began to hum with life. A general announcement was coming through. These were very common and the two men took no notice until they realised that it was directed at them.

‘Will Dr Jamieson please report to the Director at once? Dr Jamieson to report to the Director at once, please.’

Wheeler looked at his companion in surprise. ‘Hello, what have you been up to? Bad language again on the station frequency?’

This was the commonest crime in the Observatory. When one was wearing a space-suit it was often difficult to remember that the person being addressed was not necessarily the only listener. The possible indiscretions were legion and most of them had been committed at one time or another.

‘No, my conscience at any rate is clear. You’ll have to get someone else to finish this job. See you later.’

In spite of his confidence Jamieson was relieved to find the Director in a friendly though worried mood. He was not alone. Sitting in his office was a middle-aged man nursing a briefcase and wearing clothes that indicated he had only just arrived. The Director wasted no time in formalities.

‘Jamieson, you’re the best tractor driver we have. I gather that you have been to the new establishment out in the Mare Imbrium. How long would it take you to get there?’

‘What—now?—at night?’

‘Yes.’

Jamieson stood speechless for a moment, completely taken aback by the proposal. He had never driven at night. Only once had he been out as late as a day before sunset and that was bad enough. The inky shadows had lain everywhere, indistinguishable from crevasses. It needed a violent effort of will to drive into them—and even worse the real crevasses were indistinguishable from shadows.

The Director, seeing his hesitation, spoke again. ‘It won’t be as bad as you think. The Earth’s nearly full and there’ll be plenty of light. There’s no real danger if you’re careful—but Dr Fletcher wants to get to Pico in three hours. Can you do it?’

Jamieson was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I’m not sure but I’ll try. Is it permissible to ask what this is all about?’

The Director glanced at the man with the briefcase. ‘Well, Doctor?’

The other shook his head and answered in a quiet and unusually well-modulated voice, ‘Sorry—I can only tell you that I’ve got to reach the installation as soon as humanly possible. I was on my way by rocket when the underjets started to cut and we had to come down at Aristillus.

‘It will take twenty-four hours to fix the ship, so I decided to go by tractor. It’s only taken me three hours to get here but they told me I’d need an Observatory driver for the next lap. In fact, they mentioned you.’

Jamieson was somewhat amused by the mixture of encouragement and flattery. ‘The road to Aristillus happens to be the only decent highway on the Moon,’ he said. ‘I’ve done a hundred on it before now. You’ll find things very different out on the Mare—even in daylight, thirty’s a good average. I’m perfectly willing to have a shot at it but you won’t enjoy the ride.’

‘I’ll take that risk—and thanks for helping.’

Jamieson turned to the Director. ‘How about getting back, Sir?’

‘I leave that entirely to you, Jamieson. If you think best stay there until morning. Otherwise come back as soon as you’ve had a rest. Whom do you want as a second driver?’

It was a stringent rule that no one could leave the Observatory without a companion. Apart from the danger of physical accident the psychological effect of the lunar silences upon an isolated man was sometimes enough to unbalance the sanest minds.

‘I’ll take Wheeler, sir.’

‘Can he drive?’

‘Yes, I taught him myself.’

‘Good. Well, the best of luck—and don’t come back until dawn unless you feel perfectly safe.’

Wheeler was already waiting at the tractor when Jamieson and the stranger arrived. The Director must have called him and given him full instructions, for he carried a couple of suitcases with his own and Jamieson’s personal belongings. They hoped it would not be necessary to spend the seven days until dawn at the radio station but it was best to be prepared.

The great outer doors of the ‘Stable,’ as the tractor garage was called, slid smoothly open and the artificial light flooded out onto the roadway. There was a faint scurry of dust as the air rushed out of the lock. Then the tractor moved slowly forward through the open door.

The roadway down the mountain looked very different now. A fortnight earlier, it had been a blinding ribbon of concrete, baking in the glare of the noonday Sun. Now it seemed almost self-luminous under the blue-green light of the gibbous Earth, which dominated a sky so full of stars that the familiar constellations were almost lost. The coastline of western Europe was clearly visible but the Mediterranean area was blotted out by dazzling clouds, too bright to look upon.

Jamieson wasted no time in sightseeing. He knew the road perfectly and the light was superb—safer than daylight because less overpowering. Out in the treacherous shadows of the Sea it would be very different but here he could do eighty with ease.

It seemed to Wheeler that the ride down the mountain road was even more shattering than it had been during the day. The ghostly quality of the Earth-light made it difficult to judge distances but the landscape was sliding past at an appalling speed.

He glanced at the mysterious passenger, who seemed to be taking the ride very calmly. It was time to strike up an acquaintance—besides, he was anxious to discover what the whole business was about. Perhaps a calculated indiscretion might produce useful results.

‘It’s rather lucky we’ve been this way before,’ began Wheeler. ‘We visited the new radio station only a fortnight ago.’

‘Radio station?’ said the passenger, his surprisingly level voice betraying just a trace of perplexity.

Wheeler was taken aback. ‘Yes, the place we’re going to.’

The other looked puzzled. Then he asked in a quiet voice, ‘Who told you what it was?’

Wheeler decided to be a little more discreet. ‘Oh, we managed to see a bit of the place while we were over there. I took a course in elementary electronics at Astrotech and recognised some of the gear.’

For some reason the other appeared highly amused. He was about to reply when suddenly the tractor gave a jolt which roughly shot them both into the air.

‘Better hang on to your seats now,’ called Jamieson over his shoulder. ‘This is where we leave the road. I think the suspension can take it—thank goodness I’ve just had it checked.’

For the next few miles Wheeler was too breathless to do any further talking but he had time to think over his passenger’s surprising reactions. Certain doubts began to form in his mind. Who, for example, had ever heard of a radio station generating colossal magnetic fields?

Wheeler looked at his passenger again, wishing he could read minds. He wondered what was in that tightly held briefcase with the triple locks. There were initials on it—he could just see them—J.A.F. They conveyed nothing to him.

Doctor James Alan Fletcher, Ph. D., was not at all happy. He had never been in a tractor before and sincerely hoped he never would be again. Up to the present his stomach had behaved itself but a few more jolts like the last would be too much for it. He was glad to see that the machine’s thoughtful designers had foreseen such accidents and made certain provisions for them. That at least was reassuring.

Jamieson was sitting intently at the controls and had not spoken again since leaving the road. The ground over which the tractor was now travelling seemed bumpy but safe and the machine was averaging about fifty miles an hour. Presently it would enter a range of low hills a few miles ahead and its speed would be considerably reduced. So far, however, Jamieson had managed to avoid the shadows which the Earthlight was casting from every rise in the ground.

Fletcher decided to ignore the landscape outside. It was too lonely and overpowering. The brilliant light of the mother world—fifty times as bright as the full Moon on Earth—enhanced rather than diminished the impression of frightful cold. Those whitely gleaming rocks, Fletcher knew, were colder than liquid air. This was no place for man.

By comparison the tractor’s interior was warm and homey. There were touches that brought earth very close. Who, Fletcher wondered, had been responsible for the photograph of a certain famous television star which was pinned against one wall? Wheeler caught his enquiring gaze and with a grin jerked his thumb towards the intent curve of Jamieson’s back.

Suddenly darkness fell with an abruptness that was shocking. Simultaneously Jamieson brought the tractor almost to a halt. The twin beams of the machine’s dirigible searchlights began to roam over the ground ahead and Fletcher realised that they had entered the shadow of a small hill. For the first time he understood what the lunar night really meant.

Slowly the machine edged forward at five or ten miles an hour, the searchlights anxiously exploring every foot of the ground ahead. For twenty minutes the agonisingly slow progress continued. Then the tractor surmounted a rise and Fletcher was forced to shield his eyes from the glare of Earthlight on the rock ahead. The shadow fell away as the machine picked up speed again and the welcome disc of the Earth appeared in the sky.

Fletcher looked at his watch and was surprised to see that they had been on their way less than fifty minutes. It was two minutes to the hour and automatically his eyes went to the radio. ‘Mind if I switch on the news?’

‘Go right ahead—it’s tuned to Manilius I, but you can get Earth direct if you want to.’

The great lunar relay station came in crystal clear with no trace of fading. During the hours of darkness the Moon’s feeble ionosphere had been completely dispersed and there were no reflected signals to interfere with the ground ray.

Fletcher was surprised to see that the tractor chronometer was over a second fast. Then he realised that it was set to lunar time, that the signal he was listening to had just bridged the quarter million miles gulf from Earth. It was a chilling reminder of his remoteness from home.

Then there came a delay so long that Wheeler turned up the volume to check that the set was still operating. After a full minute the announcer spoke, his voice striving desperately to be as impersonal as ever. ‘This is Earth calling. The following statement has just been issue from Berne—

‘The Federation of the Outer Planets has informed the Government of Earth that it intends to seize certain portions of the Moon and that any attempt to resist this action will be countered by force.

‘This Government is taking all necessary steps to preserve the integrity of the Moon. A further announcement will be issued as soon as possible. In the meantime it is emphasised that there is no immediate danger as there are no hostile ships within twenty hours’ flight of Earth.

‘This is Earth. Stand by.’

V

A sudden silence fell. Only the hiss of the carrier and the faint crackle of infinitely distant static still issued from the speaker. Jamieson had brought the tractor to a halt and had turned around in his seat to face Fletcher.

‘So this is why you are in such a hurry,’ he said quietly.

Fletcher nodded. Colour was slowly draining back to his face. ‘We did not expect it so soon.’

There was a pause during which Jamieson made no effort to restart the tractor. Only the nervous drumming of Fletcher’s fingers on his briefcase betrayed his tension. Then Jamieson spoke again. ‘And will this journey of yours make any real difference?’

Fletcher looked at him for a long time before he answered. ‘I’ll tell you when we get there,’ he said. ‘Now, for God’s sake, start driving!’

There was a long silence. Then Jamieson turned back to the controls and restarted the engine. ‘You’ll be there in ninety minutes,’ he said.

He did not speak again during the journey. Only Wheeler realised what it must have cost him to make his decision. That Jamieson’s loyalties were divided he could understand, for there were few scientists who did not share many of the Federation’s nobler ideals. He was glad that Jamieson had gone forward, yet if he had turned back he would have respected his motives none the less.

The radio was now pouring out a stream of unintelligible coded instructions. No further news had come through and Wheeler wondered just what steps were being taken to defend the Moon. There was nothing that could be done in a few hours though the final touches could be put to plans already prepared. He began to suspect the nature of Fletcher’s business.

The latter had now opened his briefcase. It was full of photostats of extremely complicated circuits which he made no attempt to conceal. A single glance showed Wheeler that any secrecy was unnecessary for the mass of symbols and wiring was completely meaningless to him. Fletcher was ticking off various amendments against a list of corrections, as if making some final check. Wheeler could not help thinking that he was probably doing it more to pass the time than anything else.

Fletcher was not a brave man—seldom in his life had he known the need for so primitive a virtue as physical courage. He was rather surprised at his absence of fear, now that the crisis was almost upon him. Well before dawn, he knew, he would probably be dead.

The thought gave him more annoyance than fear. It meant that his paper on wave propagation, all his work on the new beam, would remain unfinished. And he would never be able to claim the massive travelling allowance he had been planning as compensation for this frightful ride across the Sea of Rains.

A long time later a cry from Wheeler broke into his reverie. ‘Here we are!’

The tractor had surmounted a rise in the ground. Still a good many miles ahead the great metal dome was glinting in the Earthlight. It seemed utterly deserted but within, Fletcher knew, it would be seething with furious activity.

A searchlight reached out and speared the tractor. Jamieson drove steadily forward. He knew it was only a symbol, that for many miles invisible radiations had been scrutinising them intently. He flashed the identification letters of the machine and raced forward over the nearly level ground.

The tractor came to a halt in the monstrous shadow of the dome. Men were awaiting them by the airlock. Fletcher was already wearing his space-suit and his hand was on the door almost before the tractor came to a stop. ‘Just wait here a minute,’ he said, ‘while I find what’s happened.’

‘He was through the lock before the others could say a word. They saw him give a few hasty instructions and then he disappeared into the dome.

He was gone for less than five minutes, though to the astronomers fretting in the tractor it seemed an age. Abruptly he was back, the outer door of the airlock slamming violently behind him. He was in far too much of a hurry to remove his helmet and his voice came muffled through the plastic sphere.

‘I haven’t time for explanation,’ he said, addressing Jamieson, ‘but I’ll keep the promise I made you. This place’—he gestured towards the dome—‘covers the uranium the Federation wants to get. It’s well defended and that’s going to give our greedy friends a bit of a shock. But it has offensive armament as well. I designed it, and I’m here to make the final adjustments before it can go into action. So that answers your question about the importance of the journey.

‘The Earth may owe you a greater debt than it can ever pay. Don’t interrupt—this is more important. The radio was wrong about the twenty hours of safety. Federal ships have been detected a day out—but they’re coming in ten times as fast as anything that’s ever gone into space before. We’ve not much more than an hour left before they get here.

‘You could stay, but for your own safety I advise you to turn round and drive like hell back to the Observatory. If anything starts to happen while you’re still out in the open get under cover as quickly as possible. Go down into a crevasse—anywhere you can find shelter—and stay there until it’s over. Now goodbye and good luck.’

He was gone again before either of the two men could speak. The outer door slammed once more and the Airlock Clear indicator flashed on. They saw the dome entrance snap open and close behind him. Then the tractor was alone in the building’s enormous shadow.

Nowhere else was there any sign of life but suddenly the framework of the machine began to vibrate at a steadily rising frequency. The meters on the control panel wavered madly, the lights dimmed and then it was all over.

Everything was normal again but some tremendous field of force had swept out from the dome and was even now expanding into space. It left the two men with an overpowering impression of energies awaiting the signal for their release. They began to understand the urgency of Fletcher’s warning. The whole deserted landscape seemed tense with expectation.

Swiftly the caterpillar backed away from the dome and spun around on its tracks. Its twin searchlights threw their pools of light across the undulating plain. Then at full speed it tore away into the lunar light. Jamieson realised that the more miles he could put between himself and the mine the greater their chances of ever reaching the Observatory again.

Dr Molton was passing through the gallery of the thousand-inch dome when the first announcement electrified the Observatory. Through all the speakers and over the radio of every space-suit in the station the Director’s voice came roaring.

Attention everybody! The Federation is about to attack the Moon. All members of the staff, with the exception of the telescope crew, are to go to the vaults immediately. I repeat, immediately. The telescope crew will remove the mirror at once and will take it to the resurfacing room. That is all. Move!

For a dozen heartbeats of life of the Observatory came to a standstill. Then with a slow majestic motion the thousand-ton shutters of the dome closed like folding petals. Air began to pour into the building from hundreds of vents as the telescope swung around to the vertical and the work of removing the mirror from its cell began.

When he started to run, Dr Molton found that his legs seemed to have turned to water. His hands were trembling as he opened the nearest emergency locker and chose a space-suit that approximately fitted him. Though he was not one of the telescope crew he had work to do in the dome now that the emergency had arrived. There were the precious auxiliary instruments to be dismantled and removed to safety and that job alone would take hours.

As he began his work with the rest of the team, Molton’s jangling nerves slowly returned to normal. Perhaps, after all, nothing serious would happen. Twenty years ago it had been a false alarm. Surely the Federation would not be so foolish— he checked his thoughts with a wry grimace. It was just such wishful thinking on Wheeler’s part that had opened their discussion a fortnight ago. How he wished that Wheeler had been right!

Swiftly the minutes fled by as one by one the priceless instruments went down into the vaults. The great mirror was now free in its cell and the hoists had been attached to the supporting framework. No one had noticed the passage of time.

Glancing up at the clock Molton was amazed to see that nearly two hours had passed since the first radio warning. He wondered when there would be any further news. The whole thing still seemed a fantastic dream. The thought of danger was inconceivable in this remote and peaceful spot.

The mirror-truck moved soundlessly up the ramp into its position beneath the telescope. Inch by inch the immense disc was lowered until the hoists could be removed. The whole operation had taken two hours and fifteen minutes—a record which was never likely to be surpassed.

The truck was now halfway down the ramp. Molton breathed a sigh of relief—his work also was nearly finished. Only the spectroscope had to be moved and— What was that?

The whole building suddenly trembled violently. A shudder ran through the mighty framework of the telescope. For a moment the space-suited figures swarming round its base stood motionless. Then there was a concerted rush to the observation windows.

It was impossible to look through them. Far out above the Sea of Rains something was blazing with a brilliance beyond all imagination. The Sun itself by comparison would have been scarcely visible.

Again the building trembled and a deep organ note ran through the mighty girders of the telescope. The mirror truck was now safely away, descending deep into the caverns far down in the solid rock. No conceivable danger could harm it there.

And now the hammer-blows were coming thick and fast with scarcely a pause between them. The rectangles of intolerable light cast by the observation windows on the floor and walls of the dome were shifting hither and thither as if their sources were moving swiftly round the sky.

Molton ran to get some sun filters so that he could look out into the glare without wrecking his eyes. But he was not allowed to do so. Once again the Director’s voice came roaring from the speakers. ‘Down into the vaults at once! Everybody!’

As he left the dome Molton risked one backward glance over his shoulder. It seemed as if the great telescope were already on fire, so brilliant was the light flowing through the windows from the inferno outside.

Strangely enough Molton’s last thought as he went down to the vaults was not for his own safety nor that of the priceless telescope. He had suddenly remembered that Wheeler and Jamieson were somewhere in the Sea of Rains. He wondered if they would escape whatever hell was brewing out there on the barren hills.

Quite unaccountably he recalled Wheeler’s ready smile, the fact that it had never been long absent even during those frequent periods when he was officially in disgrace. And Jamieson too, though quieter and more reserved, had been an intelligent and friendly colleague. The Observatory would miss them badly if they never returned.

The storm broke when Jamieson had driven scarcely a dozen miles from the dome, for the speed of the oncoming ships had been grossly underestimated. Earth’s far-flung detector screens had been designed to give warning of meteors only and these machines were infinitely faster than any meteor that had ever entered the Solar System.

The instruments had flickered once and then the ships were through. They had not even started to check their speed until they were a thousand miles from the surface of the Moon. In the last few miles of their trajectory the accelerationless drive had brought them to rest at nearly half a million gravities.

There was no warning of any kind. Suddenly the grey rocks of the Sea of Rains were lit with a brilliance they had never before known in all their history. Paralysed by the glare Jamieson brought the tractor to a grinding halt until his eyes had readjusted themselves.

His first impression was that someone had turned a searchlight upon the machine. Then he realised that the source of the light was many miles overhead. High against the stars, which it had dimmed almost to extinction, an enormous rocket flare was guttering and dying. As he watched, it slowly faded and for a little while the stars returned to their own.

‘Well,’ said Wheeler in an awed voice, ‘I guess this is it.’

Hanging motionless against the Milky Way were the three greatest ships that the two astronomers, or indeed most men, had ever seen. It was not possible to judge their distance—one could not tell whether they were ten or twenty miles overhead. They were so huge that the sense of perspective seemed somehow to have failed.

For several minutes the great ships made no attempt to move. Once again, though this time with even more reason, Jamieson felt the sense of brooding expectancy he had known in the shadow of the dome. Then another flare erupted amongst the stars and the world outside the tractor was overwhelmed with light. But as yet the ships had made no hostile move.

The commander of the Phlegethon was still in communication with Earth though he realised now that there was no hope of avoiding conflict. He was bitterly disappointed—he was also more than a little puzzled by the tone of quiet confidence with which Earth had rejected his ultimatum. He still did not know that the building below him was anything other than a mine. A mine it certainly was but it had kept its other secrets well.

The time limit expired—Earth had refused even to reply to the last appeal. The two watchers below knew only that one of the great ships had suddenly spun on its axis so that its prow pointed towards the Moon. Then, soundlessly, four arrows of fire split the darkness and plunged toward the plain.

‘Rocket torpedoes!’ gasped Wheeler. ‘Time we started to move!’

‘Yes—into your space-suit! I’ll drive Ferdy between those rocks but we’ll have to leave him there. We passed a crack just now that will protect us from anything except a direct hit. I made a note of it at the time but didn’t think we’d have to use it so quickly.’

The rock-borne concussion reached them as they were struggling with the fittings of their space-suits. The tractor was jerked off the ground and slammed back with a jar that almost knocked them off their feet.

‘If that scored a hit the mine’s done for!’ exclaimed Wheeler. ‘How can they fight back anyway? I’m sure they’ve got no guns there.’

‘We certainly wouldn’t have seen them if they had,’ grunted Jamieson as he adjusted his helmet. He finished his remarks over the suit radio. ‘Ready now? Okay—out we go!’

Wheeler felt very reluctant to leave the warmth and security of the tractor. Jamieson had left it in the shelter of a group of boulders which would protect it from almost all directions. Only something dropping from above could do it any damage.

Wheeler was suddenly struck by an alarming thought. ‘If Ferdinand gets hit,’ he said, ‘that’s the end of us anyway. So why bother to leave?’

‘There’s air in these suits for two days,’ answered Jamieson as he closed the door of the lock behind him. ‘We can walk back if we have to. Eighty miles sounds like a lot but it isn’t so much on the Moon.’

Wheeler said no more as they hurried to their shelter. An eighty-mile walk over the Sea of Rains was a sombre thought.

‘This would have made a fine fox-hole in the last war,’ he said as he settled himself down among the debris of lava and pulverised rock at the bottom of the little ravine. ‘But I want to see what’s going on over by the mine.’

‘So do I,’ said Jamieson, ‘but I also want to live to a ripe old age.’

‘I’ll risk it,’ exclaimed Wheeler impetuously. ‘Everything seems quiet now anyway. I think those torpedoes must have finished the job.’ He jumped toward the rim of the cleft and hauled himself out.

‘What can you see?’ asked Jamieson. His voice reached Wheeler easily though the suit’s low-powered radio was heavily shielded by the solid rock.

‘Wait a minute—I’m climbing up on this boulder to get a better view.’

There was a short pause. Then Wheeler spoke again with a note of surprise in his voice. ‘The dome doesn’t seem to be touched. Everything’s just the same.’

He was not to know that the first warning shots had landed many miles away from the mine. The second salvo of rockets was launched soon after he had reached his vantage point. This time they were intended to hit. Wheeler saw the long sheafs of flame driving steady and true towards their target. In a moment, he thought, that great dome would collapse like a broken toy.

The rockets never reached the surface of the Moon. They were still many miles up when, simultaneously, they exploded. Four enormous spheres of light blossomed amongst the stars and vanished. Automatically Wheeler braced himself for the concussion that could never come in the vacuum around him.

Something strange had happened to the dome. At first Wheeler thought that it had grown in size. Then he realised that the dome itself had gone and in its place was a wavering hemisphere of light, scarcely visible to the eye. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.

It was equally unfamiliar to the Federation ships. In a matter of seconds they had dwindled into space, shrinking under the drive of an inconceivable acceleration. They were taking no chances while they went into conference and hastily checked the armament they had never imagined they would have to use. Rather late in the day they understood the reason for Earth’s quiet confidence.

They were gone only a brief while. Although they had disappeared together they returned from entirely different directions as if to confuse the defences of the mine. The two cruisers came down at steep angles from opposite corners of the sky and the battleship swept up over the horizon behind the screen of Pico, where it remained for the earlier part of the conflict.

Suddenly the cruisers vanished, as the dome had vanished, behind wavering spheres of light. But these spheres were already brilliant, shining with a strange orange glow. Wheeler realised that they must be radiation screens of some kind and as he looked again towards the mine he knew that the onslaught had begun.

The hemisphere on the plain was blazing with all the colours of the rainbow and its brilliance was increasing second by second. Power was being poured into it from outside, power that was being converted into the harmless rays of the visible spectrum. That at least was clear to Wheeler—he wondered how many millions of horsepower were flowing invisibly through the space between the cruisers and the mine. It was already far brighter than day.

Slowly understanding came to him. The rays which the twentieth century had imagined but never known were a myth no longer. Not like the spaceship, gradually and over many years, had they come upon the world. In secrecy, during the seventy years of peace, they had been conceived and brought to perfection.

The dome on the plain was a fortress, such a one as no earlier man had ever dreamed of before. Its defences must have gone into action immediately the first beams of the enemy reacted upon them but for many minutes it made no attempt at retaliation. Nor yet was it in any position to do so, for under the blazing shield that protected them Fletcher and his colleagues were fighting time as well as the Federation.

Then Wheeler noticed a faint brush discharge on either side of the dome—that was all. But the screens of the cruisers turned cherry-red, then blue-white, then a colour he knew but had never thought to see on any world—the violet-white of the giant suns. So breathtaking was the sight that he gave no second thought to his deadly peril. Only imminent personal danger could move him now—whatever the risk, he must see the battle to its end.

Jamieson’s anxious voice startled him when it came again over the speaker. ‘Hello, Con! What’s happening?’

‘The fight’s started—come up and see.’

For a few seconds Jamieson struggled against his natural caution. Then he emerged from the cleft and side by side the two men watched the greatest of all battles rising to its climax.

VI

Millions of years ago the molten rock had frozen to form the Sea of Rains and now the weapons of the ships were turning it once more to lava. Out by the fortress clouds of incandescent vapour were being blasted into the sky as the beams of the attackers spent their fury against the unprotected rocks.

Ever and again a salvo of rocket torpedoes would lance toward the Moon and a mountain would rise slowly from the plain and settle back in fragments. None of the material projectiles ever reached their target, for the fields of the fortress deflected them in great spirals that sent many hurtling back into space.

Not a few were caught in the beams of the defenders and detonated many miles above the ground. The utter silence of their explosions was unnerving. Wheeler found himself continually preparing for the concussion that could never come—not on the atmosphereless Moon.

It was impossible to tell which side was inflicting more damage. Now and again a screen would flare up as a flicker of heat passed over white-hot steel. When that happened to one of the cruisers it would move with an acceleration that could not be followed by the eye and it would be several seconds before the focusing devices of the fort could find it again.

The fort itself had to take all the punishment the ships could give it. After the battle had been on for a very few minutes it was impossible to look toward the south because of the glare. Ever and again the clouds of rock vapour would go sailing up into the sky, falling back to the ground like luminous steam. And all the while a circle of lava was creeping out from the base of the fortress, melting down the hills like lumps of wax.

During the whole of the engagement the two men spoke scarcely a dozen words. This was no time for talk—they knew that they were witnessing a battle of which all the ages to come would speak with awe. Even if they were killed by the stray energies reflected from the screens of the fortress it would have been worth it to have seen so much.

They were watching the cruisers, for it was possible now and then to look at them without being blinded, when suddenly they realised that the glare to the south had doubled its intensity. The battleship, which until now had taken no part in the action, had risen above Pico and was blasting at the fortress with all the weapons she possessed.

From where he was standing Wheeler could see the throats of her bow projectors—little pits of flame that looked as if they had been carved from the Sun. The summit of the mountain had been caught in those beams. It did not have time to melt—the peak vanished and only a ragged smoking plateau was left.

Wheeler was going to risk no further damage to his eyes, which were already paining him. With a word of explanation to Jamieson he raced back to the tractor and returned a few minutes later with a set of heavy-duty filters.

The relief was immense. No longer were the screens of the cruisers like artificial suns and they could look once more in the direction of the fortress. Though he could see only the ray-shields against which the beams of the battleships were still splashing in vain it seemed to Wheeler that the hemisphere had lost its original symmetry during the battle.

At first he thought one of the generators might have failed. Then he saw that the lake of lava was at least a mile across and he knew that the whole fort had floated off its foundations. Probably the defenders were scarcely aware of the fact. Their insulation was taking care of solar heat and would hardly notice molten rock.

And now a strange thing was beginning to happen. The rays with which the battle was being fought were no longer quite invisible, for the fortress was no longer in a vacuum. Around it the boiling rock was releasing enormous volumes of gas through which the paths of the rays were as clearly visible as searchlights on Earth on a misty night.

At the same time Wheeler began to notice a continual hail of tiny particles around him. For a moment he was puzzled. Then he realised that the rock vapour was condensing after it had been blasted up into the sky. It seemed too light to be dangerous and he did not mention it to Jamieson.

As long as it was not too heavy the insulation of the space-suits could deal with it.

Accustomed though they were to the eternal silences of the Moon both men felt a sense of unreality at the sight of those tremendous weapons blasting overhead without a whisper of sound. Now and then there would be a hammerblow underfoot as a torpedo crashed, deflected by the fields of the fort. But most of the time there was absolute silence, even when there were half a dozen rockets detonating in the sky at once. It was like watching a television programme when the sound had failed.

They never knew why the fortress waited so long before it used its main weapon. Possibly Fletcher could not get it into action earlier or perhaps he was waiting for the attack to slacken so that some energy could be diverted from the screens. For it was during a lull in the engagement that the polaron beam operated for the first time in history.

The two watchers saw it strike upward like an inverted lightning flash. It was clearly visible along its whole length, not merely in patches where it passed through dust and gas. Even in that brief instant of time Wheeler noticed this staggering violation of the laws of optics and wondered at its implications. Not until many years later did he learn how a polaron beam radiates some of its energy at right angles to its direction of propagation so that it can be seen even in a vacuum.

The beam went through the Phlegethon as if she did not exist. The most terrible thing Wheeler ever saw in his life was the way the screens of that great ship suddenly vanished as her generators died, leaving her helpless and unprotected in the sky. The secondary weapons of the fortress were at her instantly, tearing out great gashes of metal and boiling away her armour layer by layer.

Then, quite slowly, she began to settle towards the Moon, still on an even keel. No one will ever know what stopped her—probably some short-circuit in her controls since none of her crew could have been left alive. For suddenly she went off to the west in a long flat trajectory.

By that time most of her hull had been boiled away and the steel skeleton of her framework was almost completely exposed. The crash came minutes later as she plunged into the mountains beyond Plato.

When Wheeler looked again for the cruisers they were so far away that their screens had shrunk to little balls of fire against the stars. At first he thought they were retreating—then abruptly the screens began to expand as they came down in an attack under terrific vertical acceleration. Around the fortress the lava was throwing itself madly into the sky as the beams tore into it.

The cruisers came out of their dives about a mile above the fort. For an instant they were motionless—then they went back into the sky together. But the Eridanus had been mortally wounded though the two watchers knew only that one of the screens was shrinking much more slowly than the other.

With a feeling of helpless fascination they watched the stricken cruiser fall back toward the Moon. About twenty miles up her screens seemed to explode and she hung unprotected, a sleek torpedo of black metal, visible only as a shadow against the stardust of the Milky Way.

Almost instantly her light-absorbing paint and the armour beneath were torn off by the beams of the fortress. The great ship turned cherry-red, then white. She swung over so that her prow pointed toward the Moon and began her last dive.

Wheeler felt his friend’s grip upon his arm and Jamieson’s voice rang through the speakers. ‘Back to the cleft for God’s sake!’

He never knew how they reached the cleft in time and had no recollection of entering it. The last thing Wheeler saw was the remaining cruiser dwindling into space and the Eridanus coming down at him like an onrushing meteor. Then he was lying flat on his face among the rocks, expecting every moment to be his last.

She landed nearly five miles away. The impact threw Wheeler a yard off the ground and set the boulders dancing in the cleft. The whole surface of the plain quivered for seconds before the rocks settled back to rest.

Wheeler turned over on to his back, breathless, and looked up at the gibbous Earth that was just visible from his position. He wondered what Earth had thought of the battle, which must have been clearly visible to the naked eye over the hemisphere facing the Moon. But his main feeling was relief at his escape. He did not know that the final paroxysm was yet to come.

Jamieson’s voice brought him back to life. ‘You all right, Con?’

‘Yes—I think so. That’s two of them gone. By the way she was travelling I don’t think number three will be coming back.’

‘Nor do I. Looks as if Earth’s won the first round. Shall we go back to the tractor?’

‘Just a minute—what’s the matter with those rocks up there?’

Wheeler glanced towards the northern face of the cleft, which was several feet higher than the other. Over the exposed surfaces of the rock waves of light were passing in slow undulations.

Jamieson was the first to realise the cause. ‘It’s the glare from that lava over by the fort. It will probably take a good while to cool off.’

‘It isn’t cooling. Look—it’s getting brighter!’

At first Wheeler had blamed his eyes but now there was no room for doubt. The rock was not merely reflecting light—it was turning cherry-red. Soon it was too bright to watch with the unprotected eye. With a feeling of sick helplessness he saw that everywhere the exposed rock surfaces were becoming incandescent.

Suddenly the appalling truth reached Wheeler’s brain. The generators of the wrecked ship had not yet detonated and the energy which it would have poured out in hours of continuous fighting was leaking away at a rate rising swiftly toward catastrophe. And he realised that all the atomic explosions of the past would be as nothing against what might happen now.

Then the Moon awoke from its sleep. The plain seemed to tear itself asunder and he could almost hear a mighty wind of radiation sweeping overhead. This was the last thing he knew before the quake reached him.

Ages later he was awakened by the glare of Earthlight in his eyes. For a long time he lay in a half dazed condition, knitting together the broken threads of memory. Then he recalled what had happened and began to look around for his friend.

It gave him a shock to discover that his torch was broken. There was no sign of Jamieson in the narrow portion of the cleft illuminated by the Earth and he could not explore the shadows without a light. As he lay there wondering what to do next, a strange sound began to intrude upon his consciousness. It was an unpleasant rasping noise that grew stronger minute by minute.

Not since his childhood, when night had once caught him in a strange wood far from home, had Wheeler known such real terror as he felt now. This was the airless Moon—there could be no sound here! Then his fuddled wits cleared and he burst into peals of relieved and half hysterical laughter.

Somewhere in the darkness near him Jamieson, still unconscious, was breathing heavily into his microphone.

Wheeler’s laughter must have aroused his friend, for suddenly he heard Jamieson calling unsteadily through the speaker. ‘Hello, Con—what the devil’s the matter?’

Wheeler took a firm grip of himself. ‘It’s okay, Sid—I’m just a bit giddy. Are you all right?’

‘Yes—at least I think so. But my head’s still ringing.’

‘So is mine. Do you think it’s safe to climb out now?’

‘I don’t see what else can happen now but I guess we’ll have to wait here for a while. Look at that rock.’

The walls overhead had been partly sheared away by the blast and were still glowing dully. The rock was too hot to touch and it was many minutes before the two men could crawl out of their refuge.

They were both prepared for a scene of devastation but the reality exceeded their wildest fears. Around them was a vision of the inferno. The whole landscape, from horizon to horizon, had altered beyond recognition. To the east the beautiful mountain that had been Pico was gone.

In its place was a sheared and blistered stump, only a fraction of its former height. It must have caught the full blast of that mammoth explosion. In all the plain, as far as the eye could see, there was no other outstanding projection. Of the fortress not a trace was left. Everything had been levelled by that final incredible blast of radiation.

That was Wheeler’s first impression. Then he realised that it was not completely correct. About five miles away to the west was another pool of lava, a mile or two across, and in its centre was a roughly hemispherical bulge. As he watched, it settled down into the molton rock until there was nothing left.

Then there came a faint trembling underfoot, and a curious disturbance at the centre of the lake. Like some evil thing emerging from the sea a great column of lava slowly climbed towards the stars, tottered and slowly fell. So sluggish was its motion that it never reached the ground but froze even as it fell to form a crooked finger jutting out of the plain. And that was the end of the Eridanus.

Jamieson broke the long silence at last. ‘Ready to start walking?’ he said.

Ten million miles away, the mortally wounded Acheron was limping back to Mars, bearing the shattered hopes of the Federation. On the second moon of Jupiter, white-faced men were sitting in conference and the destinies of the outer planets were passing from the hands of those who had planned the raid against the Moon.

Down on Earth the statesmen of the mother world faced reality at last. They had seen the Wilson drive in action and knew that the day of the rocket was gone. They also realised that although they had—at tremendous cost—won the first round the greater science of the Federation must prevail in the end. Peace and the Wilson drive were worth all the uranium in the universe. A message was already on its way to Mars with the news that Earth was willing to reopen negotiations.

It was well for humanity that the battle ended as it had. The Acheron would never fight again and no one could tell that any building made by man had ever stood in the Sea of Rains. Both sides had exhausted themselves.

Had Jamieson refused to continue his journey to the fortress complete victory might have gone to the Federation. Flushed with success, it might have been tempted to further adventures and the Treaty of Phoebus would never have been signed. Upon such small decisions may world destinies depend.

For hours, it seemed to Wheeler, they had been trudging across this seared and shattered plain, the brilliant Earthlight casting their shadows ahead of them. They spoke seldom, wishing to conserve the batteries of their suit radios. The curvature of the Moon made it impossible to signal the Observatory and there were still fifty miles to go.

It was not a pleasant prospect, for they had been able to salvage nothing from the tractor—it was now a pile of fused metal. But at least they could not lose their way with the Earth hanging fixed in the sky to guide them. They had only to keep walking into their shadows and in due course the Alps would come up over the horizon.

Wheeler was plodding along behind his friend, lost in his own thoughts, when Jamieson suddenly changed his direction of march. Slightly to the left a low ridge had appeared. When they reached it they found themselves climbing a hill not more than fifty feet high.

They looked eagerly to the north, but there was still no sign of the Alps. Jamieson switched on his radio.

‘They can’t be far below the horizon,’ he said. ‘I’m going to risk it.’

‘Risk what?’

‘Emergency transmission. You can key these sets for two minutes at fifty times normal power. Here goes.’

Very carefully, he broke the seal on the little control board inside the suit, and sent out the three dots, three dashes and three dots which were all that was left of the old Morse code.

Then they waited, staring toward the featureless skyline of the north. Below its edge, beyond sight and perhaps beyond signalling, lay safety. But the Observatory gave no sign.

Five minutes later Jamieson signalled again. This time he did not wait. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d better start walking again.’ Wheeler followed glumly.

They were halfway down the slope when a golden flare climbed into the northern sky and erupted slowly against the stars. The sense of relief was so great that Wheeler was left weak.

He sat down clumsily on the nearest boulder and stared at that beautiful, heart-warming symbol hanging in the sky. Even now, he knew, the rescue tractors would be racing down the slope of the mountains.

He turned to his friend. ‘Well, Sid, that’s that, thank God.’

For a moment Jamieson did not reply. He too was staring up toward the stars—but along the path the retreating warship had followed hours before. ‘I wish I could be sure,’ he murmured half to himself, ‘that I did the right thing. They might have won…’

Then he turned toward the blinding disc of Earth, breathtakingly lovely beneath its belts of clouds. The future might belong to the Federation but almost all that it possessed it had inherited from the mother world. How could one choose between the two?

He shrugged his shoulders—there was nothing he could do about it now. Resolutely he turned toward the north and walked forward to receive the fame from which he would never escape.

Second Dawn

First published in Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1951

Collected in Expedition to Earth

‘Here they come,’ said Eris, rising to his forefeet and turning to look down the long valley. For a moment the pain and bitterness had left his thoughts, so that even Jeryl, whose mind was more closely tuned to his than to any other, could scarcely detect it. There was even an undertone of softness that recalled poignantly the Eris she had known in the days before the War—the old Eris who now seemed almost as remote and as lost as if he were lying with all the others out there on the plain.

A dark tide was flowing up the valley, advancing with a curious, hesitant motion, making odd pauses and little bounds forward. It was flanked with gold—the thin line of the Atheleni guards, so terrifyingly few compared with the black mass of the prisoners. But they were enough: indeed, they were only needed to guide that aimless river on its faltering way. Yet at the sight of so many thousands of the enemy, Jeryl found herself trembling and instinctively moved towards her mate, silver pelt resting against gold. Eris gave no sign that he had understood or even noticed the action.

The fear vanished as Jeryl saw how slowly the dark flood was moving forwards. She had been told what to expect, but the reality was even worse than she had imagined. As the prisoners came nearer, all the hate and bitterness ebbed from her mind, to be replaced by a sick compassion. No one of her race need ever more fear the aimless, idiot horde that was being shepherded through the pass into the valley it would never leave again.

The guards were doing little more than urge the prisoners on with meaningless but encouraging cries, like nurses calling to infants too young to sense their thoughts. Strain as she might, Jeryl could detect no vestige of reason in any of these thousands of minds passing so near at hand. That brought home to her, more vividly than could anything else, the magnitude of the victory—and the defeat. Her mind was sensitive enough to detect the first faint thoughts of children, hovering on the verge of consciousness. The defeated enemy had become not even children, but babies with the bodies of adults.

The tide was passing within a few feet of them now. For the first time, Jeryl realised how much larger than her own people the Mithraneans were, and how beautifully the light of the twin suns gleamed on the dark satin of their bodies. Once a magnificent specimen, towering a full head above Eris, broke loose from the main body and came blundering towards them, halting a few paces away. Then it crouched down like a lost and frightened child, the splendid head moving uncertainly from side to side as if seeking it knew not what. For a moment the great, empty eyes fell full upon Jeryl’s face. She was as beautiful, she knew, to the Mithraneans as to her own race—but there was no flicker of emotion on the blank features, and no pause in the aimless movement of the questing head. Then an exasperated guard drove the prisoner back to his fellows.

‘Come away,’ Jeryl pleaded. ‘I don’t want to see any more. Why did you ever bring me here?’ The last thought was heavy with reproach.

Eris began to move away over the grassy slopes in great bounds that she could not hope to match, but as he went his mind threw its message back to hers. His thoughts were still gentle, though the pain beneath them was too deep to be concealed.

‘I wanted everyone—even you—to see what we had to do to win the War. Then, perhaps, we will have no more in our lifetimes.’

He was waiting for her on the brow of the hill, undistressed by the mad violence of his climb. The stream of prisoners was now too far below for them to see the details of its painful progress. Jeryl crouched down beside Eris and began to browse on the sparse vegetation that had been exiled from the fertile valley. She was slowly beginning to recover from the shock.

‘But what will happen to them?’ she asked presently, still haunted by the memory of that splendid mindless giant going into a captivity it could never understand.

‘They can be taught how to eat,’ said Eris. ‘There is food in the valley for half a year, and then we’ll move them on. It will be a heavy strain on our own resources, but we’re under a moral obligation—and we’ve put it in the peace treaty.’

‘They can never be cured?’

‘No. Their minds have been totally destroyed. They’ll be like this until they die.’

There was a long silence. Jeryl let her gaze wander across the hills, falling in gentle undulations to the edge of the ocean. She could just make out, beyond a gap in the hills, the distant line of blue that marked the sea—the mysterious, impassable sea. Its blue would soon be deepening into darkness, for the fierce white sun was setting and presently there would only be the red disc—hundreds of times larger but giving far less light—of its pale companion.

‘I suppose we had to do it,’ Jeryl said at last. She was thinking almost to herself, but she let enough of her thoughts escape for Eris to overhear.

‘You’ve seen them,’ he answered briefly. ‘They were bigger and stronger than we. Though we outnumbered them, it was stalemate: in the end, I think they would have won. By doing what we did, we saved thousands from death—or mutilation.’

The bitterness came back into his thoughts, and Jeryl dared not look at him. He had screened the depths of his mind, but she knew that he was thinking of the shattered ivory stump upon his forehead. The War had been fought, except at the very end, with two weapons only—the razor-sharp hooves of the little, almost useless forepaws, and the unicornlike horns. With one of these Eris could never fight again, and from the loss stemmed much of the embittered harshness that sometimes made him hurt even those who loved him.

Eris was waiting for someone, though who it was Jeryl could not guess. She knew better than to interrupt his thoughts while he was in his present mood, and so remained silently beside him, her shadow merging with his as it stretched far along the hill-top.

