?51h Yerir o1 Publicalion

1

THE MAG A2 1NE OF

Fantasy and

'fA

Science Fiction

NOVELETS
The Women Men Don’t See	JAMES TIPTREE, JR. 4
The Power of Blackness	JACK WILLIAMSON 60
SHORT STORIES
Time-Sharing Man	HERBERT GOLD 30
12:01 P, M.	RICHARD A. LUPOFF 44
Ms. Found In An Oxygen Bottle	GARY JENNINGS 88
Moonacy	C. G.COBB 104
Voyage With Interruption	DORIS PITKIN BUCK 124
Not A Red Cent	ROBIN SCOTT WILSON 147
FEATURES
Books	GAHAN WILSON 39
Cartoon	GAHAN WILSON 59
Films	BAIRD SEARLES 101
Science: The Figure of the Farthest	ISAAC ASIMOV 136
F&SF Competition	158
Index to Volume 45	162
Cover by Ron Walotsky for '	‘Not A Red Cent"
Edward L. Ferman, EDITOR & PUBLISHER	Isaac Asimov. SCIENCE EDITOR
Andrew Porter. ASSISTANT EDITOR Dale Beardale, CIRCULATION MANAGER
Joseph W. Ferman, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO: 51-25682

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Volume 45, No, 6, Whole No. 271, Dec. 1973. Publish^ monthly by Mercury Press, Inc. at $.75 per copy. Annual subscription $8.50; $9.00 in Canada and Mexico, $9.50 in other foreign countries. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy and Science Fiction, Box 56, Cornwall, Conn. 06753. Publication office. Box 56, Cornwall, Conn. 06753. Editorial submissions should be sent to 347 East 53rd St., New York, N.Y. 10022. Second class postage paid at Cornwall, Conn. 06753 and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright, © 1973 by Mercury Press, Inc. All rights, including translations into other languages, reserv^. Submissions must be accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. The oublisher assumes no responsibility for return of unsolicited manuscripts.

James Tiptree calls himself “an amateur — I don’t write to eat.” Exactly what Mr. Tiptree does to eat remains unknown, however he tells us: “I do not, repeat it, work for the CIA, the FBI, NSA, the Treasury, the narcs or the Metropolitan Park Police.” Well, sf people are a nosy bunch, and we won’t give up, but meanwhile there is more than enough to consider in Mr. Tiptree’s fiction. It includes perhaps thirty stories published during the last five years, a consistently high quality and Inventive body of work which has earned him a reputation as one of the major new voices in science fiction.

The Women Men Don't See

by JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

I see her first while the Mexicana 727 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger one in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.

Cozumel airport is the usual mix of panicky Yanks dressed for the sand pile and calm Mexicans dressed for lunch at the Presidente. I am a used-up Yank dressed for serious fishing; I extract my rods and duffel from the riot and hike across the field to find my charter pilot. One Captain Esteban has contracted to deliver me to the bonefish flats of Belise three

hundred kilometers down the coast.

Captain Esteban turns out to be four feet nine of mahogany Maya puro. He is also in a somber Maya snit. He tells me my Cessna is grounded somewhere and his Bonanza is booked to take a party to Chetumal.

Well, Chetumal is south; can he take me along and go on to Belise after he drops them? Gloomily he concedes the possibility — if the other party permits, and //’there are not too many equipajes.

The Chetumal party ap- proaches. It’s the woman and her young companion — daughter? — neatly picking their way across the gravel and yucca apron. Their Ventura two-suiters, like them- selves, are small, plain and neutral-colored. No problem.

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THE WOMEN MEN DON’T SEE

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When the captain asks if I may ride along, the mother says mildly “Of course,” without looking at me.

I think that’s when my inner tilt-detector sends up its first faint click. How come this woman has already looked me over carefully enough to accept on her plane? I disregard it. Paranoia hasn’t been useful in my business for years, but the habit is hard to break.