Jeryl and Eris came of a race which, in Nature’s lottery, had been luckier than most—and yet had missed one of the greatest prizes of all. They had powerful bodies and powerful minds, and they lived in a world which was both temperate and fertile. By human standards, they would have seemed strange but by no means repulsive. Their sleek, fur-covered bodies tapered to a single giant rear limb that could send them leaping over the ground in thirty-foot bounds. The two forelimbs were much smaller, and served merely for support and steadying. They ended in pointed hooves that could be deadly in combat, but had no other useful purpose.

Both the Atheleni and their cousins, the Mithraneans, possessed mental powers that had enabled them to develop a very advanced mathematics and philosophy; but over the physical world they had no control at all. Houses, tools, clothes—indeed, artifacts of any kind—were utterly unknown to them. To races which possessed hands, tentacles or other means of manipulation, their culture would have seemed incredibly limited: yet such is the adaptability of the mind, and the power of the commonplace, that they seldom realised their handicaps and could imagine no other way of life. It was natural to wander in great herds over the fertile plains, pausing where food was plentiful and moving on again when it was exhausted. This nomadic life had given them enough leisure for philosophy and even for certain arts. Their telepathic powers had not yet robbed them of their voices and they had developed a complex vocal music and an even more complex choreography. But they took the greatest pride of all in the range of their thoughts: for thousands of generations they had sent their minds roving through the misty infinities of metaphysics. Of physics, and indeed of all the sciences of matter, they knew nothing—not even that they existed.

‘Someone’s coming,’ said Jeryl suddenly. ‘Who is it?’

Eris did not bother to look, but there was a sense of strain in his reply.

‘It’s Aretenon. I agreed to meet him here.’

‘I’m so glad. You were such good friends once—it upset me when you quarrelled.’

Eris pawed fretfully at the turf, as he did when he was embarrassed or annoyed.

‘I lost my temper with him when he left me during the fifth battle of the Plain. Of course I didn’t know then why he had to go.’

Jeryl’s eyes widened in sudden amazement and understanding.

‘You mean—he had something to do with the Madness, and the way the War ended?’

‘Yes. There were very few people who knew more about the mind than he did. I don’t know what part he played, but it must have been an important one. I don’t suppose he’ll ever be able to tell us much about it.’

Still a considerable distance below them, Aretenon was zigzagging up the hillside in great leaps. A little later he had reached them and instinctively bent his head to touch horns with Eris in the universal gesture of greeting. Then he stopped, horribly embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause until Jeryl came to the rescue with some conventional remarks.

When Eris spoke, Jeryl was relieved to sense his obvious pleasure at meeting his friend once again, for the first time since their angry parting at the height of the War. It had been longer still since her last meeting with Aretenon, and she was surprised to see how much he had changed. He was considerably younger than Eris—but no one would have guessed it now. Some of his once-golden pelt was turning black with age, and with a flash of his old humour Eris remarked that soon no one would be able to tell him from a Mithranean.

Aretenon smiled.

‘That would have been useful in the last few weeks. I’ve just come through their country, helping to round up the Wanderers. We weren’t very popular, as you might expect. If they’d known who I was, I don’t suppose I’d have got back alive—armistice or no armistice.’

‘You weren’t actually in charge of the Madness, were you?’ asked Jeryl, unable to control her curiosity.

She had a momentary impression of thick, defensive mists forming around Aretenon’s mind, shielding all his thoughts from the outer world. Then the reply came, curiously muffled, and with a sense of distance that was very rare in telepathic contact.

‘No: I wasn’t in supreme charge. But there were only two others between myself and—the top.’

‘Of course,’ said Eris, rather petulantly, ‘I’m only an ordinary soldier and don’t understand these things. But I’d like to know just how you did it. Naturally,’ he added, ‘neither Jeryl nor myself would talk to anyone else.’

Again that veil seemed to descend over Aretenon’s thoughts. Then it lifted, ever so slightly.

‘There’s very little I’m allowed to tell. As you know, Eris, I was always interested in the mind and its workings. Do you remember the games we used to play, when I tried to uncover your thoughts, and you did your best to stop me? And how I sometimes made you carry out acts against your will?’

‘I still think,’ said Eris, ‘that you couldn’t have done that to a stranger, and that I was really unconsciously co-operating.’

‘That was true then—but it isn’t any longer. The proof lies down there in the valley.’ He gestured towards the last stragglers who were being rounded up by the guards. The dark tide had almost passed, and soon the entrance to the valley would be closed.

‘When I grew older,’ continued Aretenon, ‘I spent more and more of my time probing into the ways of the mind, and trying to discover why some of us can share our thoughts so easily, while others can never do so but must remain always isolated and alone, forced to communicate by sounds or gestures. And I became fascinated by those rare minds that are completely deranged, so that those who possess them seem less than children.

‘I had to abandon these studies when the War began. Then, as you know, they called for me one day during the fifth battle. Even now, I’m not quite sure who was responsible for that. I was taken to a place a long way from here, where I found a little group of thinkers many of whom I already knew.

‘The plan was simple—and tremendous. From the dawn of our race we’ve known that two or three minds, linked together, could be used to control another mind, if it was willing, in the way that I used to control you. We’ve employed this power for healing since ancient times. Now we planned to use it for destruction.

‘There were two main difficulties. One was bound up with that curious limitation of our normal telepathic powers—the fact that, except in rare cases, we can only have contact over a distance with someone we already know, and can communicate with strangers only when we are actually in their presence.

‘The second, and greater problem, was that the massed power of many minds would be needed, and never before had it been possible to link together more than two or three. How we succeeded is our main secret: like all things, it seems easy now it has been done. And once we had started, it was simpler than we had expected. Two minds are more than twice as powerful as one, and three are much more than thrice as powerful as a single will. The exact mathematical relationship is an interesting one. You know how very rapidly the number of ways a group of objects may be arranged increases with the size of the group? Well, a similar relationship holds in this case.

‘So in the end we had our Composite Mind. At first it was unstable, and we could hold it together only for a few seconds. It’s still a tremendous strain on our mental resources, and even now we can only do it for—well, for long enough.

‘All these experiments, of course, were carried out in great secrecy. If we could do this, so could the Mithraneans, for their minds are as good as ours. We had a number of their prisoners, and we used them as subjects.’

For a moment the veil that hid Aretenon’s inner thoughts seemed to tremble and dissolve: then he regained control.

‘That was the worst part. It was bad enough to send madness into a far land, but it was infinitely worse when you could watch with your own eyes the effects of what you did.

‘When we had perfected our technique, we made the first long-distance test. Our victim was someone so well known to one of our prisoners—whose mind we had taken over—that we could identify him completely and thus the distance between us was no objection. The experiment worked, but of course no one suspected that we were responsible.

‘We did not operate again until we were certain that our attack would be so overwhelming that it would end the War. From the minds of our prisoners we had identified about a score of Mithraneans—their friends and kindred—in such detail that we could pick them out and destroy them. As each mind fell beneath our attack, it gave up to us the knowledge of others, and so our power increased. We could have done far more damage than we did, for we took only the males.’

‘Was that,’ said Jeryl bitterly, ‘so very merciful?’

‘Perhaps not: but it should be remembered to our credit. We stopped as soon as the enemy sued for peace, and as we alone knew what had happened, we went into their country to undo what damage we could. It was little enough.’

There was a long silence. The valley was deserted now, and the white sun had set. A cold wind was blowing over the hills, passing, where none could follow it, out across the empty and untravelled sea. Then Eris spoke, his thoughts almost whispering in Aretenon’s mind.

‘You did not come to tell me this, did you? There is something more.’ It was a statement rather than a query.

‘Yes,’ replied Aretenon. ‘I have a message for you—one that will surprise you a good deal. It’s from Therodimus.’

‘Therodimus! I thought—’

‘You thought he was dead, or worse still, a traitor. He’s neither, although he’s lived in enemy territory for the last twenty years. The Mithraneans treated him as we did, and gave him everything he needed. They recognised his mind for what it was, and even during the War no one touched him. Now he wants to see you again.’

Whatever emotions Eris was feeling at this news of his old teacher, he gave no sign of them. Perhaps he was recalling his youth, remembering now that Therodimus had played a greater part in the shaping of his mind than any other single influence. But his thoughts were barred to Aretenon and even to Jeryl.

‘What’s he been doing all this time?’ Eris asked at length. ‘And why does he want to see me now?’

‘It’s a long and complicated story,’ said Aretenon, ‘but Therodimus has made a discovery quite as remarkable as ours, and one that may have even greater consequences.’

‘Discovery? What sort of discovery?’

Aretenon paused, looking thoughtfully along the valley. The guards were returning, leaving behind only the few who would be needed to deal with any wandering prisoners.

‘You know as much of our history as I do, Eris,’ he began. ‘It took, we believe, something like a million generations for us to reach our present level of development—and that’s a tremendous length of time! Almost all the progress we’ve made has been due to our telepathic powers: without them we’d be little different from all those other animals that show such puzzling resemblance to us. We’re very proud of our philosophy and our mathematics, of our music and dancing—but have you ever thought, Eris, that there might be other lines of cultural development which we’ve never even dreamed of? That there might be other forces in the Universe beside mental ones?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Eris flatly.

‘It’s hard to explain, and I won’t try—except to say this. Do you realise just how pitiably feeble is our control over the external world, and how useless these limbs of ours really are? No—you can’t, for you won’t have seen what I have. But perhaps this will make you understand.’

The pattern of Aretenon’s thoughts modulated suddenly into a minor key.

‘I remember once coming upon a bank of beautiful and curiously complicated flowers. I wanted to see what they were like inside, so I tried to open one, steadying it between my hooves and picking it apart with my teeth. I tried again and again—and failed. In the end, half mad with rage, I trampled all those flowers into the dirt.’

Jeryl could detect the perplexity in Eris’s mind, but she could see that he was interested and curious to know more.

‘I have had that sort of feeling, too,’ he admitted. ‘But what can one do about it? And after all, is it really important? There are a good many things in this Universe which are not exactly as we should like them.’

Aretenon smiled.

‘That’s true enough. But Therodimus has found how to do something about it. Will you come and see him?’

‘It must be a long journey.’

‘About twenty days from here, and we have to go across a river.’

Jeryl felt Eris give a little shudder. The Atheleni hated water, for the excellent and sufficient reason that they were too heavily boned to swim, and promptly drowned if they fell into it.

‘It’s in enemy territory: they won’t like me.’

‘They respect you, and it might be a good idea for you to go—a friendly gesture, as it were.’

‘But I’m wanted here.’

‘You can take my word that nothing you do here is as important as the message Therodimus has for you—and for the whole world.’

Eris veiled his thoughts for a moment, then uncovered them briefly.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.

It was surprising how little Aretenon managed to say on the many days of the journey. From time to time Eris would challenge the defences of his mind with half-playful thrusts, but always they were parried with an effortless skill. About the ultimate weapon that had ended the War he would say nothing, but Eris knew that those who had wielded it had not yet disbanded and were still at their secret hiding-place. Yet though he would not talk about the past, Aretenon often spoke of the future, and with the urgent anxiety of one who had helped to shape it and was not sure if he had acted aright. Like many others of his race, he was haunted by what he had done, and the sense of guilt sometimes overwhelmed him. Often he made remarks which puzzled Eris at the time, but which he was to remember more and more vividly in the years ahead.

‘We’ve come to a turning-point in our history, Eris. The powers we’ve uncovered will soon be shared by the Mithraneans, and another war will mean destruction for us both. All my life I’ve worked to increase our knowledge of the mind, but now I wonder if I’ve brought something into the world that is too powerful, and too dangerous for us to handle. Yet it’s too late, now, to retrace our footsteps: sooner or later our culture was bound to come to this point, and to discover what we have found.

‘It’s a terrible dilemma: and there’s only one solution. We cannot go back, and if we go forward we may meet disaster. So we must change the very nature of our civilisation, and break completely with the million generations behind us. You can’t imagine how that could be done: nor could I, until I met Therodimus and he told me of his dream.

‘The mind is a wonderful thing, Eris—but by itself it is helpless in the universe of matter. We know now how to multiply the power of our brains by an enormous factor: we can solve, perhaps, the great problems of mathematics that have baffled us for ages. But neither our unaided minds, nor the group-mind we’ve now created, can alter in the slightest the one fact that all through history has brought us and the Mithraneans into conflict—the fact that the food supply is fixed, and our populations are not.’

Jeryl would watch them, taking little part in their thoughts, as they argued these matters. Most of their discussions took place while they were browsing, for like all active ruminants they had to spend a considerable part of each day searching for food. Fortunately the land through which they were passing was extremely fertile—indeed, its fertility had been one of the causes of the War. Eris, Jeryl was glad to see, was becoming something of his old self again. The feeling of frustrated bitterness that had filled his mind for so many months had not lifted, but it was no longer as all-pervading as it had been.

They left the open plain on the twenty-second day of their journey. For a long time they had been travelling through Mithranean territory, but those few of their ex-enemies they had seen had been inquisitive rather than hostile. Now the grasslands were coming to an end, and the forest with all its primeval terrors lay ahead.

‘Only one carnivore lives in this region,’ Aretenon reassured them, ‘and it’s no match for the three of us. We’ll be past the trees in a day and a night.’

‘A night—in the forest!’ gasped Jeryl, half-petrified with terror at the very thought.

Aretenon was obviously a little ashamed of himself.

‘I didn’t like to mention it before,’ he apologised, ‘but there’s really no danger. I’ve done it by myself, several times. After all, none of the great flesh-eaters of ancient times still exists—and it won’t be really dark, even in the woods. The red sun will still be up.’

Jeryl was still trembling slightly. She came of a race which, for thousands of generations, had lived on the high hills and the open plains, relying on speed to escape from danger. The thought of going among trees—and in the dim red twilight while the primary sun was down—filled her with panic. And of the three of them, only Aretenon possessed a horn with which to fight. (It was nothing like so long or sharp, thought Jeryl, as Eris’s had been.)

She was still not at all happy even when they had spent a completely uneventful day moving through the woods. The only animals they saw were tiny, long-tailed creatures that ran up and down the tree-trunks with amazing speed, gibbering with anger as the intruders passed. It was entertaining to watch them, but Jeryl did not think that the forest would be quite so amusing in the night.

Her fears were well founded. When the fierce white sun passed below the trees, and the crimson shadows of the red giant lay everywhere, a change seemed to come over the world. A sudden silence swept across the forest—a silence abruptly broken by a very distant wail towards which the three of them turned instinctively, ancestral warnings shrieking in their minds.

‘What was that?’ gasped Jeryl.

Aretenon was breathing swiftly, but his reply was calm enough.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It was a long way off. I don’t know what it was.’

They took turns to keep guard, and the long night wore slowly away. From time to time Jeryl would awaken from troubled dreams into the nightmare reality of the strange, distorted trees gathered threateningly around her. Once, when she was on guard, she heard the sound of a heavy body moving through the woods very far away—but it came no nearer and she did not disturb the others. So at last the longed-for brilliance of the white sun began to flood the sky, and the day had come again.

Aretenon, Jeryl thought, was probably more relieved than he pretended to be. He was almost boyish as he frisked around in the morning sunlight, snatching an occasional mouthful of foliage from an overhanging branch.

‘We’ve only half a day to go now,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ll be out of the forest by noon.’

There was a mischievous undertone to his thoughts that puzzled Jeryl. It seemed as if Aretenon was keeping still another secret from them, and Jeryl wondered what further obstacles they would have to overcome. By midday she knew, for their way was barred by a great river flowing slowly past them as if in no haste to meet the sea.

Eris looked at it with some annoyance, measuring it with a practised eye.

‘It’s much too deep to ford here. We’ll have to go a long way upstream before we can cross.’

Aretenon smiled.

‘On the contrary,’ he said cheerfully, ‘we’re going downstream.’

Eris and Jeryl looked at him in amazement.

‘Are you mad?’ Eris cried.

‘You’ll soon see. We’ve not far to go now—you’ve come all this way, so you might as well trust me for the rest of the journey.’

The river slowly widened and deepened. If it had been impassable before, it was doubly so now. Sometimes, Eris knew, one came upon a stream across which a tree had fallen, so that one could walk over the trunk—though it was a risky thing to do. But this river was the width of many trees, and was growing no narrower.

‘We’re nearly there,’ said Aretenon at last. ‘I recognise the place. Someone should be coming out of those woods at any moment.’ He gestured with his horn to the trees on the far side of the river, and almost as he did so three figures came bounding out on to the bank. Two of them, Jeryl saw, were Atheleni: the third was a Mithranean.

They were now nearing a great tree, standing by the water’s edge, but Jeryl had paid little attention: she was too interested in the figures on the distant bank, wondering what they were going to do next. So when Eris’s amazement exploded like a thunderclap in the depths of her own mind, she was too confused for a moment to realise its cause. Then she turned towards the tree, and saw what Eris had seen.

To some minds and some races, few things could have been more natural or more commonplace than a thick rope tied round a tree-trunk, and floating out across the water of a river to another tree on the far bank. Yet it filled both Jeryl and Eris with the terror of the unknown, and for one awful moment Jeryl thought that a gigantic snake was emerging from the water. Then she saw that it was not alive, but her fear remained. For it was the first artificial object that she had ever seen.

‘Don’t worry about what it is, or how it was put there,’ counselled Aretenon. ‘It’s going to carry you across, and that’s all that matters for the moment. Look—there’s someone coming over now!’

One of the figures on the far bank had lowered itself into the water, and was working its way with its forelimbs along the rope. As it came nearer—it was the Mithranean, and a female—Jeryl saw that it was carrying a second and much smaller rope looped round the upper part of its body.

With the skill of long practice, the stranger made her way across the floating cable, and emerged dripping from the river. She seemed to know Aretenon, but Jeryl could not intercept their thoughts.

‘I can go across without any help,’ said Aretenon, ‘but I’ll show you the easy way.’

He slipped the loop over his shoulders, and, dropping into the water, hooked his forelimbs over the fixed cable. A moment later he was being dragged across at a great speed by the two others on the far bank, where, after much trepidation, Eris and Jeryl presently joined him.

It was not the sort of bridge one would expect from a race which could quite easily have dealt with the mathematics of a reinforced concrete arch—if the possibility of such an object had ever occurred to it. But it served its purpose, and once it had been made, they could use it readily enough.

Once it had been made. But—who had made it?

When their dripping guides had rejoined them, Aretenon gave his friends a warning.

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have a good many shocks while you’re here. You’ll see some very strange sights, but when you understand them, they’ll cease to puzzle you in the slightest. In fact, you will soon come to take them for granted.’

One of the strangers, whose thoughts neither Eris nor Jeryl could intercept, was giving him a message.

‘Therodimus is waiting for us,’ said Aretenon. ‘He’s very anxious to see you.’

‘I’ve been trying to contact him,’ complained Eris, ‘but I’ve not succeeded.’

Aretenon seemed a little troubled.

‘You’ll find he’s changed,’ he said. ‘After all, you’ve not seen each other for many years. It may be some time before you can make full contact again.’

Their road was a winding one through the forest, and from time to time curiously narrow paths branched off in various directions. Therodimus, thought Eris, must have changed indeed for him to have taken up permanent residence among trees. Presently the track opened out into a large, semi-circular clearing with a low white cliff lying along its diameter. At the foot of the cliff were several dark holes of varying sizes—obviously the openings of caves.

It was the first time that either Eris or Jeryl had ever entered a cave, and they did not greatly look forward to the experience. They were relieved when Aretenon told them to wait just outside the opening, and went on alone towards the puzzling yellow light that glowed in the depths. A moment later, dim memories began to pulse in Eris’s mind, and he knew that his old teacher was coming, even though he could no longer fully share his thoughts.

Something stirred in the gloom, and then Therodimus came out into the sunlight. At the sight of him, Jeryl screamed once and buried her head in Eris’s mane, but Eris stood firm, though he was trembling as he had never done before battle. For Therodimus blazed with a magnificence that none of his race had ever known since history began. Around his neck hung a band of glittering objects that caught and refracted the sunlight in a myriad colours, while covering his body was a sheet of some thick, many-hued material that rustled softly as he walked. And his horn was no longer the yellow of ivory: some magic had changed it to the most wonderful purple that Jeryl had ever seen.

Therodimus stood motionless for a moment, savouring their amazement to the full. Then his rich laugh echoed in their minds, and he reared up on his hind limb. The coloured garment fell whispering to the ground, and at a toss of his head the glittering necklace arched like a rainbow into a corner of the cave. But the purple horn remained unchanged.

It seemed to Eris that he stood at the brink of a great chasm, with Therodimus beckoning him on the far side. Their thoughts struggled to form a bridge, but could make no contact. Between them was the gulf of half a lifetime and many battles, of a myriad unshared experiences—Therodimus’s years in this strange land, his own mating with Jeryl and the memory of their lost children. Though they stood face to face, a few feet only between them, their thoughts could never meet again.

Then Aretenon, with all the power and authority of his unsurpassed skill, did something to his mind that Eris was never quite able to recall. He only knew that the years seemed to have rolled back, that he was once more the eager, anxious pupil—and that he could speak to Therodimus again.

It was strange to sleep underground, but less unpleasant than spending the night amid the unknown terrors of the forest. As she watched the crimson shadows deepening beyond the entrance to the little cave, Jeryl tried to collect her scattered thoughts. She had understood only a small part of what had passed between Eris and Therodimus, but she knew that something incredible was taking place. The evidence of her eyes was enough to prove that: today she had seen things for which there were no words in her language.

She had heard things, too. As they had passed one of the cave-mouths, there had come from it a rhythmic ‘whirring’ sound, unlike that made by any animal she knew. It had continued steadily without pause or break as long as she could hear it, and even now its unhurried rhythm had not left her mind. Aretenon, she believed, had also noticed it, though without any surprise: Eris had been so engrossed with Therodimus.

The old philosopher had told them very little, preferring, as he said, to show them his empire when they had had a good night’s rest. Nearly all their talk had been concerned with the events of their own land during the last few years, and Jeryl found it somewhat boring. Only one thing had interested her, and she had eyes for little else. That was the wonderful chain of coloured crystals that Therodimus had worn around his neck. What it was, or how it had been created, she could not imagine: but she coveted it. As she fell asleep, she found herself thinking idly, but more than half-seriously, of the sensation it would cause if she returned to her people with such a marvel gleaming against her own pelt. It would look so much better there than upon old Therodimus.

Aretenon and Therodimus met them at the cave soon after dawn. The philosopher had discarded his regalia—which he had obviously worn only to impress his guests—and his horn had returned to its normal yellow. That was one thing Jeryl thought she could understand, for she had come across fruits whose juices could cause colour changes.

Therodimus settled himself at the mouth of the cave. He began his narration without any preliminaries, and Eris guessed that he must have told it many times before to earlier visitors.

‘I came to this place, Eris, about five years after leaving our country. As you know, I was always interested in strange lands, and from the Mithraneans I’d heard rumours that intrigued me very much. How I traced them to their source is a long story that doesn’t matter now. I crossed the river far upstream one summer, when the water was very low. There’s only one place where it can be done, and then only in the driest years. Higher still the river loses itself in the mountains, and I don’t think there’s any way through them. So this is virtually an island—almost completely cut off from Mithranean territory.

‘It’s an island, but it’s not uninhabited. The people who live here are called the Phileni, and they have a very remarkable culture—one entirely different from our own. Some of the products of that culture you’ve already seen.

‘As you know, there are many different races on our world, and quite a few of them have some sort of intelligence. But there is a great gulf between us and all other creatures. As far as we know, we are the only beings capable of abstract thought and complex logical processes.

‘The Phileni are a much younger race than ours, and they are intermediate between us and the other animals. They’ve lived here on this rather large island for several thousand generations—but their rate of development has been many, many times swifter than ours. They neither possess nor understand our telepathic powers, but they have something else which we may well envy—something which is responsible for the whole of their civilisation and its incredibly rapid progress.’

Therodimus paused, then rose slowly to his feet.

‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to see the Phileni.’

He led them back to the caves from which they had come the night before, pausing at the entrance from which Jeryl had heard that strange, rhythmic whirring. It was clearer and louder now, and she saw Eris start as though he had noticed it for the first time. Then Therodimus uttered a high-pitched whistle, and at once the whirring slackened, falling octave by octave until it had ebbed into silence. A moment later something came towards them out of the semi-gloom.

It was a little creature, scarcely half their height, and it did not hop, but walked upon two jointed limbs that seemed very thin and feeble. Its large spherical head was dominated by three huge eyes, set far apart and capable of independent movement. With the best will in the world, Jeryl did not think it was very attractive.

Then Therodimus uttered another whistle, and the creature raised its forelimbs towards them.

‘Look closely,’ said Therodimus, very gently, ‘and you will see the answer to many of your questions.’

For the first time, Jeryl saw that the creature’s forelimbs did not end in hooves, or indeed after the fashion of any animal with which she was acquainted. Instead, they divided into at least a dozen thin, flexible tentacles and two hooked claws.

‘Go towards it, Jeryl,’ commanded Therodimus. ‘It has something for you.’

Hesitantly, Jeryl moved forward. She noticed that the creature’s body was crossed with bands of dark material, to which were attached unidentifiable objects. It dropped a forelimb to one of these, and a cover opened to reveal a cavity inside which something glittered. Then the little tentacles were clutching that marvellous crystal necklace, and with a movement so swift and dexterous that Jeryl could scarcely follow it, the Phileni moved forward and clasped it round her neck.

Therodimus brushed aside her confusion and gratitude, but his shrewd old mind was well pleased. Jeryl would be his ally now in whatever he planned to do. But Eris’s emotions might not be so easily swayed, and in this matter mere logic was not enough. His old pupil had changed so much, had been so deeply wounded by the past, that Therodimus could not be certain of success. Yet he had a plan that could turn even these difficulties to his advantage.

He gave another whistle, and the Phileni made a curious waving gesture with its hands and disappeared into the cave. A moment later that strange whirring ascended once more from the silence, but Jeryl’s curiosity was now quite overshadowed by her delight in her new possession.

‘We’ll go through the woods,’ said Therodimus, ‘to the nearest settlement—it’s only a little way from here. The Phileni don’t live in the open, as we do. In fact, they differ from us in almost every conceivable way. I’m even afraid,’ he added ruefully, ‘that they’re much better natured than we are, and I believe that one day they’ll be more intelligent. But first of all, let me tell you what I’ve learned about them, so that you can understand what I’m planning to do.’

The mental evolution of any race is conditioned, even dominated, by physical factors which that race almost invariably takes for granted as part of the natural order of things. The wonderfully sensitive hands of the Phileni had enabled them to find by experiment and trial facts which had taken the planet’s only other intelligent species a thousand times as long to discover by pure deduction. Quite early in their history, the Phileni had invented simple tools. From these they had proceeded to fabrics, pottery, and the use of fire. When Therodimus had discovered them, they had already invented the lathe and the potter’s wheel, and were about to move into their first Metal Age—with all that that implied.

On the purely intellectual plane, their progress had been less rapid. They were clever and skilful, but they had a dislike of abstract thought and their mathematics was purely empirical. They knew, for example, that a triangle with sides in the ratio three-four-five was right-angled, but had not suspected that this was only a special case of a much more general law. Their knowledge was full of such yawning gaps, which, despite the help of Therodimus and his several score disciples, they seemed in no great hurry to fill.

Therodimus they worshipped as a god, and for two whole generations of their short-lived race they had obeyed him in everything, giving him all the products of their skill that he needed, and making at his suggestion the new tools and devices that had occurred to him. The partnership had been incredibly fertile, for it was as if both races had suddenly been released from their shackles. Great manual skill and great intellectual powers had fused in a fruitful union probably unique in all the Universe—and progress that would normally have taken millennia had been achieved in less than a decade.

As Aretenon had promised them, though Eris and Jeryl saw many marvels, they came across nothing that they could not understand once they had watched the little Phileni craftsmen at work and had seen with what magic their hands shaped natural materials into lovely or useful forms. Even their tiny towns and primitive farms soon lost their wonder and became part of the accepted order of things.

Therodimus let them look their fill, until they had seen every aspect of this strangely sophisticated Stone Age culture. Because they knew no differently, they found nothing incongruous in the sight of a Phileni potter—who could scarcely count beyond ten—shaping a series of complex algebraic surfaces under the guidance of a young Mithranean mathematician. Like all his race, Eris possessed tremendous powers of mental visualisation, but he realised how much easier geometry would be if one could actually see the shapes one was considering. From this beginning (though he could not guess it) would one day evolve the idea of a written language.

Jeryl was fascinated above all things by the sight of the little Phileni women weaving fabrics upon their primitive looms. She could sit for hours watching the flying shuttles and wishing that she could use them. Once one had seen it done, it seemed so simple and obvious—and so utterly beyond the powers of the clumsy, useless limbs of her own people.

They grew very fond of the Phileni, who seemed eager to please and were pathetically proud of all their manual skills. In these new and novel surroundings, meeting fresh wonders every day. Eris seemed to be recovering from some of the scars which the War had left upon his mind. Jeryl knew, however, that there was still much damage to be undone. Sometimes, before he could hide them, she would come across raw, angry wounds in the depths of Eris’s mind, and she feared that many of them—like the broken stump of his horn—would never heal. Eris had hated the War, and the manner of its ending still oppressed him. Beyond this, Jeryl knew, he was haunted by the fear that it might come again.

These troubles she often discussed with Therodimus, of whom she had now grown very fond. She still did not fully understand why he had brought them here, or what he and his followers were planning to do. Therodimus was in no hurry to explain his actions, for he wished Jeryl and Eris to draw their own conclusions as far as possible. But at last, five days after their arrival, he called them to his cave.

‘You’ve now seen,’ he began, ‘most of the things we have to show you here. You know what the Phileni can do, and perhaps you have thought how much our own lives will be enriched once we can use the products of their skill. That was my first thought when I came here, all those years ago.

‘It was an obvious and rather naïve idea, but it led to a much greater one. As I grew to know the Phileni, and found how swiftly their minds had advanced in so short a time, I realised what a fearful disadvantage our own race had always laboured under. I began to wonder how much further forward we would have been had we the Phileni’s control over the physical world. It is not a question of mere convenience, or the ability to make beautiful things like that necklace of yours, Jeryl, but something much more profound. It is the difference between ignorance and knowledge, between weakness and power.

‘We have developed our minds, and our minds alone, until we can go no further. As Aretenon has told you, we have now come to a danger that threatens our entire race. We are under the shadow of the irresistible weapon against which there can be no defence.

‘The solution is, quite literally, in the hands of the Phileni. We must use their skills to reshape our world, and so remove the cause of all our wars. We must go back to the beginning and re-lay the foundations of our culture. It won’t be our culture alone, though, for we shall share it with the Phileni. They will be the hands—we the brains. Oh, I have dreamed of the world that may come, ages ahead, when even the marvels you see around you now will be considered childish toys! But not many are philosophers, and I need an argument more substantial than dreams. That final argument I believe I may have found, though I cannot yet be certain.

‘I have asked you here, Eris, partly because I wanted to renew our old friendship, and partly because your word will now have far greater influence than mine. You are a hero among your own people, and the Mithraneans also will listen to you. I want you to return, taking with you some of the Phileni and their products. Show them to your people, and ask them to send their young men here to help us with our work.’

There was a pause during which Jeryl could gather no hints of Eris’s thoughts. Then he replied hesitantly:

‘But I still don’t understand. These things that the Phileni make are very pretty, and some of them may be useful to us. But how can they change us as profoundly as you seem to think?’

Therodimus sighed. Eris could not see past the present into the future that was yet to be. He had not caught, as Therodimus had done, the promise that lay beyond the busy hands and tools of the Phileni—the first faint possibilities of the Machine. Perhaps he would never understand: but he could still be convinced.

Veiling his deeper thoughts, Therodimus continued:

‘Perhaps some of these things are toys, Eris—but they may be more powerful than you think. Jeryl, I know, would be loath to part with hers… and perhaps I can find one that would convince you.’

Eris was sceptical, and Jeryl could see that he was in one of his darker moods.

‘I doubt it very much,’ he said.

‘Well, I can try.’ Therodimus gave a whistle, and one of the Phileni came running up. There was a short exchange of conversation.

‘Would you come with me, Eris? It will take some time.’

Eris followed him, the others, at Therodimus’s request, remaining behind. They left the large cave and went towards the row of smaller ones which the Phileni used for their various trades.

The strange whirring was sounding loudly in Eris’s ears, but for a moment he could not see its cause, the light of the crude oil lamps being too faint for his eyes. Then he made out one of the Phileni bending over a wooden table upon which something was spinning rapidly, driven by a belt from a treadle operated by another of the little creatures. He had seen the potters using a similar device, but this was different. It was shaping wood, not clay, and the potter’s fingers had been replaced by a sharp metal blade from which long, thin shavings were curling out in fascinating spirals. With their huge eyes the Phileni, who disliked full sunlight, could see perfectly in the gloom, but it was some time before Eris could discover just what was happening. Then, suddenly, he understood.

‘Aretenon,’ said Jeryl when the others had left them, ‘why should the Phileni do all these things for us? Surely they’re quite happy as they are?’

The question, Aretenon thought, was typical of Jeryl and would never have been asked by Eris.

‘They will do anything that Therodimus says,’ he answered, ‘but even apart from that there’s so much we can give them as well. When we turn our minds to their problems, we can see how to solve them in ways that would never have occurred to them. They’re very eager to learn, and already we must have advanced their culture by hundreds of generations. Also, they’re physically very feeble. Although we don’t possess their dexterity, our strength makes possible tasks they could never attempt.’

They had wandered to the edge of the river, and stood for a moment watching the unhurried waters moving down to the sea. Then Jeryl turned to go upstream, but Aretenon stopped her.

‘Therodimus doesn’t want us to go that way, yet,’ he explained. ‘It’s just another of his little secrets. He never likes to reveal his plans until they’re ready.’

Slightly piqued, and distinctly curious, Jeryl obediently turned back. She would, of course, come this way again as soon as there was no one else about.

It was very peaceful here in the warm sunlight, among the pools of heat trapped by the trees. Jeryl had almost lost her fear of the forest, though she knew she would never be quite happy there.

Aretenon seemed very abstracted, and Jeryl knew that he wished to say something and was marshalling his thoughts. Presently he began to speak, with the freedom that is only possible between two people who are fond of each other but have no emotional ties.

‘It is very hard, Jeryl,’ he began, ‘to turn one’s back on the work of a lifetime. Once I had hoped that the great new forces we have discovered could be safely used, but now I know that it is impossible, at least for many ages. Therodimus was right—we can go no further with our minds alone. Our culture has been hopelessly one-sided, though through no fault of ours. We cannot solve the fundamental problem of peace and war without a command over the physical world such as the Phileni posses—and which we hope borrow from them.

‘Perhaps there will be other great adventures here for our minds, to make us forget what we will have to abandon. We shall be able to learn something from Nature at last. What is the difference between fire and water, between wood and stone? What are the suns, and what are those millions of faint lights we see in the sky when both the suns are down? Perhaps the answers to all these questions may lie at the end of the new road along which we must travel.’

He paused.

‘New knowledge—new wisdom—in realms we have never dreamed of before. It may lure us away from the dangers we have encountered: for certainly nothing we can learn from Nature will ever be as great a threat as the peril we have uncovered in our own minds.’

The flow of Aretenon’s thoughts was suddenly interrupted. Then he said: ‘I think Eris wants to see you.’

Jeryl wondered why Eris had not sent the message to her: she wondered, too, at the undertone of amusement—or was it something else?—in Aretenon’s mind.

There was no sign of Eris as they approached the caves, but he was waiting for them and came bounding out into the sunlight before they could reach the entrance. Then Jeryl gave an involuntary cry, and retreated a pace or two as her mate came towards her.

For Eris was whole again. Gone was the shattered stump on his forehead: it had been replaced by a new, gleaming horn no less splendid than the one he had lost.

In a belated gesture of greeting, Eris touched horns with Aretenon. Then he was gone into the forest in great joyous leaps—but not before his mind had met Jeryl’s as it had seldom done since the days before the War.

‘Let him go,’ said Therodimus softly. ‘He would rather be alone. When he returns I think you will find him—different.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘The Phileni are clever, are they not? Now, perhaps, Eris will be more appreciative of their “toys”.’

‘I know I am impatient,’ said Therodimus, ‘but I am old now, and I want to see the changes begin in my own lifetime. That is why I am starting so many schemes in the hope that some at least will succeed. But this is the one, above all, in which I have put most faith.’

For a moment he lost himself in his thoughts. Not one in a hundred of his own race could fully share his dream. Even Eris, though he now believed in it, did so with his heart rather than his mind. Perhaps Aretenon—the brilliant and subtle Aretenon, so desperately anxious to neutralise the powers he had brought into the world—might have glimpsed the reality. But his was of all minds the most impenetrable, save when he wished otherwise.

‘You know as well as I do,’ continued Therodimus, as they walked upstream, ‘that our wars have only one cause—Food. We and the Mithraneans are trapped on this continent of ours with its limited resources, which we can do nothing to increase. Ahead of us we have always the nightmare of starvation, and for all our vaunted intelligence there has been nothing we can do about it. Oh yes, we have scraped some laborious irrigation ditches with our forehooves, but how slight their help has been!

‘The Phileni have discovered how to grow crops that increase the fertility of the ground manyfold. I believe that we can do the same—once we have adapted their tools for our own use. That is our first and most important task, but it is not the one on which I have set my heart. The final solution to our problem, Eris, must be the discovery of new, virgin lands into which our people can migrate.’

He smiled at the other’s amazement.

‘No, don’t think I’m mad. Such lands do exist, I’m sure of it. Once I stood at the edge of the ocean and watched a great flight of birds coming inland from far out at sea. I have seen them flying outwards, too, so purposefully that I was certain they were going to some other country. And I have followed them with my thoughts.’

‘Even if your theory is true, as it probably is,’ said Eris, ‘what use is it to us?’ He gestured to the river flowing beside them. ‘We drown in the water, and you cannot build a rope to support us—’ His thoughts suddenly faded out into a jumbled chaos of ideas.

Therodimus smiled.

‘So you have guessed what I hope to do. Well, now you can see if you are right.’

They had come to a level stretch of bank, upon which a group of the Phileni were busily at work, under the supervision of some of Therodimus’s assistants. Lying at the water’s edge was a strange object which, Eris realised, was made of many tree-trunks joined together by ropes.

They watched in fascination as the orderly tumult reached its climax. There was a great pulling and pushing, and the raft moved ponderously into the water with a mighty splash. The spray had scarcely ceased to fall when a young Mithranean leaped from the bank and began to dance gleefully upon the logs, which were now tugging at the moorings as if eager to break away and follow the river down to the sea. A moment later he had been joined by others, rejoicing in their mastery of a new element. The little Phileni, unable to make the leap, stood watching patiently on the bank while their masters enjoyed themselves.

There was an exhilaration about the scene that no one could fail to miss, though perhaps few of those present realised that they were at a turning-point in history. Only Therodimus stood a little apart from the rest, lost in his own thoughts. This primitive raft, he knew, was merely a beginning. It must be tested upon the river, then along the shores of the ocean. The work would take years, and he was never likely to see the first voyagers returning from those fabulous lands whose existence was still no more than a guess. But what had been begun, others would finish.

Overhead, a flight of birds was passing across the forest. Therodimus watched them go, envying their freedom to move at will over land and sea. He had begun the conquest of the water for his race, but that the skies might one day be theirs also was beyond even his imagination.

Aretenon, Jeryl and the rest of the expedition had already crossed the river when Eris said goodbye to Therodimus. This time they had done so without a drop of water touching their bodies, for the raft had come downstream and was performing valuable duties as a ferry. A new and much improved model was already under construction, as it was painfully obvious that the prototype was not exactly seaworthy. These initial difficulties would be quickly overcome by designers who, even if they were forced to work with Stone Age tools, could handle with ease the mathematics of metacentres, buoyancies and advanced hydrodynamics.

‘Your task won’t be a simple one,’ said Therodimus, ‘for you cannot show your people all the things you have seen here. At first you must be content to sow the seed, to arouse interest and curiosity—particularly among the young, who will come here to learn more. Perhaps you will meet opposition: I expect so. But every time you return to us, we shall have new things to show you and to strengthen your arguments.’

They touched horns: then Eris was gone, taking with him the knowledge that was to change the world—so slowly at first, then ever more swiftly. Once the barriers were down, once the Mithraneans and the Atheleni had been given the simple tools which they could fasten to their forelimbs and use unaided, progress would be swift. But for the present they must rely on the Phileni for everything: and there were so few of them.

Therodimus was well content. Only in one respect was he disappointed, for he had hoped that Eris, who had always been his favourite, might also be his successor. The Eris who was now returning to his own people was no longer self-obsessed or embittered, for he had a mission and hope for the future. But he lacked the keen, far-ranging vision that was needed here: it would be Aretenon who must continue what he had begun. Still, that could not be helped, and there was no need yet to think of such matters. Therodimus was very old, but he knew that he would be meeting Eris many times again here by the river at the entrance to his land.

The ferry was gone now, and though he had expected it, Eris stopped amazed at the great span of the bridge, swaying slightly in the breeze. Its execution did not quite match its design—a good deal of mathematics had gone into its parabolic suspension—but it was still the first great engineering feat in history. Constructed though it was entirely of wood and rope, it forecast the shape of the metal giants to come.

Eris paused in mid-stream. He could see smoke rising from the shipyards facing the ocean, and thought he could just glimpse the masts of some of the new vessels that were being built for coastal trade. It was hard to believe that when he had first crossed this river he had been dragged over dangling from a rope.

Aretenon was waiting for them on the far bank. He moved rather slowly now, but his eyes were still bright with the old, eager intelligence. He greeted Eris warmly.

‘I’m glad you could come now. You’re just in time.’

That, Eris knew, could mean only one thing.

‘The ships are back?’

‘Almost: they were sighted an hour ago, out on the horizon. They should be here at any moment, and then we shall know the truth at last, after all these years. If only—’

His thoughts faded out, but Eris could continue them. They had come to the great pyramid of stones beneath which Therodimus lay—Therodimus, whose brain was behind everything they saw, but who could never learn now if his most cherished dream was true or not.

There was a storm coming up from the ocean, and they hurried along the new road that skirted the river’s edge. Small boats of a kind that Eris had not seen before went past them occasionally, operated by Atheleni or Mithraneans with wooden paddles strapped to their forelimbs. It always gave Eris great pleasure to see such new conquests, such new liberations of his people from their age-old chains. Yet sometimes they reminded him of children who had suddenly been let loose into a wonderful new world, full of exciting and interesting things that must be done, whether they were likely to be useful or not. However, anything that promised to make his race into better sailors was more than useful. In the last decade Eris had discovered that pure intelligence was sometimes not enough: there were skills that could not be acquired by any amount of mental effort. Though his people had largely overcome their fear of water, they were still quite incompetent on the ocean, and the Phileni had therefore become the first navigators of the world.

Jeryl looked nervously around her as the first peal of thunder came rolling in from the sea. She was still wearing the necklace that Therodimus had given her so long ago: but it was by no means the only ornament she carried now.

‘I hope the ships will be safe,’ she said anxiously.

‘There’s not much wind, and they will have ridden out much worse storms than this,’ Aretenon reassured her, as they entered his cave. Eris and Jeryl looked round with eager interest to see what new wonders the Phileni had made during their absence: but if there were any they had, as usual, been hidden away until Aretenon was ready to show them. He was still rather childishly fond of such little surprises and mysteries.

There was an air of absentmindedness about the meeting that would have puzzled an onlooker ignorant of its cause. As Eris talked of all the changes in the outer world, of the success of the new Phileni settlements, and of the steady growth of agriculture among his people, Aretenon listened with only half his mind. His thoughts, and those of his friends, were far out at sea, meeting the oncoming ships which might be bringing the greatest news their world had ever received.

As Eris finished his report, Aretenon rose to his feet and began to move restlessly around the chamber.

‘You have done better than we dared to hope at the beginning. At least there has been no war for a generation, and our food supply is ahead of the population for the first time in history—thanks to our new agricultural techniques.’

Aretenon glanced at the furnishings of his chamber, recalling with an effort the fact that in his own youth almost everything he saw would have appeared impossible or even meaningless to him. Not even the simplest of tools had existed then, at least in the knowledge of his people. Now there were ships and bridges and houses—and these were only the beginning.

‘I am well satisfied,’ he said. ‘We have, as we planned, diverted the whole stream of our culture, turning it away from the dangers that lay ahead. The powers that made the Madness possible will soon be forgotten: only a handful of us still know of them, and we will take our secrets with us. Perhaps when our descendants rediscover them they will be wise enough to use them properly. But we have uncovered so many new wonders that it may be a thousand generations before we turn again to look into our own minds and to tamper with the forces locked within them.’

The mouth of the cave was illuminated by a sudden flash of lightning. The storm was coming nearer, though it was still some miles away. Rain was beginning to fall in large, angry drops from the leaden sky.

‘While we’re waiting for the ships,’ said Aretenon rather abruptly, ‘come into the next cave and see some of the new things we have to show you since your last visit.’

It was a strange collection. Side by side on the same bench were tools and inventions which in other cultures had been separated by thousands of years of time. The Stone Age was past: bronze and iron had come, and already the first crude scientific instruments had been built for experiments that were driving back the frontiers of the unknown. A primitive retort spoke of the beginnings of chemistry, and by its side were the first lenses the world had seen—waiting to reveal the unsuspected universes of the infinitely small and the infinitely great.

The storm was upon them as Aretenon’s description of these new wonders drew to its close. From time to time he had glanced nervously at the mouth of the cave, as if awaiting a messenger from the harbour, but they had remained undisturbed save by the occasional crash of thunder.

‘I’ve shown you everything of importance,’ he said, ‘but here’s something that may amuse you while we’re waiting. As I said, we’ve sent expeditions everywhere to collect and classify all the rocks they can, in the hope of finding useful minerals. One of them brought back this.’

He extinguished the lights and the cave became completely dark.

‘It will be some time before your eyes grow sensitive enough to see it,’ Aretenon warned. ‘Just look over there in that corner.’

Eris strained his eyes into the darkness. At first he could see nothing: then, slowly, a glimmering blue light became faintly visible. It was so vague and diffuse that he could not focus his eyes upon it, and he automatically moved forward.

‘I shouldn’t go too near,’ advised Aretenon. ‘It seems to be a perfectly ordinary mineral, but the Phileni who found it and carried it here got some very strange burns from handling it. Yet it’s quite cold to the touch. One day we’ll learn its secret: but I don’t suppose it’s anything at all important.’

A vast curtain of sheet lightning split the sky, and for a moment the reflected glare lit up the cave, pinning weird shadows against the walls. At the same moment one of the Phileni staggered into the entrance and called something to Aretenon in its thin, reedy voice. He gave a great shout of triumph, as one of his ancestors might have done on some ancient battlefield: then his thoughts came crashing into Eris’s mind.

‘Land! They’ve found land—a whole new continent waiting for us!’

Eris felt the sense of triumph and victory well up within him like water bursting from a spring. Clear ahead now into the future lay the new, the glorious road along which their children would travel, mastering the world and all its secrets as they went. The vision of Therodimus was at last sharp and brilliant before his eyes.

He felt for the mind of Jeryl, so that she could share his joy—and found that it was closed to him. Leaning toward her in the darkness, he could sense that she was still staring into the depths of the cave, as if she had never heard the wonderful news, and could not tear her eyes away from that enigmatic glow.

Out of the night came the roar of the belated thunder as it raced across the sky. Eris felt Jeryl tremble beside him, and sent out his thoughts to comfort her.

‘Don’t let the thunder frighten you,’ he said gently. ‘What is there to fear now?’

‘I do not know,’ replied Jeryl. ‘I am frightened—but not of the thunder. Oh, Eris, it is a wonderful thing we have done, and I wish Therodimus could be here to see it. But where will it lead in the end—this new road of ours?’

Out of the past, the words that Aretenon had once spoken had risen up to haunt her. She remembered their walk by the river, long ago, when he had talked of his hopes and had said: ‘Certainly nothing we can learn from Nature will ever be as great a threat as the peril we have encountered in our own minds.’ Now the words seemed to mock her and to cast a shadow over the golden future: but why, she could not say.

Alone, perhaps, of all the races in the Universe, her people had reached the second cross-roads—and had never passed the first. Now they must go along the road that they had missed, and must face the challenge at its end—the challenge from which, this time, they could not escape.

In the darkness, the faint glow of dying atoms burned unwavering in the rock. It would still be burning there, scarcely dimmed, when Jeryl and Eris had been dust for centuries. It would be only a little fainter when the civilisation they were building had at last unlocked its secrets.

Superiority

First published in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, August 1951

Collected in Expedition to Earth

‘Superiority’ was inspired—if that is not too pretentious a word—by the German V2 rocket programme. With 20/20 hindsight, it is now clear that the Third Reich’s attempts to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, which was too late to have any major influence on World War II, sapped its resources and contributed to the Allied victory.

Soon after publication ‘Superiority’ was inserted into the Engineering curriculum of MIT—to warn the graduates that the Better is often the enemy of the Good—and the Best can be the enemy of both, as it is always too late.

And I must confess that the two characters in this little squib were based on Dr Wernher von Braun and General Walter Dornberger, both of whom later became good friends. To put the record straight, may I say that Wernher was nothing like the Dr Strangelove image many people have of him: he had a wonderful sense of humour and was greatly liked by all those who worked under him—Germans and Americans.

In making this statement—which I do of my own free will—I wish to make it perfectly clear that I am not in any way trying to gain sympathy, nor do I expect any mitigation of whatever sentence the Court may pronounce. I am writing this in an attempt to refute some of the lying reports published in the papers I have been allowed to see and broadcast over the prison radio. These have given an entirely false picture of the true cause of our defeat, and as the leader of my race’s armed forces at the cessation of hostilities I feel it my duty to protest against such libels upon those who served under me.

I also hope that this statement may explain the reasons for the application I have twice made to the Court, and will now induce it to grant a favour for which I can see no possible grounds of refusal.

The ultimate cause of our failure was a simple one: despite all statements to the contrary, it was not due to lack of bravery on the part of our men, or to any fault of the Fleet’s. We were defeated by one thing only—by the inferior science of our enemies. I repeat—by the inferior science of our enemies.

When the war opened we had no doubts of our ultimate victory. The combined fleets of our allies greatly exceeded in number and armament those which the enemy could muster against us, and in almost all branches of military science we were their superiors. We were sure that we could maintain this superiority. Our belief proved, alas, to be only too well founded.

At the opening of the war our main weapons were the long-range homing torpedo, dirigible ball-lightning and the various modifications of the Klydon beam. Every unit of the Fleet was equipped with these and though the enemy possessed similar weapons their installations were generally of lesser power. Moreover, we had behind us a far greater military Research Organization, and with this initial advantage we could not possibly lose.

The campaign proceeded according to plan until the Battle of the Five Suns. We won this, of course, but the opposition proved stronger than we had expected. It was realized that victory might be more difficult, and more delayed, than had first been imagined. A conference of supreme commanders was therefore called to discuss our future strategy.

Present for the first time at one of our war conferences was Professor-General Norden, the new Chief of the Research Staff, who had just been appointed to fill the gap left by the death of Malvar, our greatest scientist. Malvar’s leadership had been responsible, more than any other single factor, for the efficiency and power of our weapons. His loss was a very serious blow, but no one doubted the brilliance of his successor—though many of us disputed the wisdom of appointing a theoretical scientist to fill a post of such vital importance. But we had been overruled.

I can well remember the impression Norden made at that conference. The military advisers were worried, and as usual turned to the scientists for help. Would it be possible to improve our existing weapons, they asked, so that our present advantage could be increased still further?

Norden’s reply was quite unexpected. Malvar had often been asked such a question—and he had always done what we requested.

“Frankly, gentlemen,” said Norden, “I doubt it. Our existing weapons have practically reached finality. I don’t wish to criticize my predecessor, or the excellent work done by the Research Staff in the last few generations, but do you realize that there has been no basic change in armaments for over a century? It is, I am afraid, the result of a tradition that has become conservative. For too long, the Research Staff has devoted itself to perfecting old weapons instead of developing new ones. It is fortunate for us that our opponents have been no wiser: we cannot assume that this will always be so.”

Norden’s words left an uncomfortable impression, as he had no doubt intended. He quickly pressed home the attack.

“What we want are new weapons—weapons totally different from any that have been employed before. Such weapons can be made: it will take time, of course, but since assuming charge I have replaced some of the older scientists by young men and have directed research into several unexplored fields, which show great promise. I believe, in fact, that a revolution in warfare may soon be upon us.”

We were skeptical. There was a bombastic tone in Norden’s voice that made us suspicious of his claims. We did not know, then, that he never promised anything that he had not already perfected in the laboratory. In the laboratory—that was the operative phrase.

Norden proved his case less than a month later, when he demonstrated the Sphere of Annihilation, which produced complete disintegration of matter over a radius of several hundred meters. We were intoxicated by the power of the new weapon, and were quite prepared to overlook one fundamental defect—the fact that it was a sphere and hence destroyed its rather complicated generating equipment at the instant of formation. This meant, of course, that it could not be used on warships but only on guided missiles, and a great programme was started to convert all homing torpedoes to carry the new weapon. For the time being all further offensives were suspended.

We realise now that this was our first mistake. I still think that it was a natural one, for it seemed to us then that all our existing weapons had become obsolete overnight, and we already regarded them almost as primitive survivals. What we did not appreciate was the magnitude of the task we were attempting and the length of time it would take to get the revolutionary super-weapon into battle. Nothing like this had happened for a hundred years, and we had no previous experience to guide us.

The conversion problem proved far more difficult than anticipated. A new class of torpedo had to be designed, as the standard model was too small. This meant in turn that only the larger ships could launch the weapon, but we were prepared to accept this penalty. After six months, the heavy units of the Fleet were being equipped with the Sphere. Training manoeuvres and tests had shown that it was operating satisfactorily, and we were ready to take it into action. Norden was already being hailed as the architect of victory, and had half-promised even more spectacular weapons.

Then two things happened. One of our battleships disappeared completely on a training flight, and an investigation showed that under certain conditions the ship’s long-range radar could trigger the Sphere immediately after it had been launched. The modification needed to overcome this defect was trivial, but it caused a delay of another month and was the source of much bad feeling between the naval staff and the scientists. We were ready for action again—when Norden announced that the radius of effectiveness of the Sphere had now been increased by ten, thus multiplying by a thousand the chances of destroying an enemy ship.

So the modifications started all over again, but everyone agreed that the delay would be worth it. Meanwhile, however, the enemy had been emboldened by the absence of further attacks and had made an unexpected onslaught. Our ships were short of torpedoes, since none had been coming from the factories, and were forced to retire. So we lost the systems of Kyrane and Floranus, and the planetary fortress of Rhamsandron.

It was an annoying but not a serious blow, for the recaptured systems had been unfriendly and difficult to administer. We had no doubt that we could restore the position in the near future, as soon as the new weapon became operational.

These hopes were only partially fulfilled. When we renewed our offensive, we had to do so with fewer of the Spheres of Annihilation than had been planned, and this was one reason for our limited success. The other reason was more serious.

While we had been equipping as many of our ships as we could with the irresistible weapon, the enemy had been building feverishly. His ships were of the old pattern, with the old weapons—but they outnumbered ours. When we went into action, we found that the numbers ranged against us were often 100 per cent greater than expected, causing target confusion among the automatic weapons and resulting in higher losses than anticipated. The enemy losses were higher still, for once a Sphere had reached its objective, destruction was certain, but the balance had not swung as far in our favour as we had hoped.

Moreover, while the main fleets had been engaged, the enemy had launched a daring attack on the lightly held systems of Eriston, Duranus, Carmanidor and Pharanidon—recapturing them all. We were thus faced with a threat only fifty light-years from our home planets.

There was much recrimination at the next meeting of the supreme commanders. Most of the complaints were addressed to Norden—Grand Admiral Taxaris in particular maintaining that thanks to our admittedly irresistible weapon we were now considerably worse off than before. We should, he claimed, have continued to build conventional ships, thus preventing the loss of our numerical superiority.

Norden was equally angry and called the naval staff ungrateful bunglers. But I could tell that he was worried—as indeed we all were—by the unexpected turn of events. He hinted that there might be a speedy way of remedying the situation.

We now know that Research had been working on the Battle Analyser for many years, but at the time it came as a revelation to us and perhaps we were too easily swept off our feet. Norden’s argument, also, was seductively convincing. What did it matter, he said, if the enemy had twice as many ships as we—if the efficiency of ours could be doubled or even trebled? For decades the limiting factor in warfare had been not mechanical but biological—it had become more and more difficult for any single mind, or group of minds, to cope with the rapidly changing complexities of battle in three-dimensional space. Norden’s mathematicians had analysed some of the classic engagements of the past and had shown that even when we had been victorious we had often operated our units at much less than half of their theoretical efficiency.

The Battle Analyser would change all this by replacing operations staff by electronic calculators. The idea was not new in theory, but until now it had been no more than a Utopian dream. Many of us found it difficult to believe that it was still anything but a dream: after we had run through several very complex dummy battles, however, we were convinced.

It was decided to install the Analyser in four of our heaviest ships, so that each of the main fleets could be equipped with one. At this stage, the trouble began—though we did not know it until later.

The Analyser contained just short of a million vacuum tubes and needed a team of five hundred technicians to maintain and operate it. It was quite impossible to accommodate the extra staff aboard a battleship, so each of the four units had to be accompanied by a converted liner to carry the technicians not on duty. Installation was also a very slow and tedious business, but by gigantic efforts it was completed in six months.

Then, to our dismay, we were confronted by another crisis. Nearly five thousand highly skilled men had been selected to serve the Analysers and had been given an intensive course at the Technical Training Schools. At the end of seven months, 10 per cent of them had had nervous breakdowns, and only 40 per cent had qualified.

Once again, everyone started to blame everyone else. Norden, of course, said that the Research Staff could not be held responsible, and so incurred the enmity of the Personnel and Training Commands. It was finally decided that the only thing to do was to use two instead of four Analysers and to bring the others into action as soon as men could be trained. There was little time to lose, for the enemy was still on the offensive, and his morale was rising.

The first Analyser fleet was ordered to recapture the system of Eriston. On the way, by one of the hazards of war, the liner carrying the technicians was struck by a roving mine. A warship would have survived, but the liner with its irreplaceable cargo was totally destroyed. So the operation had to be abandoned.

The other expedition was, at first, more successful. There was no doubt at all that the Analyser fulfilled its designers’ claims, and the enemy was heavily defeated in the first engagements. He withdrew, leaving us in possession of Saphran, Leucon and Hexanerax. But his Intelligence Staff must have noted the change in our tactics and the inexplicable presence of a liner in the heart of our battle-fleet. It must have noted, also, that our first fleet had been accompanied by a similar ship—and had withdrawn when it had been destroyed.

In the next engagement, the enemy used his superior numbers to launch an overwhelming attack on the Analyser ship and its unarmed consort. The attack was made without regard to losses—both ships were, of course, very heavily protected—and it succeeded. The result was the virtual decapitation of the fleet, since an effectual transfer to the old operational methods proved impossible. We disengaged under heavy fire, and so lost all our gains and also the systems of Lorymia, Ismarnus, Beronis, Alphanidon and Sideneus.

At this stage, Grand Admiral Taxaris expressed his disapproval of Norden by committing suicide, and I assumed supreme command.

The situation was now both serious and infuriating. With stubborn conservatism and complete lack of imagination the enemy continued to advance with his old-fashioned and inefficient but now vastly more numerous ships. It was galling to realise that if we had only continued building, without seeking new weapons, we would have been in a far more advantageous position. There were many acrimonious conferences at which Norden defended the scientists while everyone else blamed them for all that had happened. The difficulty was that Norden had proved every one of his claims; he had a perfect excuse for all the disasters that had occurred. And we could not now turn back—the search for an irresistible weapon must go on. At first it had been a luxury that would shorten the war. Now it was a necessity if we were to end it victoriously.

We were on the defensive, and so was Norden. He was more than ever determined to re-establish his prestige and that of the Research Staff. But we had been twice disappointed, and would not make the same mistake again. No doubt Norden’s twenty thousand scientists would produce many further weapons: we would remain unimpressed.

We were wrong. The final weapon was something so fantastic that even now it seems difficult to believe that it ever existed. Its innocent, noncommittal name—the Exponential Field—gave no hint of its real potentialities. Some of Norden’s mathematicians had discovered it during a piece of entirely theoretical research into the properties of space, and to everyone’s great surprise their results were found to be physically realisable.

It seems very difficult to explain the operation of the Field to the layman. According to the technical description, it ‘produces an exponential condition of space, so that a finite distance in normal, linear space may become infinite in pseudo-space’. Norden gave an analogy that some of us found useful. It was as if one took a flat disc of rubber—representing a region of normal space—and then pulled its centre out to infinity. The circumference of the disc would be unaltered—but its ‘diameter’ would be infinite. That was the sort of thing the generator of the Field did to the space around it.

As an example, suppose that a ship carrying the generator was surrounded by a ring of hostile machines. If it switched on the Field, each of the enemy ships would think that it—and the ships on the far side of the circle—had suddenly receded into nothingness. Yet the circumference of the circle would be the same as before: only the journey to the centre would be of infinite duration, for as one proceeded, distances would appear to become greater and greater as the ‘scale’ of space altered.

It was a nightmare condition, but a very useful one. Nothing could reach a ship carrying the Field: it might be englobed by an enemy fleet yet would be as inaccessible as if it were at the other side of the Universe. Against this, of course, it could not fight back without switching off the Field, but this still left it at a very great advantage, not only in defence but in offence. For a ship fitted with the Field could approach an enemy fleet undetected and suddenly appear in its midst.

This time there seemed to be no flaws in the new weapon. Needless to say, we looked for all the possible objections before we committed ourselves again. Fortunately the equipment was fairly simple and did not require a large operating staff. After much debate, we decided to rush it into production, for we realised that time was running short and the war was going against us. We had now lost almost the whole of our initial gains and the enemy forces had made several raids into our own Solar System.

We managed to hold off the enemy while the Fleet was re-equipped and the new battle techniques were worked out. To use the Field operationally it was necessary to locate an enemy formation, set a course that would intercept it, and then switch on the generator for the calculated period of time. On releasing the Field again—if the calculations had been accurate—one would be in the enemy’s midst and could do great damage during the resulting confusion, retreating by the same route when necessary.

The first trial manoeuvres proved satisfactory and the equipment seemed quite reliable. Numerous rock attacks were made and the crews became accustomed to the new technique. I was on one of the test flights and can vividly remember my impressions as the Field was switched on. The ships around us seemed to dwindle as if on the surface of an expanding bubble: in an instant they had vanished completely. So had the stars—but presently we could see that the Galaxy was still visible as a faint band of light around the ship. The virtual radius of our pseudo-space was not really infinite, but some hundred thousand light-years, and so the distance to the farthest stars of our system had not been greatly increased—though the nearest had of course totally disappeared.

These training manoeuvres, however, had to be cancelled before they were complete owing to a whole flock of minor technical troubles in various pieces of equipment, notably the communications circuits. These were annoying, but not important, though it was thought best to return to Base to clear them up.

At that moment the enemy made what was obviously intended to be a decisive attack against the fortress planet of Iton at the limits of our Solar System. The Fleet had to go into battle before repairs could be made.

The enemy must have believed that we had mastered the secret of invisibility—as in a sense we had. Our ships appeared suddenly out of nowhere and inflicted tremendous damage—for a while. And then something quite baffling and inexplicable happened.

I was in command of the flag-ship Hircania when the trouble started. We had been operating as independent units, each against assigned objectives. Our detectors observed an enemy formation at medium range and the navigating officers measured its distance with great accuracy. We set course and switched on the generator.

The Exponential Field was released at the moment when we should have been passing through the centre of the enemy group. To our consternation, we emerged into normal space at a distance of many hundred miles—and when we found the enemy, he had already found us. We retreated and tried again. This time we were so far away from the enemy that he located us first.

Obviously, something was seriously wrong. We broke communicator silence and tried to contact the other ships of the Fleet to see if they had experienced the same trouble. Once again we failed—and this time the failure was beyond all reason, for the communication equipment appeared to be working perfectly. We could only assume, fantastic though it seemed, that the rest of the Fleet had been destroyed.

I do not wish to describe the scenes when the scattered units of the Fleet struggled back to Base. Our casualties had actually been negligible, but the ships were completely demoralised. Almost all had lost touch with each other and had found that their ranging equipment showed inexplicable errors. It was obvious that the Exponential Field was the cause of the troubles, despite the fact that they were only apparent when it was switched off.

The explanation came too late to do us any good, and Norden’s final discomfiture was small consolation for the virtual loss of the war. As I have explained, the Field generators produced a radial distortion of space, distances appearing greater and greater as one approached the centre of the artificial pseudo-space. When the field was switched off, conditions returned to normal.

But not quite. It was never possible to restore the initial state exactly. Switching the field on and off was equivalent to an elongation and contraction of the ship carrying the generator, but there was an hysteresis effect, as it were, and the initial condition was never quite reproducible, owing to all the thousands of electrical changes and movements of mass aboard the ship while the Field was on. These asymmetries and distortions were cumulative, and though they seldom amounted to more than a fraction of one per cent, that was quite enough. It meant that the precision ranging equipment and the tuned circuits in the communication apparatus were thrown completely out of adjustment. Any single ship could never detect the change—only when it compared its equipment with that of another vessel, or tried to communicate with it, could it tell what had happened.

It is impossible to describe the resultant chaos. Not a single component of one ship could be expected with certainty to work aboard another. The very nuts and bolts were no longer interchangeable, and the supply position became quite impossible. Given time, we might even have overcome these difficulties, but the enemy ships were already attacking in thousands with weapons which now seemed centuries behind those that we had invented. Our magnificent Fleet, crippled by our own science, fought on as best it could until it was overwhelmed and forced to surrender. The ships fitted with the Field were still invulnerable, but as fighting units they were almost helpless. Every time they switched on their generators to escape from enemy attack, the permanent distortion of their equipment increased. In a month, it was all over.

This is the true story of our defeat, which I give without prejudice to my defence before this Court. I make it, as I have said, to counteract the libels that have been circulating against the men who fought under me, and to show where the true blame for our misfortunes lay.

Finally, my request, which as the Court will now realise I make in no frivolous a manner and which I hope will therefore be granted.

The Court will be aware that the conditions under which we are housed and the constant surveillance to which we are subjected night and day are somewhat distressing. Yet I am not complaining of this: nor do I complain of the fact that shortage of accommodation has made it necessary to house us in pairs.

But I cannot be held responsible for my future actions if I am compelled any longer to share my cell with Professor Norden, late Chief of the Research Staff of my armed forces.

‘If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth…’

First published in Future, September 1951

Collected in Expedition to Earth

This story, which has been rather widely reprinted, was written at Christmas 1950.

On another Christmas, eighteen years later, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first of all mankind to see an Earthrise from the Moon.

Let us hope that no one ever views an Earthrise like the child in this cautionary tale.

When Marvin was ten years old, his father took him through the long, echoing corridors that led up through Administration and Power, until at last they came to the uppermost levels of all and were among the swiftly growing vegetation of the Farmlands. Marvin liked it here: it was fun watching the great, slender plants creeping with almost visible eagerness towards the sunlight as it filtered down through the plastic domes to meet them. The smell of life was everywhere, awakening inexpressible longings in his heart: no longer was he breathing the dry, cool air of the residential levels, purged of all smells but the faint tang of ozone. He wished he could stay here for a little while, but Father would not let him. They went onwards until they had reached the entrance to the Observatory, which he had never visited: but they did not stop, and Marvin knew with a sense of rising excitement that there could be only one goal left. For the first time in his life, he was going Outside.

There were a dozen of the surface vehicles, with their wide balloon tyres and pressurised cabins, in the great servicing chamber. His father must have been expected, for they were led at once to the little scout car waiting by the huge circular door of the airlock. Tense with expectancy, Marvin settled himself down in the cramped cabin while his father started the motor and checked the controls. The inner door of the lock slid open and then closed behind them: he heard the roar of the great air-pumps fade slowly away as the pressure dropped to zero. Then the ‘Vacuum’ sign flashed on, the outer door parted, and before Marvin lay the land which he had never yet entered.

He had seen it in photographs, of course: he had watched it imaged on television screens a hundred times. But now it was lying all around him, burning beneath the fierce sun that crawled so slowly across the jet-black sky. He stared into the west, away from the blinding splendour of the sun—and there were the stars, as he had been told but had never quite believed. He gazed at them for a long time, marvelling that anything could be so bright and yet so tiny. They were intense unscintillating points, and suddenly he remembered a rhyme he had once read in one of his father’s books:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are.

Well, he knew what the stars were. Whoever asked that question must have been very stupid. And what did they mean by ‘twinkle’? You could see at a glance that all the stars shone with the same steady, unwavering light. He abandoned the puzzle and turned his attention to the landscape around him.

They were racing across a level plain at almost a hundred miles an hour, the great balloon tyres sending up little spurts of dust behind them. There was no sign of the Colony: in the few minutes while he had been gazing at the stars, its domes and radio towers had fallen below the horizon. Yet there were other indications of man’s presence, for about a mile ahead Marvin could see the curiously shaped structures clustering round the head of a mine. Now and then a puff of vapour would emerge from a squat smoke-stack and would instantly disperse.

They were past the mine in a moment. Father was driving with a reckless and exhilarating skill as if—it was a strange thought to come into a child’s mind—he was trying to escape from something. In a few minutes they had reached the edge of the plateau on which the Colony had been built. The ground fell sharply away beneath them in a dizzying slope whose lower stretches were lost in the shadow. Ahead, as far as the eye could reach, was a jumbled wasteland of craters, mountain ranges, and ravines. The crests of the mountains, catching the low sun, burned like islands of fire in a sea of darkness: and above them the stars still shone as steadfastly as ever.

There could be no way forward—yet there was. Marvin clenched his fists as the car edged over the slope and started the long descent. Then he saw the barely visible track leading down the mountainside, and relaxed a little. Other men, it seemed, had gone this way before.

Night fell with a shocking abruptness as they crossed the shadow line and the sun dropped below the crest of the plateau. The twin searchlights sprang into life, casting blue-white bands on the rocks ahead, so that there was scarcely need to check their speed. For hours they drove through valleys and past the feet of mountains whose peaks seemed to comb the stars, and sometimes they emerged for a moment into the sunlight as they climbed over higher ground.

And now on the right was a wrinkled, dusty plain, and on the left, its ramparts and terraces rising mile after mile into the sky, was a wall of mountains that marched into the distance until its peaks sank from sight below the rim of the world. There was no sign that men had ever explored this land, but once they passed the skeleton of a crashed rocket, and beside it a stone cairn surmounted by a metal cross.

It seemed to Marvin that the mountains stretched on forever: but at last, many hours later, the range ended in a towering, precipitous headland that rose steeply from a cluster of little hills. They drove down into a shallow valley that curved in a great arc towards the far side of the mountains: and as they did so, Marvin slowly realised that something very strange was happening in the land ahead.

The sun was now low behind the hills on the right: the valley before them should be in total darkness. Yet it was awash with a cold white radiance that came spilling over the crags beneath which they were driving. Then, suddenly, they were out in the open plain, and the source of the light lay before them in all its glory.

It was very quiet in the little cabin now that the motors had stopped. The only sound was the faint whisper of the oxygen feed and an occasional metallic crepitation as the outer walls of the vehicle radiated away their heat. For no warmth at all came from the great silver crescent that floated low above the far horizon and flooded all this land with pearly light. It was so brilliant that minutes passed before Marvin could accept its challenge and look steadfastly into its glare, but at last he could discern the outlines of continents, the hazy border of the atmosphere, and the white islands of cloud. And even at this distance, he could see the glitter of sunlight on the polar ice.

It was beautiful, and it called to his heart across the abyss of space. There in that shining crescent were all the wonders that he had never known—the hues of sunset skies, the moaning of the sea on pebbled shores, the patter of falling rain, the unhurried benison of snow. These and a thousand others should have been his rightful heritage, but he knew them only from the books and ancient records, and the thought filled him with the anguish of exile.

Why could they not return? It seemed so peaceful beneath those lines of marching cloud. Then Marvin, his eyes no longer blinded by the glare, saw that the portion of the disc that should have been in darkness was gleaming faintly with an evil phosphorescence: and he remembered. He was looking upon the funeral pyre of a world—upon the radioactive aftermath of Armageddon. Across a quarter of a million miles of space, the glow of dying atoms was still visible, a perennial reminder of the ruined past. It would be centuries yet before that deadly glow died from the rocks and life could return again to fill that silent, empty world.

And now Father began to speak, telling Marvin the story which until this moment had meant no more to him than the fairy-tales he had heard in childhood. There were many things he could not understand: it was impossible for him to picture the glowing, multi-coloured pattern of life on the planet he had never seen. Nor could he comprehend the forces that had destroyed it in the end, leaving the Colony, preserved by its isolation, as the sole survivor. Yet he could share the agony of those final days, when the Colony had learned at last that never again would the supply ships come flaming down through the stars with gifts from home. One by one the radio stations had ceased to call: on the shadowed globe the lights of the cities had dimmed and died, and they were alone at last, as no men had ever been alone before, carrying in their hands the future of the race.

Then had followed the years of despair, and the long-drawn battle for survival in their fierce and hostile world. That battle had been won, though barely: this little oasis of life was safe against the worst that Nature could do. But unless there was a goal, a future towards which it could work, the Colony would lose the will to live and neither machines nor skill nor science could save it then.

So, at last, Marvin understood the purpose of this pilgrimage. He would never walk beside the rivers of that lost and legendary world, or listen to the thunder raging above its softly rounded hills. Yet one day—how far ahead?—his children’s children would return to claim their heritage. The winds and the rains would scour the poisons from the burning lands and carry them to the sea, and in the depths of the sea they would waste their venom until they could harm no living things. Then the great ships that were still waiting here on the silent, dusty plains could lift once more into space, along the road that led to home.

That was the dream: and one day, Marvin knew with a sudden flash of insight, he would pass it on to his own son, here at this same spot with the mountains behind him and the silver light from the sky streaming into his face.

He did not look back as they began the homeward journey. He could not bear to see the cold glory of the crescent Earth fade from the rocks around him, as he went to rejoin his people in their long exile.

All the Time in the World

First published in Startling Stores, July 1951

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

This was my first story ever to be adapted for TV—ABC, 13 June 1952. Although I worked on the script, I have absolutely no recollection of the programme, and can’t imagine how it was produced in pre-video-tape days!

When the quiet knock came on the door, Robert Ashton surveyed the room in one swift, automatic movement. Its dull respectability satisfied him and should reassure any visitor. Not that he had any reason to expect the police, but there was no point in taking chances.

‘Come in,’ he said, pausing only to grab Plato’s Dialogues from the shelf beside him. Perhaps this gesture was a little too ostentatious, but it always impressed his clients.

The door opened slowly. At first, Ashton continued his intent reading, not bothering to glance up. There was the slightest acceleration of his heart, a mild and even exhilarating constriction of the chest. Of course, it couldn’t possibly be a flatfoot: someone would have tipped him off. Still, any unheralded visitor was unusual and thus potentially dangerous.

Ashton laid down the book, glanced toward the door and remarked in a noncommittal voice: ‘What can I do for you?’ He did not get up; such courtesies belonged to a past he had buried long ago. Besides, it was a woman. In the circles he now frequented, women were accustomed to receive jewels and clothes and money—but never respect.

Yet there was something about this visitor that drew him slowly to his feet. It was not merely that she was beautiful, but she had a poised and effortless authority that moved her into a different world from the flamboyant doxies he met in the normal course of business. There was a brain and a purpose behind those calm, appraising eyes—a brain, Ashton suspected, the equal of his own.

He did not know how grossly he had underestimated her.

‘Mr Ashton,’ she began, ‘let us not waste time. I know who you are and I have work for you. Here are my credentials.’

She opened a large, stylish handbag and extracted a thick bundle of notes.

‘You may regard this,’ she said, ‘as a sample.’

Ashton caught the bundle as she tossed it carelessly toward him. It was the largest sum of money he had ever held in his life—at least a hundred fivers, all new and serially numbered. He felt them between his fingers. If they were not genuine, they were so good that the difference was of no practical importance.

He ran his thumb to and fro along the edge of the wad as if feeling a pack for a marked card, and said thoughtfully, ‘I’d like to know where you got these. If they aren’t forgeries, they must be hot and will take some passing.’

‘They are genuine. A very short time ago they were in the Bank of England. But if they are of no use to you throw them in the fire. I merely let you have them to show that I mean business.’

‘Go on.’ He gestured to the only seat and balanced himself on the edge of the table.

She drew a sheaf of papers from the capacious handbag and handed it across to him.

‘I am prepared to pay you any sum you wish if you will secure these items and bring them to me, at a time and place to be arranged. What is more, I will guarantee that you can make the thefts with no personal danger.’

Ashton looked at the list, and sighed. The woman was mad. Still, she had better be humoured. There might be more money where this came from.

‘I notice,’ he said mildly, ‘that all these items are in the British Museum, and that most of them are, quite literally, priceless. By that I mean that you could neither buy nor sell them.’

‘I do not wish to sell them. I am a collector.’

‘So it seems. What are you prepared to pay for these acquisitions?’

‘Name a figure.’

There was a short silence. Ashton weighed the possibilities. He took a certain professional pride in his work, but there were some things that no amount of money could accomplish. Still, it would be amusing to see how high the bidding would go.

‘I think a round million would be a very reasonable figure for this lot,’ he said ironically.

‘I fear you are not taking me very seriously. With your contacts, you should be able to dispose of these.’

There was a flash of light and something sparkled through the air. Ashton caught the necklace before it hit the ground, and despite himself was unable to suppress a gasp of amazement. A fortune glittered through his fingers. The central diamond was the largest he had ever seen—it must be one of the world’s most famous jewels.

His visitor seemed completely indifferent as he slipped the necklace into his pocket. Ashton was badly shaken; he knew she was not acting. To her, that fabulous gem was of no more value than a lump of sugar. This was madness on an unimaginable scale.

‘Assuming that you can deliver the money,’ he said, ‘how do you imagine that it’s physically possible to do what you ask? One might steal a single item from this list, but within a few hours the Museum would be solid with police.’

With a fortune already in his pocket, he could afford to be frank. Besides, he was curious to learn more about his fantastic visitor.

She smiled, rather sadly, as if humouring a backward child.

‘If I show you the way,’ she said softly, ‘will you do it?’

‘Yes—for a million.’

‘Have you noticed anything strange since I came in? Is it not—very quiet?’

Ashton listened. My God, she was right! This room was never completely silent, even at night. There had been a wind blowing over the roof tops; where had it gone now? The distant rumble of traffic had ceased; five minutes ago he had been cursing the engines shunting in the marshalling yard at the end of the road. What had happened to them?

‘Go to the window.’

He obeyed the order and drew aside the grimy lace curtains with fingers that shook slightly despite all attempt at control. The he relaxed. The street was quite empty, as it often was at this time in the midmorning. There was no traffic, and hence no reason for sound. Then he glanced down the row of dingy houses towards the shunting yard.

His visitor smiled as he stiffened with the shock.

‘Tell me what you see, Mr Ashton.’

He turned slowly, face pale and throat muscles working.

‘What are you?’ he gasped. ‘A witch?’

‘Don’t be foolish. There is a simple explanation. It is not the world that has changed—but you.’

Ashton stared again at that unbelievable shunting engine, the plume of steam frozen motionless above it as if made from cotton wool. He realised now that the clouds were equally immobile; they should have been scudding across the sky. All around him was the unnatural stillness of the highspeed photograph, the vivid unreality of a scene glimpsed in a flash of lightning.

‘You are intelligent enough to realise what is happening, even if you cannot understand how it is done. Your time scale has been altered: a minute in the outer world would be a year in this room.’

Again she opened the handbag, and this time brought forth what appeared to be a bracelet of some silvery metal, with a series of dials and switches moulded into it.

‘You can call this a personal generator,’ she said. ‘With it strapped about your arm, you are invincible. You can come and go without hindrance—you can steal everything on that list and bring it to me before one of the guards in the Museum has blinked an eyelid. When you have finished, you can be miles away before you switch off the field and step back into the normal world.

‘Now listen carefully, and do exactly what I say. The field has a radius of about seven feet, so you must keep at least that distance from any other person. Secondly, you must not switch it off again until you have completed your task and I have given you your payment. This is most important. Now, the plan I have worked out is this….’

No criminal in the history of the world had ever possessed such power. It was intoxicating—yet Ashton wondered if he would ever get used to it. He had ceased to worry about explanations, at least until the job was done and he had collected his reward. Then, perhaps, he would get away from England and enjoy a well-earned retirement.

His visitor had left a few minutes ahead of him, but when he stepped out onto the street the scene was completely unchanged. Though he had prepared for it, the sensation was still unnerving. Ashton felt an impulse to hurry, as if this condition couldn’t possibly last and he had to get the job done before the gadget ran out of juice. But that, he had been assured, was impossible.

In the High Street he slowed down to look at the frozen traffic, the paralysed pedestrians. He was careful, as he had been warned, not to approach so close to anyone that they came within his field. How ridiculous people looked when one saw them like this, robbed of such grace as movement could give, their mouths half open in foolish grimaces!

Having to seek assistance went against the grain, but some parts of the job were too big for him to handle by himself. Besides, he could pay liberally and never notice it. The main difficulty, Ashton realised, would be to find someone who was intelligent enough not to be scared—or so stupid that he would take everything for granted. He decided to try the first possibility.

Tony Marchetti’s place was down a side street so close to the police station that one felt it was really carrying camouflage too far. As he walked past the entrance, Ashton caught a glimpse of the duty sergeant at his desk and resisted a temptation to go inside to combine a little pleasure with business. But that sort of thing could wait until later.

The door of Tony’s flat opened in his face as he approached. It was such a natural occurrence in a world where nothing was normal that it was a moment before Ashton realised its implications. Had his generator failed? He glanced hastily down the street and was reassured by the frozen tableau behind him.

‘Well, if it isn’t Bob Ashton!’ said a familiar voice. ‘Fancy meeting you as early in the morning as this. That’s an odd bracelet you’re wearing. I thought I had the only one.’

‘Hello, Aram,’ replied Ashton. ‘It looks as if there’s a lot going on that neither of us knows about. Have you signed up Tony, or is he still free?’

‘Sorry. We’ve a little job which will keep him busy for a while.’

‘Don’t tell me. It’s at the National Gallery or the Tate.’

Aram Albenkian fingered his neat goatee. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked.

‘No one. But, after all, you are the crookedest art dealer in the trade, and I’m beginning to guess what’s going on. Did a tall, very good-looking brunette give you that bracelet and a shopping list?’

‘I don’t see why I should tell you, but the answer’s no. It was a man.’

Ashton felt a momentary surprise. Then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I might have guessed that there would be more than one of them. I’d like to know who’s behind it.’

‘Have you any theories?’ said Albenkian guardedly.

Ashton decided that it would be worth risking some loss of information to test the other’s reactions. ‘It’s obvious they’re not interested in money—they have all they want and can get more with this gadget. The woman who saw me said she was a collector. I took it as a joke, but I see now that she meant it seriously.’

‘Why do we come into the picture? What’s to stop them doing the whole job themselves?’ Albenkian asked.

‘Maybe they’re frightened. Or perhaps they want our—er—specialised knowledge. Some of the items on my list are rather well cased in. My theory is that they’re agents for a mad millionaire.’

It didn’t hold water, and Ashton knew it. But he wanted to see which leaks Albenkian would try to plug.

‘My dear Ashton,’ said the other impatiently, holding up his wrist. ‘How do you explain this little thing? I know nothing about science, but even I can tell that it’s beyond the wildest dreams of our technologies. There’s only one conclusion to be drawn from that.’

‘Go on.’

‘These people are from—somewhere else. Our world is being systematically looted of its treasures. You know all this stuff you read about rockets and spaceships? Well, someone else has done it first.’

Ashton didn’t laugh. The theory was no more fantastic than the facts.

‘Whoever they are,’ he said, ‘they seem to know their way around pretty well. I wonder how many teams they’ve got? Perhaps the Louvre and the Prado are being reconnoitred at this very minute. The world is going to have a shock before the day’s out.’

They parted amicably enough, neither confiding any details of real importance about his business. For a fleeting moment Ashton thought of trying to buy over Tony, but there was no point in antagonising Albenkian. Steve Regan would have to do. That meant walking about a mile, since of course any form of transport was impossible. He would die of old age before a bus completed the journey. Ashton was not clear what would happen if he attempted to drive a car when the field was operating, and he had been warned not to try any experiments.

It astonished Ashton that even such a nearly certified moron as Steve could take the accelerator so calmly; there was something to be said, after all, for the comic strips which were probably his only reading. After a few words of grossly simplified explanation, Steve buckled on the spare wristlet which, rather to Ashton’s surprise, his visitor had handed over without comment. Then they set out on their long walk to the Museum.

Ashton, or his client, had thought of everything. They stopped once at a park bench to rest and enjoy some sandwiches and regain their breath. When at last they reached the Museum, neither felt any the worse for the unaccustomed exercise.

They walked together though the gates of the Museum—unable, despite logic, to avoid speaking in whispers—and up the wide stone steps into the entrance hall. Ashton knew his way perfectly. With whimsical humour he displayed his Reading Room ticket as they walked, at a respectful distance, past the statuesque attendants. It occurred to him that the occupants of the great chamber, for the most part, looked just the same as they normally did, even without the benefit of the accelerator.

It was a straightforward but tedious job collecting the books that had been listed. They had been chosen, it seemed, for their beauty as works of art as much as for their literary content. The selection had been done by someone who knew his job. Had they done it themselves, Ashton wondered, or had they bribed other experts as they were bribing him? He wondered if he would ever glimpse the full ramifications of their plot.

There was a considerable amount of panel-smashing to be done, but Ashton was careful not to damage any books, even the unwanted ones. Whenever he had collected enough volumes to make a comfortable load, Steve carried them out into the courtyard and dumped them on the paving stones until a small pyramid had accumulated.

It would not matter if they were left for short periods outside the field of the accelerator. No one would notice their momentary flicker of existence in the normal world.

They were in the library for two hours of their time, and paused for another snack before passing to the next job. On the way Ashton stopped for a little private business. There was a tinkle of glass as the tiny case, standing in solitary splendour, yielded up its treasure: then the manuscript of Alice was safely tucked into Ashton’s pocket.

Among the antiquities, he was not quite so much at home. There were a few examples to be taken from every gallery, and sometimes it was hard to see the reasons for the choice. It was as if—and again he remembered Albenkian’s words—these works of art had been selected by someone with totally alien standards. This time, with a few exceptions, they had obviously not been guided by the experts.

For the second time in history the case of the Portland Vase was shattered. In five seconds, thought Ashton, the alarms would be going all over the Museum and the whole building would be in an uproar. And in five seconds he could be miles away. It was an intoxicating thought, and as he worked swiftly to complete his contract he began to regret the price he had asked. Even now, it was not too late.

He felt the quiet satisfaction of the good workman as he watched Steve carry the great silver tray of the Mildenhall Treasure out into the courtyard and place it beside the now impressive pile. ‘That’s the lot,’ he said. ‘I’ll settle up at my place this evening. Now let’s get this gadget off you.’