As we clamber into the Bonanza, I see the girl has what could be an attractive body if there was any spark at all. There isn’t. Captain Esteban folds a serape to sit on so he can see over the cowling and runs a meticulous check-down. And then we’re up and trundling over the turquoise Jello of the Caribbean into a stiff south wind.

The coast on our right is the territory of Quintana Roo. If you haven’t seen Yucatan, imagine the world’s biggest absolutely flat green-grey rug. An empty-looking land. We pass the white ruin of Tulum and the gash of the road to Chichen Itza, a half-dozen coconut plantations, and then nothing but reef and low scrub jungle all the way to the horizon, just about the way the conquistadores saw it four centuries back.

Long strings of cumulus are racing at us, shadowing the coast. I have gathered that part of our pilot’s gloom concerns the weather. A cold front is dying on the

henequen fields of Merida to west, and the south wind has piled up a string of coastal storms: what they call llovisnas. Est^an detours methodically around a couple of small thunderheads. The Bonanza jinks, and I look back with a vague notion of reassuring the women. They are calmly intent on what can be seen of Yucatan. Well, they were offered the copilot’s view, but they turned it down. Too shy?

Another llovisna puffs up ahead. Esteban takes the Bonanza upstairs, rising in his seat to sight his course. I relax for the first time in too long, savoring the latitudes between me and my desk, the week of fishing ahead. Our captain’s classic Maya profile attracts my gaze: forehead sloping back from his predatory nose, lips and jaw stepping back below it. If his slant eyes had been any more crossed, he couldn’t have made his license. That’s a handsome combination, believe it or not. On the little Maya chicks in their minishifts with iridescent gloop on those cockeyes, it’s also highly erotic. Nothing like the oriental doll thing; these people have stone bones. Captain Este- ban’s old grandmother could probably tow' the Bonanza...

I’m snapped awake by the cabin hitting my ear. Esteban is barking into his headset over a drumming racket of hail; the windows are dark grey.

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FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

One important noise is missing — the motor. I realize Esteban is fighting a dead plane. Thirty-six hundred; we’ve lost two thousand feet!

He slaps tank switches as the storm throws us around; I catch something about gasolina in a snarl that shows his big teeth. The Bonanza reels down. As he reaches for an overhead toggle, I see the fuel gauges are high. Maybe a clogged gravity feed line; I’ve heard of dirty gas down here. He drops the set. It’s a million to one nobody can read us through the storm at this range anyway. Twenty-five hundred — going down.

His electric feed pump seems to have cut in: the motor explodes — quits — explodes — and quits again for good. We are suddenly out of the bottom of the clouds. Below us is a long white line almost hidden by rain: The reef. But there isn’t any beach behind it, only a big meandering bay with a few mangrove flats — and it’s coming up at us fast.

This is going to be bad, I tell myself with great unoriginality. The women behind me haven’t made a sound. I look back and see they’re braced down with their coats by their heads. With a stalling speed around eighty, all this isn’t much use, but I wedge myself in.

Esteban yells some more into his set, flying a falling plane. He is

doing one jesus job, too — as the water rushes up at us he dives into a hair-raising turn and hangs us into the wind — with a long pale ridge of sandbar in front of our nose.

Where in hell he found it I never know. The Bonanza mushes down, and we belly-hit with a tremendous tearing crash — bounce — hit again — and everything slews wildly as we flat-spin into the mangroves at the end of the bar. Crash! Clang! The plane is wrapping itself into a mound of strangler fig with one wing up. The crashing quits with us all in one piece. And no fire. Fantastic.

Captain Esteban prys open his door, which is now in the roof. Behind me a woman is repeating quietly. “Mother. Mother.’’ I climb up the floor and find the girl trying to free herself from her mother’s embrace. The woman’s eyes are closed. Then she opens them and suddenly lets go, sane as soap. Esteban starts hauling them out. I grab the Bonanza’s aid kit and scramble out after them into brilliant sun and wind. The storm that hit us is already vanishing up the coast.