They walked out into High Holborn and chose a secluded side street that had no pedestrians near it. Ashton unfastened the peculiar buckle and stepped back from his cohort, watching him freeze into immobility as he did so. Steve was vulnerable again, moving once more with all the other men in the stream of time. But before the alarm had gone out he would have lost himself in the London crowds.

When he re-entered the Museum yard, the treasure had already gone. Standing where it had been was his visitor of—how long ago? She was still poised and graceful, but, Ashton thought, looking a little tired. He approached until their fields merged and they were no longer separated by an impassable gulf of silence. ‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ he said. ‘How did you move the stuff so quickly?’

She touched the bracelet around her own wrist and gave a wan smile. ‘We have many other powers beside this.’

‘Then why did you need my help?’

‘There were technical reasons. It was necessary to remove the objects we required from the presence of other matter. In this way, we could gather only what we needed and not waste our limited—what shall I call them?—transporting facilities. Now may I have the bracelet back?’

Ashton slowly handed over the one he was carrying, but made no effort to unfasten his own. There might be danger in what he was doing, but he intended to retreat at the first sign of it.

‘I’m prepared to reduce my fee,’ he said. ‘In fact I’ll waive all payment—in exchange for this.’ He touched his wrist, where the intricate metal band gleamed in the sunlight.

She was watching him with an expression as fathomless as the Gioconda smile. (Had that, Ashton wondered, gone to join the treasure he had gathered? How much had they taken from the Louvre?)

‘I would not call that reducing your fee. All the money in the world could not purchase one of those bracelets.’

‘Or the things I have given you.’

‘You are greedy, Mr Ashton. You know that with an accelerator the entire world would be yours.’

‘What of that? Do you have any further interest in our planet, now you have taken what you need?’

There was a pause. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. ‘So you have guessed I do not belong to your world.’

‘Yes. And I know that you have other agents besides myself. Do you come from Mars, or won’t you tell me?’

‘I am quite willing to tell you. But you may not thank me if I do.’

Ashton looked at her warily. What did she mean by that? Unconscious of his action, he put his wrist behind his back, protecting the bracelet.

‘No, I am not from Mars, or any planet of which you have ever heard. You would not understand what I am. Yet I will tell you this. I am from the Future.’

‘The Future! That’s ridiculous!’

‘Indeed? I should be interested to know why.’

‘If that sort of thing were possible, our past history would be full of time travellers. Besides, it would involve a reductio ad absurdum. Going into the past could change the present and produce all sorts of paradoxes.’

‘Those are good points, though not perhaps as original as you suppose. But they only refute the possibility of time travel in general, not in the very special case which concerns us now.’

‘What is peculiar about it?’ he asked.

‘On very rare occasions, and by the release of an enormous amount of energy, it is possible to produce a—singularity—in time. During the fraction of a second when that singularity occurs, the past becomes accessible to the future, though only in a restricted way. We can send our minds back to you, but not our bodies.’

‘You mean,’ said Ashton, ‘that you are borrowing the body I see?’

‘Oh, I have paid for it, as I am paying you. The owner has agreed to the terms. We are very conscientious in these matters.’

Ashton was thinking swiftly. If this story was true, it gave him a definite advantage.

‘You mean,’ he continued, ‘that you have no direct control over matter, and must work through human agents?’

‘Yes. Even those bracelets were made here, under our mental control.’

She was explaining too much too readily, revealing all her weaknesses. A warning signal was flashing in the back of Ashton’s mind, but he had committed himself too deeply to retreat.

‘Then it seems to me,’ he said slowly, ‘that you cannot force me to hand this bracelet back.’

‘That is perfectly true.’

‘That’s all I want to know.’

She was smiling at him now, and there was something in that smile that chilled him to the marrow.

‘We are not vindictive or unkind, Mr Ashton,’ she said quietly. ‘What I am going to do now appeals to my sense of justice. You have asked for that bracelet; you can keep it. Now I shall tell you just how useful it will be.’

For a moment Ashton had a wild impulse to hand back the accelerator. She must have guessed his thoughts.

‘No, it’s too late. I insist that you keep it. And I can reassure you on one point. It won’t wear out. It will last you’—again that enigmatic smile—‘the rest of your life.

‘Do you mind if we go for a walk, Mr Ashton? I have done my work here, and would like to have a last glimpse of your world before I leave it forever.’

She turned toward the iron gates, and did not wait for a reply. Consumed by curiosity, Ashton followed.

They walked in silence until they were standing among the frozen traffic of Tottenham Court Road. For a while she stood staring at the busy yet motionless crowds; then she sighed.

‘I cannot help feeling sorry for them, and for you. I wonder what you would have made of yourselves.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Just now, Mr Ashton, you implied that the future cannot reach back into the past, because that would alter history. A shrewd remark, but, I am afraid, irrelevant. You see, your world has no more history to alter.’

She pointed across the road, and Ashton turned swiftly on his heels. There was nothing there except a newsboy crouching over his pile of papers. A placard formed an impossible curve in the breeze that was blowing through this motionless world. Ashton read the crudely lettered words with difficulty:

SUPER-BOMB TEST TODAY

The voice in his ears seemed to come from a very long way off.

‘I told you that time travel, even in this restricted form, requires an enormous release of energy—far more than a single bomb can liberate, Mr Ashton. But that bomb is only a trigger—’

She pointed to the solid ground beneath their feet. ‘Do you know anything about your own planet? Probably not; your race has learned so little. But even your scientists have discovered that, two thousand miles down, the Earth has a dense, liquid core. That core is made of compressed matter, and it can exist in either of two stable states. Given a certain stimulus, it can change from one of those states to another, just as a seesaw can tip over at the touch of a finger. But that change, Mr Ashton, will liberate as much energy as all the earthquakes since the beginning of your world. The oceans and continents will fly into space; the sun will have a second asteroid belt.

‘That cataclysm will send its echoes down the ages, and will open up to us a fraction of a second in your time. During that instant, we are trying to save what we can of your world’s treasures. It is all that we can do; even if your motives were purely selfish and completely dishonest, you have done your race a service you never intended.

‘And now I must return to our ship, where it waits by the ruins of Earth almost a hundred thousand years from now. You can keep the bracelet.’

The withdrawal was instantaneous. The woman suddenly froze and became one with the other statues in the silent street. He was alone.

Alone! Ashton held the gleaming bracelet before his eyes, hypnotised by its intricate workmanship and by the powers it concealed. He had made a bargain, and he must keep it. He could live out the full span of his life—at the cost of an isolation no other man had ever known. If he switched off the field, the last seconds of history would tick inexorably away.

Seconds? Indeed, there was less time than that. For he knew that the bomb must already have exploded.

He sat down on the edge of the pavement and began to think. There was no need to panic; he must take things calmly, without hysteria. After all, he had plenty of time.

All the time in the world.

The Nine Billion Names of God

First published in Star Science Fiction Stories 1, ed. Frederik Pohl, 1953

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

This story triggered a charming response from the highest possible authority—His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

‘This is a slightly unusual request,’ said Dr Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. ‘As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your—ah—establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?’

‘Gladly,’ replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. ‘Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures.’

‘I don’t quite understand…’

‘This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it.’

‘Naturally.’

‘It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘We have reason to believe,’ continued the lama imperturbably, ‘that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.’

‘And you have been doing this for three centuries?’

‘Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task.’

‘Oh,’ Dr Wagner looked a little dazed. ‘Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?’

The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.

‘Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on—they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.’

‘I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAA… and working up to ZZZZZZZZ….’

‘Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.’

‘Three? Surely you mean two.’

‘Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language.’

‘I’m sure it would,’ said Wagner hastily. ‘Go on.’

‘Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your Automatic Sequence Computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days.’

Dr Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right….

‘There’s no doubt,’ replied the doctor, ‘that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I’m much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not going to be easy.’

‘We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air—that is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there.’

‘And you want to hire two of our engineers?’

‘Yes, for the three months that the project should occupy.’

‘I’ve no doubt that Personnel can manage that.’ Dr Wagner scribbled a note on his desk pad. ‘There are just two other points—’

Before he could finish the sentence the lama had produced a small slip of paper.

‘This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank.’

‘Thank you. It appears to be—ah—adequate. The second matter is so trivial that I hesitate to mention it—but it’s surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked. What source of electrical energy have you?’

‘A diesel generator providing fifty kilowatts at a hundred and ten volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It’s made life at the lamasery much more comfortable, but of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels.’

‘Of course,’ echoed Dr Wagner. ‘I should have thought of that.’

The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the two-thousand-foot swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover.

This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him. ‘Project Shangri-La’, some wit back at the labs had christened it. For weeks now the Mark V had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish. Patiently, inexorably, the computer had been rearranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting each class before going on to the next. As the sheets had emerged from the electromatic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into enormous books. In another week, heaven be praised, they would have finished. Just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn’t bother to go on to works of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn’t know. One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan, and that the high lama (whom they’d naturally called Sam Jaffe, though he didn’t look a bit like him) would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to approximately AD 2060. They were quite capable of it.

George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out onto the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made him so popular with the monks—who, it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures of life. That was one thing in their favour: they might be crazy, but they weren’t bluenoses. Those frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance…

‘Listen, George,’ said Chuck urgently. ‘I’ve learned something that means trouble.’

‘What’s wrong? Isn’t the machine behaving?’ That was the worst contingency George could imagine. It might delay his return, and nothing could be more horrible. The way he felt now, even the sight of a TV commercial would seem like manna from heaven. At least it would be some link with home.

‘No—it’s nothing like that.’ Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which was unusual because normally he was scared of the drop. ‘I’ve just found what all this is about.’

‘What d’ya mean? I thought we knew.’

‘Sure—we know what the monks are trying to do. But we didn’t know why. It’s the craziest thing—’

‘Tell me something new,’ growled George.

‘—but old Sam’s just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or at least as near as he’ll ever get to it. When I told him that we were on the last cycle he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I’d ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said, “Sure”—and he told me.’

‘Go on: I’ll buy it.’

‘Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.’

‘Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?’

‘There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up… bingo!’

‘Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.’

Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.

‘That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said, “It’s nothing as trivial as that.”’

George thought this over for a moment.

‘That’s what I call taking the Wide View,’ he said presently. ‘But what d’you suppose we should do about it? I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference to us. After all, we already knew that they were crazy.’

‘Yes—but don’t you see what may happen? When the list’s complete and the Last Trump doesn’t blow—or whatever it is they expect—we may get the blame. It’s our machine they’ve been using. I don’t like the situation one little bit.’

‘I see,’ said George slowly. ‘You’ve got a point there. But this sort of thing’s happened before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana we had a crackpot preacher who once said the world was going to end next Sunday. Hundreds of people believed him—even sold their homes. Yet when nothing happened, they didn’t turn nasty, as you’d expect. They just decided that he’d made a mistake in his calculations and went right on believing. I guess some of them still do.’

‘Well, this isn’t Louisiana, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are just two of us and hundreds of these monks. I like them, and I’ll be sorry for old Sam when his lifework backfires on him. But all the same, I wish I was somewhere else.’

‘I’ve been wishing that for weeks. But there’s nothing we can do until the contract’s finished and the transport arrives to fly us out.’

‘Of course,’ said Chuck thoughtfully, ‘we could always try a bit of sabotage.’

‘Like hell we could! That would make things worse.’

‘Not the way I meant. Look at it like this. The machine will finish its run four days from now, on the present twenty-hours-a-day basis. The transport calls in a week. OK—then all we need to do is to find something that needs replacing during one of the overhaul periods—something that will hold up the works for a couple of days. We’ll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If we time matters properly, we can be down at the airfield when the last name pops out of the register. They won’t be able to catch us then.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said George. ‘It will be the first time I ever walked out on a job. Besides, it would make them suspicious. No, I’ll sit tight and take what comes.’

‘I still don’t like it,’ he said, seven days later, as the tough little mountain ponies carried them down the winding road. ‘And don’t you think I’m running away because I’m afraid. I’m just sorry for those poor old guys up there, and I don’t want to be around when they find what suckers they’ve been. Wonder how Sam will take it?’

‘It’s funny,’ replied Chuck, ‘but when I said goodbye I got the idea he knew we were walking out on him—and that he didn’t care because he knew the machine was running smoothly and that the job would soon be finished. After that—well, of course, for him there just isn’t any After That….’

George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamasery. The squat, angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset: here and there, lights gleamed like portholes in the side of an ocean liner. Electric lights, of course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark V. How much longer would they share it? wondered George. Would the monks smash up the computer in their rage and disappointment? Or would they just sit down quietly and begin their calculations all over again?

He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment. The high lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and pasted them into the great volumes. No one would be saying anything. The sound would be the incessant patter, the never-ending rainstorm of the keys hitting the paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. Three months of this, thought George, was enough to start anyone climbing up the wall.

‘There she is!’ called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. ‘Ain’t she beautiful!’

She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC 3 lay at the end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savouring like a fine liqueur. George let it roll round his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope.

The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately, the road was very good, as roads went in that region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear, and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.

He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.

‘Should be there in an hour,’ he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought: ‘Wonder if the computer’s finished its run. It was due about now.’

Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.

‘Look,’ whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

The Possessed

First published in Dynamic Science Fiction, March 1953

Collected in Reach for Tomorrow

‘The Possessed’ has sometimes been criticised because lemmings are not really as suicidal as popularly imagined. However, countless numbers do indeed perish in the sea during their periodical population explosions, so I refuse to apologise.

And now the sun ahead was so close that the hurricane of radiation was forcing the Swarm back into the dark night of space. Soon it would be able to come no closer; the gales of light on which it rode from star to star could not be faced so near their source. Unless it encountered a planet very soon, and could fall down into the peace and safety of its shadow, this sun must be abandoned as had so many before.

Six cold outer worlds had already been searched and discarded. Either they were frozen beyond all hope of organic life, or else they harboured entities of types that were useless to the Swarm. If it was to survive, it must find hosts not too unlike those it had left on its doomed and distant home. Millions of years ago the Swarm had begun its journey, swept starward by the fires of its own exploding sun. Yet even now the memory of its lost birthplace was still sharp and clear, an ache that would never die.

There was a planet ahead, swinging its cone of shadow through the flame-swept night. The senses that the Swarm had developed upon its long journey reached out toward the approaching world, reached out and found it good.

The merciless buffeting of radiation ceased as the black disc of the planet eclipsed the sun. Falling freely under gravity, the Swarm dropped swiftly until it hit the outer fringe of the atmosphere. The first time it had made planetfall it had almost met its doom, but now it contracted its tenuous substance with the unthinking skill of long practice, until it formed a tiny, close-knit sphere. Slowly its velocity slackened, until at last it was floating motionless between earth and sky.

For many years it rode the winds of the stratosphere from Pole to Pole, or let the soundless fusillades of dawn blast it westward from the rising sun. Everywhere it found life, but nowhere intelligence. There were things that crawled and flew and leaped, but there were no things that talked or built. Ten million years hence there might be creatures here with minds that the Swarm could possess and guide for its own purposes; there was no sign of them now. It could not guess which of the countless life-forms on this planet would be the heir to the future, and without such a host it was helpless—a mere pattern of electric charges, a matrix of order and a self-awareness in a universe of chaos. By its own resources the Swarm had no control over matter, yet once it had lodged in the mind of a sentient race there was nothing that lay beyond its powers.

It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that the planet had been surveyed by a visitant from space—though never by one in such peculiar and urgent need. The Swarm was faced with a tormenting dilemma. It could begin its weary travels once more, hoping that ultimately it might find the conditions it sought, or it could wait here on this world, biding its time until a race had arisen which would fit its purpose.

It moved like mist through the shadows, letting the vagrant winds take it where they willed. The clumsy, ill-formed reptiles of this young world never saw its passing, but it observed them, recording, analysing, trying to extrapolate into the future. There was so little to choose between all these creatures; not one showed even the first faint glimmering of conscious mind. Yet if it left this world in search of another, it might roam the universe in vain until the end of time.

At last it made its decision. By its very nature, it could choose both alternatives. The greater part of the Swarm would continue its travels among the stars, but a portion of it would remain on this world, like a seed planted in the hope of future harvest.

It began to spin upon its axis, its tenuous body flattening into a disc. Now it was wavering at the frontiers of visibility—it was a pale ghost, a faint will-of-the-wisp that suddenly fissured into two unequal fragments. The spinning slowly died away: the Swarm had become two, each an entity with all the memories of the original, and all its desires and needs.

There was a last exchange of thoughts between parent and child who were also identical twins. If all went well with them both, they would meet again in the far future here at this valley in the mountains. The one who was staying would return to this point at regular intervals down the ages; the one who continued the search would send back an emissary if ever a better world was found. And then they would be united again, no longer homeless exiles vainly wandering among the indifferent stars.

The light of dawn was spilling over the raw, new mountains when the parent swarm rose up to meet the sun. At the edge of the atmosphere the gales of radiation caught it and swept it unresisting out beyond the planets, to start again upon the endless search.

The one that was left began its almost equally hopeless task. It needed an animal that was not so rare that disease or accident could make it extinct, nor so tiny that it could never acquire any power over the physical world. And it must breed rapidly, so that its evolution could be directed and controlled as swiftly as possible.

The search was long and the choice difficult, but at last the Swarm selected its host. Like rain sinking into thirsty soil, it entered the bodies of certain small lizards and began to direct their destiny.

It was an immense task, even for a being which could never know death. Generation after generation of the lizards was swept into the past before there came the slightest improvement in the race. And always, at the appointed time, the Swarm returned to its rendezvous among the mountains. Always it returned in vain: there was no messenger from the stars, bringing news of better fortune elsewhere.

The centuries lengthened into millennia, the millennia into eons. By the standards of geological time, the lizards were now changing rapidly. Presently they were lizards no more, but warm-blooded, fur-covered creatures that brought forth their young alive. They were still small and feeble, and their minds were rudimentary, but they contained the seeds of future greatness.

Yet not only the living creatures were altering as the ages slowly passed. Continents were being rent asunder, mountains being worn down by the weight of the unwearying rain. Through all these changes, the Swarm kept to its purpose; and always, at the appointed times, it went to the meeting place that had been chosen so long ago, waited patiently for a while, and came away. Perhaps the parent swarm was still searching or perhaps—it was a hard and terrible thought to grasp—some unknown fate had overtaken it and it had gone the way of the race it had once ruled. There was nothing to do but to wait and see if the stubborn life-stuff of this planet could be forced along the path to intelligence.

And so the eons passed….

Somewhere in the labyrinth of evolution the Swarm made its fatal mistake and took the wrong turning. A hundred million years had gone since it came to Earth, and it was very weary. It could not die, but it could degenerate. The memories of its ancient home and of its destiny were fading: its intelligence was waning even while its hosts climbed the long slope that would lead to self-awareness.

By a cosmic irony, in giving the impetus which would one day bring intelligence to this world, the Swarm had exhausted itself. It had reached the last stage of parasitism; no longer could it exist apart from its hosts. Never again could it ride free above the world, driven by wind and sun. To make the pilgrimage to the ancient rendezvous, it must travel slowly and painfully in a thousand little bodies. Yet it continued the immemorial custom, driven on by the desire for reunion which burned all the more fiercely now that it knew the bitterness of failure. Only if the parent swarm returned and reabsorbed it could it ever know new life and vigour.

The glaciers came and went; by a miracle the little beasts that now housed the waning alien intelligence escaped the clutching fingers of the ice. The oceans overwhelmed the land, and still the race survived. It even multiplied, but it could do no more. This world would never be its heritage, for far away in the heart of another continent a certain monkey had come down from the trees and was looking at the stars with the first glimmerings of curiosity.

The mind of the Swarm was dispersing, scattering among a million tiny bodies, no longer able to unite and assert its will. It had lost all cohesion; its memories were fading. In a million years, at most, they would all be gone.

Only one thing remained—the blind urge which still, at intervals which by some strange aberration were becoming ever shorter, drove it to seek its consummation in a valley that long ago had ceased to exist.

Quietly riding the lane of moonlight, the pleasure steamer passed the island with its winking beacon and entered the fjord. It was a calm and lovely night, with Venus sinking in the west out beyond the Faroes, and the lights of the harbour reflected with scarcely a tremor in the still waters far ahead.

Nils and Christina were utterly content. Standing side by side against the boat rail, their fingers locked together, they watched the wooded slopes drift silently by. The tall trees were motionless in the moonlight, their leaves unruffled by even the merest breath of wind, their slender trunks rising whitely from pools of shadow. The whole world was asleep; only the moving ship dared to break the spell that had bewitched the night.

Then suddenly, Christina gave a little gasp and Nils felt her fingers tighten convulsively on his. He followed her gaze: she was staring out across the water, looking toward the silent sentinels of the forest.

‘What is it, darling?’ he asked anxiously.

‘Look!’ she replied, in a whisper Nils could scarcely hear. ‘There—under the pines!’

Nils stared, and as he did so the beauty of the night ebbed slowly away and ancestral terrors came crawling back from exile. For beneath the trees the land was alive: a dappled brown tide was moving down the slopes of the hill and merging into the dark waters. Here was an open patch on which the moonlight fell unbroken by shadow. It was changing even as he watched: the surface of the land seemed to be rippling downward like a slow waterfall seeking union with the sea.

And then Nils laughed and the world was sane once more. Christina looked at him, puzzled but reassured.

‘Don’t you remember?’ he chuckled. ‘We read all about it in the paper this morning. They do this every few years, and always at night. It’s been going on for days.’

He was teasing her, sweeping away the tension of the last few minutes. Christina looked back at him, and a slow smile lit up her face.

‘Of course!’ she said. ‘How stupid of me!’ Then she turned once more toward the land and her expression became sad, for she was very tender-hearted.

‘Poor little things!’ she sighed. ‘I wonder why they do it?’

Nils shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

‘No one knows,’ he answered. ‘It’s just one of those mysteries. I shouldn’t think about it if it worries you. Look—we’ll soon be in harbour!’

They turned toward the beckoning lights where their future lay, and Christina glanced back only once toward the tragic, mindless tide that was still flowing beneath the moon.

Obeying an urge whose meaning they had never known, the doomed legions of the lemmings were finding oblivion beneath the waves.

The Parasite

First published in The Avon SF & F Reader, 1953

Collected in Reach for Tomorrow

This may have been the subconscious basis for the novel The Light of Other Days which I have just published with Stephen Baxter.

‘There is nothing you can do,’ said Connolly, ‘nothing at all. Why did you have to follow me?’ He was standing with his back to Pearson, staring out across the calm blue water that led to Italy. On the left, behind the anchored fishing fleet, the sun was setting in Mediterranean splendour, incarnadining land and sky. But neither man was even remotely aware of the beauty all around.

Pearson rose to his feet, and came forward out of the little cafe’s shadowed porch, into the slanting sunlight. He joined Connolly by the cliff wall, but was careful not to come too close to him. Even in normal times Connolly disliked being touched. His obsession, whatever it might be, would make him doubly sensitive now.

‘Listen, Roy,’ Pearson began urgently. ‘We’ve been friends for twenty years, and you ought to know I wouldn’t let you down this time. Besides—’

‘I know. You promised Ruth.’

‘And why not? After all, she is your wife. She has a right to know what’s happened.’ He paused, choosing his words carefully. ‘She’s worried, Roy. Much more worried than if it was only another woman.’ He nearly added the word ‘again’, but decided against it.

Connolly stubbed out his cigarette on the flat-topped granite wall, then flicked the white cylinder out over the sea, so that it fell twisting and turning toward the waters a hundred feet below. He turned to face his friend.

‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ he said, and for a moment there was a glimpse of the familiar personality which, Pearson knew, must be trapped somewhere within the stranger standing at his side. ‘I know you’re trying to be helpful, and I appreciate it. But I wish you hadn’t followed me. You’ll only make matters worse.’

‘Convince me of that, and I’ll go away.’

Connolly sighed.

‘I could no more convince you than that psychiatrist you persuaded me to see. Poor Curtis! He was such a well-meaning fellow. Give him my apologies, will you?’

‘I’m not a psychiatrist, and I’m not trying to cure you—whatever that means. If you like it the way you are, that’s your affair. But I think you ought to let us know what’s happened, so that we can make plans accordingly.’

‘To get me certified?’

Pearson shrugged his shoulders. He wondered if Connolly could see through his feigned indifference to the real concern he was trying to hide. Now that all other approaches seemed to have failed, the ‘frankly-I-don’t-care’ attitude was the only one left open to him.

‘I wasn’t thinking of that. There are a few practical details to worry about. Do you want to stay here indefinitely? You can’t live without money, even on Syrene.’

‘I can stay at Clifford Rawnsley’s villa as long as I like. He was a friend of my father’s you know. It’s empty at the moment except for the servants, and they don’t bother me.’

Connolly turned away from the parapet on which he was resting.

‘I’m going up the hill before it’s dark,’ he said. The words were abrupt, but Pearson knew that he was not being dismissed. He could follow if he pleased, and the knowledge brought him the first satisfaction he had felt since locating Connolly. It was a small triumph, but he needed it.

They did not speak during the climb; indeed, Pearson scarcely had the breath to do so. Connolly set off at a reckless pace, as if deliberately attempting to exhaust himself. The island fell away beneath them, the white villas gleamed like ghosts in the shadowed valleys, the little fishing boats, their day’s work done, lay at rest in the harbour. And all around was the darkling sea.

When Pearson caught up with his friend, Connolly was sitting in front of the shrine which the devout islanders had built on Syrene’s highest point. In the daytime, there would be tourists here, photographing each other or gaping at the much-advertised beauty spread beneath them, but the place was deserted now.

Connolly was breathing heavily from his exertions, yet his features were relaxed and for the moment he seemed almost at peace. The shadow that lay across his mind had lifted, and he turned to Pearson with a smile that echoed his old, infectious grin.

‘He hates exercise, Jack. It always scares him away.’

‘And who is he?’ said Pearson. ‘Remember, you haven’t introduced us yet.’

Connolly smiled at his friend’s attempted humour; then his face suddenly became grave.

‘Tell me, Jack,’ he began. ‘Would you say I have an overdeveloped imagination?’

‘No: you’re about average. You’re certainly less imaginative than I am.’

Connolly nodded slowly.

‘That’s true enough, Jack, and it should help you to believe me. Because I’m certain I could never have invented the creature who’s haunting me. He really exists. I’m not suffering from paranoiac hallucinations, or whatever Dr Curtis would call them.

‘You remember Maude White? It all began with her. I met her at one of David Trescott’s parties, about six weeks ago. I’d just quarrelled with Ruth and was rather fed up. We were both pretty tight, and as I was staying in town she came back to the flat with me.’

Pearson smiled inwardly. Poor Roy! It was always the same pattern, though he never seemed to realise it. Each affair was different to him, but to no one else. The eternal Don Juan, always seeking—always disappointed, because what he sought could be found only in the cradle or the grave, but never between the two.

‘I guess you’ll laugh at what knocked me out—it seems so trivial, though it frightened me more than anything that’s ever happened in my life. I simply went over to the cocktail cabinet and poured out the drinks, as I’ve done a hundred times before. It wasn’t until I’d handed one to Maude that I realised I’d filled three glasses. The act was so perfectly natural that at first I didn’t recognise what it meant. Then I looked wildly around the room to see where the other man was—even then I knew, somehow, that it wasn’t a man. But, of course, he wasn’t there. He was nowhere at all in the outside world: he was hiding deep down inside my own brain….’

The night was very still, the only sound a thin ribbon of music winding up to the stars from some café in the village below. The light of the rising moon sparkled on the sea; overhead, the arms of the crucifix were silhouetted against the darkness. A brilliant beacon on the frontiers of twilight, Venus was following the sun into the west.

Pearson waited, letting Connolly take his time. He seemed lucid and rational enough, however strange the story he was telling. His face was quite calm in the moonlight, though it might be the calmness that comes after acceptance of defeat.

‘The next thing I remember is lying in bed while Maude sponged my face. She was pretty frightened: I’d passed out and cut my forehead badly as I fell. There was a lot of blood around the place, but that didn’t matter. The thing that really scared me was the thought that I’d gone crazy. That seems funny, now that I’m much more scared of being sane.

‘He was still there when I woke up; he’s been there ever since. Somehow I got rid of Maude—it wasn’t easy—and tried to work out what had happened. Tell me, Jack, do you believe in telepathy?’

The abrupt challenge caught Pearson off his guard.

‘I’ve never given it much thought, but the evidence seems rather convincing. Do you suggest that someone else is reading your mind?’

‘It’s not as simple as that. What I’m telling you now I’ve discovered slowly—usually when I’ve been dreaming or slightly drunk. You may say that invalidates the evidence, but I don’t think so. At first it was the only way I could break through the barrier that separates me from Omega—I’ll tell you later why I’ve called him that. But now there aren’t any obstacles: I know he’s there all the time, waiting for me to let down my guard. Night and day, drunk or sober, I’m conscious of his presence. At times like this he’s quiescent, watching me out of the corner of his eye. My only hope is that he’ll grow tired of waiting, and go in search of some other victim.’

Connolly’s voice, calm until now, suddenly came near to breaking.

‘Try and imagine the horror of that discovery: the effect of learning that every act, every thought or desire that flitted through your mind was being watched and shared by another being. It meant, of course, the end of all normal life for me. I had to leave Ruth and I couldn’t tell her why. Then, to make matters worse, Maude came chasing after me. She wouldn’t leave me alone, and bombarded me with letters and phone calls. It was hell. I couldn’t fight both of them, so I ran away. And I thought that on Syrene, of all places, he would find enough to interest him without bothering me.’

‘Now I understand,’ said Pearson softly. ‘So that’s what he’s after. A kind of telepathic Peeping Tom—no longer content with mere watching….’

‘I suppose you’re humouring me,’ said Connolly, without resentment. ‘But I don’t mind, and you’ve summed it up pretty accurately, as you usually do. It was quite a while before I realised what his game was. Once the first shock had worn off, I tried to analyse the position logically. I thought backward from that first moment of recognition, and in the end I knew that it wasn’t a sudden invasion of my mind. He’d been with me for years, so well hidden that I’d never guessed it. I expect you’ll laugh at this, knowing me as you do. But I’ve never been altogether at ease with a woman, even when I’ve been making love to her, and now I know the reason. Omega has always been there, sharing my emotions, gloating over the passions he can no longer experience in his body.

‘The only way I kept my control was by fighting back, trying to come to grips with him and to understand what he was. And in the end I succeeded. He’s a long way away and there must be some limit to his powers. Perhaps that first contact was an accident, though I’m not sure.

‘What I’ve told you already, Jack, must be hard enough for you to believe, but it’s nothing to what I’ve got to say now. Yet remember—you agreed that I’m not an imaginative man, and see if you can find a flaw anywhere in this story.

‘I don’t know if you’ve read any of the evidence suggesting that telepathy is somehow independent of time. I know that it is. Omega doesn’t belong to our age: he’s somewhere in the future, immensely far ahead of us. For a while I thought he must be one of the last men—that’s why I gave him his name. But now I’m not sure; perhaps he belongs to an age when there are a myriad different races of man, scattered all over the universe—some still ascending, others sinking into decay. His people, wherever and whenever they may be, have reached the heights and fallen from them into the depths the beasts can never know. There’s a sense of evil about him, Jack—the real evil that most of us never meet in all our lives. Yet sometimes I feel almost sorry for him, because I know what has made him the thing he is.

‘Have you ever wondered, Jack, what the human race will do when science has discovered everything, when there are no more worlds to be explored, when all the stars have given up their secrets? Omega is one of the answers. I hope he’s not the only one, for if so everything we’ve striven for is in vain. I hope that he and his race are an isolated cancer in a still healthy universe, but I can never be sure.

‘They have pampered their bodies until they are useless, and too late they have discovered their mistake. Perhaps they have thought, as some men have thought, that they could live by intellect alone. And perhaps they are immortal, and that must be their real damnation. Through the ages their minds have been corroding in their feeble bodies, seeking some release from their intolerable boredom. They have found it at last in the only way they can, by sending back their minds to an earlier, more virile age, and becoming parasites on the emotions of others.

‘I wonder how many of them there are? Perhaps they explain all cases of what used to be called possession. How they must have ransacked the past to assuage their hunger! Can’t you picture them, flocking like carrion crows around the decaying Roman Empire, jostling one another for the minds of Nero and Caligula and Tiberius? Perhaps Omega failed to get those richer prizes. Or perhaps he hasn’t much choice and must take whatever mind he can contact in any age, transferring from that to the next whenever he has the chance.

‘It was only slowly, of course, that I worked all this out. I think it adds to his enjoyment to know that I’m aware of his presence. I think he’s deliberately helping—breaking down his side of the barrier. For in the end, I was able to see him.’

Connolly broke off. Looking around, Pearson saw that they were no longer alone on the hilltop. A young couple, hand in hand, were coming up the road toward the crucifix. Each had the physical beauty so common and so cheap among the islanders. They were oblivious to the night around them and to any spectators, and went past without the least sign of recognition. There was a bitter smile on Connolly’s lips as he watched them go.

‘I suppose I should be ashamed of this, but I was wishing then that he’d leave me and go after that boy. But he won’t; though I’ve refused to play his game any more, he’s staying to see what happens.’

‘You were going to tell me what he’s like,’ said Pearson, annoyed at the interruption. Connolly lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply before replying.

‘Can you imagine a room without walls? He’s in a kind of hollow, egg-shaped space—surrounded by blue mist that always seems to be twisting and turning, but never changes its position. There’s no entrance or exit—and no gravity, unless he’s learned to defy it. Because he floats in the centre, and around him is a circle of short, fluted cylinders, turning slowly in the air. I think they must be machines of some kind, obeying his will. And once there was a large oval hanging beside him, with perfectly human, beautifully formed arms coming from it. It could only have been a robot, yet those hands and fingers seemed alive. They were feeding and massaging him, treating him like a baby. It was horrible….

‘Have you ever seen a lemur or a spectral tarsier? He’s rather like that—a nightmare travesty of mankind, with huge malevolent eyes. And this is strange—it’s not the way one had imagined evolution going—he’s covered with a fine layer of fur, as blue as the room in which he lives. Every time I’ve seen him he’s been in the same position, half curled up like a sleeping baby. I think his legs have completely atrophied; perhaps his arms as well. Only his brain is still active, hunting up and down the ages for its prey.

‘And now you know why there was nothing you or anyone else could do. Your psychiatrists might cure me if I was insane, but the science that can deal with Omega hasn’t been invented yet.’

Connolly paused, then smiled wryly.

‘Just because I’m sane, I realise that you can’t be expected to believe me. So there’s no common ground on which we can meet.’

Pearson rose from the boulder on which he had been sitting, and shivered slightly. The night was becoming cold, but that was nothing to the feeling of inner helplessness that had overwhelmed him as Connolly spoke.

‘I’ll be frank, Roy,’ he began slowly. ‘Of course I don’t believe you. But insofar as you believe in Omega yourself, he’s real to you, and I’ll accept him on that basis and fight him with you.’

‘It may be a dangerous game. How do we know what he can do when he’s cornered?’

‘I’ll take that chance,’ Pearson replied, beginning to walk down the hill. Connolly followed him without argument. ‘Meanwhile, just what do you propose to do yourself?’

‘Relax. Avoid emotion. Above all, keep away from women—Ruth, Maude, and the rest of them. That’s been the hardest job. It isn’t easy to break the habits of a lifetime.’

‘I can well believe that,’ replied Pearson, a little dryly. ‘How successful have you been so far?’

‘Completely. You see, his own eagerness defeats his purpose, by filling me with a kind of nausea and self-loathing whenever I think of sex. Lord, to think that I’ve laughed at the prudes all my life, yet now I’ve become one myself!’

There, thought Pearson in a sudden flash of insight, was the answer. He would never have believed it, but Connolly’s past had finally caught up with him. Omega was nothing more than a symbol of conscience, a personification of guilt. When Connolly realised this, he would cease to be haunted. As for the remarkably detailed nature of the hallucination, that was yet another example of the tricks the human mind can play in its efforts to deceive itself. There must be some reason why the obsession had taken this form, but that was of minor importance.

Pearson explained this to Connolly at some length as they approached the village. The other listened so patiently that Pearson had an uncomfortable feeling that he was the one who was being humoured, but he continued grimly to the end. When he had finished, Connolly gave a short, mirthless laugh.

‘Your story’s as logical as mine, but neither of us can convince the other. If you’re right, then in time I may return to “normal”. You can’t imagine how real Omega is to me. He’s more real than you are: if I close my eyes you’re gone, but he’s still there. I wish I knew what he was waiting for! I’ve left my old life behind; he knows I won’t go back to it while he’s there. So what’s he got to gain by hanging on?’ He turned to Pearson with a feverish eagerness. ‘That’s what really frightens me, Jack. He must know what my future is—all my life must be like a book he can dip into where he pleases. So there must still be some experience ahead of me that he’s waiting to savour. Sometimes—sometimes I wonder if it’s my death.’

They were now among the houses at the outskirts of the village, and ahead of them the nightlife of Syrene was getting into its stride. Now that they were no longer alone, there came a subtle change in Connolly’s attitude. On the hilltop he had been, if not his normal self, at least friendly and prepared to talk. But now the sight of the happy, carefree crowds ahead seemed to make him withdraw into himself. He lagged behind as Pearson advanced and presently refused to come any further.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Pearson. ‘Surely you’ll come down to the hotel and have dinner with me?’

Connolly shook his head.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’d meet too many people.’

It was an astonishing remark from a man who had always delighted in crowds and parties. It showed, as nothing else had done, how much Connolly had changed. Before Pearson could think of a suitable reply, the other had turned on his heels and made off up a side-street. Hurt and annoyed, Pearson started to pursue him, then decided that it was useless.

That night he sent a long telegram to Ruth, giving what reassurance he could. Then, tired out, he went to bed.

Yet for an hour he was unable to sleep. His body was exhausted, but his brain was still active. He lay watching the patch of moonlight move across the pattern on the wall, marking the passage of time as inexorably as it must still do in the distant age that Connolly had glimpsed. Of course, that was pure fantasy—yet against his will Pearson was growing to accept Omega as a real and living threat. And in a sense Omega was real—as real as those other mental abstractions, the Ego and the Subconscious Mind.

Pearson wondered if Connolly had been wise to come back to Syrene. In times of emotional crisis—there had been others, though none so important as this—Connolly’s reaction was always the same. He would return again to the lovely island where his charming, feckless parents had borne him and where he had spent his youth. He was seeking now, Pearson knew well enough, the contentment he had known only for one period of his life, and which he had sought so vainly in the arms of Ruth and all those others who had been unable to resist him.

Pearson was not attempting to criticise his unhappy friend. He never passed judgments; he merely observed with a bright-eyed, sympathetic interest that was hardly tolerance, since tolerance implied the relaxation of standards which he had never possessed….

After a restless night, Pearson finally dropped into a sleep so sound that he awoke an hour later than usual. He had breakfast in his room, then went down to the reception desk to see if there was any reply from Ruth. Someone else had arrived in the night: two travelling cases, obviously English, were stacked in a corner of the hall, waiting for the porter to move them. Idly curious, Pearson glanced at the labels to see who his compatriot might be. Then he stiffened, looked hastily around, and hurried across to the receptionist.

‘This Englishwoman,’ he said anxiously. ‘When did she arrive?’

‘An hour ago, Signor, on the morning boat.’

‘Is she in now?’

The receptionist looked a little undecided, then capitulated gracefully.

‘No, Signor. She was in a great hurry, and asked me where she could find Mr Connolly. So I told her. I hope it was all right.’

Pearson cursed under his breath. It was an incredible stroke of bad luck, something he would never have dreamed of guarding against. Maude White was a woman of even greater determination than Connolly had hinted. Somehow she had discovered where he had fled, and pride or desire or both had driven her to follow. That she had come to this hotel was not surprising; it was an almost inevitable choice for English visitors to Syrene.

As he climbed the road to the villa, Pearson fought against an increasing sense of futility and uselessness. He had no idea what he should do when he met Connolly and Maude. He merely felt a vague yet urgent impulse to be helpful. If he could catch Maude before she reached the villa, he might be able to convince her that Connolly was a sick man and that her intervention could only do harm. Yet was this true? It was perfectly possible that a touching reconciliation had already taken place, and that neither party had the least desire to see him.

They were talking together on the beautifully laid-out lawn in front of the villa when Pearson turned through the gates and paused for breath. Connolly was resting on a wrought-iron seat beneath a palm tree, while Maude was pacing up and down a few yards away. She was speaking swiftly; Pearson could not hear her words, but from the intonation of her voice she was obviously pleading with Connolly. It was an embarrassing situation. While Pearson was still wondering whether to go forward, Connolly looked up and caught sight of him. His face was a completely expressionless mask; it showed neither welcome nor resentment.

At the interruption, Maude spun round to see who the intruder was, and for the first time Pearson glimpsed her face. She was a beautiful woman, but despair and anger had so twisted her features that she looked like a figure from some Greek tragedy. She was suffering not only the bitterness of being scorned, but the agony of not knowing why.

Pearson’s arrival must have acted as a trigger to her pent-up emotions. She suddenly whirled away from him and turned toward Connolly, who continued to watch her with lack-lustre eyes. For a moment Pearson could not see what she was doing; then he cried in horror: ‘Look out, Roy!’

Connolly moved with surprising speed, as if he had suddenly emerged from a trance. He caught Maude’s wrist, there was a brief struggle, and then he was backing away from her, looking with fascination at something in the palm of his hand. The woman stood motionless, paralysed with fear and shame, knuckles pressed against her mouth.

Connolly gripped the pistol with his right hand and stroked it lovingly with his left. There was a low moan from Maude.

‘I only meant to frighten you, Roy! I swear it!’

‘That’s all right, my dear,’ said Connolly softly. ‘I believe you. There’s nothing to worry about.’ His voice was perfectly natural. He turned toward Pearson, and gave him his old, boyish smile.

‘So this is what he was waiting for, Jack,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to disappoint him.’

‘No!’ gasped Pearson, white with terror. ‘Don’t, Roy, for God’s sake!’

But Connolly was beyond the reach of his friend’s entreaties as he turned the pistol to his head. In that same moment Pearson knew at last, with an awful clarity, that Omega was real and that Omega would now be seeking for a new abode.

He never saw the flash of the gun or heard the feeble but adequate explosion. The world he knew had faded from his sight, and around him now were the fixed yet crawling mists of the blue room. Staring from its centre—as they had stared down the ages at how many others?—were two vast and lidless eyes. They were satiated for the moment, but for the moment only.

Jupiter Five

First published in If, May 1953

Collected in Reach for Tomorrow

In 1962, I commented that I am by no means sure that I could write ‘Jupiter Five’ today; it involved twenty or thirty pages of orbital calculations and should by rights be dedicated to Professor G. C. McVittie, my erstwhile tutor in applied mathematics. (I had better hasten to add that he bears no slightest resemblance to the professor in the story.)

‘Jupiter Five’ formed the basis of the fifth novel in the series ‘Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime’, written by Paul Preuss.

Professor Forster is such a small man that a special space-suit had to be made for him. But what he lacked in physical size he more than made up—as is so often the case—in sheer drive and determination. When I met him, he’d spent twenty years pursuing a dream. What is more to the point, he had persuaded a whole succession of hard-headed business men, World Council Delegates and administrators of scientific trusts to underwrite his expenses and to fit out a ship for him. Despite everything that happened later, I still think that was his most remarkable achievement….

The Arnold Toynbee had a crew of six aboard when we left Earth. Besides the Professor and Charles Ashton, his chief assistant, there was the usual pilot-navigator-engineer triumvirate and two graduate students—Bill Hawkins and myself. Neither of us had ever gone into space before, and we were still so excited over the whole thing that we didn’t care in the least whether we got back to Earth before the next term started. We had a strong suspicion that our tutor had very similar views. The reference he had produced for us was a masterpiece of ambiguity, but as the number of people who could even begin to read Martian script could be counted, if I may coin a phrase, on the fingers of one hand, we’d got the job.