“Great landing. Captain.’’

''Oh, yes! It was beautiful.’’ The women are shaky, but no hysteria. Esteban is surveying the scenery with the expression his ancestors used on the Spaniards.

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If you’ve been in one of these things, you know the slow-motion inanity that goes on. Euphoria, first. We straggle down the fig tree and out onto the sandbar in the roaring hot wind, noting without alarm that there’s nothing but miles of crystalline water on all sides. It’s only a foot or so deep, and the bottom is the olive color of silt. The distant shore around us is all flat mangrove swamp, totally uninhabitable.

“Bahia Espiritu Santo.’’ Este- ban confirms my guess that we’re down in that huge water wilderness. I always wanted to fish it.

“What’s all that smoke?’’ The girl is pointing at the plumes blowing around the horizon.

“Alligator hunters,’’ says Este- ban. Maya poachers have left burn-offs in the swamps. It occurs to me that any signal fires we make aren’t going to be too conspicuous. And I now note that our plane is well-buried in the mound of fig. Hard to see it from the air.

Just as the question of how the hell we get out of here surfaces in my mind, the older woman asks composedly, “If they didn’t hear you. Captain, when will they start looking for us? Tomorrow?’’

“Correct,” Esteban agrees dourly. I recall that air-sea rescue is fairly informal here. Like, keep an eye open for Mario, his mother says he hasn’t been home all week.

It dawns on me we may be here quite some while.

Furthermore, the diesel-truck noise on our left is the Caribbean piling back into the mouth of the bay. The wind is pushing it at us, and the bare bottoms on the mangroves show that our bar is covered at high tide. I recall seeing a full moon this morning in — believe it, St. Louis — which means maximal tides. Well, we can climb up in the plane. But what about drinking water?

There’s a small splat! behind me. The older woman has sampled the bay. She shakes her head, smiling ruefully. It’s the first real expression on either of them; I take it as the signal for introductions. When I say I’m Don Fenton from St. Louis, she tells me their name is Parsons, from Bethesda, Maryland. She says it so nicely I don’t at first notice we aren’t being given first names. We all compliment Captain Esteban again.

His left eye is swelled shut, an inconvenience beneath his atten- tion as a Maya, but Mrs. Parsons spots the way he’s bracing his elbow in his ribs.

“You’re hurt. Captain.’’

''Roto — I think is broken.’’ He’s embarrassed at being in pain. We get him to peel off his Jaime shirt, revealing a nasty bruise in his superb dark-bay torso.

“Is there tape in that kit, Mr.

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Fenton? I’ve had a little first-aid training.”

She begins to deal competently and very impersonally with the tape. Miss Parsons and I wander to the end of the bar and have a conversation which I am later to recall acutely.

‘‘Roseate spoonbills,” I tell her as three pink birds flap away.

‘‘They’re beautiful,” she says in her tiny voice. They both have tiny voices. ‘‘He’s a Mayan Indian, isn’t he? The pilot, I mean.”

‘‘Right. The real thing, straight out of the Bonampak murals. Have you seen Chichen and Uxmal?”

‘‘Yes. We were in Merida. We’re going to Tikal in Guatemala ...I mean, we were.”

“You’ll get there.” It occurs to me the girl needs cheering up. “Have they told you that Maya mothers used to tie a board on the infant’s forehead to get that slant? They also hung a ball of tallow over its nose to make its eyes cross. It was considered aristocratic.”

She smiles and takes another peak at Esteban. “People seem different in Yucatan,” she says thoughtfully. “Not like the Indians around Mexico City. More, I don’t know, independent.”

“Comes from never having been conquered. Mayas got massacred and chased a lot, but nobody ever really flattened them. I bet you didn’t know that the last Mexican-

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

Maya war ended with a negotiated truce in nineteen thirty-five?”

“No!” Then she says seriously, “I like that.”

“So do I.”

“The water is really rising very fast,” says Mrs. Parsons gently from behind us.