As we were going to Jupiter, and not to Mars, the purpose of this particular qualification seemed a little obscure, though knowing something about the Professor’s theories we had some pretty shrewd suspicions. They were partly confirmed when we were ten days out from Earth.

The Professor looked at us very thoughtfully when we answered his summons. Even under zero g he always managed to preserve his dignity, while the best we could do was to cling to the nearest handhold and float around like drifting seaweed. I got the impression—though I may of course be wrong—that he was thinking: What have I done to deserve this? as he looked from Bill to me and back again. Then he gave a sort of ‘It’s too late to do anything about it now’ sigh and began to speak in that slow, patient way he always does when he has something to explain. At least, he always uses it when he’s speaking to us, but it’s just occurred to me—oh, never mind.

‘Since we left Earth,’ he said, ‘I’ve not had much chance of telling you the purpose of this expedition. Perhaps you’ve guessed it already.’

‘I think I have,’ said Bill.

‘Well, go on,’ replied the Professor, a peculiar gleam in his eye. I did my best to stop Bill, but have you ever tried to kick anyone when you’re in free fall?

‘You want to find some proof—I mean, some more proof—of your diffusion theory of extraterrestrial culture.’

‘And have you any idea why I’m going to Jupiter to look for it?’

‘Well, not exactly. I suppose you hope to find something on one of the moons.’

‘Brilliant, Bill, brilliant. There are fifteen known satellites, and their total area is about half that of Earth. Where would you start looking if you had a couple of weeks to spare? I’d rather like to know.’

Bill glanced doubtfully at the Professor, as if he almost suspected him of sarcasm.

‘I don’t know much about astronomy,’ he said. ‘But there are four big moons, aren’t there? I’d start on those.’

‘For your information, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are each about as big as Africa. Would you work through them in alphabetical order?’

‘No,’ Bill replied promptly. ‘I’d start on the one nearest Jupiter, and go outward.’

‘I don’t think we’ll waste any more time pursuing your logical processes,’ sighed the Professor. He was obviously impatient to begin his set speech. ‘Anyway, you’re quite wrong. We’re not going to the big moons at all. They’ve been photographically surveyed from space and large areas have been explored on the surface. They’ve got nothing of archaeological interest. We’re going to a place that’s never been visited before.’

‘Not to Jupiter!’ I gasped.

‘Heavens no, nothing as drastic as that! But we’re going nearer to him than anyone else has ever been.’

He paused thoughtfully.

‘It’s a curious thing, you know—or you probably don’t—that it’s nearly as difficult to travel between Jupiter’s satellites as it is to go between the planets, although the distances are so much smaller. This is because Jupiter’s got such a terrific gravitational field and his moons are travelling so quickly. The innermost moon’s moving almost as fast as Earth, and the journey to it from Ganymede costs almost as much fuel as the trip from Earth to Venus, even though it takes only a day and a half.

‘And it’s that journey which we’re going to make. No one’s ever done it before because nobody could think of any good reason for the expense. Jupiter Five is only thirty kilometres in diameter, so it couldn’t possibly be of much interest. Even some of the outer satellites, which are far easier to reach, haven’t been visited because it hardly seemed worth while to waste the rocket fuel.’

‘Then why are we going to waste it?’ I asked impatiently. The whole thing sounded like a complete wild-goose chase, though as long as it proved interesting, and involved no actual danger, I didn’t greatly mind.

Perhaps I ought to confess—though I’m tempted to say nothing, as a good many others have done—that at this time I didn’t believe a word of Professor Forster’s theories. Of course I realised that he was a very brilliant man in his field, but I did draw the line at some of his more fantastic ideas. After all, the evidence was so slight and the conclusions so revolutionary that one could hardly help being sceptical.

Perhaps you can still remember the astonishment when the first Martian expedition found the remains not of one ancient civilisation, but of two. Both had been highly advanced, but both had perished more than five million years ago. The reason was unknown (and still is). It did not seem to be warfare, as the two cultures appear to have lived amicably together. One of the races had been insect-like, the other vaguely reptilian. The insects seem to have been the genuine, original Martians. The reptile-people—usually referred to as ‘Culture X’—had arrived on the scene later.

So, at least, Professor Forster maintained. They had certainly possessed the secret of space travel, because the ruins of their peculiar cruciform cities had been found on—of all places—Mercury. Forster believed that they had tried to colonise all the smaller planets—Earth and Venus having been ruled out because of their excessive gravity. It was a source of some disappointment to the Professor that no traces of Culture X had ever been found on the Moon, though he was certain that such a discovery was only a matter of time.

The ‘conventional’ theory of Culture X was that it had originally come from one of the smaller planets or satellites, had made peaceful contact with the Martians—the only other intelligent race in the known history of the System—and had died out at the same time as the Martian civilisation. But Professor Forster had more ambitious ideas: he was convinced that Culture X had entered the Solar System from interstellar space. The fact that no one else believed this annoyed him, though not very much, for he is one of those people who are happy only when in a minority.

From where I was sitting, I could see Jupiter through the cabin porthole as Professor Forster unfolded his plan. It was a beautiful sight: I could just make out the equatorial cloud belts, and three of the satellites were visible as little stars close to the planet. I wondered which was Ganymede, our first port of call.

‘If Jack will condescend to pay attention,’ the Professor continued, ‘I’ll tell you why we’re going such a long way from home. You know that last year I spent a good deal of time poking among the ruins in the twilight belt of Mercury. Perhaps you read the paper I gave on the subject at the London School of Economics. You may even have been there—I do remember a disturbance at the back of the hall.

‘What I didn’t tell anyone then was that while I was on Mercury I discovered an important clue to the origin of Culture X. I’ve kept quiet about it, although I’ve been sorely tempted when fools like Dr Haughton have tried to be funny at my expense. But I wasn’t going to risk letting someone else get here before I could organise this expedition.

‘One of the things I found on Mercury was a rather well preserved bas-relief of the Solar System. It’s not the first that’s been discovered—as you know, astronomical motifs are common in true Martian and Culture X art. But there were certain peculiar symbols against various planets, including Mars and Mercury. I think the pattern had some historic significance, and the most curious thing about it is that little Jupiter Five—one of the least important of all the satellites—seemed to have the most attention drawn to it. I’m convinced that there’s something on Five which is the key to the whole problem of Culture X, and I’m going there to discover what it is.’

As far as I can remember now, neither Bill nor I was particularly impressed by the Professor’s story. Maybe the people of Culture X had left some artifacts on Five for obscure reasons of their own. It would be interesting to unearth them, but hardly likely that they would be as important as the Professor thought. I guess he was rather disappointed at our lack of enthusiasm. If so it was his fault since, as we discovered later, he was still holding out on us.

We landed on Ganymede, the largest moon, about a week later. Ganymede is the only one of the satellites with a permanent base on it; there’s an observatory and a geophysical station with a staff of about fifty scientists. They were rather glad to see visitors, but we didn’t stay long as the Professor was anxious to refuel and set off again. The fact that we were heading for Five naturally aroused a good deal of interest, but the Professor wouldn’t talk and we couldn’t; he kept too close an eye on us.

Ganymede, by the way, is quite an interesting place and we managed to see rather more of it on the return journey. But as I’ve promised to write an article for another magazine about that, I’d better not say anything else here. (You might like to keep your eyes on the National Astrographic Magazine next Spring.)

The hop from Ganymede to Five took just over a day and a half, and it gave us an uncomfortable feeling to see Jupiter expanding hour by hour until it seemed as if he was going to fill the sky. I don’t know much about astronomy, but I couldn’t help thinking of the tremendous gravity field into which we were falling. All sorts of things could go wrong so easily. If we ran out of fuel we’d never be able to get back to Ganymede, and we might even drop into Jupiter himself.

I wish I could describe what it was like seeing that colossal globe, with its raging storm belts spinning in the sky ahead of us. As a matter of fact I did make the attempt, but some literary friends who have read this MS advised me to cut out the result. (They also gave me a lot of other advice which I don’t think they could have meant seriously, because if I’d followed it there would have been no story at all.)

Luckily there have been so many colour close-ups of Jupiter published by now that you’re bound to have seen some of them. You may even have seen the one which, as I’ll explain later, was the cause of all our trouble.

At last Jupiter stopped growing: we’d swung into the orbit of Five and would soon catch up with the tiny moon as it raced around the planet. We were all squeezed in the control room waiting for our first glimpse of our target. At least, all of us who could get in were doing so. Bill and I were crowded out into the corridor and could only crane over the other people’s shoulders. Kingsley Searle, our pilot, was in the control seat looking as unruffled as ever: Eric Fulton, the engineer, was thoughtfully chewing his moustache and watching the fuel gauges, and Tony Groves was doing complicated things with his navigation tables.

And the Professor appeared to be rigidly attached to the eyepiece of the teleperiscope. Suddenly he gave a start and we heard a whistle of indrawn breath. After a minute, without a word, he beckoned to Searle, who took his place at the eyepiece. Exactly the same thing happened, and then Searle handed over to Fulton. It got a bit monotonous by the time Groves had reacted identically, so we wormed our way in and took over after a bit of opposition.

I don’t know quite what I’d expected to see, so that’s probably why I was disappointed. Hanging there in space was a tiny gibbous moon, its ‘night’ sector lit up faintly by the reflected glory of Jupiter. And that seemed to be all.

Then I began to make out additional markings, in the way that you do if you look through a telescope for long enough. There were faint crisscrossing lines on the surface of the satellite, and suddenly my eye grasped their full pattern. For it was a pattern: those lines covered Five with the same geometrical accuracy as the lines of latitude and longitude divide up a globe of the Earth. I suppose I gave my whistle of amazement, for then Bill pushed me out of the way and had his turn to look.

The next thing I remember is Professor Forster looking very smug while we bombarded him with questions.

‘Of course,’ he explained, ‘this isn’t as much a surprise to me as it is to you. Besides the evidence I’d found on Mercury, there were other clues. I’ve a friend at the Ganymede Observatory whom I’ve sworn to secrecy and who’s been under quite a strain this last few weeks. It’s rather surprising to anyone who’s not an astronomer that the Observatory has never bothered much about the satellites. The big instruments are used on extra-galactic nebulae, and the little ones spend all their time looking at Jupiter.

‘The only thing the Observatory had ever done to Five was to measure its diameter and take a few photographs. They weren’t quite good enough to show the markings we’ve just observed, otherwise there would have been an investigation before. But my friend Lawton detected them through the hundred-centimetre reflector when I asked him to look, and he also noticed something else that should have been spotted before. Five is only thirty kilometres in diameter, but it’s much brighter than it should be for its size. When you compare its reflecting power—its aldeb—its—’

‘Its albedo.’

‘Thanks, Tony—its albedo with that of the other Moons, you find that it’s a much better reflector than it should be. In fact, it behaves more like polished metal than rock.’

‘So that explains it!’ I said. ‘The people of Culture X must have covered Five with an outer shell—like the domes they built on Mercury, but on a bigger scale.’

The Professor looked at me rather pityingly.

‘So you still haven’t guessed!’ he said.

I don’t think this was quite fair. Frankly, would you have done any better in the same circumstances?

We landed three hours later on an enormous metal plain. As I looked through the portholes, I felt completely dwarfed by my surroundings. An ant crawling on the top of an oil-storage tank might have had much the same feelings—and the looming bulk of Jupiter up there in the sky didn’t help. Even the Professor’s usual cockiness now seemed to be overlaid by a kind of reverent awe.

The plain wasn’t quite devoid of features. Running across it in various directions were broad bands where the stupendous metal plates had been joined together. These bands, or the crisscross pattern they formed, were what we had seen from space.

About a quarter of a kilometre away was a low hill—at least, what would have been a hill on a natural world. We had spotted it on our way in after making a careful survey of the little satellite from space. It was one of six such projections, four arranged equidistantly around the equator and the other two at the Poles. The assumption was pretty obvious that they would be entrances to the world below the metal shell.

I know that some people think it must be very entertaining to walk around on an airless, low-gravity planet in spacesuits. Well, it isn’t. There are so many points to think about, so many checks to make and precautions to observe, that the mental strain outweighs the glamour—at least as far as I’m concerned. But I must admit that this time, as we climbed out of the airlock, I was so excited that for once these things didn’t worry me.

The gravity of Five was so microscopic that walking was completely out of the question. We were all roped together like mountaineers and blew ourselves across the metal plain with gentle bursts from our recoil pistols. The experienced astronauts, Fulton and Groves, were at the two ends of the chain so that any unwise eagerness on the part of the people in the middle was restrained.

It took us only a few minutes to reach our objective, which we discovered to be a broad, low dome at least a kilometre in circumference. I wondered if it was a gigantic airlock, large enough to permit the entrance of whole spaceships. Unless we were very lucky, we might be unable to find a way in, since the controlling mechanisms would no longer be functioning, and even if they were, we would not know how to operate them. It would be difficult to imagine anything more tantalising than being locked out, unable to get at the greatest archaeological find in all history.

We had made a quarter circuit of the dome when we found an opening in the metal shell. It was quite small—only about two metres across—and it was so nearly circular that for a moment we did not realise what it was. Then Tony’s voice came over the radio.

‘That’s not artificial. We’ve got a meteor to thank for it.’

‘Impossible!’ protested Professor Forster. ‘It’s much too regular.’

Tony was stubborn.

‘Big meteors always produce circular holes, unless they strike very glancing blows. And look at the edges; you can see there’s been an explosion of some kind. Probably the meteor and the shell were vaporised; we won’t find any fragments.’

‘You’d expect this sort of thing to happen,’ put in Kingsley. ‘How long has this been here? Five million years? I’m surprised we haven’t found any other craters.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said the Professor, too pleased to argue. ‘Anyway, I’m going in first.’

‘Right,’ said Kingsley, who as captain has the last say in all such matters. ‘I’ll give you twenty metres of rope and will sit in the hole so that we can keep radio contact. Otherwise this shell will blanket your signals.’

So Professor Forster was the first man to enter Five, as he deserved to be. We crowded close to Kingsley so that he could relay news of the Professor’s progress.

He didn’t get very far. There was another shell just inside the outer one, as we might have expected. The Professor had room to stand upright between them, and as far as his torch could throw its beam he could see avenues of supporting struts and girders, but that was about all.

It took us about twenty-four exasperating hours before we got any further. Near the end of that time I remember asking the Professor why he hadn’t thought of bringing any explosives. He gave me a very hurt look.

‘There’s enough aboard the ship to blow us all to glory,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to risk doing any damage if I can find another way.’

That’s what I call patience, but I could see his point of view. After all, what was another few days in a search that had already taken him twenty years?

It was Bill Hawkins, of all people, who found the way in when we had abandoned our first line of approach. Near the North Pole of the little world he discovered a really giant meteor hole—about a hundred metres across and cutting through both the outer shells surrounding Five. It had revealed still another shell below those, and by one of those chances that must happen if one waits enough eons, a second, smaller, meteor had come down inside the crater and penetrated the innermost skin. The hole was just big enough to allow entrance for a man in a spacesuit. We went through head first, one at a time.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever have a weirder experience than hanging from that tremendous vault, like a spider suspended beneath the dome of St Peter’s. We only knew that the space in which we floated was vast. Just how big it was we could not tell, for our torches gave us no sense of distance. In this airless, dustless cavern the beams were, of course, totally invisible and when we shone them on the roof above, we could see the ovals of light dancing away into the distance until they were too diffuse to be visible. If we pointed them ‘downward’ we could see a pale smudge of illumination so far below that it revealed nothing.

Very slowly, under the minute gravity of this tiny world, we fell downward until checked by our safety ropes. Overhead I could see the tiny glimmering patch through which we had entered; it was remote but reassuring.

And then, while I was swinging with an infinitely sluggish pendulum motion at the end of my cable, with the lights of my companions glimmering like fitful stars in the darkness around me, the truth suddenly crashed into my brain. Forgetting that we were all on open circuit, I cried out involuntarily:

‘Professor—I don’t believe this is a planet at all! It’s a spaceship!’

Then I stopped, feeling that I had made a fool of myself. There was a brief, tense silence, then a babble of noise as everyone else started arguing at once. Professor Forster’s voice cut across the confusion and I could tell that he was both pleased and surprised.

‘You’re quite right, Jack. This is the ship that brought Culture X to the Solar System.’

I heard someone—it sounded like Eric Fulton—give a gasp of incredulity.

‘It’s fantastic! A ship thirty kilometres across!’

‘You ought to know better than that,’ replied the Professor with surprising mildness. ‘Suppose a civilisation wanted to cross interstellar space—how else would it attack the problem? It would build a mobile planetoid out in space, taking perhaps centuries over the task. Since the ship would have to be a self-contained world, which could support its inhabitants for generations, it would need to be as large as this. I wonder how many suns they visited before they found ours and knew that their search was ended? They must have had smaller ships that could take them down to the planets, and of course they had to leave the parent vessel somewhere in space. So they parked it here, in a close orbit near the largest planet, where it would remain safely forever—or until they needed it again. It was the logical place: if they had set it circuling the Sun, in time the pulls of the planets would have disturbed its orbit so much that it might have been lost. That could never happen to it here.’

‘Tell me, Professor,’ someone asked, ‘did you guess all this before we started?’

‘I hoped it. All the evidence pointed to this answer. There’s always been something anomalous about Satellite Five, though no one seems to have noticed it. Why this single tiny moon so close to Jupiter, when all the other small satellites are seventy times further away? Astronomically speaking, it didn’t make sense. But enough of this chattering. We’ve got work to do.’

That, I think, must count as the understatement of the century. There were seven of us faced with the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. Almost a whole world—a small world, an artificial one, but still a world—was waiting for us to explore. All we could perform was a swift and superficial reconnaissance: there might be material here for generations of research workers.

The first step was to lower a powerful floodlight on a power line running from the ship. This would act as a beacon and prevent us getting lost, as well as giving local illumination on the inner surface of the satellite. (Even now, I still find it hard to call Five a ship.) Then we dropped down the line to the surface below. It was a fall of about a kilometre, and in this low gravity it was quite safe to make the drop unretarded. The gentle shock of the impact could be absorbed easily enough by the spring-loaded staffs we carried for that purpose.

I don’t want to take up any space here with yet another description of all the wonders of Satellite Five; there have already been enough pictures, maps and books on the subject. (My own, by the way is being published by Sidgwick and Jackson next summer.) What I would like to give you instead is some impression of what it was actually like to be the first men ever to enter that strange metal world. Yet I’m sorry to say—I know this sounds hard to believe—I simply can’t remember what I was feeling when we came across the first of the great mushroom-capped entrance shafts. I suppose I was so excited and so overwhelmed by the wonder of it all that I’ve forgotten everything else. But I can recall the impression of sheer size, something which mere photographs can never give. The builders of this world, coming as they did from a planet of low gravity, were giants—about four times as tall as men. We were pigmies crawling among their works.

We never got below the outer levels on our first visit, so we met few of the scientific marvels which later expeditions discovered. That was just as well; the residential areas provided enough to keep us busy for several lifetimes. The globe we were exploring must once have been lit by artificial sunlight pouring down from the triple shell that surrounded it and kept its atmosphere from leaking into space. Here on the surface the Jovians (I suppose I cannot avoid adopting the popular name for the people of Culture X) had reproduced, as accurately as they could, conditions on the world they had left unknown ages ago. Perhaps they still had day and night, changing seasons, rain and mist. They had even taken a tiny sea with them into exile. The water was still there, forming a frozen lake three kilometres across. I hear that there is a plan afoot to electrolise it and provide Five with a breathable atmosphere again, as soon as the meteor holes in the outer shell have been plugged.

The more we saw of their work, the more we grew to like the race whose possessions we were disturbing for the first time in five million years. Even if they were giants from another sun, they had much in common with man, and it is a great tragedy that our races missed each other by what is, on the cosmic scale, such a narrow margin.

We were, I suppose, more fortunate than any archaeologists in history. The vacuum of space had preserved everything from decay and—this was something which could not have been expected—the Jovians had not emptied their mighty ship of all its treasures when they had set out to colonise the Solar System. Here on the inner surface of Five everything still seemed intact, as it had been at the end of the ship’s long journey. Perhaps the travellers had preserved it as a shrine in memory of their lost home, or perhaps they had thought that one day they might have to use these things again.

Whatever the reason, everything was here as its makers had left it. Sometimes it frightened me. I might be photographing, with Bill’s help, some great wall carving when the sheer timelessness of the place would strike into my heart. I would look round nervously, half expecting to see giant shapes come stalking in through the pointed doorways, to continue the tasks that had been momentarily interrupted.

We discovered the art gallery on the fourth day. That was the only name for it; there was no mistaking its purpose. When Groves and Searle, who had been doing rapid sweeps over the southern hemisphere, reported the discovery we decided to concentrate all our forces there. For, as somebody or other has said, the art of a people reveals its soul, and here we might find the key to Culture X.

The building was huge, even by the standards of this giant race. Like all the other structures on Five, it was made of metal, yet there was nothing cold or mechanical about it. The topmost peak climbed half way to the remote roof of the world, and from a distance—before the details were visible—the building looked not unlike a Gothic cathedral. Misled by this chance resemblance, some later writers have called it a temple; but we have never found any trace of what might be called a religion among the Jovians. Yet there seems something appropriate about the name. ‘The Temple of Art’, and it’s stuck so thoroughly that no one can change it now.

It has been estimated that there are between ten and twenty million individual exhibits in this single building—the harvest garnered during the whole history of a race that may have been much older than Man. And it was here that I found a small, circular room which at first sight seemed to be no more than the meeting place of six radiating corridors. I was by myself (and thus, I’m afraid, disobeying the Professor’s orders) and taking what I thought would be a short-cut back to my companions. The dark walls were drifting silently past me as I glided along, the light of my torch dancing over the ceiling ahead. It was covered with deeply cut lettering, and I was so busy looking for familiar character groupings that for some time I paid no attention to the chamber’s floor. Then I saw the statue and focused my beam upon it.

The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured. In this case the subject matter made the effect all the more overwhelming. I was the first man ever to know what the Jovians had looked like, for here, carved with superb skill and authority, was one obviously modelled from life.

The slender, reptilian head was looking straight toward me, the sightless eyes staring into mine. Two of the hands were clasped upon the breast as if in resignation; the other two were holding an instrument whose purpose is still unknown. The long, powerful tail—which, like a kangaroo’s, probably balanced the rest of the body—was stretched out along the ground, adding to the impression of rest or repose.

There was nothing human about the face or the body. There were, for example, no nostrils—only gill-like openings in the neck. Yet the figure moved me profoundly; the artist had spanned the barriers of time and culture in a way I should never have believed possible. ‘Not human—but humane’ was the verdict Professor Forster gave. There were many things we could not have shared with the builders of this world, but all that was really important we would have felt in common.

Just as one can read emotions in the alien but familiar face of a dog or a horse, so it seemed that I knew the feelings of the being confronting me. Here was wisdom and authority—the calm, confident power that is shown, for example, in Bellini’s famous portrait of the Doge Loredano. Yet there was sadness also—the sadness of a race which had made some stupendous effort, and made it in vain.

We still do not know why this single statue is the only representation the Jovians have ever made of themselves in their art. One would hardly expect to find taboos of this nature among such an advanced race; perhaps we will know the answer when we have deciphered the writing carved on the chamber walls.

Yet I am already certain of the statue’s purpose. It was set here to bridge time and to greet whatever beings might one day stand in the footsteps of its makers. That, perhaps, is why they shaped it so much smaller than life. Even then they must have guessed that the future belonged to Earth or Venus, and hence to beings whom they would have dwarfed. They knew that size could be a barrier as well as time.

A few minutes later I was on my way back to the ship with my companions, eager to tell the Professor about the discovery. He had been reluctantly snatching some rest, though I don’t believe he averaged more than four hours sleep a day all the time we were on Five. The golden light of Jupiter was flooding the great metal plain as we emerged through the shell and stood beneath the stars once more.

‘Hello!’ I heard Bill say over the radio. ‘The Prof’s moved the ship.’

‘Nonsense,’ I retorted. ‘It’s exactly where we left it.’

Then I turned my head and saw the reason for Bill’s mistake. We had visitors.

The second ship had come down a couple of kilometres away, and as far as my non-expert eyes could tell it might have been a duplicate of ours. When we hurried through the airlock, we found that the Professor, a little bleary-eyed, was already entertaining. To our surprise, though not exactly to our displeasure, one of the three visitors was an extremely attractive brunette.

‘This,’ said Professor Forster, a little wearily, ‘is Mr Randolph Mays, the science writer. I imagine you’ve heard of him. And this is—’ He turned to Mays. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch the names.’

‘My pilot, Donald Hopkins—my secretary, Marianne Mitchell.’

There was just the slightest pause before the word ‘secretary,’ but it was long enough to set a little signal light flashing in my brain. I kept my eyebrows from going up, but I caught a glance from Bill that said, without any need for words: If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, I’m ashamed of you.

Mays was a tall, rather cadaverous man with thinning hair and an attitude of bonhomie which one felt was only skin-deep—the protective coloration of a man who has to be friendly with too many people.

‘I expect this is as big a surprise to you as it is to me,’ he said with unnecessary heartiness. ‘I certainly never expected to find anyone here before me, and I certainly didn’t expect to find all this.’

‘What brought you here?’ said Ashton, trying to sound not too suspiciously inquisitive.

‘I was just explaining that to the Professor. Can I have that folder please, Marianne? Thanks.’

He drew out a series of very fine astronomical paintings and passed them round. They showed the planets from their satellites—a common-enough subject, of course.

‘You’ve all seen this sort of thing before,’ Mays continued. ‘But there’s a difference here. These pictures are nearly a hundred years old. They were painted by an artist named Chesley Bonestell and appeared in Life back in 1944—long before space-travel began, of course. Now what’s happened is that Life has commissioned me to go round the Solar System and see how well I can match these imaginative paintings against the reality. In the centenary issue, they’ll be published side by side with photographs of the real thing. Good idea, eh?’

I had to admit that it was. But it was going to make matters rather complicated, and I wondered what the Professor thought about it. Then I glanced again at Miss Mitchell, standing demurely in the corner, and decided that there would be compensations.

In any other circumstances, we would have been glad to meet another party of explorers, but here there was the question of priority to be considered. Mays would certainly be hurrying back to Earth as quickly as he could, his original mission abandoned and all his film used up here and now. It was difficult to see how we could stop him, and not even certain that we desired to do so. We wanted all the publicity and support we could get, but we would prefer to do things in our own time, after our own fashion. I wondered how strong the Professor was on tact, and feared the worst.

Yet at first diplomatic relations were smooth enough. The Professor had hit upon the bright idea of pairing each of us with one of May’s team, so that we acted simultaneously as guides and supervisors. Doubling the number of investigating groups also greatly increased the rate at which we could work. It was unsafe for anyone to operate by himself under these conditions, and this had handicapped us a great deal.

The Professor outlined his policy to us the day after the arrival of Mays’s party.

‘I hope we can get along together,’ he said a little anxiously. ‘As far as I’m concerned they can go where they like and photograph what they like, as long as they don’t take anything, and as long as they don’t get back to Earth with their records before we do.’

‘I don’t see how we can stop them,’ protested Ashton.

‘Well, I hadn’t intended to do this, but I’ve now registered a claim to Five. I radioed it to Ganymede last night, and it will be at The Hague by now.’

‘But no one can claim an astronomical body for himself. That was settled in the case of the Moon, back in the last century.’

The Professor gave a rather crooked smile.

‘I’m not annexing an astronomical body, remember. I’ve put in a claim for salvage, and I’ve done it in the name of the World Science Organisation. If Mays takes anything out of Five, he’ll be stealing it from them. Tomorrow I’m going to explain the situation gently to him, just in case he gets any bright ideas.’

It certainly seemed peculiar to think of Satellite Five as salvage, and I could imagine some pretty legal quarrels developing when we got home. But for the present the Professor’s move should have given us some safeguards and might encourage Mays from collecting souvenirs—so we were optimistic enough to hope.

It took rather a lot of organising, but I managed to get paired off with Marianne for several trips round the interior of Five. Mays didn’t seem to mind: there was no particular reason why he should. A spacesuit is the most perfect chaperon ever devised, confound it.

Naturally enough I took her to the art gallery at the first opportunity, and showed her my find. She stood looking at the statue for a long time while I held my torch beam upon it.

‘It’s very wonderful,’ she breathed at last. ‘Just think of it waiting here in the darkness all those millions of years! But you’ll have to give it a name.’

‘I have. I’ve christened it “The Ambassador”.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, because I think it’s kind of envoy, if you like, carrying a greeting to us. The people who made it knew that one day someone else was bound to come here and find this place.’

‘I think you’re right. “The Ambassador”—yes, that was clever of you. There’s something noble about it, and something very sad, too. Don’t you feel it?’

I could tell that Marianne was a very intelligent woman. It was quite remarkable the way she saw my point of view, and the interest she took in everything I showed her. But ‘The Ambassador’ fascinated her most of all, and she kept on coming back to it.

‘You know, Jack,’ she said (I think this was sometime the next day, when Mays had been to see it as well), ‘you must take that statue back to Earth. Think of the sensation it would cause.’

I sighed.

‘The Professor would like to, but it must weight a ton. We can’t afford the fuel. It will have to wait for a later trip.’

She looked puzzled.

‘But things hardly weigh anything here,’ she protested.

‘That’s different,’ I explained. ‘There’s weight, and there’s inertia—two quite different things. Now inertia—oh, never mind. We can’t take it back, anyway. Captain Searle’s told us that, definitely.’

‘What a pity,’ said Marianne.

I forgot all about this conversation until the night before we left. We had had a busy and exhausting day packing our equipment (a good deal, of course, we left behind for future use). All our photographic material had been used up. As Charlie Ashton remarked, if we met a live Jovian now we’d be unable record the fact. I think we were all wanting a breathing space, an opportunity to relax and sort out our impressions and to recover from our head-on collision with an alien culture.

Mays’s ship, the Henry Luce, was also nearly ready for take-off. We would leave at the same time, an arrangement which suited the Professor admirably as he did not trust Mays alone on Five.

Everything had been settled when, while checking through our records, I suddenly found that six rolls of exposed film were missing. They were photographs of a complete set of transcriptions in the Temple of Art. After a certain amount of thought I recalled that they had been entrusted to my charge, and I had put them very carefully on a ledge in the Temple, intending to collect them later.

It was a long time before take-off, the Professor and Ashton was cancelling some arrears of sleep, and there seemed no reason why I should not slip back to collect the missing material. I knew there would be a row if it was left behind, and as I remembered exactly where it was I need be gone only thirty minutes. So I went, explaining my mission to Bill just in case of accidents.

The floodlight was no longer working, of course, and the darkness inside the shell of Five was somewhat oppressive. But I left a portable beacon at the entrance, and dropped freely until my hand torch told me it was time to break the fall. Ten minutes later, with a sigh of relief, I gathered up the missing films.

It was a natural enough thing to pay my last respects to The Ambassador: it might be years before I saw him again, and that calmly enigmatic figure had begun to exercise an extraordinary fascination over me.

Unfortunately, that fascination had not been confined to me alone. For the chamber was empty and the statue gone.

I suppose I could have crept back and said nothing, thus avoiding awkward explanations. But I was too furious to think of discretion, and as soon as I returned we woke the Professor and told him what had happened.

He sat on his bunk rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, then uttered a few harsh words about Mr Mays and his companions which it would do no good at all to repeat here.

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Searle, ‘is how they got the thing out—if they have, in fact. We should have spotted it.’

‘There are plenty of hiding places, and they could have waited until there was no one around before they took it up through the hull. It must have been quite a job, even under this gravity,’ remarked Eric Fulton, in tones of admiration.

‘There’s no time for post-mortems,’ said the Professor savagely. ‘We’ve got five hours to think of something. They can’t take off before then, because we’re only just past opposition with Ganymede. That’s correct, isn’t it Kingsley?’

Searle nodded agreement.

‘Yes. We must move round to the other side of Jupiter before we can enter a transfer orbit—at least, a reasonably economical one.’

‘Good. That gives us a breathing space. Well, has anyone any ideas?’

Looking back on the whole thing now, it often seems to me that our subsequent behaviour was, shall I say, a little peculiar and slightly uncivilised. It was not the sort of thing we could have imagined ourselves doing a few months before. But we were annoyed and overwrought, and our remoteness from all other human beings somehow made everything seem different. Since there were no other laws here, we had to make our own….

‘Can’t we do something to stop them from taking off? Could we sabotage their rockets, for instance?’ asked Bill.

Searle didn’t like this idea at all.

‘We mustn’t do anything drastic,’ he said. ‘Besides, Don Hopkins is a good friend of mine. He’d never forgive me if I damaged his ship. There’d be the danger, too, that we might do something that couldn’t be repaired.’

‘Then pinch their fuel,’ said Groves laconically.

‘Of course! They’re probably all asleep, there’s no light in the cabin. All we’ve got to do is to connect up and pump.’

‘A very nice idea,’ I pointed out, ‘but we’re two kilometres apart. How much pipeline have we got? Is it as much as a hundred metres?’

The others ignored this interruption as though it was beneath contempt and went on making their plans. Five minutes later the technicians had settled everything: we only had to climb into our spacesuits and do the work.

I never thought, when I joined the Professor’s expedition, that I should end up like an African porter in one of those old adventure stories, carrying a load on my head. Especially when the load was a sixth of a spaceship (being so short, Professor Forster wasn’t able to provide very effective help). Now that its fuel tanks were half empty, the weight of the ship in this gravity was about two hundred kilograms. We squeezed beneath, heaved, and up she went—very slowly, of course, because her inertia was still unchanged. Then we started marching.

It took us quite a while to make the journey, and it wasn’t quite as easy as we’d thought it would be. But presently the two ships were lying side by side, and nobody had noticed us. Everyone in the Henry Luce was fast asleep, as they had every reason to expect us to be.

Though I was still rather short of breath, I found a certain schoolboy amusement in the whole adventure as Searle and Fulton drew the refuelling pipeline out of our airlock and quietly coupled up to the other ship.

‘The beauty of this plan,’ explained Groves to me as we stood watching, ‘is that they can’t do anything to stop us, unless they come outside and uncouple our line. We can drain them dry in five minutes, and it will take them half that time to wake up and get into their spacesuits.’

A sudden horrid fear smote me.

‘Suppose they turned on their rockets and tried to get away?’

‘Then we’d both be smashed up. No, they’ll just have to come outside and see what’s going on. Ah, there go the pumps.’

The pipeline had stiffened like a fire-hose under pressure, and I knew that the fuel was pouring into our tanks. Any moment now the lights would go on in the Henry Luce and her startled occupants would come scuttling out.

It was something of an anticlimax when they didn’t. They must have been sleeping very soundly not to have felt the vibration from the pumps, but when it was all over nothing had happened and we just stood round looking rather foolish. Searle and Fulton carefully uncoupled the pipeline and put it back into the airlock.

‘Well?’ we asked the Professor.

He thought things over for a minute.

‘Let’s get back into the ship,’ he said.

When we had climbed out of our suits and were gathered together in the control room, or as far in as we could get, the Professor sat down at the radio and punched out the ‘Emergency’ signal. Our sleeping neighbours would be awake in a couple of seconds as their automatic receiver sounded the alarm.

The TV screen glimmered into life. There, looking rather frightened, was Randolph Mays.

‘Hello, Forster,’ he snapped. ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘Nothing wrong here,’ replied the Professor in his best deadpan manner, ‘but you’ve lost something important. Look at your fuel gauges.’

The screen emptied, and for a moment there was a confused mumbling and shouting from the speaker. Then Mays was back, annoyance and alarm competing for possession of his features.

‘What’s going on?’ he demanded angrily. ‘Do you know anything about this?’

The Prof. let him sizzle for a moment before he replied.

‘I think you’d better come across and talk things over,’ he said. ‘You won’t have far to walk.’

Mays glared back at him uncertainly, then retorted, ‘You bet I will!’ The screen went blank.

‘He’ll have to climb down now!’ said Bill gleefully. ‘There’s nothing else he can do!’

‘It’s not so simple as you think,’ warned Fulton. ‘If he really wanted to be awkward, he could just sit tight and radio Ganymede for a tanker.’

‘What good would that do him? It would waste days and cost a fortune.’

‘Yes, but he’d still have the statue, if he wanted it that badly. And he’d get his money back when he sued us.’

The airlock light flashed on and Mays stumped into the room. He was in a surprisingly conciliatory mood; on the way over, he must have had second thoughts.

‘Well, well,’ he said affably. ‘What’s all this nonsense in aid of?’

‘You know perfectly well,’ the Professor retorted coldly. ‘I made it quite clear that nothing was to be taken off Five. You’ve been stealing property that doesn’t belong to you.’

‘Now, let’s be reasonable. Who does it belong to? You can’t claim everything on this planet as your personal property.’

‘This is not a planet—it’s a ship and the laws of salvage operate.’

‘Frankly, that’s a very debatable point. Don’t you think you should wait until you get a ruling from the lawyers?’

The Professor was being icily polite, but I could see that the strain was terrific and an explosion might occur at any moment.

‘Listen, Mr Mays,’ he said with ominous calm. ‘What you’ve taken is the most important single find we’ve made here. I will make allowances for the fact that you don’t appreciate what you’ve done, and don’t understand the viewpoint of an archaeologist like myself. Return that statue, and we’ll pump your fuel back and say no more.’

Mays rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

‘I really don’t see why you should make such a fuss about one statue, when you consider all the stuff that’s still here.’

It was then that the Professor made one of his rare mistakes.

‘You talk like a man who’s stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and argues that nobody will miss it because of all the other paintings. This statue’s unique in a way that no terrestrial work of art can ever be. That’s why I’m determined to get it back.’

You should never, when you’re bargaining, make it obvious that you want something really badly. I saw the greedy glint in Mays’s eye and said to myself, ‘Uh-huh! He’s going to be tough.’ And I remembered Fulton’s remark about calling Ganymede for a tanker.

‘Give me half an hour to think it over,’ said Mays, turning to the airlock.

‘Very well,’ replied the Professor stiffly. ‘Half an hour—no more.’

I must give Mays credit for brains. Within five minutes we saw his communications aerial start slewing round until it locked on Ganymede. Naturally we tried to listen in, but he had a scrambler. These newspaper men must trust each other.

The reply came back a few minutes later; that was scrambled too. While we were waiting for the next development, we had another council of war. The Professor was now entering the stubborn, stop-at-nothing stage. He realised he’d miscalculated and that had made him fighting mad.

I think Mays must have been a little apprehensive, because he had reinforcements when he returned. Donald Hopkins, his pilot, came with him, looking rather uncomfortable.

‘I’ve been able to fix things up, Professor,’ he said smugly. ‘It will take me a little longer, but I can get back without your help if I have to. Still, I must admit that it will save a good deal of time and money if we can come to an agreement. I’ll tell you what. Give me back my fuel and I’ll return the other—er—souvenirs I’ve collected. But I insist on keeping Mona Lisa, even if it means I won’t get back to Ganymede until the middle of next week.’

The Professor then uttered a number of what are usually called deep-space oaths, though I can assure you they’re much the same as any other oaths. That seemed to relieve his feelings a lot and he became fiendishly friendly.

‘My dear Mr Mays,’ he said, ‘you’re an unmitigated crook, and accordingly I’ve no compunction left in dealing with you. I’m prepared to use force, knowing that the law will justify me.’

Mays looked slightly alarmed, though not unduly so. We had moved to strategic positions round the door.

‘Please don’t be so melodramatic,’ he said haughtily. ‘This is the twenty-first century, not the Wild West back in 1800.’

‘1880,’ said Bill, who is a stickler for accuracy.

‘I must ask you,’ the Professor continued, ‘to consider yourself under detention while we decide what is to be done. Mr Searle, take him to Cabin B.’

Mays sidled along the wall with a nervous laugh.

‘Really, Professor, this is too childish! You can’t detain me against my will.’ He glanced for support at the Captain of the Henry Luce.

Donald Hopkins dusted an imaginary speck of fluff from his uniform.

‘I refuse,’ he remarked for the benefit of all concerned, ‘to get involved in vulgar brawls.’

Mays gave him a venomous look and capitulated with bad grace. We saw that he had a good supply of reading matter, and locked him in.

When he was out of the way, the Professor turned to Hopkins, who was looking enviously at our fuel gauges.

‘Can I take it, Captain,’ he said politely, ‘that you don’t wish to get mixed up in any of your employer’s dirty business?’

‘I’m neutral. My job is to fly the ship here and take her home. You can fight this out among yourselves.’

‘Thank you. I think we understand each other perfectly. Perhaps it would be best if you returned to your ship and explained the situation. We’ll be calling you in a few minutes.’

Captain Hopkins made his way languidly to the door. As he was about to leave he turned to Searle.

‘By the way, Kingsley,’ he drawled. ‘Have you thought of torture? Do call me if you get round to it—I’ve some jolly interesting ideas.’ Then he was gone, leaving us with our hostage.

I think the Professor had hoped he could do a direct exchange. If so, he had not bargained on Marianne’s stubbornness.

‘It serves Randolph right,’ she said. ‘But I don’t really see that it makes any difference. He’ll be just as comfortable in your ship as in ours, and you can’t do anything to him. Let me know when you’re fed up with having him around.’

It seemed a complete impasse. We had been too clever by half, and it had got us exactly nowhere. We’d capture Mays, but he wasn’t any use to us.

The Professor was standing with his back to us, staring morosely out of the window. Seemingly balanced on the horizon, the immense bulk of Jupiter nearly filled the sky.

‘We’ve got to convince her that we really do mean business,’ he said. Then he turned abruptly to me.

‘Do you think she’s actually fond of this blackguard?’

‘Er—I shouldn’t be surprised. Yes, I really believe so.’

The Professor looked very thoughtful. Then he said to Searle, ‘Come into my room. I want to talk something over.’

They were gone quite a while. When they returned they both had an indefinable air of gleeful anticipation, and the Professor was carrying a piece of paper covered with figures. He went to the radio, and called the Henry Luce.

‘Hello,’ said Marianne, replying so promptly that she’d obviously been waiting for us. ‘Have you decided to call it off? I’m getting so bored.’

The Professor looked at her gravely.

‘Miss Mitchell,’ he replied. ‘It’s apparent that you have not been taking us seriously. I’m therefore arranging a somewhat—er—drastic little demonstration for your benefit. I’m going to place your employer in a position from which he’ll be only too anxious for you to retrieve him as quickly as possible.’

‘Indeed?’ replied Marianne noncommittally—though I thought I could detect a trace of apprehension in her voice.

‘I don’t suppose,’ continued the Professor smoothly, ‘that you know anything about celestial mechanics. No? Too bad, but your pilot will confirm everything I tell you. Won’t you, Hopkins?’

‘Go ahead,’ came a painstakingly neutral voice from the background.

‘Then listen carefully, Miss Mitchell. I want to remind you of our curious—indeed our precarious—position on this satellite. You’ve only got to look out of the window to see how close to Jupiter we are, and I need hardly remind you that Jupiter has by far the most intense gravitational field of all the planets. You follow me?’

‘Yes,’ replied Marianne, no longer quite so self-possessed. ‘Go on.’

‘Very well. This little world of ours goes round Jupiter in almost exactly twelve hours. Now there’s a well-known theorem stating that if a body falls from an orbit to the centre of attraction, it will take point one seven seven of a period to make the drop. In other words, anything falling from here to Jupiter would reach the centre of the planet in about two hours seven minutes. I’m sure Captain Hopkins can confirm this.’

There was a long pause. Then we heard Hopkins say, ‘Well, of course I can’t confirm the exact figures, but they’re probably correct. It would be something like that, anyway.’

‘Good,’ continued the Professor. ‘Now I’m sure you realise,’ he went on with a hearty chuckle, ‘that a fall to the centre of the planet is a very theoretical case. If anything really was dropped from here, it would reach the upper atmosphere of Jupiter in a considerably shorter time. I hope I’m not boring you?’

‘No,’ said Marianne, rather faintly.

‘I’m so glad to hear it. Anyway, Captain Searle has worked out the actual time for me, and it’s one hour thirty-five minutes—with a few minutes either way. We can’t guarantee complete accuracy, ha, ha!

‘Now, it has doubtless not escaped your notice that this satellite of ours has an extremely weak gravitational field. Its escape velocity is only about ten metres a second, and anything thrown away from it at that speed would never come back. Correct, Mr Hopkins?’

‘Perfectly correct.’

‘Then, if I may come to the point, we propose to take Mr Mays for a walk until he’s immediately under Jupiter, remove the reaction pistols from his suit, and—ah—launch him forth. We will be prepared to retrieve him with our ship as soon as you’ve handed over the property you’ve stolen. After what I’ve told you, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that time will be rather vital. An hour and thirty-five minutes is remarkably short, isn’t it?’

‘Professor!’ I gasped. ‘You can’t possibly do this!’

‘Shut up!’ he barked. ‘Well, Miss Mitchell, what about it?’

Marianne was staring at him with mingled horror and disbelief.

‘You’re simply bluffing!’ she cried. ‘I don’t believe you’d do anything of the kind! Your crew won’t let you!’

The Professor sighed.

‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘Captain Searle—Mr Groves—will you take the prisoner and proceed as instructed.’

‘Aye-aye, sir,’ replied Searle with great solemnity.

Mays looked frightened but stubborn.

‘What are you going to do now?’ he said, as his suit was handed back to him.

Searle unholstered his reaction pistols. ‘Just climb in,’ he said. ‘We’re going for a walk.’

I realised then what the Professor hoped to do. The whole thing was a colossal bluff: of course he wouldn’t really have Mays thrown into Jupiter; and in any case Searle and Groves wouldn’t do it. Yet surely Marianne would see through the bluff, and then we’d be left looking mighty foolish.

Mays couldn’t run away; without his reaction pistols he was quite helpless. Grasping his arms and towing him along like a captive balloon, his escorts set off toward the horizon—and towards Jupiter.

I could see, looking across the space to the other ship, that Marianne was staring out through the observation windows at the departing trio. Professor Forster noticed it too.

‘I hope you’re convinced, Miss Mitchell, that my men aren’t carrying along an empty spacesuit. Might I suggest that you follow the proceedings with a telescope? They’ll be over the horizon in a minute, but you’ll be able to see Mr Mays when he starts to—er—ascend.’

There was a stubborn silence from the loudspeaker. The period of suspense seemed to last for a very long time. Was Marianne waiting to see how far the Professor really would go?

By this time I had got hold of a pair of binoculars and was sweeping the sky beyond the ridiculously close horizon. Suddenly I saw it—a tiny flare of light against the vast yellow back-cloth of Jupiter. I focused quickly, and could just make out the three figures rising into space. As I watched, they separated: two of them decelerated with their pistols and started to fall back toward Five. The other went on ascending helplessly toward the ominous bulk of Jupiter.

I turned on the Professor in horror and disbelief.

‘They’ve really done it!’ I cried. ‘I thought you were only bluffing!’

‘So did Miss Mitchell, I’ve no doubt,’ said the Professor calmly, for the benefit of the listening microphone. ‘I hope I don’t need to impress upon you the urgency of the situation. As I’ve remarked once or twice before, the time of fall from our orbit to Jupiter’s surface is ninety-five minutes. But, of course, if one waited even half that time, it would be much too late….’

He let that sink in. There was no reply from the other ship.

‘And now,’ he continued, ‘I’m going to switch off our receiver so we can’t have any more arguments. We’ll wait until you’ve unloaded that statue—and the other items Mr Mays was careless enough to mention—before we’ll talk to you again. Goodbye.’

It was a very uncomfortable ten minutes. I’d lost track of Mays, and was seriously wondering if we’d better overpower the Professor and go after him before we had a murder on our hands. But the people who could fly the ship were the ones who had actually carried out the crime. I didn’t know what to think.

Then the airlock of the Henry Luce slowly opened. A couple of space-suited figures emerged, floating the cause of all the trouble between them.

‘Unconditional surrender,’ murmured the Professor with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Get it into our ship,’ he called over the radio. ‘I’ll open up the airlock for you.’

He seemed in no hurry at all. I kept looking anxiously at the clock; fifteen minutes had already gone by. Presently there was a clanking and banging in the airlock, the inner door opened, and Captain Hopkins entered. He was followed by Marianne, who only needed a bloodstained axe to make her look like Clytaemnestra. I did my best to avoid her eye, but the Professor seemed to be quite without shame. He walked into the airlock, checked that his property was back, and emerged rubbing his hands.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Now let’s sit down and have a drink to forget all this unpleasantness, shall we?’

I pointed indignantly at the clock.

‘Have you gone crazy!’ I yelled. ‘He’s already halfway to Jupiter!’

Professor Forster looked at me disapprovingly.

‘Impatience,’ he said, ‘is a common failing in the young. I see no cause at all for hasty action.’

Marianne spoke for the first time; she now looked really scared.

‘But you promised,’ she whispered.

The Professor suddenly capitulated. He had had his little joke, and didn’t want to prolong the agony.

‘I can tell you at once, Miss Mitchell—and you too, Jack—that Mays is in no more danger than we are. We can go and collect him whenever we like.’

‘Do you mean that you lied to me?’

‘Certainly not. Everything I told you was perfectly true. You simply jumped to the wrong conclusions. When I said that a body would take ninety-five minutes to fall from here to Jupiter, I omitted—not, I must confess, accidentally—a rather important phrase. I should have added “a body at rest with respect to Jupiter.” Your friend Mr Mays was sharing the orbital speed of his satellite, and he’s still got it. A little matter of twenty-six kilometres a second, Miss Mitchell.

‘Oh yes, we threw him completely off Five and toward Jupiter. But the velocity we gave him then was trivial. He’s still moving in practically the same orbit as before. The most he can do—I’ve got Captain Searle to work out the figures—is to drift about a hundred kilometres inward. And in one revolution—twelve hours—he’ll be right back where he started, without us bothering to do anything at all.’

There was a long, long silence. Marianne’s face was a study in frustration, relief, and annoyance at having been fooled. Then she turned on Captain Hopkins.

‘You must have known all the time! Why didn’t you tell me?’

Hopkins gave her a wounded expression.

‘You didn’t ask me,’ he said.

We hauled Mays down about an hour later. He was only twenty kilometres up, and we located him quickly enough by the flashing light on his suit. His radio had been disconnected, for a reason that hadn’t occurred to me. He was intelligent enough to realise that he was in no danger, and if his set had been working he could have called his ship and exposed our bluff. That is, if he wanted to. Personally, I think I’d have been glad enough to call the whole thing off even if I had known that I was perfectly safe. It must have been awfully lonely up there.

To my great surprise, Mays wasn’t as mad as I’d expected. Perhaps he was too relieved to be back in our snug little cabin when we drifted up to him on the merest fizzle of rockets and yanked him in. Or perhaps he felt that he’d been worsted in fair fight and didn’t bear any grudge. I really think it was the latter.

There isn’t much more to tell, except that we did play one other trick on him before we left Five. He had a good deal more fuel in his tanks than he really needed, now that his payload was substantially reduced. By keeping the excess ourselves, we were able to carry The Ambassador back to Ganymede after all. Oh, yes, the Professor gave him a cheque for the fuel we’d borrowed. Everything was perfectly legal.

There’s one amusing sequel I must tell you, though. The day after the new gallery was opened at the British Museum I went along to see The Ambassador, partly to discover if his impact was still as great in these changed surroundings. (For the record, it wasn’t—though it’s still considerable and Bloomsbury will never be quite the same to me again.) A huge crowd was milling around the gallery, and there in the middle of it was Mays and Marianne.

It ended up with us having a very pleasant lunch together in Holborn. I’ll say this about Mays—he doesn’t bear any grudges. But I’m still rather sore about Marianne.

And, frankly, I can’t imagine what she sees in him.

Encounter in the Dawn

First published in Amazing, June/July 1953

Collected in Expedition to Earth

This inspired the opening sequence of 2001:A Space Odyssey. Dan Richter, who played Moon Watcher, has made the transition from Man-ape to LA Executive in a single lifetime. I am sure he must still find that bone club quite useful around Hollywood.

It was in the last days of the Empire. The tiny ship was far from home, and almost a hundred light-years from the great parent vessel searching through the loosely packed stars at the rim of the Milky Way. But even here it could not escape from the shadow that lay across civilisation: beneath that shadow, pausing ever and again in their work to wonder how their distant homes were faring, the scientists of the Galactic Survey still laboured at their never-ending task.

The ship held only three occupants, but between them they carried knowledge of many sciences, and the experience of half a lifetime in space. After the long interstellar night, the star ahead was warming their spirits as they dropped down towards its fires. A little more golden, a trifle more brilliant than the Sun that now seemed a legend of their childhood. They knew from past experience that the chance of locating planets here was more than ninety per cent, and for the moment they forgot all else in the excitement of discovery.

They found the first planet within minutes of coming to rest. It was a giant, of a familiar type, too cold for protoplasmic life and probably possessing no stable surface. So they turned their search sunward, and presently were rewarded.

It was a world that made their hearts ache for home, a world where everything was hauntingly familiar, yet never quite the same. Two great land masses floated in blue-green seas, capped by ice at either pole. There were some desert regions, but the larger part of the planet was obviously fertile. Even from this distance, the signs of vegetation were unmistakably clear.

They gazed hungrily at the expanding landscape as they fell down into the atmosphere, heading towards noon in the sub-tropics. The ship plummeted through cloudless skies towards a great river, checked its fall with a surge of soundless power, and came to rest among the long grasses by the water’s edge.

No one moved: there was nothing to be done until the automatic instruments had finished their work. Then a bell tinkled softly and the lights on the control board flashed in a pattern of meaningful chaos. Captain Altman rose to his feet with a sigh of relief.

‘We’re in luck,’ he said. ‘We can go outside without protection, if the pathogenic tests are satisfactory. What did you make of the place as we came in, Bertrond?’

‘Geologically stable—no active volcanoes, at least. I didn’t see any trace of cities, but that proves nothing. If there’s a civilisation here, it may have passed that stage.’

‘Or not reached it yet?’

Bertrond shrugged. ‘Either’s just as likely. It may take us some time to find out on a planet this size.’

‘More time than we’ve got,’ said Clindar, glancing at the communications panel that linked them to the mother ship and thence to the Galaxy’s threatened heart. For a moment there was a gloomy silence. Then Clindar walked to the control board and pressed a pattern of keys with automatic skill.

With a slight jar, a section of the hull slid aside and the fourth member of the crew stepped out on to the new planet, flexing metal limbs and adjusting servo motors to the unaccustomed gravity. Inside the ship, a television screen glimmered into life, revealing a long vista of waving grasses, some trees in the middle distance, and a glimpse of the great river. Clindar punched a button, and the picture flowed steadily across the screen as the robot turned its head.

‘Which way shall we go?’ Clindar asked.

‘Let’s have a look at those trees,’ Altman replied. ‘If there’s any animal life we’ll find it there.’

‘Look!’ cried Bertrond. ‘A bird!’

Clindar’s fingers flew over the keyboard; the picture centred on the tiny speck that had suddenly appeared on the left of the screen, and expanded rapidly as the robot’s telephoto lens came into action.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Feathers—beak—well up the evolutionary ladder. This place looks promising. I’ll start the camera.’

The swaying motion of the picture as the robot walked forward did not distract them: they had grown accustomed to it long ago. But they had never become reconciled to this exploration by proxy when all their impulses cried out to them to leave the ship, to run through the grass and to feel the wind blowing against their faces. Yet it was too great a risk to take, even on a world that seemed as fair as this. There was always a skull hidden behind Nature’s most smiling face. Wild beasts, poisonous reptiles, quagmires—death could come to the unwary explorer in a thousand disguises. And worst of all were the invisible enemies, the bacteria and viruses against which the only defence might often be a thousand light-years away.

A robot could laugh at all these dangers and even if, as sometimes happened, it encountered a beast powerful enough to destroy it—well, machines could always be replaced.

They met nothing on the walk across the grasslands. If any small animals were disturbed by the robot’s passage, they kept outside its field of vision. Clindar slowed the machine as it approached the trees, and the watchers in the spaceship flinched involuntarily at the branches that appeared to slash across their eyes. The picture dimmed for a moment before the controls readjusted themselves to the weaker illumination; then it came back to normal.

The forest was full of life. It lurked in the undergrowth, clambered among the branches, flew through the air. It fled chattering and gibbering through the trees as the robot advanced. And all the while the automatic cameras were recording the pictures that formed on the screen, gathering material for the biologists to analyse when the ship returned to base.

Clindar breathed a sigh of relief when the trees suddenly thinned. It was exhausting work, keeping the robot from smashing into obstacles as it moved through the forest, but on open ground it could take care of itself. Then the picture trembled as if beneath a hammer-blow, there was a grinding metallic thud, and the whole scene swept vertiginously upward as the robot toppled and fell.

‘What’s that?’ cried Altman. ‘Did you trip?’

‘No,’ said Clindar grimly, his finger flying over the keyboard. ‘Something attacked from the rear. I hope—ah—I’ve still got control.’

He brought the robot to a sitting position and swivelled its head. It did not take long to find the cause of the trouble. Standing a few feet away, and lashing its tail angrily, was a large quadruped with a most ferocious set of teeth. At the moment it was, fairly obviously, trying to decide whether to attack again.

Slowly, the robot rose to its feet, and as it did so the great beast crouched to spring. A smile flitted across Clindar’s face: he knew how to deal with this situation. His thumb felt for the seldom-used key labelled ‘Siren’.

The forest echoed with a hideous undulating scream from the robot’s concealed speaker, and the machine advanced to meet its adversary, arms flailing in front of it. The startled beast almost fell over backward in its effort to turn, and in seconds was gone from sight.

‘Now I suppose we’ll have to wait a couple of hours until everything comes out of hiding again,’ said Bertrond ruefully.

‘I don’t know much about animal psychology,’ interjected Altman, ‘but is it usual for them to attack something completely unfamiliar?’

‘Some will attack anything that moves, but that’s unusual. Normally they attack only for food, or if they’ve already been threatened. What are you driving at? Do you suggest that there are other robots on this planet?’

‘Certainly not. But our carnivorous friend may have mistaken our machine for a more edible biped. Don’t you think that this opening in the jungle is rather unnatural? It could easily be a path.’

‘In that case,’ said Clindar promptly, ‘we’ll follow it and find out. I’m tired of dodging trees, but I hope nothing jumps on us again: it’s bad for my nerves.’

‘You were right, Altman,’ said Bertrond a little later. ‘It’s certainly a path. But that doesn’t mean intelligence. After all, animals—’

He stopped in mid-sentence, and at the same instant Clindar brought the advancing robot to a halt. The path had suddenly opened out into a wide clearing, almost completely occupied by a village of flimsy huts. It was ringed by a wooden palisade, obviously defence against an enemy who at the moment presented no threat. For the gates were wide open, and beyond them the inhabitants were going peacefully about their ways.

For many minutes the three explorers stared in silence at the screen. Then Clindar shivered a little and remarked: ‘It’s uncanny. It might be our own planet, a hundred thousand years ago. I feel as if I’ve gone back in time.’

‘There’s nothing weird about it,’ said the practical Altman. ‘After all, we’ve discovered nearly a hundred planets with our type of life on them.’

‘Yes,’ retorted Clindar. ‘A hundred in the whole Galaxy! I still think that it’s strange it had to happen to us.’

‘Well, it had to happen to somebody,’ said Bertrond philosophically. ‘Meanwhile, we must work out our contact procedure. If we send the robot into the village it will start a panic.’

‘That,’ said Altman, ‘is a masterly understatement. What we’ll have to do is catch a native by himself and prove that we’re friendly. Hide the robot, Clindar—somewhere in the woods where it can watch the village without being spotted. We’ve a week’s practical anthropology ahead of us!’

It was three days before the biological tests showed that it would be safe to leave the ship. Even then Bertrond insisted on going alone—alone, that is, if one ignored the substantial company of the robot. With such an ally he was not afraid of this planet’s larger beasts, and his body’s natural defences could take care of the micro-organisms, so, at least, the analysers had assured him: and considering the complexity of the problem, they made remarkably few mistakes.

He stayed outside for an hour, enjoying himself cautiously, while his companions watched with envy. It would be another three days before they could be quite certain that it was safe to follow Bertrond’s example. Meanwhile, they kept busy enough watching the village through the lenses of the robot, and recording everything they could with the cameras. They had moved the spaceship at night so that it was hidden in the depths of the forest, for they did not wish to be discovered until they were ready.

And all the while the news from the home grew worse. Though their remoteness here at the edge of the Universe deadened its impact, it lay heavily on their minds and sometimes overwhelmed them with a sense of futility. At any moment, they knew, the signal for recall might come as the Empire summoned up its last resources in its extremity. But until then they would continue their work as though pure knowledge were the only thing that mattered.

Seven days after landing, they were ready to make the experiment. They knew now what paths the villagers used when going hunting, and Bertrond chose one of the less frequented ways. Then he placed a chair firmly in the middle of the path and settled down to read a book.

It was not, of course, quite as simple as that: Bertrond had taken all imaginable precautions. Hidden in the undergrowth fifty yards away, the robot was watching through its telescopic lenses, and in its hand it held a small but deadly weapon. Controlling it from the spaceship, his fingers poised over the keyboard, Clindar waited to do what might be necessary.

That was the negative side of the plan: the positive side was more obvious. Lying at Bertrond’s feet was the carcass of a small, horned animal which he hoped would be an acceptable gift to any hunter passing this way.

Two hours later the radio in his suit harness whispered a warning. Quite calmly, though the blood was pounding in his veins, Bertrond laid aside his book and looked down the trail. The savage was walking forward confidently enough, swinging a spear in his right hand. He paused for a moment when he saw Bertrond, then advanced more cautiously. He could tell that there was nothing to fear, for the stranger was slightly built and obviously unarmed.

When only twenty feet separated them, Bertrond gave a reassuring smile and rose slowly to his feet. He bent down, picked up the carcass, and carried it forward as an offering. The gesture would have been understood by any creature on any world, and it was understood here. The savage reached forward, took the animal, and threw it effortless over his shoulder. For an instant he stared into Bertrond’s eyes with a fathomless expression; then he turned and walked back towards the village. Three times he glanced round to see if Bertrond was following, and each time Bertrond smiled and waved reassurance. The whole episode lasted little more than a minute. As the first contact between two races it was completely without drama, though not without dignity.

Bertrond did not move until the other had vanished from sight. Then he relaxed and spoke into his suit microphone.

‘That was a pretty good beginning,’ he said jubilantly. ‘He wasn’t in the least frightened, or even suspicious. I think he’ll be back.’

‘It still seems too good to be true,’ said Altman’s voice in his ear. ‘I should have thought he’d have been either scared or hostile. Would you have accepted a lavish gift from a peculiar stranger with such little fuss?’

Bertrond was slowly walking back to the ship. The robot had now come out of cover and was keeping guard a few paces behind him.

‘I wouldn’t,’ he replied, ‘but I belong to a civilised community. Complete savages may react to strangers in many different ways, according to their past experience. Suppose this tribe has never had any enemies. That’s quite possible on a large but sparsely populated planet. Then we may expect curiosity, but no fear at all.’

‘If these people have no enemies,’ put in Clindar, no longer fully occupied in controlling the robot, ‘why have they got a stockade round the village?’

‘I mean no human enemies,’ replied Bertrond. ‘If that’s true, it simplifies our task immensely.’

‘Do you think he’ll come back?’

‘Of course. If he’s human as I think, curiosity and greed will make him return. In a couple of days we’ll be bosom friends.’

Looked at dispassionately, it became a fantastic routine. Every morning the robot would go hunting under Clindar’s direction, until it was now the deadliest killer in the jungle. Then Bertrond would wait until Yaan—which was the nearest they could get to his name—came striding confidently along the path. He came at the same time every day, and he always came alone. They wondered about this: did he wish to keep his great discovery to himself and thus get all the credit for his hunting prowess? If so, it showed unexpected foresight and cunning.

At first Yaan had departed at once with his prize, as if afraid that the donor of such a generous gift might change his mind. Soon, however, as Bertrond had hoped, he could be induced to stay for a while by simple conjuring tricks and a display of brightly coloured fabrics and crystals, in which he took a child-like delight. At last Bertrond was able to engage him in lengthy conversations, all of which were recorded as well as being filmed through the eyes of the hidden robot.

One day the philologists might be able to analyse this material; the best that Bertrond could do was to discover the meanings of a few simple verbs and nouns. This was made more difficult by the fact that Yaan not only used different words for the same thing, but sometimes the same word for different things.

Between these daily interviews, the ship travelled far, surveying the planet from the air and sometimes landing for more detailed examinations. Although several other human settlements were observed, Bertrond made no attempt to get in touch with them, for it was easy to see that they were all at much the same culture level as Yaan’s people.

It was, Bertrond often thought, a particularly bad joke on the part of Fate that one of the Galaxy’s very few truly human races should have been discovered at this moment of time. Not long ago this would have been an event of supreme importance; now civilisation was too hard-pressed to concern itself with these savage cousins waiting at the dawn of history.

Not until Bertrond was sure he had become part of Yaan’s everyday life did he introduce him to the robot. He was showing Yaan the patterns in a kaleidoscope when Clindar brought the machine striding through the grass with its latest victim dangling across one metal arm. For the first time Yaan showed something akin to fear; but he relaxed at Bertrond’s soothing words, though he continued to watch the advancing monster. It halted some distance away, and Bertrond walked forward to meet it. As he did so, the robot raised its arms and handed him the dead beast. He took it solemnly and carried it back to Yaan, staggering a little under the unaccustomed load.

Bertrond would have given a great deal to know just what Yaan was thinking as he accepted the gift. Was he trying to decide whether the robot was master or slave? Perhaps such conceptions as this were beyond his grasp: to him the robot might be merely another man, a hunter who was a friend of Bertrond.

Clindar’s voice, slightly larger than life, came from the robot’s speaker.

‘It’s astonishing how calmly he accepts us. Won’t anything scare him?’

‘You will keep judging him by your own standards,’ replied Bertrond. ‘Remember, his psychology is completely different, and much simpler. Now that he has confidence in me anything that I accept won’t worry him.’

‘I wonder if that will be true of all his race?’ queried Altman. ‘It’s hardly safe to judge by a single specimen. I want to see what happens when we send the robot into the village.’

‘Hello!’ exclaimed Bertrond. ‘That surprised him. He’s never met a person who could speak with two voices before.’

‘Do you think he’ll guess the truth when he meets us?’ said Clindar.

‘No. The robot will be pure magic to him—but it won’t be any more wonderful than fire and lightning and all the other forces he must already take for granted.’

‘Well, what’s the next move?’ asked Altman, a little impatiently. ‘Are you going to bring him to the ship, or will you go into the village first?’

Bertrond hesitated. ‘I’m anxious not to do too much too quickly. You know the accidents that have happened with strange races when that’s been tried. I’ll let him think this over and when we get back tomorrow I’ll try to persuade him to take the robot back to the village.’

In the hidden ship, Clindar reactivated the robot and started it moving again. Like Altman, he was growing a little impatient of this excessive caution, but on all matters relating to alien life-forms Bertrond was the expert, and they had to obey his orders.

There were times now when he almost wished he were a robot himself, devoid of feelings or emotions, able to watch the fall of a leaf or the death agonies of a world with equal detachment—

The Sun was low when Yaan heard the great voice crying from the jungle. He recognised it at once, despite its inhuman volume: it was the voice of his friend calling him.

In the echoing silence, the life of the village came to a stop. Even the children ceased their play: the only sound was the thin cry of a baby frightened by the sudden silence.

All eyes were upon Yaan as he walked swiftly to his hut and grasped the spear that lay beside the entrance. The stockade would soon be closed against the prowlers of the night, but he did not hesitate as he stepped out into the lengthening shadows. He was passing through the gates when once again that mighty voice summoned him, and now it held a note of urgency that came clearly across all the barriers of language and culture.

The shining giant who spoke with many voices met him a little way from the village and beckoned him to follow. There was no sign of Bertrond. They walked for almost a mile before they saw him in the distance, standing not far from the river’s edge and staring out across the dark, slowly moving waters.

He turned as Yaan approached, yet for a moment seemed unaware of his presence. Then he gave a gesture of dismissal to the shining one, who withdrew into the distance.

Yaan waited. He was patient and, though he could never have expressed it in words, contented. When he was with Bertrond he felt the first intimations of that selfless, utterly irrational devotion his race would not fully achieve for many ages.

It was a strange tableau. Here at the river’s brink two men were standing. One was dressed in a closely fitting uniform equipped with tiny, intricate mechanisms. The other was wearing the skin of an animal and was carrying a flint-tipped spear. Ten thousand generations lay between them, ten thousand generations and an immeasurable gulf of space. Yet they were both human. As she must often do in eternity, Nature had repeated one of her basic patterns.

Presently Bertrond began to speak, walking to and fro in short, quick steps as he did so, and in his voice there was a trace of sadness.

‘It’s all over, Yaan. I’d hoped that with our knowledge we could have brought you out of barbarism in a dozen generations but now you will have to fight your way up from the jungle alone, and it may take you a million years to do so. I’m sorry—there’s so much we could have done. Even now I wanted to stay here, but Altman and Clindar talk of duty, and I suppose that they are right. There is little enough that we can do, but our world is calling and we must not forsake it.

‘I wish you could understand me, Yaan. I wish you knew what I was saying. I’m leaving you these tools: some of them you will discover how to use, though as likely as not in a generation they’ll be lost or forgotten. See how this blade cuts: it will be ages before your world can make its like. And guard this well: when you press the button—look! If you use it sparingly, it will give you light for years, though sooner or later it will die. As for these other things—find what use for them you can.

‘Here come the first stars, up there in the east. Do you ever look at the stars, Yaan? I wonder how long it will be before you have discovered what they are, and I wonder what will have happened to us by then. Those stars are our homes, Yaan, and we cannot save them. Many have died already, in explosions so vast that I can imagine them no more than you. In a hundred thousand of your years, the light of those funeral pyres will reach your world and set its peoples wondering. By then, perhaps, you race will be reaching for the stars. I wish I could warn you against the mistakes we made, and which now will cost us all that we have won.

‘It is well for your people, Yaan, that your world is here at the frontier of the Universe. You may escape the doom that waits for us. One day, perhaps, your ships will go searching among the stars as we have done, and they may come upon the ruins of our worlds and wonder who we were. But they will never know that we met here by this river when your race was young.

‘Here come my friends; they would give me no more time. Goodbye, Yaan—use well the things I have left you. They are your world’s greatest treasures.’

Something huge, something that glittered in the starlight, was sliding down from the sky. It did not reach the ground, but came to rest a little way above the surface, and in utter silence a rectangle of light opened in its side. The shining giant appeared out of the night and stepped through the golden door. Bertrond followed, pausing for a moment at the threshold to wave back at Yaan. Then the darkness closed behind him.

No more swiftly than smoke drifts upward from a fire, the ship lifted away. When it was so small that Yaan felt he could hold it in his hands, it seemed to blur into a long line of light slanting upward into the stars. From the empty sky a peal of thunder echoed over the sleeping land: and Yaan knew at last that the gods were gone and would never come again.

For a long time he stood by the gently moving waters, and into his soul there came a sense of loss he was never to forget and never to understand. Then, carefully and reverently, he collected together the gifts that Bertrond had left.

Under the stars, the lonely figure walked homeward across the nameless land. Behind him the river flowed softly to the sea, winding through the fertile plains on which, more than a thousand centuries ahead, Yaan’s descendants would build the great city they were to call Babylon.

The Other Tiger

First published in Fantastic Universe, June/July 1953

Collected in Tales From Planet Earth

Originally entitled ‘Refutation’, this story was retitled by Sam Merwin, editor of Fantastic Universe, as a nod to Frank Stockton’s classic but now forgotten ‘The Lady or the Tiger’.

‘It’s an interesting theory,’ said Arnold, ‘but I don’t see how you can ever prove it.’ They had come to the steepest part of the hill and for a moment Webb was too breathless to reply.

‘I’m not trying to,’ he said when he had gained his second wind. ‘I’m only exploring its consequences.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, let’s be perfectly logical and see where it gets us. Our only assumption, remember, is that the universe is infinite.’

‘Right. Personally I don’t see what else it can be.’

‘Very well. That means there must be an infinite number of stars and planets. Therefore, by the laws of chance, every possible event must occur not merely once but an infinite number of times. Correct?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Then there must be an infinite number of worlds exactly like Earth, each with an Arnold and Webb on it, walking up this hill just as we are doing now, saying these same words.’

‘That’s pretty hard to swallow.’

‘I know it’s a staggering thought—but so is infinity. The thing that interests me, though, is the idea of all those other Earths that aren’t exactly the same as this one. The Earths where Hitler won the War and the Swastika flies over Buckingham Palace—the Earths where Columbus never discovered America—the Earths where the Roman Empire has lasted to this day. In fact the Earths where all the great if’s of history had different answers.’

‘Going right back to the beginning, I suppose, to the one in which the ape-man who would have been the daddy of us all, broke his neck before he could have any children?’

‘That’s the idea. But let’s stick to the worlds we know—the worlds containing us climbing this hill on this spring afternoon. Think of all our reflections on those millions of other planets. Some of them are exactly the same but every possible variation that doesn’t violate the laws of logic must also exist.

‘We could—we must—be wearing every conceivable sort of clothes—and no clothes at all. The Sun’s shining here but on countless billions of those other Earths it’s not. On many it’s winter or summer here instead of spring. But let’s consider more fundamental changes too.

‘We intend to walk up this hill and down the other side. Yet think of all the things that might possibly happen to us in the next few minutes. However improbably they may be, as long as they are possible, then somewhere they’ve got to happen.’

‘I see,’ said Arnold slowly, absorbing the idea with obvious reluctance. An expression of mild discomfort crossed his features. ‘Then somewhere, I suppose, you will fall dead with heart failure when you’ve taken your next step.’

‘Not in this world.’ Webb laughed. ‘I’ve already refuted it. Perhaps you’re going to be the unlucky one.’

‘Or perhaps,’ said Arnold, ‘I’ll get fed up with the whole conversation, pull out a gun and shoot you.’

‘Quite possibly,’ admitted Webb, ‘except that I’m pretty sure you, on this Earth, haven’t got one. Don’t forget, though, that in millions of those alternative worlds I’ll beat you on the draw.’

The path was now winding up a wooded slope, the trees thick on either side. The air was fresh and sweet. It was very quiet as though all Nature’s energies were concentrated, with silent intentness, on rebuilding the world after the ruin of winter.

‘I wonder,’ continued Webb, ‘how improbably a thing can get before it becomes impossible. We’ve mentioned some unlikely events but they’re not completely fantastic. Here we are in an English country lane, walking along a path we know perfectly well.

‘Yet in some universe those—what shall I call them—twins of ours will walk around that corner and meet anything, absolutely anything that imagination can conceive. For as I said at the beginning, if the cosmos is infinite, then all possibilities must arise.’

‘So it’s possible,’ said Arnold, with a laugh that was not quite as light as he had intended, ‘that we may walk into a tiger or something equally unpleasant.’

‘Of course,’ replied Webb cheerfully, warming to his subject. ‘If it’s possible, then it’s got to happen to someone, somewhere in the universe. So why not to us?’

Arnold gave a snort of disgust. ‘This is getting quite futile,’ he protested. ‘Let’s talk about something sensible. If we don’t meet a tiger round this corner I’ll regard your theory as refuted and changed the subject.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Webb gleefully. ‘That won’t refute anything. There’s no way you can—’

They were the last words he ever spoke. On an infinite number of Earths an infinite numbers of Webbs and Arnolds met tigers friendly, hostile or indifferent. But this was not one of those Earths—it lay far closer to the point where improbability urged on the impossible.

Yet of course it was not totally inconceivable that during the night the rain-sodden hillside had caved inward to reveal an ominous cleft leading down into the subterranean world. As for what had laboriously climbed up that cleft, drawn toward the unknown light of day—well, it was really no more unlikely than the giant squid, the boa constrictor or the feral lizards of the Jurassic jungle. It had strained the laws of zoological probability but not to the breaking-point.

Webb had spoken the truth. In an infinite cosmos everything must happen somewhere—including their singularly bad luck. For it was hungry—very hungry—and a tiger or a man would have been a small yet acceptable morsel to any one of its half dozen gaping mouths.

The concept that every possible Universe may exist is certainly not an original one, but it has recently been revised in a sophisticated form by today’s theoretical physicists (insofar as I understand anything that they are talking about). It is also linked with the so-called Anthropic Principle, which now has the cosmologists in a considerable tizzy. (See Tipler and Barrow’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Even if you have to skip many pages of music, the bits of text between them are fascinating and mind-stretching.)

The anthroposists have pointed out what appear to be some peculiarities of our Universe. Many of the fundamental physical constants—which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked—are in fact very precisely adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible. A few per cent either way, and we wouldn’t be here.

One explanation of this mystery is that in fact all the other possible Universes do exist (somewhere!) but of course, the vast majority are lifeless. Only in an infinitesimally small fraction of the total Creation are the parameters such that matter can exist, stars can form—and, ultimately, life can arise. We’re here because we couldn’t be anywhere else.

But all those elsewhere are somewhere, so my story may be uncomfortably close to the truth. Luckily, there’s no way that we’ll ever to be able prove it.

I think…

Publicity Campaign

First published in London Evening News, 1953

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

For the first few decades after the Martians lowered New Jersey real estate values [referring to Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds broadcast], benevolent aliens were few and far between, perhaps the most notable example being Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Yet nowadays, largely thanks to E.T., friendly and even cuddly aliens are taken almost for granted. Where does the truth lie?…

Of course, hostile and malevolent aliens make for much more exciting stories than benevolent ones. Moreover, the Things You Wouldn’t Like to Meet of the 1950s and 1960s, as has often been pointed out, were reflections of the paranoia of that time, particularly in the United States. Now the Cold War has, hopefully, given way to the Tepid Truce, we may look at the skies with less apprehensions.

For we have already met Darth Vader—and he is us.

The concussion of the last atom bomb still seemed to linger as the lights came on again. For a long time, no one moved. Then the assistant producer said innocently: ‘Well, R.B., what do you think of it?’

R.B. heaved himself out of his seat while his acolytes waited to see which way the cat would jump. It was then that they noticed that R.B.’s cigar had gone out. Why, that hadn’t happened even at the preview of ‘G.W.T.W.’!

‘Boys,’ he said ecstatically, ‘we’ve got something here! How much did you say it cost, Mike?’

‘Six and a half million, R.B.’

‘It was cheap at the price. Let me tell you, I’ll eat every foot of it if the gross doesn’t beat “Quo Vadis”.’ He wheeled, as swiftly as could be expected for one of his bulk, upon a small man still crouched in his seat at the back of the projection room. ‘Snap out of it, Joe! The Earth’s saved! You’ve seen all these space films. How does this line up with the earlier ones?’

Joe came to with an obvious effort.

‘There’s no comparison,’ he said. ‘It’s got all the suspence of “The Thing”, without that awful let down at the end when you saw the monster was human. The only picture that comes within miles of it is “War of the Worlds”. Some of the effects in that were nearly as good as ours, but of course George Pal didn’t have 3D. And that sure makes a difference! When the Golden Gate Bridge went down, I thought that pier was going to hit me!’

‘The bit I liked best,’ put in Tony Auerbach from Publicity, ‘was when the Empire State Building split right up the middle. You don’t suppose the owners might sue us, though?’

‘Of course not. No one expects any building to stand up to—what did the script call them?—city busters. And after all, we wiped out the rest of New York as well. Ugh—that scene in the Holland Tunnel when the roof gave way! Next time, I’ll take the ferry!’

‘Yes, that was very well done—almost too well done. But what really got me was those creatures from space. The animation was perfect—how did you do it, Mike?’

‘Trade secret,’ said the proud producer. ‘Still, I’ll let you in on it. A lot of that stuff is genuine.’

‘What!’

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong! We haven’t been on location to Sirius B. But they’ve developed a microcamera over at Cal Tech, and we used that to film spiders in action. We cut in the best shots, and I think you’d have a job telling which was micro and which was the full-sized studio stuff. Now you understand why I wanted the Aliens to be insects, and not octopuses, like the script said first.’

‘There’s a good publicity angle here,’ said Tony. ‘One thing worries me, though. That scene where the monsters kidnap Gloria. Do you suppose the censor… I mean the way we’ve done it, it almost looks…’

‘Aw, quit worrying! That’s what people are supposed to think! Anyway, we make it clear in the next reel that they really want her for dissection, so that’s all right.’

‘It’ll be a riot!’ gloated R.B., a faraway gleam in his eye as if he was already hearing the avalanche of dollars pouring into the box office. ‘Look—we’ll put another million into publicity! I can just see the posters—get all this down, Tony. WATCH THE SKY! THE SIRIANS ARE COMING! And we’ll make thousands of clockwork models—can’t you imagine them scuttling around on their hairy legs! People love to be scared, and we’ll scare them. By the time we’ve finished, no one will be able to look at the sky without getting the creeps! I leave it to you, boys—this picture is going to make history!’

He was right. ‘Monsters from Space’ hit the public two months later. Within a week of the simultaneous London and New York premières, there could have been no one in the western world who had not seen the posters screaming EARTH BEWARE! or had not shuddered at the photograph of the hairy horrors stalking along deserted Fifth Avenue on their thin, many-jointed legs. Blimps cleverly disguised as spaceships cruised across the skies, to the vast confusion of pilots who encountered them, and clockwork models of the Alien invaders were everywhere, scaring old ladies out of their wits.

The publicity campaign was brilliant, and the picture would undoubtedly have run for months had it not been for a coincidence as disastrous as it was unforeseeable. While the number of people fainting at each performance was still news, the skies of Earth filled suddenly with long, lean shadows sliding swiftly through the clouds….

Prince Zervashni was good-natured but inclined to be impetuous—a well-known failing of his race. There was no reason to suppose that his present mission, that of making a peaceful contact with the planet Earth, would present any particular problems. The correct technique of approach had been thoroughly worked out over many thousands of years, as the Third Galactic Empire slowly expanded its frontiers, absorbing planet after planet, sun upon sun. There was seldom any trouble: really intelligent races can always co-operate, once they have got over the initial shock of learning that they are not alone in the universe.

It was true that humanity had emerged from its primitive, warlike stage only within the last generation. This however, did not worry Prince Zervashni’s chief adviser, Sigisnin II, Professor of Astropolitics.

‘It’s a perfectly typical Class E culture,’ said the professor. ‘Technically advanced, morally rather backward. However, they are already used to the conception of space flight, and will soon take us for granted. The normal precautions will be sufficient until we have won their confidence.’

‘Very well,’ said the prince. ‘Tell the envoys to leave at once.’

It was unfortunate that the ‘normal precautions’ did not allow for Tony Auerbach’s publicity campaign, which had now reached new heights of interplanetary xenophobia. The ambassadors landed in New York’s Central Park on the very day that a prominent astronomer, unusually hard up and therefore amenable to influence, announced in a widely reported interview that any visitors from space probably would be unfriendly.

The luckless ambassadors, heading for the United Nations Building, had got as far south as 60th Street when they met the mob. The encounter was very one-sided, and the scientists at the Museum of Natural History were most annoyed that there was so little left for them to examine.

Prince Zervashni tried once more, on the other side of the planet, but the news had got there first. This time the ambassadors were armed, and gave a good account of themselves before they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Even so, it was not until the rocket bombs started climbing up toward his fleet that the prince finally lost his temper and decided to take drastic action.

It was all over in twenty minutes, and was really quite painless. Then the prince turned to his adviser and said, with considerable understatement: ‘That appears to be that. And now—can you tell me exactly what went wrong?’

Sigisnin II knitted his dozen flexible fingers together in acute anguish. It was not only the spectacle of the neatly disinfected Earth that distressed him, though to a scientist the destruction of such a beautiful specimen is always a major tragedy. At least equally upsetting was the demolition of his theories and, with them, his reputation.

‘I just don’t understand it!’ he lamented. ‘Of course, races at this level of culture are often suspicious and nervous when contact is first made. But they’d never had visitors before, so there was no reason for them to be hostile.’

‘Hostile! They were demons! I think they were all insane.’ The prince turned to his captain, a tripedal creature who looked rather like a ball of wool balanced on three knitting needles.

‘Is the fleet reassembled?’

‘Yes, Sire.’

‘Then we will return to Base at optimum speed. This planet depresses me.’

On the dead and silent Earth, the posters still screamed their warnings from a thousand hoardings. The malevolent insectile shapes shown pouring from the skies bore no resemblance at all to Prince Zervashni, who apart from his four eyes might have been mistaken for a panda with purple fur—and who, moreover, had come from Rigel, not Sirius.

But, of course, it was now much too late to point this out.

Armaments Race

First published in Adventure, April 1954

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

This story was inspired by a visit to George Pal in Hollywood, while he was working on the special effects for The War of the Worlds. Bill Temple was in fact William F. Temple, the well-known writer of science fiction.

As I’ve remarked on previous occasions, no one has ever succeeded in pinning down Harry Purvis, prize raconteur of the ‘White Hart,’ for any length of time. Of his scientific knowledge there can be no doubt—but where did he pick it up? And what justification is there for the terms of familiarity with which he speaks of so many Fellows of the Royal Society? There are, it must be admitted, many who do not believe a single word he says. That, I feel, is going a little too far as I recently remarked somewhat forcibly to Bill Temple.

‘You’re always gunning for Harry,’ I said, ‘but you must admit that he provides entertainment. And that’s more than most of us can say.’

‘If you’re being personal,’ retorted Bill, still rankling over the fact that some perfectly serious stories had just been returned by an American editor on the grounds that they hadn’t made him laugh, ‘step outside and say that again.’ He glanced through the window, noticed that it was still snowing hard, and hastily added, ‘Not today, then, but maybe sometime in the summer, if we’re both here on the Wednesday that catches it. Have another of your favourite shots of straight pineapple juice?’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘One day I’ll ask for a gin with it, just to shake you. I think I must be the only guy in the “White Hart” who can take it or leave it—and leaves it.’

This was as far as the conversation got, because the subject of the discussion then arrived. Normally, this would merely have added fuel to the controversy, but as Harry had a stranger with him we decided to be polite little boys.

‘Hello, folks,’ said Harry. ‘Meet my friend Solly Blumberg. Best special-effects man in Hollywood.’

‘Let’s be accurate, Harry,’ said Mr Blumberg sadly, in a voice that should have belonged to a whipped spaniel. ‘Not in Hollywood. Out of Hollywood.’

‘Harry waved the correction aside.

‘All the better for you. Sol’s come over here to apply his talents to the British film industry.’

‘There is a British film industry?’ said Solly anxiously. ‘No one seemed very sure round the studio.’

‘Sure there is. It’s in a very flourishing condition, too. The Government piles on an entertainments tax that drives it to bankruptcy, then keeps it alive with whacking big grants. That’s the way we do things in this country. Hey, Drew, where’s the visitors’ book? And a double for both of us. Solly’s had a terrible time—he needs a bit of building up.’