It is, and so is another llovisna. We climb back into the Bonanza. I try to rig my parka for a rain catcher, which blows loose as the storm hits fast and furious. We sort a couple of malt bars and my bottle of Jack Daniels out of the jumble in the cabin and make ourselves reasonably comfortable. The Par- sons take a sip of whiskey each, Esteban and I considerably more. The Bonanza begins to bump soggily. Esteban makes an ancient one-eyed Maya face at the water seeping into his cabin and goes to sleep. We all nap.

When the water goes down, the euphoria has gone with it, and we’re very, very thirsty. It’s also damn near sunset. I get to work with a bait-casting rod and some treble hooks and manage to foul-hook four small mullets. Esteban and the women tie the Bonanza’s midget life raft out in the mangroves to catch rain. The wind is parching hot. No planes go by.

Finally another shower comes over and yields us six ounces of water apiece. When the sunset

THE WOMEN MEN DON’T SEE

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envelopes the world in golden smoke, we squat on the sandbar to eat wet raw mullet and Instant Breakfast crumbs. The women are now in shorts, neat but definitely not sexy.

“I never realized how refreshing raw fish is,” Mrs. Parsons says pleasantly. Her daughter chuckles, also pleasantly. She’s on Mamma’s far side away from Esteban and me. I have Mrs. Parsons figured now: Mother Hen protecting only chick from male predators. That’s all right with me. I came here to fish.

But something is irritating me. The damn women haven’t com- plained once, you understand. Not a peep, not a quaver, no personal manifestations whatever. They’re like something out of a manual.

“You really seem at home in the wilderness, Mrs. Parsons. You do much camping?”

“Oh goodness no.” Diffident laugh. “Not since my girl scout days. Oh, look — are those man-of-war birds?”

Answer a question with a question. I wait while the frigate birds sail nobly into the sunset.

“Bethesda... Would I be wrong in guessing you work for Uncle Sam?”

“Why, yes. You must be very familiar with Washington, Mr. Fenton. Does your work bring you there often?”

Anywhere but on our sandbar

the little ploy would have worked. My hunter’s gene twitches.

“Which agency are you with?”

She gives up gracefully. “Oh, just GSA records. I’m a librarian.”

Of course, I know her now, all the Mrs. Parsonses in records divisions, accounting sections, re- search branches, personnel and administration offices. Tell Mrs. Parsons we need a recap on the external service contracts for fiscal ’73. So Yucatan is on the tours now? Pity... I offer her the tired little joke. “You know where the bodies are buried.”

She smiles deprecatingly and stands up. “It does get dark quickly, doesn’t it?”

Time to get back into the plane.

A flock of ibis are circling us, evidently accustomed to roosting in our fig tree. Esteban produces a machete and a Maya hammock. He proceeds to sling it between tree and plane, refusing help. His machete stroke is noticeably tentative.

The Parsons are taking a pee behind the tail vane. I hear one of them slip and squeal faintly. When they come back over the hull, Mrs. Parsons asks, “Might we sleep in the hammock. Captain?”

Esteban splits an unbelieving grin. I protest about rain and mosquitoes.

“Oh, we have insect repellent and we do enjoy fresh air.”

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FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

The air is rushing by about force five and colder by the minute.

“We have our raincoats,” the girl adds cheerfully.

Well, okay, ladies. We dan- gerous males retire inside the damp cabin. Through the wind I hear the women laugh softly now and then, apparently cosy in their chilly ibis roost. A private insanity, I decide. I know myself for the least threaten- ing of men; my non-charisma has been in fact an asset jobwise, over the years. Are they having fantasies about Esteban? Or maybe they really are fresh-air nuts.. .Sleep comes for me in invisible diesels roaring by on the reef outside.

We emerge dry-mouthed into a vast windy salmon sunrise. A diamond chip of sun breaks out of the sea and promptly submerges in cloud. I go to work with the rod and some mullet bait while two showers detour around us. Breakfast is a strip of wet barracuda apiece.