I cannot say that, apart from his hangdog look, Mr Blumberg had the appearance of a man who had suffered extreme hardship. He was neatly dressed in a Hart Schnaffner & Marx suit, and the points of his shirt collar buttoned down somewhere around the middle of his chest. That was thoughtful of them as they thus concealed something, but not enough, of his tie. I wondered what the trouble was. Not un-American activities again, I prayed: that would trigger off our pet Communist, who at the moment was peaceably studying a chessboard in the corner.

We all made sympathetic noises and John said rather pointedly: ‘Maybe it’ll help to get it off your chest. It will be such a change to hear someone else talking around here.’

‘Don’t be so modest, John,’ cut in Harry promptly. ‘I’m not tired of hearing you yet. But I doubt if Solly feels much like going through it again. Do you, old man?’

‘No,’ said Mr Blumberg. ‘You tell them.’

(‘I knew it would come to that,’ sighed John in my ear.)

‘Where shall I begin,’ asked Harry. ‘The time Lillian Ross came to interview you?’

‘Anywhere but there,’ shuddered Solly. ‘It really started when we were making the first “Captain Zoom” serial.’

‘“Captain Zoom”?’ said someone ominously. ‘Those are two very rude words in this place. Don’t say you were responsible for that unspeakable rubbish!’

‘Now boys!’ put in Harry in his best oil-on-troubled-waters voice. ‘Don’t be too harsh. We can’t apply our own high standards of criticism to everything. And people have got to earn a living. Besides, millions of kids like Captain Zoom. Surely you wouldn’t want to break their little hearts—and so near Xmas, too!’

‘If they really liked Captain Zoom, I’d rather break their little necks.’

‘Such unseasonable sentiments! I really must apologise for some of my compatriots, Solly. Let’s see, what was the name of the first serial?’

‘“Captain Zoom and the Menace from Mars”’

‘Ah yes, that’s right. Incidentally, I wonder why we always are menaced by Mars? I suppose that man Welles started it. One day we may have a big interplanetary libel action on our hands—unless we can prove that the Martians have been equally rude about us.

‘I’m very glad to say that I never saw “Menace from Mars”.’ (‘I did,’ moaned somebody in the background. ‘I’m still trying to forget it.’) ‘But we are not concerned with the story, such as it was. That was written by three men in a bar on Wilshire Boulevard. No one is sure whether the Menace came out the way it did because the script-writers were drunk, or whether they had to keep drunk in order to face the Menace. If that’s confusing, don’t bother. All that Solly was concerned with were the special effects that the director demanded.

‘First of all, he had to build Mars. To do this he spent half an hour with The Conquest of Space, and then emerged with a sketch which the carpenters turned into an overripe orange floating in nothingness, with an improbable number of stars around it. That was easy. The Martian cities weren’t so simple. You try and think of completely alien architecture that still makes sense. I doubt if it’s possible—if it will work at all, someone’s already used it here on Earth. What the studio finally built was vaguely Byzantine with touches of Frank Lloyd Wright. The fact that none of the doors led anywhere didn’t really matter, as long as there was enough room on the sets for the swordplay and general acrobatics that the script demanded.

‘Yes—swordplay. Here was a civilisation which had atomic power, death rays, spaceships, television and suchlike modern conveniences, but when it came to a fight between Captain Zoom and the evil Emperor Klugg, the clock went back a couple of centuries. A lot of soldiers stood round holding deadly looking ray guns, but they never did anything with them. Well, hardly ever. Sometimes a shower of sparks would chase Captain Zoom and singe his pants, but that was all. I suppose that as the rays couldn’t very well move faster than light, he could always outrun them.

‘Still, those ornamental ray guns gave everyone quite a few headaches. It’s funny how Hollywood will spend endless trouble on some minute detail in a film which is complete rubbish. The director of Captain Zoom had a thing about ray guns. Solly designed the Mark I, which looked like a cross between a bazooka and a blunderbuss. He was quite satisfied with it, and so was the director—for about a day. And then the great man came raging into the studio carrying a revolting creation of purple plastic with knobs and lenses and levers.

‘“Lookit this, Solly!” he puffed. “Junior got it down at the supermarket—they’re being given away with packets of Crunch. Collect ten lids, and you get one. Hell, they’re better than ours! And they work!”

‘He pressed a lever, and a thin stream of water shot across the set and disappeared behind Captain Zoom’s spaceship, where it promptly extinguished a cigarette that had no right to be burning there. An angry stagehand emerged through the airlock, saw who it was had drenched him, and swiftly retreated, muttering things about his union.

‘Solly examined the ray gun with annoyance and yet with an expert’s discrimination. Yes, it was certainly much more impressive than anything he’d put out. He retired into his office and promised to see what he could do about it.

‘The Mark II had everything built into it, including a television screen. If Captain Zoom was suddenly confronted by a charging hickoderm, all he had to do was to switch on the set, wait for the tubes to warm up, check the channel selector, adjust the fine tuning, touch up the focus, twiddle with the Line and Frame holds—and then press the trigger. He was, fortunately, a man of unbelievably swift reactions.

‘The director was impressed, and the Mark II went into production. A slightly different model, the Mark IIa, was built for the Emperor Klugg’s diabolical cohorts. It would never do, of course, if both sides had the same weapon. I told you that Pandemic Productions were sticklers for accuracy.

‘All went well until the first rushes, and even beyond. While the cast were acting, if you can use that word, they had to point the guns and press the triggers as if something was really happening. The sparks and flashes, however, were put on the negative later by two little men in a darkroom about as well guarded as Fort Knox. They did a good job, but after a while the producer again felt twinges in his overdeveloped artistic conscience.

‘“Solly,” he said, toying with the plastic horror which had reached Junior by courtesy of Crunch, the Succulent Cereal—Not a Burp in a Barrel—“Solly, I still want a gun that does something.”

‘Solly ducked in time, so the jet went over his head and baptized a photograph of Louella Parsons.

‘“You’re not going to start shooting all over again!” he wailed.

‘“Noo,” replied the producer, with obvious reluctance. “We’ll have to use what we’ve got. But it looks faked, somehow.” He ruffled through the script on his desk, then brightened up.

‘“Now next week we start on Episode 54—‘Slaves of the Slug-Men’. Well, the Slug-Men gotta have guns, so what I’d like you to do is this—”

‘The Mark III gave Solly a lot of trouble. (I haven’t missed out one yet, have I? Good.) Not only had it to be a completely new design, but as you’ll have gathered it had to “do something”. This was a challenge to Solly’s ingenuity: however, if I may borrow from Professor Toynbee, it was a challenge that evoked the appropriate response.

‘Some high-powered engineering went into the Mark III. Luckily, Solly knew an ingenious technician who’d helped him out on similar occasions before, and he was really the man behind it.’ (‘I’ll say he was!’ said Mr Blumberg gloomily.) ‘The principle was to use a jet of air, produced by a small but extremely powerful electric fan, and then to spray finely divided powder into it. When the thing was adjusted correctly, it shot out a most impressive beam, and made a still more impressive noise. The actors were so scared of it that their performances became most realistic.

‘The producer was delighted—for a full three days. Then a dreadful doubt assailed him.

‘“Solly,” he said, “those damn guns are too good. The Slug-Men can beat the pants off Captain Zoom. We’ll have to give him something better.”

‘It was at this point that Solly realised what had happened. He had become involved in an armaments race.

‘Let’s see, this brings us to the Mark IV, doesn’t it? How did that work?—Oh yes, I remember. It was a glorified oxyacetylene burner, with various chemicals injected into it to produce the most beautiful flames. I should have mentioned that from Episode 50—“Doom on Deimos”—the studio had switched over from black and white to Murkicolor, and great possibilities were thus opened up. By squirting copper or strontium or barium into the jet, you could get any colour you wanted.

‘If you think that by this time the producer was satisfied, you don’t know Hollywood. Some cynics may still laugh when the motto “Ars Gratia Artis” flashes on the screen, but this attitude, I submit, is not in accordance with the facts. Would such old fossils as Michelangelo, Rembrandt or Titian have spent so much time, effort and money on the quest for perfection as did Pandemic Productions? I think not.

‘I don’t pretend to remember all the Marks that Solly and his ingenious engineer friend produced during the course of the serial. There was one that shot out a stream of coloured smoke rings. There was the high-frequency generator that produced enormous but quite harmless sparks. There was a particularly ingenious curved beam produced by a jet of water with light reflected along inside it, which looked most spectacular in the dark. And finally, there was the Mark XII.’

‘Mark XIII,’ said Mr Blumberg.

‘Of course—how stupid of me! What other number could it have been! The Mark XIII was not actually a portable weapon—though some of the others were portable only by a considerable stretch of the imagination. It was the diabolical device to be installed on Phobos in order to subjugate Earth. Though Solly has explained them to me once, the scientific principles involved escape my simple mind…. However, who am I to match my brains against the intellects responsible for “Captain Zoom”? I can only report what the ray was supposed to do, not how it did it. It was to start a chain reaction in the atmosphere of our unfortunate planet, making the nitrogen and the oxygen in the air combine—with highly deleterious effects to terrestrial life.

‘I’m not sure whether to be sorry or glad that Solly left all the details of the fabulous Mark XIII to his talented assistant. Though I’ve questioned him at some length, all he can tell me is that the thing was about six feet high and looked like a cross between a two-hundred-inch telescope and an antiaircraft gun. That’s not very helpful, is it?

‘He also says that there were a lot of radio tubes in the brute, as well as a thundering great magnet. And it was definitely supposed to produce a harmless but impressive electric arc, which could be distorted into all sorts of interesting shapes by the magnet. That was what the inventor said, and, despite everything, there is still no reason to disbelieve him.

‘By one of those mischances that later turn out to be providential, Solly wasn’t at the studio when they tried out the Mark XIII. To his great annoyance, he had to be down in Mexico that day. And wasn’t that lucky for you, Solly! He was expecting a long-distance call from one of his friends in the afternoon, but when it came through it wasn’t the kind of message he’d anticipated.

‘The Mark XIII had been, to put it mildly, a success. No one knew exactly what had happened, but by a miracle no lives had been lost and the fire department had been able to save the adjoining studios. It was incredible, yet the facts were beyond dispute. The Mark XIII was supposed to be a phony death ray—and it had turned out to be a real one. Something had emerged from the projector, and gone through the studio wall as if it wasn’t there. Indeed, a moment later it wasn’t. There was just a great big hole, beginning to smoulder round the edges. And then the roof fell in….

‘Unless Solly could convince the F.B.I. that it was all a mistake, he’d better stay the other side of the border. Even now the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission were converging upon the wreckage….

‘What would you have done in Solly’s shoes? He was innocent, but how could he prove it? Perhaps he would have gone back to face the music if he hadn’t remembered that he’d once hired a man who’d campaigned for Harry Wallace, back in ’48. That might take some explaining away: besides, Solly was a little tired of Captain Zoom. So here he is. Anyone know of a British film company that might have an opening for him? But historical films only, please. He won’t touch anything more up to date than crossbows.’

The Deep Range

First published in Argosy (UK), April 1954

Collected in Tales from Planet Earth

The concept of whale-herding is an idea whose time has not yet come, and I wonder if it ever will. Over the last decade, whales have had such excellent P.R. that most Europeans and Americans would soon eat dog- or catburgers. I did tackle whalemeat once, during World War Two: it tasted like rather tough beef.

In 1957 I expanded it into the novel of the same name.

There was a killer loose on the range. A ‘copter patrol, five hundred miles off Greenland, had seen the great corpse staining the sea crimson as it wallowed in the waves. Within seconds, the intricate warning system had been alerted: men were plotting circles and moving counters on the North Atlantic chart—and Don Burley was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he dropped silently down to the twenty-fathom line.

The pattern of green lights on the tell-tale was a glowing symbol of security. As long as that pattern was unchanged, as long as none of those emerald stars winked to red, all was well with Don and his tiny craft. Air—fuel—power—this was the triumvirate which ruled his life. If any of them failed, he would be sinking in a steel coffin down toward the pelagic ooze, as Johnnie Tyndall had done the season before last. But there was no reason why they should fail; the accidents one foresaw, Don told himself reassuringly, were never the ones that happened.

He leaned across the tiny control board and spoke into the mike. Sub 5 was still close enough to the mother ship for radio to work, but before long he’d have to switch to the sonics.

‘Setting course 255, speed 50 knots, depth 20 fathoms, full sonar coverage…. Estimated time to target area, 70 minutes…. Will report at 10-minute intervals. That is all…. Out.’

The acknowledgement, already weakening with range, came back at once from the Herman Melville.

‘Message received and understood. Good hunting. What about the hounds?’

Don chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. This might be a job he’d have to handle alone. He had no idea, to within fifty miles either way, where Benj and Susan were at the moment. They’d certainly follow if he signalled for them, but they couldn’t maintain his speed and would soon have to drop behind. Besides, he might be heading for a pack of killers, and the last thing he wanted to do was to lead his carefully trained porpoises into trouble. That was common sense and good business. He was also very fond of Susan and Benj.

‘It’s too far, and I don’t know what I’m running into,’ he replied. ‘If they’re in the interception area when I get there, I may whistle them up.’

The acknowledgement from the mother ship was barely audible, and Don switched off the set. It was time to look around.

He dimmed the cabin lights so that he could see the scanner screen more clearly, pulled the polaroid glasses down over his eyes, and peered into the depths. This was the moment when Don felt like a god, able to hold within his hands a circle of the Atlantic twenty miles across, and to see clear down to the still-unexplored depths, three thousand fathoms below. The slowly rotating beam of inaudible sound was searching the world in which he floated, seeking out friend and foe in the eternal darkness where light could never penetrate. The pattern of soundless shrieks, too shrill even for the hearing of the bats who had invented sonar a million years before man, pulsed out into the watery night: the faint echoes came tingling back as floating, blue-green flecks on the screen.

Through long practice, Don could read their message with effortless ease. A thousand feet below, stretching out to his submerged horizon, was the scattering layer—the blanket of life that covered half the world. The sunken meadow of the sea, it rose and fell with the passage of the sun, hovering always at the edge of darkness. But the ultimate depths were no concern of his. The flocks he guarded, and the enemies who ravaged them, belonged to the upper levels of the sea.

Don flicked the switch of the depth-selector, and his sonar beam concentrated itself into the horizontal plane. The glimmering echoes from the abyss vanished, but he could see more clearly what lay around him here in the ocean’s stratospheric heights. That glowing cloud two miles ahead was a school of fish; he wondered if Base knew about it, and made an entry in his log. There were some larger, isolated blips at the edge of the school—the carnivores pursuing the cattle, insuring that the endlessly turning wheel of life and death would never lose momentum. But this conflict was no affair of Don’s; he was after bigger game.

Sub 5 drove on toward the west, a steel needle swifter and more deadly than any other creature that roamed the seas. The tiny cabin, lit only by the flicker of lights from the instrument board, pulsed with power as the spinning turbines thrust the water aside. Don glanced at the chart and wondered how the enemy had broken through this time. There were still many weak points, for fencing the oceans of the world had been a gigantic task. The tenuous electric fields, fanning out between generators many miles apart, could not always hold at bay the starving monsters of the deep. They were learning, too. When the fences were opened, they would sometimes slip through with the whales and wreak havoc before they were discovered.

The long-range receiver bleeped plaintively, and Don switched over to TRANSCRIBE. It wasn’t practical to send speech any distance over an ultrasonic beam, and code had come back into its own. Don had never learned to read it by ear, but the ribbon of paper emerging from the slot saved him the trouble.

COPTER REPORTS SCHOOL 50–100 WHALES HEADING 95 DEGREES GRID REF X186475 STOP. MOVING AT SPEED. STOP. MELVILLE. OUT.

Don started to set the coordinates on the plotting grid, then saw that it was no longer necessary. At the extreme edge of his screen, a flotilla of faint stars had appeared. He altered course slightly, and drove head-on toward the approaching herd.

The copter was right: they were moving fast. Don felt a mounting excitement, for this could mean that they were on the run and luring the killers toward him. At the rate at which they were travelling he would be among them in five minutes. He cut the motors and felt the backward tug of water bringing him swiftly to rest.

Don Burley, a knight in armour, sat in his tiny dim-lit room fifty feet below the bright Atlantic waves, testing his weapons for the conflict that lay ahead. In these moments of raised suspense, before action began, his racing brain often explored such fantasies. He felt a kinship with all shepherds who had guarded their flocks back to the dawn of time. He was David, among ancient Palestinian hills, alert for the mountain lions that would prey upon his father’s sheep. But far nearer in time, and far closer in spirit, were the men who had marshalled the great herds of cattle on the American plains, only a few lifetimes ago. They would have understood his work, though his implements would have been magic to them. The pattern was the same; only the scale had altered. It made no fundamental difference that the beasts Don herded weighed almost a hundred tons, and browsed on the endless savannahs of the sea.

The school was now less than two miles away, and Don checked his scanner’s continuous circling to concentrate on the sector ahead. The picture on the screen altered to a fan-shaped wedge as the sonar beam started to flick from side to side; now he could count every whale in the school, and even make a good estimate of its size. With a practised eye, he began to look for stragglers.

Don could never have explained what drew him at once toward those four echoes at the southern fringe of the school. It was true that they were a little apart from the rest, but others had fallen as far behind. There is some sixth sense that a man acquires when he has stared long enough into a sonar screen—some hunch which enables him to extract more from the moving flecks than he has any right to do. Without conscious thought, Don reached for the control which would start the turbines whirling into life. Sub 5 was just getting under way when three leaden thuds reverberated through the hull, as if someone was knocking on the front door and wanted to come in.

‘Well I’m damned,’ said Don. ‘How did you get here?’ He did not bother to switch on the TV; he’d know Benj’s signal anywhere. The porpoises must have been in the neighbourhood and had spotted him before he’d even switched on the hunting call. For the thousandth time, he marvelled at their intelligence and loyalty. It was strange that Nature had played the same trick twice—on land with the dog, in the ocean with the porpoise. Why were these graceful sea-beasts so fond of man, to whom they owed so little? It made one feel that the human race was worth something after all, if it could inspire such unselfish devotion.

It had been known for centuries that the porpoise was at least as intelligent as the dog, and could obey quite complex verbal commands. The experiment was still in progress, but if it succeeded then the ancient partnership between shepherd and sheep-dog would have a new lease on life.

Don switched on the speakers recessed into the sub’s hull and began to talk to his escorts. Most of the sounds he uttered would have been meaningless to other human ears; they were the product of long research by the animal psychologists of the World Food Administration. He gave his orders twice to make sure they were understood, then checked with the sonar screen to see that Benj and Susan were following astern as he had told them to.

The four echoes that had attracted his attention were clearer and closer now, and the main body of the whale pack had swept past him to the east. He had no fear of a collision; the great animals, even in their panic, could sense his presence as easily as he could detect theirs, and by similar means. Don wondered if he should switch on his beacon. They might recognise its sound pattern, and it would reassure them. But the still unknown enemy might recognise it too.

He closed for an interception, and hunched low over the screen as if to drag from it by sheer will power every scrap of information the scanner could give. There were two large echoes, some distance apart, and one was accompanied by a pair of smaller satellites. Don wondered if he was already too late. In his mind’s eye, he could picture the death struggle taking place in the water less than a mile ahead. Those two fainter blips would be the enemy—either shark or grampus—worrying a whale while one of its companions stood by in helpless terror, with no weapons of defence except its mighty flukes.

Now he was almost close enough for vision. The TV camera in Sub 5’s prow strained through the gloom, but at first could show nothing but the fog of plankton. Then a vast shadowy shape began to form in the centre of the screen, with two smaller companions below it. Don was seeing, with the greater precision but hopelessly limited range of ordinary light, what the sonar scanners had already told him.

Almost at once he saw his mistake. The two satellites were calves, not sharks. It was the first time he had ever met a whale with twins; although multiple births were not unknown, a cow could suckle only two young at once and usually only the stronger would survive. He choked down his disappointment; his error had cost him many minutes and he must begin the search again.

Then came the frantic tattoo on the hull that meant danger. It wasn’t easy to scare Benj, and Don shouted his reassurance as he swung Sub 5 round so that the camera could search the turgid waters. Automatically, he had turned toward the fourth blip on the sonar screen—the echo he had assumed, from its size, to be another adult whale. And he saw that, after all, he had come to the right place.

‘Jesus!’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t know they came that big.’ He’d seen larger sharks before, but they had all been harmless vegetarians. This, he could tell at a glance, was a Greenland shark, the killer of the northern seas. It was supposed to grow up to thirty feet long, but this specimen was bigger than Sub 5. It was every inch of forty feet from snout to tail, and when he spotted it, it was already turning in toward the kill. Like the coward it was, it had launched its attack at one of the calves.

Don yelled to Benj and Susan, and saw them racing ahead into his field of vision. He wondered fleetingly why porpoises had such an overwhelming hatred of sharks; then he loosed his hands from the controls as the autopilot locked on to the target. Twisting and turning as agilely as any other sea-creature of its size, Sub 5 began to close in upon the shark, leaving Don free to concentrate on his armament.

The killer had been so intent upon his prey that Benj caught him completely unawares, ramming him just behind the left eye. It must have been a painful blow: an iron-hard snout, backed by a quarter-ton of muscle moving at fifty miles an hour is something not to be laughed at even by the largest fish. The shark jerked round in an impossibly tight curve, and Don was almost jolted out of his seat as the sub snapped on to a new course. If this kept up, he’d find it hard to use his Sting. But at least the killer was too busy now to bother about his intended victims.

Benj and Susan were worrying the giant like dogs snapping at the heels of an angry bear. They were too agile to be caught in those ferocious jaws, and Don marvelled at the coordination with which they worked. When either had to surface for air, the other would hold off for a minute until the attack could be resumed in strength.

There was no evidence that the shark realised that a far more dangerous adversary was closing in upon it, and that the porpoises were merely a distraction. That suited Don very nicely; the next operation was going to be difficult unless he could hold a steady course for at least fifteen seconds. At a pinch he could use the tiny rocket torps to make a kill. If he’d been alone, and faced with a pack of sharks he would certainly have done so. But it was messy, and there was a better way. He preferred the technique of the rapier to that of the hand-grenade.

Now he was only fifty feet away, and closing rapidly. There might never be a better chance. He punched the launching stud.

From beneath the belly of the sub, something that looked like a sting-ray hurtled forward. Don had checked the speed of his own craft; there was no need to come any closer now. The tiny, arrow-shaped hydrofoil, only a couple of feet across, could move far faster than his vessel and would close the gap in seconds. As it raced forward, it spun out the thin line of the control wire, like some underwater spider laying its thread. Along that wire passed the energy that powered the Sting, and the signals that steered it to its goal. Don had completely ignored his own larger craft in the effort of guiding this underwater missile. It responded to his touch so swiftly that he felt he was controlling some sensitive high-spirited steed.

The shark saw the danger less than a second before impact. The resemblance of the Sting to an ordinary ray confused it, as the designers had intended. Before the tiny brain could realise that no ray behaved like this, the missile had struck. The steel hypodermic, rammed forward by an exploding cartridge, drove through the shark’s horny skin, and the great fish erupted in a frenzy of terror. Don backed rapidly away, for a blow from that tail would rattle him around like a pea in a can and might even cause damage to the sub. There was nothing more for him to do, except to speak into the microphone and call off his hounds.

The doomed killer was trying to arch its body so that it could snap at the poisoned dart. Don had now reeled the Sting back into its hiding place, pleased that he had been able to retrieve the missile undamaged. He watched without pity as the great fish succumbed to its paralysis.

Its struggles were weakening. It was swimming aimlessly back and forth, and once Don had to sidestep smartly to avoid a collision. As it lost control of buoyancy, the dying shark drifted up to the surface. Don did not bother to follow; that could wait until he had attended to more important business.

He found the cow and her two calves less than a mile away, and inspected them carefully. They were uninjured, so there was no need to call the vet in his highly specialised two-man sub which could handle any cetological crisis from a stomach-ache to a Caesarian. Don made a note of the mother’s number, stencilled just behind the flippers. The calves, as was obvious from their size, were this season’s and had not yet been branded.

Don watched for a little while. They were no longer in the least alarmed, and a check on the sonar had shown that the whole school had ceased its panicky flight. He wondered how they knew what had happened; much had been learned about communication among whales, but much was still a mystery.

‘I hope you appreciate what I’ve done for you, old lady,’ he muttered. Then, reflecting that fifty tons of mother love was a slightly awe-inspiring sight, he blew his tanks and surfaced.

It was calm, so he cracked the airlock and popped his head out of the tiny conning tower. The water was only inches below his chin, and from time to time a wave made a determined effort to swamp him. There was little danger of this happening, for he fitted the hatch so closely that he was quite an effective plug.

Fifty feet away, a long slate-coloured mound, like an overturned boat, was rolling on the surface. Don looked at it thoughtfully and did some mental calculation. A brute this size should be valuable; with any luck there was a chance of a double bonus. In a few minutes he’d radio his report, but for the moment it was pleasant to drink the fresh Atlantic air and to feel the open sky above his head.

A grey thunderbolt shot up out of the depths and smashed back onto the surface of the water, smothering Don with spray. It was just Benj’s modest way of drawing attention to himself; a moment later the porpoise had swum up to the conning tower, so that Don could reach down and tickle its head. The great, intelligent eyes stared back into his; was it pure imagination, or did an almost human sense of fun also lurk in their depths?

Susan, as usual, circled shyly at a distance until jealousy overpowered her and she butted Benj out of the way. Don distributed caresses impartially and apologised because he had nothing to give them. He undertook to make up for the omission as soon as he returned to the Herman Melville.

‘I’ll go for another swim with you, too,’ he promised, ‘as long as you behave yourselves next time.’ He rubbed thoughtfully at a large bruise caused by Benj’s playfulness, and wondered if he was not getting a little too old for rough games like this.

‘Time to go home,’ Don said firmly, sliding down into the cabin and slamming the hatch. He suddenly realised that he was very hungry, and had better do something about the breakfast he had missed. There were not many men on earth who had earned a better right to eat their morning meal. He had saved for humanity more tons of meat, oil and milk than could easily be estimated.

Don Burley was the happy warrior, coming home from one battle that man would always have to fight. He was holding at bay the spectre of famine which had confronted all earlier ages, but which would never threaten the world again while the great plankton farms harvested their millions of tons of protein, and the whale herds obeyed their new masters. Man had come back to the sea after aeons of exile; until the oceans froze, he would never be hungry again….

Don glanced at the scanner as he set his course. He smiled as he saw the two echoes keeping pace with the central splash of light that marked his vessel. ‘Hang around,’ he said. ‘We mammals must stick together.’ Then, as the autopilot took over, he lay back in his chair.

And presently Benj and Susan heard a most peculiar noise, rising and falling against the drone of the turbines. It had filtered faintly through the thick walls of Sub 5, and only the sensitive ears of the porpoises could have detected it. But intelligent beasts though they were, they could hardly be expected to understand why Don Burley was announcing, in a highly unmusical voice, that he was heading for the Last Round-up….

No Morning After

First published in Time to Come, ed. August Derleth, 1954

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

‘But this is terrible!’ said the Supreme Scientist. ‘Surely there is something we can do!’

‘Yes, Your Cognisance, but it will be extremely difficult. The planet is more than five hundred light-years away, and it is very hard to maintain contact. However, we believe we can establish a bridgehead. Unfortunately, that is not the only problem. So far, we have been quite unable to communicate with these beings. Their telepathic powers are exceedingly rudimentary—perhaps even nonexistent. And if we cannot talk to them, there is no way in which we can help.’

There was a long mental silence while the Supreme Scientist analysed the situation and arrived, as he always did, at the correct answer.

‘Any intelligent race must have some telepathic individuals,’ he mused. ‘We must send out hundreds of observers, tuned to catch the first hint of stray thought. When you find a single responsive mind, concentrate all your efforts upon it. We must get our message through.’

‘Very good, Your Cognisance. It shall be done.’

Across the abyss, across the gulf which light itself took half a thousand years to span, the questing intellects of the planet Thaar sent out their tendrils of thought, searching desperately for a single human being whose mind could perceive their presence. And as luck would have it, they encountered William Cross.

At least they thought it was luck at the time, though later they were not so sure. In any case, they had little choice. The combination of circumstances that opened Bill’s mind to them lasted only for seconds, and was not likely to occur again this side of eternity.

There were three ingredients in the miracle: it is hard to say if one was more important than another. The first was the accident of position. A flask of water, when sunlight falls upon it, can act as a crude lens, concentrating the light into a small area. On an immeasurably larger scale, the dense core of the Earth was coverging the waves that came from Thaar. In the ordinary way, the radiations of thought are unaffected by matter—they pass through it as effortlessly as light through glass. But there is rather a lot of matter in a planet, and the whole Earth was acting as a gigantic lens. As it turned, it was carrying Bill through its focus, where the feeble thought impulses from Thaar were concentrated a hundredfold.

Yet millions of other men were equally well placed: they received no message. But they were not rocket engineers: they had not spent years thinking and dreaming of space until it had become part of their very being.

And they were not, as Bill was, blind drunk, teetering on the last knife-edge of consciousness, trying to escape from reality into the world of dreams, where there were no disappointments and setbacks.

Of course, he could see the Army’s point of view. ‘You are paid, Dr Cross,’ General Potter had pointed out with unnecessary emphasis, ‘to design missiles, not—ah—spaceships. What you do in your spare time is your own concern, but I must ask you not to use the facilities of the establishment for your hobby. From now on, all projects for the computing section will have to be cleared by me. That is all.’

They couldn’t sack him, of course: he was too important. But he was not sure that he wanted to stay. He was not really sure of anything except that the job had backfired on him, and that Brenda had finally gone off with Johnny Gardner—putting events in their order of importance.

Wavering slightly, Bill cupped his chin in his hands and stared at the whitewashed brick wall on the other side of the table. The only attempt at ornamentation was a calendar from Lockheed and a glossy six-by-eight from Aerojet showing L’il Abner Mark I making a boosted take-off. Bill gazed morosely at the spot midway between the two pictures, and emptied his mind of thought. The barriers went down….

At that moment, the massed intellects of Thaar gave a soundless cry of triumph, and the wall in front of Bill slowly dissolved into a swirling mist. He appeared to be looking down a tunnel that stretched to infinity. As a matter of fact, he was.

Bill studied the phenomenon with mild interest. It had a certain novelty, but was not up to the standard of previous hallucinations. And when the voice started to speak in his mind, he let it ramble on for some time before he did anything about it. Even when drunk, he had an old-fashioned prejudice against starting conversations with himself.

‘Bill,’ the voice began, ‘listen carefully. We have had great difficulty in contacting you, and this is extremely important.’

Bill doubted this on general principles. Nothing was important any more.

‘We are speaking to you from a very distant planet,’ continued the voice in a tone of urgent friendliness. ‘You are the only human being we have been able to contact, so you must understand what we are saying.’

Bill felt mildly worried, though in an impersonal sort of way, since it was now rather hard to focus on his own problems. How serious was it, he wondered, when you started to hear voices? Well, it was best not to get excited. You can take it or leave it, Dr Cross, he told himself. Let’s take it until it gets to be a nuisance.

‘OK,’ he answered with bored indifference. ‘Go right ahead and talk to me. I won’t mind as long as it’s interesting.’

There was a pause. Then the voice continued, in a slightly worried fashion.

‘We don’t quite understand. Our message isn’t merely interesting. It’s vital to your entire race, and you must notify your government immediately.’

‘I’m waiting,’ said Bill. ‘It helps to pass the time.’

Five hundred light-years away, the Thaarns conferred hastily among themselves. Something seemed to be wrong, but they could not decide precisely what. There was no doubt that they had established contact, yet this was not the sort of reaction they had expected. Well, they could only proceed and hope for the best.

‘Listen, Bill,’ they continued. ‘Our scientists have just discovered that your sun is about to explode. It will happen three days from now—seventy-four hours, to be exact. Nothing can stop it. But there’s no need to be alarmed. We can save you, if you’ll do what we say.’

‘Go on,’ said Bill. This hallucination was ingenious.

‘We can create what we call a bridge—it’s a kind of tunnel through space, like the one you’re looking into now. The theory is far too complicated to explain, even to one of your mathematicians.’

‘Hold on a minute!’ protested Bill. ‘I am a mathematician, and a darn good one, even when I’m sober. And I’ve read all about this kind of thing in the science fiction magazines. I presume you’re talking about some kind of short cut through a higher dimension of space. That’s old stuff—pre-Einstein.’

A sensation of distinct surprise seeped into Bill’s mind.

‘We had no idea you were so advanced scientifically,’ said the Thaarns. ‘But we haven’t time to talk about the theory. All that matters is this—if you were to step into that opening in front of you, you’d find yourself instantly on another planet. It’s a short cut, as you said—in this case through the thirty-seventh dimension.’

‘And it leads to your world?’

‘Oh no—you couldn’t live here. But there are plenty of planets like Earth in the universe, and we’ve found one that will suit you. We’ll establish bridgeheads like this all over Earth, so your people will only have to walk through them to be saved. Of course, they’ll have to start building up civilisation again when they reach their new homes, but it’s their only hope, You have to pass on this message, and tell them what to do.’

‘I can just see them listening to me,’ said Bill. ‘Why don’t you go and talk to the president?’

‘Because yours was the only mind we were able to contact. Others seemed closed to us: we don’t understand why.’

‘I could tell you,’ said Bill, looking at the nearly empty bottle in front of him. He was certainly getting his money’s worth. What a remarkable thing the human mind was! Of course, there was nothing at all original in this dialogue: it was easy to see where the ideas came from. Only last week he’d been reading a story about the end of the world, and all this wishful thinking about bridges and tunnels through space was pretty obvious compensation for anyone who’d spent five years wrestling with recalcitrant rockets.

‘If the sun does blow up,’ Bill asked abruptly—trying to catch his hallucination unawares—‘what would happen?’

‘Why, your planet would be melted instantly. All the planets, in fact, right out to Jupiter.’

Bill had to admit that this was quite a grandiose conception. He let his mind play with the thought, and the more he considered it, the more he liked it.

‘My dear hallucination,’ he remarked pityingly, ‘if I believed you, d’you know what I’d say?’

‘But you must believe us!’ came the despairing cry across the light-years.

Bill ignored it. He was warming to his theme.

‘I’d tell you this. It would be the best thing that could possibly happen. Yes, it would save a whole lot of misery. No one would have to worry about the Russians and the atom bomb and the high cost of living. Oh, it would be wonderful! It’s just what everybody really wants. Nice of you to come along and tell us, but just you go back home and pull your old bridges after you.’

There was consternation on Thaar. The Supreme Scientist’s brain, floating like a great mass of coral in its tank of nutrient solution, turned slightly yellow about the edges—something it had not done since the Xantil invasion, five thousand years ago. At least fifteen psychologists had nervous breakdowns and were never the same again. The main computer in the College of Cosmophysics started dividing every number in its memory circuits by zero, and promptly blew all its fuses.

And on Earth, Bill Cross was really hitting his stride.

‘Look at me,’ he said, pointing a wavering finger at his chest. ‘I’ve spent years trying to make rockets do something useful, and they tell me I’m only allowed to build guided missiles, so that we can all blow each other up. The sun will make a neater job of it, and if you did give us another planet we’d only start the whole damn thing all over again.’

He paused sadly, marshalling his morbid thoughts.

‘And now Brenda heads out of town without even leaving a note. So you’ll pardon my lack of enthusiasm for your Boy Scout act.’

He couldn’t have said ‘enthusiasm’ aloud, Bill realised. But he could still think it, which was an interesting scientific discovery. As he got drunker and drunker, would his cogitation—whoops, that nearly threw him!—finally drop down to words of one syllable?

In a final despairing exertion, the Thaarns sent their thoughts along the tunnel between the stars.

‘You can’t really mean it, Bill! Are all human beings like you?’

Now that was an interesting philosophical question! Bill considered it carefully—or as carefully as he could in view of the warm, rosy glow that was now beginning to envelop him. After all, things might be worse. He could get another job, if only for the pleasure of telling General Porter what he could do with his three stars. And as for Brenda—well, women were like streetcars; there’d always be another along in a minute.

Best of all, there was a second bottle of whisky in the Top Secret file. Oh, frabjous day! He rose unsteadily to his feet and wavered across the room.

For the last time, Thaar spoke to Earth.

‘Bill!’ it repeated desperately. ‘Surely all human beings can’t be like you!’

Bill turned and looked into the swirling tunnel. Strange—it seemed to be lighted with flecks of starlight, and was really rather pretty. He felt proud of himself: not many people could imagine that.

‘Like me?’ he said. ‘No, they’re not.’ He smiled smugly across the light-years, as the rising tide of euphoria lifted him out of his despondency. ‘Come to think of it,’ he added, ‘there are a lot of people much worse off than me. Yes, I guess I must be one of the lucky ones, after all.’

He blinked in mild surprise, for the tunnel had suddenly collapsed upon itself and the whitewashed wall was there again, exactly as it had always been. Thaar knew when it was beaten.

‘So much for that hallucination,’ thought Bill. ‘I was getting tired of it, anyway. Let’s see what the next one’s like.’

As it happened, there wasn’t a next one, for five seconds later he passed out cold, just as he was getting the combination of the file cabinet.

The next two days were rather vague and bloodshot, and he forgot all about the interview.

On the third day something was nagging at the back of his mind: he might have remembered if Brenda hadn’t turned up again and kept him busy being forgiving.

And there wasn’t a fourth day, of course.

Big Game Hunt

First appeared in Adventure, October 1956 as ‘The Reckless Ones’

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

As I write these words, Jean-Michel Cousteau is on his way to New Zealand to look for the giant squid. I’m not sure whether to wish him luck—see ‘The Shining Ones’.

Although by general consent Harry Purvis stands unrivalled among the ‘White Hart’ clientele as a purveyor of remarkable stories (some of which, we suspect, may be slightly exaggerated) it must not be thought that his position has never been challenged. There have even been occasions when he has gone into temporary eclipse. Since it is always entertaining to watch the discomfiture of an expert, I must confess that I take a certain glee in recalling how Professor Hinckleberg disposed of Harry on his own home ground.

Many visiting Americans pass through the ‘White Hart’ in the course of the year. Like the residents, they are usually scientists or literary men, and some distinguished names have been recorded in the visitors’ book that Drew keeps behind the bar. Sometimes the newcomers arrive under their own power, diffidently introducing themselves as soon as they have the opportunity. (There was the time when a shy Nobel Prize winner sat unrecognised in a corner for an hour before he plucked up enough courage to say who he was.) Others arrive with letters of introduction, and not a few are escorted in by regular customers and then thrown to the wolves.

Professor Hinckleberg glided up one night in a vast fishtailed Cadillac he’d borrowed from the fleet in Grosvenor Square. Heavens only knows how he had managed to insinuate it through the side streets that lead to the ‘White Hart’, but amazingly enough all the fenders seemed intact. He was a large lean man, with that Henry Ford-Wilbur Wright kind of face that usually goes with the slow, taciturn speech of the sun-tanned pioneer. It didn’t in Professor Hinckleberg’s case. He could talk like an LP record on a seventy-eight turntable. In about ten seconds we’d discovered that he was a zoologist on leave of absence from a North Virginia college, that he was attached to the Office of Naval Research on some project to do with plankton, that he was tickled pink with London and even liked English beer, that he’d heard about us through a letter in Science but couldn’t believe we were true, that Stevenson was OK but if the Democrats wanted to get back they’d better import Winston, that he’d like to know what the heck was wrong with all our telephone call boxes and could he retrieve the small fortune in coppers of which they had mulcted him, that there seemed to be a lot of empty glasses around and how about filling them up, boys?

On the whole the Professor’s shock tactics were well received, but when he made a momentary pause for breath I thought to myself, ‘Harry’d better look out. This guy can talk rings round him.’ I glanced at Purvis, who was only a few feet away from me, and saw that his lips were pursued into a slight frown. I sat back luxuriously and awaited results.

As it was a fairly busy evening, it was quite some time before Professor Hinckleberg had been introduced to everybody. Harry, usually so forward at meeting celebrities, seemed to be keeping out of the way. But eventually he was concerned by Arthur Vincent, who acts as informal club secretary and makes sure that everyone signs the visitors’ book.

‘I’m sure you and Harry will have a lot to talk about,’ said Arthur, in a burst of innocent enthusiasm. ‘You’re both scientists, aren’t you? And Harry’s had some most extraordinary things happen to him. Tell the Professor about the time you found that U235 in your letter box….’

‘I don’t think,’ said Harry, a trifle too hastily, ‘that Professor—ah—Hinckleberg wants to listen to my little adventure. I’m sure he must have a lot to tell us.’

I’ve puzzled my head about that reply a good deal since then. It wasn’t in character. Usually, with an opening like this, Purvis was up and away. Perhaps he was sizing up the enemy, waiting for the Professor to make the first mistake, and then swooping in to the kill. If that was the explanation, he’d misjudged his man. He never had a chance, for Professor Hinckleberg made a jet-assisted take-off and was immediately in full flight.

‘Odd you should mention that,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been dealing with a most remarkable case. It’s one of these things that can’t be written up as a proper scientific paper, and this seems a good time to get it off my chest. I can’t often do that, because of this darned security—but so far no one’s gotten round to classifying Dr Grinnell’s experiments, so I’ll talk about them while I can.’

Grinnell, it seemed, was one of the many scientists trying to interpret the behaviour of the nervous system in terms of electrical circuits. He had started, as Grey Walter, Shannon and others had done, by making models that could reproduce the simpler actions of living creatures. His greatest success in this direction had been a mechanical cat that could chase mice and could land on its feet when dropped from a height. Very quickly, however, he had branched off in another direction owing to his discovery of what he called ‘neutral induction’. This was, to simplify it greatly, nothing less than a method of actually controlling the behaviour of animals.

It had been known for many years that all the processes that take place in the mind are accompanied by the production of minute electric currents, and for a long time it has been possible to record these complex fluctuations—though their exact interpretation is still unknown. Grinnell had not attempted the intricate task of analysis; what he had done was a good deal simpler, though its achievement was still complicated enough. He had attached his recording device to various animals, and thus been able to build up a small library, if one could call it that, of electrical impulses associated with their behaviour. One pattern of voltage might correspond to a movement to the right, another with travelling in a circle, another with complete stillness, and so on. That was an interesting enough achievement, but Grinnell had not stopped there. By ‘playing back’ the impulses he had recorded, he could compel his subject to repeat their previous actions—whether they wanted to or not.

That such a thing might be possible in theory almost any neurologist would admit, but few would have believed that it could be done in practice owing to the enormous complexity of the nervous system. And it was true that Grinnell’s first experiments were carried out on very low forms of life, with relatively simple responses.

‘I saw only one of his experiments,’ said Hinckleberg. ‘There was a large slug crawling on a horizontal piece of glass, and half a dozen tiny wires led from it to a control panel which Grinnell was operating. There were two dials—that was all—and by suitable adjustments he could make the slug move in any direction. To a layman, it would have seemed a trivial experiment, but I realised that it might have tremendous implications. I remember telling Grinnell that I hoped his device could never be applied to human beings. I’d been reading Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and I could just imagine what Big Brother would do with a gadget like this.

‘Then, being a busy man, I forgot all about the matter for a year. By the end of that time, it seems, Grinnell had improved his apparatus considerably and had worked up to more complicated organisms, though for technical reasons he had restricted himself to invertebrates. He had now built up a substantial store of “orders” which he could then play back to his subjects. You might think it surprising that such diverse creatures as worms, snails, insects, crustaceans and so on would be able to respond to the same electrical commands, but apparently that was the case.