The Parsons continue stoic and helpful. Under Esteban’s direction they set up a section of cowling for a gasoline flare in case we hear a plane, but nothing goes over except one unseen jet droning toward Panama. The wind howls, hot and dry and full of coral dust. So are we.

“They look first in the sea,” Esteban remarks. His aristocratic frontal slope is beaded with sweat; Mrs. Parsons watches him con-

cernedly. I watch the cloud blanket tearing by above, getting higher and dryer and thicker. While that lasts nobody is going to find us, and the water business is now unfunny.

Finally I borrow Esteban’s machete and hack a long light pole. There’s stream coming in there, I saw it from the plane. Can’t be more than two, three miles.”

“I’m afraid the raft’s torn.” Mrs. Parsons shows me the cracks in the orange plastic; irritatingly, it’s a Delaware label.

“All right,” I hear myself announce. “The tide’s going down. If we cut the good end of that air tube, I can haul water back in it. I’ve waded flats before.”

Even to me it sounds crazy.

“Stay by plane,” Esteban says. He’s right, of course. He’s also clearly running a fever. I look at the overcast and taste grit and old barracuda. The hell with the manual.

When I start cutting up the raft, Esteban tells me to take the serape. “You stay one night.” He’s right about that, too; I’ll have to wait out the tide.

“I’ll come with you,” says Mrs. Parsons calmly.

I simply stare at her. What new madness has got into Mother Hen? Does she imagine Esteban is too battered to be functional? While I’m being astounded, my eyes take in the fact that Mrs. Parsons is now

the women men DON’T SEE

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quite rosy around the knees, with her hair loose and a sunburn starting on her nose. A trim, in fact a very neat shading-forty.

“Look, that stuff is horrible going. Mud up to your ears and water over your head.”

“Fm really quite fit and I swim a great deal. Fll try to keep up. Two would be much safer, Mr. Fenton, and we can bring more water.”

She's serious. Well, Fm about as fit as a marshmallow at this time of winter, and I can’t pretend Fm depressed by the idea of company. So be it.

“Let me show Miss Parsons how to work this rod.”

Miss Parsons is even rosier and more windblown, and she’s not clumsy with my tackle. A good girl. Miss Parsons, in her nothing way. We cut another staff and get some gear together. At the last minute Esteban shows how sick he feels: he offers me the machete. I thank him, but, no; Fm used to my Wirkkala knife. We tie some air into the plastic tube for a float and set out along the sandiest looking line.

Esteban raises one dark palm.

^Buen viaje." Miss Parsons has hugged her mother and gone to cast from the mangrove. She waves. We wave.

An hour later we’re barely out of waving distance. The going is purely god-awful. The sand keeps dissolving into silt you can’t walk

on or swim through, and the bottom is spiked with dead mangrove spears. We flounder from one pothole to the next, scaring up rays and turtles and hoping to god we don’t kick a moray eel. Where we’re not soaked in slime, we’re desiccated, and we smell like the Old Cretaceous.

Mrs. Parsons keeps up dog- gedly. I only have to pull her out once. When I do so, I notice the sandbar is now out of sight.

Finally we reach the gap in the mangrove line I thought was the creek. It turns out to open into another arm of the bay, with more mangroves ahead. And the tide is coming in.

“I’ve had the world’s lousiest idea.”

Mrs. Parsons only says mildly, “It’s so different from the view from the plane.”

I revise my opinion of the girl scouts, and we plow on past the mangroves toward the smoky haze that has to be shore. The sun is setting in our faces, making it hard to see. Ibises and herons fly up around us, and once a big hermit spooks ahead, his fin cutting a rooster tail. We fall into more potholes. The flashlights get soaked. I am having fantasies of the mangrove as universal obstacle; it’s hard to recall I ever walked down a street, for instance, without stum- bling over or under or through

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FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

mangrove roots. And the sun is dropping, down, down.

Suddenly we hit a ledge and fall over it into a cold flow.

“The stream! It’s fresh water!”

We guzzle and gargle and douse our heads; it’s the best drink I remember. “Oh my, oh my — !” Mrs. Parsons is laughing right out loud.

“That dark place over to the right looks like real land.”

We flounder across the flow and follow a hard shelf, which turns into solid bank and rises over our heads. Shortly there’s a break beside a clump of spiny bromels, and we scramble up and flop down at the top, dripping and stinking. Out of sheer reflex my arms goes around my companion’s shoulder — but Mrs. Parsons isn’t there; she’s up on her knees peering at the burnt-over plain around us.

“Its so good to see land one can walk on!” The tone is too innocent. Noli me tangere.

“Don’t try it.” I’m exasperated; the muddy little woman, what does she think? “That ground out there is a crust of ashes over muck, and it’s full of stubs. You can go in over your knees.”

“It seems firm here.”

“We’re in an alligator nursery. That was the slide we came up. Don’t worry, by now the old lady’s doubtless on her way to be made into handbags.”

“What a shame.”

“I better set a line down in the stream while I can still see.”

I slide back down and rig a string of hooks that may get us breakfast. When I get back Mrs. Parsons is wringing muck out of the serape.

“I’m glad you warned me, Mr. Fenton. It is treacherous.”

“Yeah.” I’m over my irritation; god knows I don’t want to tangere Mrs. Parsons, even if I weren’t beat down to mush. “In its quiet way, Yucatan is a tough place to get around in. You can see why the Mayas built roads. Speaking of which — look!”

The last of the sunset is silhouetting a small square shape a couple of kilometers inland: a Maya ruina with a fig tree growing out of it.

“Lot of those around. People think they were guard towers.”

“What a deserted-feeling land.”

“Let’s hope it’s deserted by mosquitoes.”

We slump down in the ’gator nursery and share the last malt bar, watching the stars slide in and out of the blowing clouds. The bugs aren’t too bad; maybe the burn did them in. And it isn’t hot any more, either — in fact, it’s not even warm, wet as we are. Mrs. Parsons continues tranquilly interested in Yucatan and unmistakably unin- terested in togetherness.

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Just as Fm beginning to get aggressive notions about how we’re going to spend the night if she expects me to give her the serape, she stands up, scuffs at a couple of hummocks and says, “I expect this is as good a place as any, isn’t it, Mr. Fenton?”

With which she spreads out the raft bag for a pillow and lies down on her side in the dirt with exactly half the serape over her and the other corner folded neatly open. Her small back is toward me.

The demonstration is so con- vincing that I’m halfway under my share of serape before the preposterousness of it stops me.

“By the way. My name is Don.”

“Oh, of course.” Her voice is graciousness itself. “I’m Ruth.”

I get in not quite touching her, and we lie there like two fish on a plate, exposed to the stars and smelling the smoke in the wind and feeling things underneath us. It is absolutely the most intimately awkward moment I’ve had in years.

The woman doesn’t mean one thing to me, but the obtrusive recessiveness of her, the defiance of her little rump eight inches from my fly — for two pesos I’d have those shorts down and introduce myself. If I were twenty years younger. If I wasn’t so bushed. ..But the twenty years and the exhaustion are there, and it comes to me wryly that Mrs. Ruth Parsons has judged

things to a nicety. If I were twenty years younger, she wouldn’t be here. Like the butterfish that float around a sated barracuda, only to vanish away the instant his intent changes, Mrs. Parsons knows her little shorts are safe. Those firmly filled little shorts, so close...

A warm nerve stirs in my groin — and just as it does I become aware of a silent emptiness beside me. Mrs. Parsons is imperceptibly inching away. Did my breathing change? Whatever, I’m perfectly sure that if my hand reached, she’d be elsewhere — probably announc- ing her intention to take a dip. The twenty years bring a chuckle to my throat, and I relax.

“Good night, Ruth.”

“Good night, Don.”

And believe it or not, we sleep, while the armadas of the wind roar overhead.