‘If it had not been for Dr Jackson, Grinnell would probably have stayed working away in the lab for the rest of his life, moving steadily up the animal kingdom. Jackson was a very remarkable man—I’m sure you must have seen some of his films. In many circles he was regarded as a publicity-hunter rather than a real scientist, and academic circles were suspicious of him because he had far too many interests. He’d led expeditions into the Gobi Desert, up the Amazon, and had even made one raid on the Antarctic. From each of these trips he had returned with a best-selling book and a few miles of Kodachrome. And despite reports to the contrary, I believe he had obtained some valuable scientific results, even if they were slightly incidental.

‘I don’t know how Jackson got to hear of Grinnell’s work, or how he talked the other man into co-operating. He could be very persuasive, and probably dangled vast appropriations before Grinnell’s eyes—for he was the sort of man who could get the ear of the trustees. Whatever happened, from that moment Grinnell became mysteriously secretive. All we knew was that he was building a much larger version of his apparatus, incorporating all the latest refinements. When challenged, he would squirm nervously and say, “We’re going big game hunting.”

‘The preparations took another year, and I expect that Jackson—who was always a hustler—must have been mighty impatient by the end of that time. But at last everything was ready. Grinnell and all his mysterious boxes vanished in the general direction of Africa.

‘That was Jackson’s work. I suppose he didn’t want any premature publicity, which was understandable enough when you consider the somewhat fantastic nature of the expedition. According to the hints with which he had—as we later discovered—carefully misled us all, he hoped to get some really remarkable pictures of animals in their wild state, using Grinnell’s apparatus. I found this rather hard to swallow, unless Grinnell had somehow succeeded in linking his device to a radio-transmitter. It didn’t seem likely that he’d be able to attach his wires and electrodes to a charging elephant….

‘They’d thought of that, of course, and the answer seems obvious now. Sea water is a good conductor. They weren’t going to Africa at all, but were heading out into the Atlantic. But they hadn’t lied to us. They were after big game, all right. The biggest game there is…

‘We’d never had known what happened if their radio operator hadn’t been chattering to an amateur friend over in the States. From his commentary it’s possible to guess the sequence of events. Jackson’s ship—it was only a small yacht, bought up cheaply and converted for the expedition—was lying not far from the Equator off the west coast of Africa, and over the deepest part of the Atlantic. Grinnell was angling: his electrodes had been lowered into the abyss, while Jackson waited impatiently with his camera.

‘They waited a week before they had a catch. By that time, tempers must have been rather frayed. Then, one afternoon on a perfectly calm day, Grinnell’s meters started to jump. Something was caught in the sphere of influence of the electrodes.

‘Slowly, they drew up the cable. Until now, the rest of the crew must have thought them mad, but everyone must have shared their excitement as the catch rose up through all those thousands of feet of darkness until it broke surface. Who can blame the radio operator if, despite Jackson’s orders, he felt an urgent need to talk things over with a friend back on the safety of dry land?

‘I won’t attempt to describe what they saw, because a master has done it before me. Soon after the report came in, I turned up my copy of Moby Dick and reread the passage; I can still quote it from memory and don’t suppose I’ll ever forget it. This is how it goes, more or less:

‘“A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to catch at any hapless object within reach.”

‘Yes: Grinnell and Jackson had been after the largest and most mysterious of all living creatures—the giant squid. Largest? Almost certainly: Bathyteuthis may grow up to a hundred feet long. He’s not as heavy as the sperm whales who dine upon him, but he’s a match for them in length.

‘So here they were, with this monstrous beast that no human being had ever before seen under such ideal conditions. It seems that Grinnell was calmly putting it through its paces while Jackson ecstatically shot off yards of film. There was no danger, though it was twice the size of their boat. To Grinnell, it was just another mollusc that he could control like a puppet by means of his knobs and dials. When he had finished, he would let it return to its normal depths and it could swim away again, though it would probably have a bit of a hangover.

‘What one wouldn’t give to get hold of that film! Altogether apart from its scientific interest, it would be worth a fortune in Hollywood. You must admit that Jackson knew what he was doing: he’d seen the limitations of Grinnell’s apparatus and put it to its most effective use. What happened next was not his fault.’

Professor Hinckleberg sighed and took a deep draught of beer, as if to gather strength for the finale of his tale.

‘No, if anyone is to blame it’s Grinnell. Or, I should say, it was Grinnell, poor chap. Perhaps he was so excited that he overlooked a precaution he would undoubtedly have taken in the lab. How otherwise can you account for the fact that he didn’t have a spare fuse handy when the one in the power supply blew out?

‘And you can’t really blame Bathyteuthis, either. Wouldn’t you have been a little annoyed to be pushed about like this? And when the orders suddenly ceased and you were your own master again, you’d take steps to see it remained that way. I sometimes wonder, though, if Jackson stayed filming to the very end….’

Patent Pending

First published in Adventure, November 1954, as ‘The Invention’

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

A light-hearted tale from Harry Purvis at the White Hart, yet with serious undertones, and also a nod towards Virtual Reality, fifty years before it came into being.

There are no subjects that have not been discussed, at some time or other, in the saloon bar of the ‘White Hart’—and whether or not there are ladies present makes no difference whatsoever. After all, they came in at their own risk. Three of them, now I come to think of it, have eventually gone out again with husbands. So perhaps the risk isn’t on their side at all….

I mention this because I would not like you to think that all our conversations are highly erudite and scientific, and our activities purely cerebral. Though chess is rampant, darts and shove-ha’penny also flourish. The Times Literary Supplement, the Saturday Review, the New Statesman and the Atlantic Monthly may be brought in by some of the customers, but the same people are quite likely to leave with the latest issue of Staggering Stories of Pseudoscience.

A great deal of business also goes on in the obscurer corners of the pub. Copies of antique books and magazines frequently change hands at astronomical prices, and on almost any Wednesday at least three well-known dealers may be seen smoking large cigars as they lean over the bar, swapping stories with Drew. From time to time a vast guffaw announces the denouement of some anecdote and provokes a flood of anxious enquiries from patrons who are afraid they may have missed something. But, alas, delicacy forbids that I should repeat any of these interesting tales here. Unlike most things in this island, they are not for export….

Luckily, no such restrictions apply to the tales of Mr Harry Purvis, B.Sc. (at least), Ph. D. (probably), F.R.S. (personally I don’t think so, though it has been rumoured). None of them would bring a blush to the cheeks of the most delicately nurtured maiden aunts, should any still survive in these days.

I must apologise. This is too sweeping a statement. There was one story which might, in some circles, be regarded as a little daring. Yet I do not hesitate to repeat it, for I know that you, dear reader, will be sufficiently broadminded to take no offence.

It started in this fashion. A celebrated Fleet Street reviewer had been pinned into a corner by a persuasive publisher, who was about to bring out a book of which he had high hopes. It was one of the riper productions of the deep and decadent South—a prime example of the ‘and-then-the-house-gave-another-lurch-as-the-termites-finished-the-east-wing’ school of fiction. Eire had already banned it, but that is an honour which few books escape nowadays, and certainly could not be considered a distinction. However, if a leading British newspaper could be induced to make a stern call for its suppression, it would become a best seller overnight….

Such was the logic of its publisher, and he was using all his wiles to induce co-operation. I heard him remark, apparently to allay any scruples his reviewer friend might have, ‘Of course not! If they can understand it, they can’t be corrupted any further!’ And then Harry Purvis, who has an uncanny knack of following half a dozen conversations simultaneously, so that he can insert himself in the right one at the right time, said in his peculiarly penetrating and non-interruptible voice: ‘Censorship does raise some very difficult problems, doesn’t it? I’ve always argued that there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s degree of civilisation and the restraints it puts on its press.’

A New England voice from the back of the room cut in: ‘On that argument, Paris is a more civilised place than Boston.’

‘Precisely,’ answered Purvis. For once, he waited for a reply.

‘OK,’ said the New England voice mildly. ‘I’m not arguing. I just wanted to check.’

‘To continue,’ said Purvis, wasting no more time in doing so, ‘I’m reminded of a matter which has not yet concerned the censor, but which will certainly do so before long. It began in France, and so far has remained there. When it does come out into the open, it may have a greater impact on our civilisation than the atom bomb.

‘Like the atom bomb, it arose out of equally academic research. Never, gentlemen, underestimate science. I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.

‘You will appreciate that the story I am telling you is, for once in a while, secondhand. I got it from a colleague at the Sorbonne last year while I was over there at a scientific conference. So the names are all fictitious: I was told them at the time, but I can’t remember them now.

‘Professor—ah—Julian was an experimental physiologist at one of the smaller, but less impecunious, French universities. Some of you may remember that rather unlikely tale we heard here the other week from that fellow Hinckleberg, about his colleague who’d learned how to control the behaviour of animals through feeding the correct currents into their nervous systems. Well, if there was any truth in that story—and frankly I doubt it—the whole project was probably inspired by Julian’s papers in Comptes Rendus.

‘Professor Julian, however, never published his most remarkable results. When you stumble on something which is really terrific, you don’t rush into print. You wait until you have overwhelming evidence—unless you’re afraid that someone else is hot on the track. Then you may issue an ambiguous report that will establish your priority at a later date, without giving too much away at the moment—like the famous cryptogram that Huygens put out when he detected the rings of Saturn.

‘You may well wonder what Julian’s discovery was, so I won’t keep you in suspense. It was simply the natural extension of what man has been doing for the last hundred years. First the camera gave us the power to capture scenes. Then Edison invented the phonograph, and sound was mastered. Today, in the talking film, we have a kind of mechanical memory which would be inconceivable to our forefathers. But surely the matter cannot rest there. Eventually science must be able to catch and store thoughts and sensations themselves, and feed them back into the mind so that, whenever it wishes, it can repeat any experience in life, down to its minutest detail.’

‘That’s an old idea!’ snorted someone. ‘See the “feelies” in Brave New World.’

‘All good ideas have been thought of by somebody before they are realised,’ said Purvis severely. ‘The point is that what Huxley and others had talked about, Julian actually did. My goodness, there’s a pun there! Aldous—Julian—oh, let it pass!

‘It was done electronically, of course. You all know how the encephalograph can record the minute electrical impulses in the living brain—the so-called “brain waves”, as the popular press calls them. Julian’s device was a much subtler elaboration of this well-known instrument. And, having recorded cerebral impulses, he could play them back again. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? So was the phonograph, but it took the genius of Edison to think of it.

‘And now, enter the villain. Well, perhaps that’s too strong a word, for Professor Julian’s assistant Georges—Georges Dupin—is really quite a sympathetic character. It was just that, being a Frenchman of a more practical turn of mind than the Professor, he saw at once that there were some milliards of francs involved in this laboratory toy.

‘The first thing was to get it out of the laboratory. The French have an undoubted flair for elegant engineering, and after some weeks of work—with the full co-operation of the Professor—Georges had managed to pack the “playback” side of the apparatus into a cabinet no larger than a television set, and containing not very many more parts.

‘Then Georges was ready to make his first experiment. It would involve considerable expense, but, as someone so rightly remarked, you cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs. And the analogy is, if I may say so, an exceedingly apt one.

‘For Georges went to see the most famous gourmet in France, and made an interesting proposition. It was one that the great man could not refuse, because it was so unique a tribute to his eminence. Georges explained patiently that he had invented a device for registering (he said nothing about storing) sensations. In the cause of science, and for the honour of the French cuisine, could he be privileged to analyse the emotions, the subtle nuances of gustatory discrimination, that took place in Monsieur Ie Baron’s mind when he employed his unsurpassed talents? Monsieur could name the restaurant, the chef and the menu—everything would be arranged for his convenience. Of course, if he was too busy, no doubt that well-known epicure Le Compte de—

‘The Baron, who was in some respects a surprisingly coarse man, uttered a word not to be found in most French dictionaries. “That cretin!” he exploded. “He would be happy on English cooking! No, I shall do it.” And forthwith he sat down to compose the menu, while Georges anxiously estimated the cost of the items and wondered if his bank balance would stand the strain….

‘It would be interesting to know what the chef and the waiters thought about the whole business. There was the Baron, seated at his favourite table and doing full justice to his favourite dishes, not in the least inconvenienced by the tangle of wires that trailed from his head to that diabolical-looking machine in the corner. The restaurant was empty of all other occupants, for the last thing Georges wanted was premature publicity. This had added very considerably to the already distressing cost of the experiment. He could only hope that the results would be worth it.

‘They were. The only way of proving that, of course, would be to play back Georges’s “recording”. We have to take his word for it, since the utter inadequacy of words in such matters is all too well known. The Baron was a genuine connoisseur, not one of those who merely pretend to powers of discrimination they do not possess. You know Thurber’s “Only a naïve domestic Burgundy, but I think you’ll admire its presumption”. The Baron would have known at the first sniff whether it was domestic or not—and if it had been presumptuous he’d have smacked it down.

‘I gather that Georges had his money’s worth out of that recording, even though he had not intended it merely for personal use. It opened up new worlds to him, and clarified the ideas that had been forming in his ingenious brain. There was no doubt about it: all the exquisite sensations that had passed through the Baron’s mind during the consumption of that Lucullan repast had been captured, so that anyone else, however untrained they might be in such matters, could savour them to the full. For, you see, the recording dealt purely with emotions: intelligence did not come into the picture at all. The Baron needed a lifetime of knowledge and training before he could experience these sensations. But once they were down on tape, anyone, even if in real life they had no sense of taste at all, could take over from there.

‘Think of the glowing vistas that opened up before Georges’s eyes! There were other meals, other gourmets. There were the collected impressions of all the vintages of Europe—what would connoisseurs not pay for them? When the last bottle of a rare wine had been broached, its incorporeal essence could be preserved, as the voice of Melba can travel down the centuries. For, after all, it was not the wine itself that mattered, but the sensations it evoked….

‘So mused Georges. But this, he knew, was only a beginning. The French claim to logic I have often disputed, but in Georges’s case it cannot be denied. He thought the matter over for a few days: then he went to see his petite dame.

‘“Yvonne, ma chérie,” he said, “I have a somewhat unusual request to make of you….”’

Harry Purvis knew when to break off in a story. He turned to the bar and called, ‘Another Scotch, Drew.’ No one said a word while it was provided.

‘To continue,’ said Purvis at length, ‘the experiment, unusual though it was, even in France, was successfully carried out. As both discretion and custom demanded, all was arranged in the lonely hours of the night. You will have gathered already that Georges was a persuasive person, though I doubt if Mam’selle needed much persuading.

‘Stifling her curiosity with a sincere but hasty kiss, Georges saw Yvonne out of the lab and rushed back to his apparatus. Breathlessly, he ran through the playback. It worked—not that he had ever had any real doubts. Moreover—do please remember I have only my informant’s word for this—it was indistinguishable from the real thing. At that moment something approaching religious awe overcame Georges. This was, without a doubt, the greatest invention in history. He would be immortal as well as wealthy, for he had achieved something of which all men had dreamed, and had robbed old age of one of its terrors….

‘He also realised that he could now dispense with Yvonne, if he so wished. This raised implications that would require further thought. Much further thought.

‘You will, of course, appreciate that I am giving you a highly condensed account of events. While all this was going on, Georges was still working as a loyal employee of the Professor, who suspected nothing. As yet, indeed, Georges had done little more than any research worker might have in similar circumstances. His performances had been somewhat beyond the call of duty, but could all be explained away if need be.

‘The next step would involve some very delicate negotiations and the expenditure of further hard-won francs. Georges now had all the material he needed to prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that he was handling a very valuable commercial property. There were shrewd businessmen in Paris who would jump at the opportunity. Yet a certain delicacy, for which we must give him full credit, restrained Georges from using his second—er—recording as a sample of the wares his machine could purvey. There was no way of disguising the personalities involved, and Georges was a modest man. “Besides,” he argued, again with great good sense, “when the gramophone company wishes to make a disque, it does not enregister the performance of some amateur musician. That is a matter for professionals. And so, ma foi, is this.” Whereupon, after a further call at his bank, he set forth again for Paris.

‘He did not go anywhere near the Place Pigalle, because that was full of Americans and prices were accordingly exorbitant. Instead, a few discreet enquiries and some understanding cab drivers took him to an almost oppressively respectable suburb, where he presently found himself in a pleasant waiting room, by no means as exotic as might have been supposed.

‘And there, somewhat embarrassed, Georges explained his mission to a formidable lady whose age one could have no more guessed than her profession. Used though she was to unorthodox requests, this was something she had never encountered in all her considerable experience. But the customer was always right, as long as he had the cash, and so in due course everything was arranged. One of the young ladies and her boyfriend, an apache of somewhat overwhelming masculinity, travelled back with Georges to the provinces. At first they were, naturally, somewhat suspicious, but as Georges had already found, no expert can ever resist flattery. Soon they were all on excellent terms. Hercule and Susette promised Georges that they would give him every cause for satisfaction.

‘No doubt some of you would be glad to have further details, but you can scarcely expect me to supply them. All I can say is that Georges—or, rather, his instrument—was kept very busy, and that by the morning little of the recording material was left unused. For it seems that Hercule was indeed appropriately named….

‘When this piquant episode was finished, Georges had very little money left, but he did possess two recordings that were quite beyond price. Once more he set off to Paris, where, with practically no trouble, he came to terms with some businessmen who were so astonished that they gave him a very generous contract before coming to their senses. I am pleased to report this, because so often the scientist emerges second best in his dealings with the world of finance. I’m equally pleased to record that Georges had made provision for Professor Julian in the contract. You may say cynically that it was, after all, the Professor’s invention, and that sooner or later Georges would have had to square him. But I like to think that there was more to it than that.

‘The full details of the scheme for exploiting the device are, of course, unknown to me. I gather that Georges had been expansively eloquent—not that much eloquence was needed to convince anyone who had once experienced one or both of his playbacks. The market would be enormous, unlimited. The export trade alone could put France on her feet again and would wipe out her dollar deficit overnight—once certain snags had been overcome. Everything would have to be managed through somewhat clandestine channels, for think of the hubbub from the hypocritical Anglo-Saxons when they discovered just what was being imported into their countries. The Mothers’ Union, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Housewives League, and all the religious organisations would rise as one. The lawyers were looking into the matter very carefully, and as far as could be seen the regulations that still excluded Tropic of Capricorn from the mails of the English-speaking countries could not be applied to this case—for the simple reason that no one had thought of it. But there would be such a shout for new laws that Parliament and Congress would have to do something, so it was best to keep under cover as long as possible.

‘In fact, as one of the directors pointed out, if the recordings were banned, so much the better. They could make much more money on a smaller output, because the price would promptly soar and all the vigilance of the Customs Officials couldn’t block every leak. It would be Prohibition all over again.

‘You will scarcely be surprised to hear that by this time Georges had somewhat lost interest in the gastronomical angle. It was an interesting but definitely minor possibility of the invention. Indeed, this had been tacitly admitted by the directors as they drew up the articles of association, for they had included the pleasures of the cuisine among “subsidiary rights”.

‘Georges returned home with his head in the clouds, and a substantial cheque in his pocket. A charming fancy had struck his imagination. He thought of all the trouble to which the gramophone companies had gone so that the world might have the complete recordings of the Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues or the Nine Symphonies. Well, his new company would put out a complete and definite set of recordings, performed by experts versed in the most esoteric knowledge of East and West. How many opus numbers would be required? That, of course, had been a subject of profound debate for some thousands of years. The Hindu textbooks, Georges had heard, got well into three figures. It would be a most interesting research, combining profit with pleasure in an unexampled manner…. He had already begun some preliminary studies, using treatises which even in Paris were none too easy to obtain.

‘If you think that while all this was going on, Georges had neglected his usual interests you are all too right. He was working literally night and day, for he had not yet revealed his plans to the Professor and almost everything had to be done when the lab was closed. And one of the interests he had had to neglect was Yvonne.

‘Her curiosity had already been aroused, as any girl’s would have been. But now she was more than intrigued—she was distracted. For Georges had become so remote and cold. He was no longer in love with her.

‘It was a result that might have been anticipated. Publicans have to guard against the danger of sampling their own wares too often—I’m sure you don’t, Drew—and Georges had fallen into this seductive trap. He had been through that recording too many times, with somewhat debilitating results. Moreover, poor Yvonne was not to be compared with the experienced and talented Susette. It was the old story of the professional versus the amateur.

‘All that Yvonne knew was that Georges was in love with someone else. That was true enough. She suspected that he had been unfaithful to her. And that raises profound philosophical questions we can hardly go into here.

‘This being France, in case you had forgotten, the outcome was inevitable. Poor Georges! He was working late one night at the lab, as usual, when Yvonne finished him off with one of those ridiculous ornamental pistols which are de rigeur for such occasions. Let us drink to his memory.’

‘That’s the trouble with all your stories,’ said John Beynon. ‘You tell us about wonderful inventions, and then at the end it turns out that the discoverer was killed, so no one can do anything about it. For I suppose, as usual, the apparatus was destroyed?’

‘But no,’ replied Purvis. ‘Apart from Georges, this is one of the stories that has a happy ending. There was no trouble at all about Yvonne, of course. Georges’s grieving sponsors arrived on the scene with great speed and prevented any adverse publicity. Being men of sentiment as well as men of business, they realised that they would have to secure Yvonne’s freedom. They promptly did this by playing the recording to le Maire and le Préfet, thus convincing them that the poor girl had experienced irresistible provocation. A few shares in the new company clinched the deal, with expressions of the utmost cordiality on both sides. Yvonne even got her gun back.’

‘Then when—’ began someone else.

‘Ah, these things take time. There’s the question of mass production, you know. It’s quite possible that distribution has already commenced through private—very private—channels. Some of those dubious little shops and notice boards around Leicester Square may soon start giving hints.

‘Of course,’ said the New England voice disrespectfully, ‘you wouldn’t know the name of the company.’

You can’t help admiring Purvis at times like this. He scarcely hesitated.

‘Le Société Anonyme d’ Aphrodite,’ he replied. ‘And I’ve just remembered something that will cheer you up. They hope to get round your sticky mail regulations and establish themselves before the inevitable congressional enquiry starts. They’re opening up a branch in Nevada: apparently you can still get away with anything there.’ He raised his glass.

‘To Georges Dupin,’ he said solemnly. ‘Martyr to science. Remember him when the fireworks start. And one other thing—’

‘Yes?’ we all asked.

‘Better start saving now. And sell your TV sets before the bottom drops out of the market.’

Refugee

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1955, as ‘?’

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

‘Refugee’ was originally published by Anthony Boucher as ‘?’ because he didn’t like the title, after which he ran a competition to find a better one, choosing ‘This Earth of Majesty’. Meanwhile, in New Worlds Ted Carnell called it ‘Royal Prerogative’, adding to the confusion. I cannot pretend that no resemblance was intended to any living character. Indeed, I have since met the prototype of “Prince Henry” and we had a conversation uncannily appropriate to this meeting.

‘When he comes aboard,’ said Captain Saunders, as he waited for the landing ramp to extrude itself, ‘what the devil shall I call him?’

There was a thoughtful silence while the navigation officer and the assistant pilot considered this problem in etiquette. Then Mitchell locked the main control panel, and the ship’s multitudinous mechanisms lapsed into unconsciousness as power was withdrawn from them.

‘The correct address,’ he drawled slowly, ‘is “Your Royal Highness”.’

‘Huh!’ snorted the captain. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll call anyone that!’

‘In these progressive days,’ put in Chambers helpfully, ‘I believe that “Sir” is quite sufficient. But there’s no need to worry if you forget: it’s been a long time since anyone went to the Tower. Besides, this Henry isn’t as tough a proposition as the one who had all the wives.’

‘From all accounts,’ added Mitchell, ‘he’s a very pleasant young man. Quite intelligent, too. He’s often been known to ask people technical questions that they couldn’t answer.’

Captain Saunders ignored the implications of this remark, beyond resolving that if Prince Henry wanted to know how a field Compensation Drive Generator worked, then Mitchell could do the explaining. He got gingerly to his feet—they’d been operating on half a gravity during flight, and now they were on Earth, he felt like a ton of bricks—and started to make his way along the corridors that led to the lower air lock. With an oily purring, the great curving door side-stepped out of his way. Adjusting his smile, he walked out to meet the television cameras and the heir to the British throne.

The man who would, presumably, one day be Henry IX of England was still in his early twenties. He was slightly below average height, and had fine-drawn, regular features that really lived up to all the genealogical clichés. Captain Saunders, who came from Dallas and had no intention of being impressed by any prince, found himself unexpectedly moved by the wide, sad eyes. They were eyes that had seen too many receptions and parades, that had had to watch countless totally uninteresting things, that had never been allowed to stray far from the carefully planned official routes. Looking at that proud but weary face, Captain Saunders glimpsed for the first time the ultimate loneliness of royalty. All his dislike of that institution became suddenly trivial against its real defect: what was wrong with the Crown was the unfairness of inflicting such a burden on any human being….

The passageways of the Centaurus were too narrow to allow for general sight-seeing, and it was soon clear that it suited Prince Henry very well to leave his entourage behind. Once they had begun moving through the ship, Saunders lost all his stiffness and reserve, and within a few minutes was treating the prince exactly like any other visitor. He did not realise that one of the earliest lessons royalty has to learn is that of putting people at their ease.

‘You know, Captain,’ said the prince wistfully, ‘this is a big day for us. I’ve always hoped that one day it would be possible for spaceships to operate from England. But it still seems strange to have a port of our own here, after all these years. Tell me—did you ever have much to do with rockets?’

‘Well, I had some training on them, but they were already on the way out before I graduated. I was lucky: some older men had to go back to school and start all over again—or else abandon space completely if they couldn’t convert to the new ships.’

‘It made as much difference as that?’

‘Oh yes—when the rocket went, it was as big as the change from sail to steam. That’s an analogy you’ll often hear, by the way. There was a glamour about the old rockets, just as there was about the old windjammers, which these modern ships haven’t got. When the Centaurus takes off, she goes up as quietly as a balloon—and as slowly, if she wants to. But a rocket blastoff shook the ground for miles, and you’d be deaf for days if you were too near the launching apron. Still, you know all that from the old news recordings.’

The prince smiled.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve often run through them at the Palace. I think I’ve watched every incident in all the pioneering expeditions. I was sorry to see the end of the rockets, too. But we could never have had a spaceport here on Salisbury Plain—the vibration would have shaken down Stonehenge!’

‘Stonehenge?’ queried Saunders as he held open a hatch and let the prince through into Hold Number 3.

‘Ancient monument—one of the most famous stone circles in the world. It’s really impressive, and about three thousand years old. See it if you can—it’s only ten miles from here.’

Captain Saunders had some difficulty in suppressing a smile. What an odd country this was: where else, he wondered, would you find contrasts like this? It made him feel very young and raw when he remembered that back home Billy the Kid was ancient history, and there was hardly anything in the whole of Texas as much as five hundred years old. For the first time he began to realise what tradition meant: it gave Prince Henry something that he could never possess. Poise—self-confidence, yes, that was it. And a pride that was somehow free from arrogance because it took itself so much for granted that it never had to be asserted.

It was surprising how many questions Prince Henry managed to ask in the thirty minutes that had been allotted for his tour of the freighter. They were not the routine questions that people asked out of politeness, quite uninterested in the answers. H.R.H. Prince Henry knew a lot about spaceships, and Captain Saunders felt completely exhausted when he handed his distinguished guest back to the reception committee, which had been waiting outside the Centaurus with well-simulated patience.

‘Thank you very much, Captain,’ said the prince as they shook hands in the air lock. ‘I’ve not enjoyed myself so much for ages. I hope you have a pleasant stay in England, and a successful voyage.’ Then his retinue whisked him away, and the port officials, frustrated until now, came aboard to check the ship’s papers.

‘Well,’ said Mitchell when it was all over, ‘what did you think of our Princes of Wales?’

‘He surprised me,’ answered Saunders frankly. ‘I’d never have guessed he was a prince. I always thought they were rather dumb. But heck, he knew the principles of the Field Drive! Has he ever been up in space?’

‘Once, I think. Just a hop above the atmosphere in a Space Force ship. It didn’t even reach orbit before it came back again—but the Prime Minister nearly had a fit. There were questions in the House and editorials in the Times. Everyone decided that the heir to the throne was too valuable to risk in these newfangled inventions. So, though he has the rank of commodore in the Royal Space Force, he’s never even been to the moon.’

‘The poor guy,’ said Captain Saunders.

He had three days to burn, since it was not the captain’s job to supervise the loading of the ship or the preflight maintenance. Saunders knew skippers who hung around breathing heavily on the necks of the servicing engineers, but he wasn’t that type. Besides, he wanted to see London. He had been to Mars and Venus and the moon, but this was his first visit to England. Mitchell and Chambers filled him with useful information and put him on the monorail to London before dashing off to see their own families. They would be returning to the spaceport a day before he did, to see that everything was in order. It was a great relief having officers one could rely on so implicitly: they were unimaginative and cautious, but thoroughgoing almost to a fault. If they said that everything was shipshape, Saunders knew he could take off without qualms.

The sleek, streamlined cylinder whistled across the carefully tailored landscape. It was so close to the ground, and travelling so swiftly, that one could only gather fleeting impressions of the towns and fields that flashed by. Everything, thought Saunders, was so incredibly compact, and on such a Lilliputian scale. There were no open spaces, no fields more than a mile long in any direction. It was enough to give a Texan claustrophobia—particularly a Texan who also happened to be a space pilot.

The sharply defined edge of London appeared like the bulwark of some walled city on the horizon. With few exceptions, the buildings were quite low—perhaps fifteen or twenty storeys in height. The monorail shot through a narrow canyon, over a very attractive park, across a river that was presumably the Thames, and then came to rest with a steady, powerful surge of deceleration. A loud-speaker announced, in a modest voice that seemed afraid of being overheard: ‘This is Paddington. Passengers for the North please remain seated.’ Saunders pulled his baggage down from the rack and headed out into the station.

As he made for the entrance to the Underground, he passed a bookstall and glanced at the magazines on display. About half of them, it seemed, carried photographs of Prince Henry or other members of the royal family. This, thought Saunders, was altogether too much of a good thing. He also noticed that all the evening papers showed the prince entering or leaving the Centaurus, and bought copies to read in the subway—he begged its pardon, the ‘Tube’.

The editorial comments had a monotonous similarity. At last, they rejoiced, England need no longer take a back seat among the space-going nations. Now it was possible to operate a space fleet without having a million square miles of desert: the silent, gravity-defying ships of today could land, if need be, in Hyde Park, without even disturbing the ducks on the Serpentine. Saunders found it odd that this sort of patriotism had managed to survive into the age of space, but he guessed that the British had felt it pretty badly when they’d had to borrow launching sites from the Australians, the Americans, and the Russians.

The London Underground was still, after a century and a half, the best transport system in the world, and it deposited Saunders safely at his destination less than ten minutes after he had left Paddington. In ten minutes the Centaurus could have covered fifty thousand miles; but space, after all, was not quite so crowded as this. Nor were the orbits of space craft so tortuous as the streets Saunders had to negotiate to reach his hotel. All attempts to straighten out London had failed dismally, and it was fifteen minutes before he completed the last hundred yards of his journey.

He stripped off his jacket and collapsed thankfully on his bed. Three quiet, carefree days all to himself: it seemed too good to be true.

It was. He had barely taken a deep breath when the phone rang.

‘Captain Saunders? I’m so glad we found you. This is the BBC. We have a program called “In Town Tonight” and we were wondering…’

The thud of the air-lock door was the sweetest sound Saunders had heard for days. Now he was safe: nobody could get at him here in his armoured fortress, which would soon be far out in the freedom of space. It was not that he had been treated badly: on the contrary, he had been treated altogether too well. He had made four (or was it five?) appearances on various TV programmes; he had been to more parties than he could remember; he had acquired several hundred new friends and (the way his head felt now) forgotten all his old ones.

‘Who started the rumour,’ he said to Mitchell as they met at the port, ‘that the British were reserved and stand-offish? Heaven help me if I ever meet a demonstrative Englishman.’

‘I take it,’ replied Mitchell, ‘that you had a good time.’

‘Ask me tomorrow,’ Saunders replied. ‘I may have reintegrated my psyche by then.’

‘I saw you on that quiz programme last night,’ remarked Chambers. ‘You looked pretty ghastly.’

‘Thank you: that’s just the sort of sympathetic encouragement I need at the moment. I’d like to see you think of a synonym of “jejune” after you’d been up until three in the morning.’

‘Vapid,’ replied Chambers promptly.

‘Insipid,’ said Mitchell, not to be outdone.

‘You win. Let’s have those overhaul schedules and see what the engineers have been up to.’

Once seated at the control desk, Captain Saunders quickly became his usual efficient self. He was home again, and his training took over. He knew exactly what to do, and would do it with automatic precision. To right and left of him, Mitchell and Chambers were checking their instruments and calling the control tower.

It took them an hour to carry out the elaborate pre-flight routine. When the last signature had been attached to the last sheet of instructions, and the last red light on the monitor panel had turned to green, Saunders flopped back in his seat and lit a cigarette. They had ten minutes to spare before take-off.

‘One day,’ he said, ‘I’m going to come back to England incognito to find what makes the place tick. I don’t understand how you can crowd so many people onto one little island without it sinking.’

‘Huh,’ snorted Chambers. ‘You should see Holland. That makes England look as wide open as Texas.’

‘And then there’s this royal family business. Do you know, wherever I went everybody kept asking me how I got on with Prince Henry—what we’d talked about—didn’t I think he was a fine guy, and so on. Frankly, I got fed up with it. I can’t imagine how you’ve managed to stand it for a thousand years.’

‘Don’t think that the royal family’s been popular all the time,’ replied Mitchell. ‘Remember what happened to Charles the First? And some of the things we said about the early Georges were quite as rude as the remarks your people made later.’

‘We just happen to like tradition,’ said Chambers. ‘We’re not afraid to change when the time comes, but as far as the royal family is concerned—well, it’s unique and we’re rather fond of it. Just the way you feel about the Statue of Liberty.’

‘Not a fair example. I don’t think it’s right to put human beings up on a pedestal and treat them as if they’re—well, minor deities. Look at Prince Henry, for instance. Do you think he’ll ever have a chance of doing the things he really wants to do? I saw him three times on TV when I was in London. The first time he was opening a new school somewhere; then he was giving a speech to the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers at the Guildhall (I swear I’m not making that up), and finally he was receiving an address of welcome from the mayor of Podunk, or whatever your equivalent is.’ (‘Wigan,’ interjected Mitchell.) ‘I think I’d rather be in jail than live that sort of life. Why can’t you leave the poor guy alone?’

For once, neither Mitchell nor Chambers rose to the challenge. Indeed, they maintained a somewhat frigid silence. That’s torn it, thought Saunders. I should have kept my big mouth shut; now I’ve hurt their feelings. I should have remembered that advice I read somewhere: ‘The British have two religions—cricket and the royal family. Never attempt to criticise either.’

The awkward pause was broken by the radio and the voice of the spaceport controller.

‘Control to Centaurus. Your flight lane clear. OK to lift.’

‘Take-off program starting—now!’ replied Saunders, throwing the master switch. Then he leaned back, his eyes taking in the entire control panel, his hands clear of the board but ready for instant action.

He was tense but completely confident. Better brains than his—brains of metal and crystal and flashing electron streams—were in charge of the Centaurus now. If necessary, he could take command, but he had never yet lifted a ship manually and never expected to do so. If the automatics failed, he would cancel the take-off and sit here on Earth until the fault had been cleared up.

The main field went on, and weight ebbed from the Centaurus. There were protesting groans from the ship’s hull and structure as the strains redistributed themselves. The curved arms of the landing cradle were carrying no load now; the slightest breath of wind would carry the freighter away into the sky.

Control called from the tower: ‘Your weight now zero: check calibration.’

Saunders looked at his meters. The upthrust of the field would now exactly equal the weight of the ship, and the meter readings should agree with the totals on the loading schedules. In at least one instance this check had revealed the presence of a stowaway on board a spaceship—the gauges were as sensitive as that.

‘One million, five hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and twenty kilograms,’ Saunders read off from the thrust indicators. ‘Pretty good—it checks to within fifteen kilos. The first time I’ve been underweight, though. You could have taken on some more candy for that plump girl friend of yours in Port Lowell, Mitch.’

The assistant pilot gave a rather sickly grin. He had never quite lived down a blind date on Mars which had given him a completely unwarranted reputation for preferring statuesque blondes.

There was no sense of motion, but the Centaurus was now falling up into the summer sky as her weight was not only neutralised but reversed. To the watchers below, she would be a swiftly mounting star, a silver globule climbing through and beyond the clouds. Around her, the blue of the atmosphere was deepening into the eternal darkness of space. Like a bead moving along an invisible wire, the freighter was following the pattern of radio waves that would lead her from world to world.

This, thought Captain Saunders, was his twenty-sixth take-off from Earth. But the wonder would never die, nor would he ever outgrow the feeling of power it gave him to sit here at the control panel, the master of forces beyond even the dreams of mankind’s ancient gods. No two departures were ever the same: some were into the dawn, some toward the sunset, some above a cloud-veiled Earth, some through clear and sparkling skies. Space itself might be unchanging, but on Earth the same pattern never recurred, and no man ever looked twice at the same landscape or the same sky. Down there the Atlantic waves were marching eternally toward Europe, and high above them—but so far below the Centaurus!—the glittering bands of cloud were advancing before the same winds. England began to merge into the continent, and the European coast line became foreshortened and misty as it sank hull down beyond the curve of the world. At the frontier of the west, a fugitive stain on the horizon was the first hint of America. With a single glance, Captain Saunders could span all the leagues across which Columbus had laboured half a thousand years ago.

With the silence of limitless power, the ship shook itself free from the last bonds of Earth. To an outside observer, the only sign of the energies it was expending would have been the dull red glow from the radiation fins around the vessel’s equator, as the heat loss from the mass-converters was dissipated into space.

‘14:03:45,’ wrote Captain Saunders neatly in the log. ‘Escape velocity attained. Course deviation negligible.’

There was little point in making the entry. The modest 25,000 miles an hour that had been the almost unattainable goal of the first astronauts had no practical significance now, since the Centaurus was still accelerating and would continue to gain speed for hours. But it had a profound psychological meaning. Until this moment, if power had failed, they would have fallen back to Earth. But now gravity could never recapture them: they had achieved the freedom of space, and could take their pick of the planets.

In practice, of course, there would be several kinds of hell to pay if they did not pick Mars and deliver their cargo according to plan. But Captain Saunders, like all spacemen, was fundamentally a romantic. Even on a milk run like this he would sometimes dream of the ringed glory of Saturn or the sombre Neptunian wastes, lit by the distant fires of the shrunken sun.

An hour after take-off, according to the hallowed ritual, Chambers left the course computer to its own devices and produced the three glasses that lived beneath the chart table. As he drank the traditional toast to Newton, Oberth, and Einstein, Saunders wondered how this little ceremony had originated. Space crews had certainly been doing it for at least sixty years: perhaps it could be traced back to the legendary rocket engineer who made the remark, ‘I’ve burned more alcohol in sixty seconds than you’ve ever sold across this lousy bar.’

Two hours later, the last course correction that the tracking stations on Earth could give them had been fed into the computer. From now on, until Mars came sweeping up ahead, they were on their own. It was a lonely thought, yet a curiously exhilarating one. Saunders savoured it in his mind. There were just the three of them here—and no one else within a million miles.

In the circumstances, the detonation of an atomic bomb could hardly have been more shattering than the modest knock on the cabin door….

Captain Saunders had never been so startled in his life. With a yelp that had already left him before he had a chance to suppress it, he shot out of his seat and rose a full yard before the ship’s residual gravity field dragged him back. Chambers and Mitchell, on the other hand, behaved with traditional British phlegm. They swivelled in their bucket seats, stared at the door, and then waited for their captain to take action.

It took Saunders several seconds to recover. Had he been confronted with what might be called a normal emergency, he would already have been halfway into a space suit. But a diffident knock on the door of the control cabin, when everybody else in the ship was sitting beside him, was not a fair test.

A stowaway was simply impossible. The danger had been so obvious, right from the beginning of commercial space flight, that the most stringent precautions had been taken against it. One of his officers, Saunders knew, would always have been on duty during loading; no one could possibly have crept in unobserved. Then there had been the detailed preflight inspection, carried out by both Mitchell and Chambers. Finally, there was the weight check at the moment before take-off; that was conclusive. No, a stowaway was totally…

The knock on the door sounded again. Captain Saunders clenched his fists and squared his jaw. In a few minutes, he thought, some romantic idiot was going to be very, very sorry.

‘Open the door, Mr Mitchell,’ Saunders growled. In a single long stride, the assistant pilot crossed the cabin and jerked open the hatch.

For an age, it seemed, no one spoke. Then the stowaway, wavering slightly in the low gravity, came into the cabin. He was completely self-possessed, and looked very pleased with himself.

‘Good afternoon, Captain Saunders,’ he said, ‘I must apologise for this sudden intrusion.’

Saunders swallowed hard. Then, as the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, he looked first at Mitchell, then at Chambers. Both of his officers stared guilelessly back at him with expressions of ineffable innocence. ‘So that’s it,’ he said bitterly. There was no need for any explanations: everything was perfectly clear. It was easy to picture the complicated negotiations, the midnight meetings, the falsification of records, the off-loading of nonessential cargoes that his trusted colleagues had been conducting behind his back. He was sure it was a most interesting story, but he didn’t want to hear about it now. He was too busy wondering what the Manual of Space Law would have to say about a situation like this, though he was already gloomily certain that it would be of no use to him at all.

It was too late to turn back, of course: the conspirators wouldn’t have made an elementary miscalculation like that. He would just have to make the best of what looked to be the trickiest voyage in his career.

He was still trying to think of something to say when the PRIORITY signal started flashing on the radio board. The stowaway looked at his watch.

‘I was expecting that,’ he said. ‘It’s probably the Prime Minister. I think I’d better speak to the poor man.’

Saunders thought so too.

‘Very well, Your Royal Highness,’ he said sulkily, and with such emphasis that the title sounded almost like an insult. Then, feeling much put upon, he retired into a corner.

It was the Prime Minister all right, and he sounded very upset. Several times he used the phrase ‘your duty to your people’ and once there was a distinct catch in his throat as he said something about ‘devotion of your subjects to the Crown’. Saunders realised, with some surprise, that he really meant it.

While this emotional harangue was in progress, Mitchell leaned over to Saunders and whispered in his ear:

‘The old boy’s on a sticky wicket, and he knows it. The people will be behind the prince when they hear what’s happened. Everybody knows he’s been trying to get into space for years.’

‘I wish he hadn’t chosen my ship,’ said Saunders. ‘And I’m not sure that this doesn’t count as mutiny.’

‘The heck it does. Mark my words—when this is all over you’ll be the only Texan to have the Order of the Garter. Won’t that be nice for you?’

‘Shush!’ said Chambers. The prince was speaking, his words winging back across the abyss that now sundered him from the island he would one day rule.

‘I am sorry, Mr Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘if I’ve caused you any alarm. I will return as soon as it is convenient. Someone has to do everything for the first time, and I felt the moment had come for a member of my family to leave Earth. It will be a valuable part of my education, and will make me more fitted to carry out my duty. Goodbye.’

He dropped the microphone and walked over to the observation window—the only spaceward-looking port on the entire ship. Saunders watched him standing there, proud and lonely—but contented now. And as he saw the prince staring out at the stars which he had at last attained, all his annoyance and indignation slowly evaporated.

No one spoke for a long time. Then Prince Henry tore his gaze away from the blinding splendour beyond the port, looked at Captain Saunders, and smiled.

‘Where’s the galley, Captain?’ he asked. ‘I may be out of practice, but when I used to go scouting I was the best cook in my patrol.’

Saunders slowly relaxed, then smiled back. The tension seemed to lift from the control room. Mars was still a long way off, but he knew now that this wasn’t going to be such a bad trip after all….