Light wakes me — a cold white glare.

My first thought is ’gator hunters. Best to manifest ourselves as turistas as fast as possible. I scramble up, noting that Ruth has dived under the bromel clump.

*'Quien estas? A secorro! Help, senores!

No answer except the light goes out, leaving me blind.

I yell some more in a couple of languages. It stays dark. There’s a vague scrabbling, whistling sound somewhere in the burn-off. Liking

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everything less by the minute, I try a speech about our plane having crashed and we need help.

A very narrow pencil of light flicks over us and snaps off.

“Eh-ep,” says a blurry voice and something metallic twitters. They for sure aren’t locals. I’m getting unpleasant ideas.

“Yes, help!’’

Something goes crackle-crackle whish-whish, and all sounds fade away.

“What the holy hell!’’ I stumble toward where they were.

“Look.’’ Ruth whispers behind me. “Over by the ruin.’’

I look and catch a multiple flicker which winks out fast.

“A camp?’’

And I take two more blind strides; my leg goes down through the crust, and a spike spears me just where you stick the knife in to unjoint a drumstick. By the pain that goes through my bladder I recognize that my trick kneecap has caught it.

For instant basket case you can’t beat kneecaps. First you discover your knee doesn’t bend any more, and so you try putting some weight on it, and a bayonet goes up your spine and unhinges your jaw. Little grains of gristle have got into the sensitive bearing surface. The knee tries to buckle and can’t, and mercifully you fall down.

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

Ruth helps me back to the serape.

“What a fool, what a god- forgotten imbecile — ’’

“Not at all, Don. It was perfectly natural.” We strike matches; her fingers push mine aside, exploring. “I think it’s in place, but it’s swelling fast. I’ll lay a wet handkerchief on it. We’ll have to wait for morning to check the cut. Were they poachers, do you think?’’

“Probably,’’ I lie. What I think they were is smugglers.

She comes back with a soaked bandanna and drapes it on. “We must have frightened them. That light.. .it seemed so bright.’’

“Some hunting party. People do crazy things around here.”

“Perhaps they’ll come back in the morning.”

“Could be.”

Ruth pulls up the wet serape, and we say goodnight again. Neither of us are mentioning how we’re going to get back to the plane without help.

I lie staring south where Alpha Centauri is blinking in and out of the overcast and cursing myself for the sweet mess I’ve made. My first idea is giving way to an even less pleasing one.

Smuggling, around here, is a couple of guys in an outboard meeting a shrimp boat by the reef. They don’t light up the sky or have

the women men DON’T SEE

some kind of swamp buggy that goes whoosh. Plus a big camp... paramilitary-type equipment?

I’ve seen a report of Guevarista infiltrators operating on the British Honduran border, which is about a hundred kilometers — sixty miles — south of here. Right under those clouds. If that’s what looked us over, ril be more than happy if they don’t come back...

I wake up in pelting rain, alone. My first move confirms that my leg is as expected — a giant misplaced erection bulging out of my shorts. I raise up painfully to see Ruth standing by the bromels, looking over the bay. Solid wet nimbus is pouring out of the south.

“No planes today.’’

“Oh, good morning,' Don. Should we look at that cut now?’’

“It’s minimal.’’ In fact the skin is hardly broken, and no deep puncture. Totally out of proportion to the havoc inside.

“Well, they have water to drink,” Ruth says tranquilly. “Maybe those hunters will come back. I’ll go see if we have a fish — that is, can I help you in any way, Don?”

Very tactful. I emit an ungracious negative, and she goes off about her private concerns.

They certainly are private, too; when I recover from my own sanitary efforts, she’s still away. Finally I hear splashing.

15

“It’s a big fish!” More splashing. Then she climbs up the bank with a three-pound mangrove snapper — and something else.

It isn’t until after the messy work of filleting the fish that I begin to notice.

She’s making a smudge of chaff and twigs to singe the fillets, small hands very quick, tension in that female upper lip. The rain has eased off for the moment; we’re sluicing wet but warm enough. Ruth brings me my fish on a mangrove skewer and sits back on her heels with an odd breathy sigh.

“Aren’t you joining me?”

“Oh, of course.” She gets a strip and picks at it, saying quickly, “We either have too much salt or too little, don’t we? I should fetch some brine.” Her eyes are roving from nothing to noplace.

“Good thought.” I hear another sigh and decide the girl scouts need an assist. “Your daughter men- tioned you’ve come from Merida. Seen much of Mexico?”

“Not really. Last year we went to Mazatlan and Cuernavaca...” She puts the fish down, frowning.

“And you’re going to see Tikal. Going to Bonampak too?”

“No.” Suddenly she jumps up brushing rain off her face. “I’ll bring you some water, Don.”

She ducks down the slide, and after a fair while comes back with a full bromel stalk.

16

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

“Thanks.” She’s standing above me, staring restlessly round the horizon. “

“Ruth, I hate to say it, but those guys are not coming back and it’s probably just as well. Whatever they were up to, we looked like trouble. The most they’ll do is tell someone we’re here. That’ll take a day or two to get around, we’ll be back at the plane by then.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Don.” She wanders over to the smudge fire.

“And quit fretting about your daughter. She’s a big girl.”

“Oh, I’m sure Althea’s all right... They have plenty of water now.” Her fingers drum on her thigh. It’s raining again.

“Come on, Ruth. Sit down. Tell me about Althea. Is she still in college?”

She gives that sighing little laugh and sits. “Althea got her degree last year. She’s in computer programming.”

“I’m in Foreign Procurement Archives.” She smiles mechan- ically, but her breathing is shallow. “It’s very interesting.”

“I know a Jack Wittig in Contracts, maybe you know him?”

It sounds pretty absurd, there in the ’gator slide.

“Oh, I’ve met Mr. Wittig. I’m sure he wouldn’t remember me.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not very memorable.”

Her voice is purely factual. She’s perfectly right, of course. Who was that woman, Mrs. Jannings, Janny, who coped with my per diem for years? Competent, agreeable, impersonal. She had a sick father or something. But dammit, Ruth is a lot younger and better-looking. Comparatively speaking.

“Maybe Mrs. Parsons doesn’t want to be memorable.”

She makes a vague sound, and I suddenly realize Ruth isn’t listen- ing to me at all. Her hands are clenched around her knees, she’s staring inland at the ruin.

“Ruth, I tell you our friends with the light are in the next county by now. Forget it, we don’t need them.”

Her eyes come back to me as if she’d forgotten I was there, and she nods slowly. It seems to be too much effort to speak. Suddenly she cocks her head and jumps up again.

“I’ll go look at the line, Don. I thought I heard something — ” She’s gone like a rabbit.

While she’s away I try getting up onto my good leg and the staff. The pain is sickening; knees seem to have some kind of hot line to the stomach. I take a couple of hops to test whether the Demerol I have in my belt would get me walking. As I do so, Ruth comes up the bank with a fish flapping in her hands.

the women men DON’T SEE

17

“Oh, no, Don! No/'’ She actually clasps the snapper to her breast.

“The water will take some of my weight. I’d like to give it a try.”

“You mustn’t!” Ruth says quite violently and instantly modulates down. “Look at the bay, Don. One can’t see a thing.”

I teeter there, tasting bile and looking at the mingled curtains of sun and rain driving across the water. She’s right, thank god. Even with two good legs we could get into trouble out there.

“I guess one more night won’t kill us.”

I let her collapse me back onto the gritty plastic, and she positively bustles around, finding me a chunk to lean on, stretching the serape on both staffs to keep rain off me, bringing another drink, grubbing for dry tinder.

“I’ll make us a real bonfire as soon as it lets up, Don. They’ll see our smoke, they’ll know we’re all right. We just have to wait.” Cheery smile. “Is there any way we can make you more comfortable?”

Holy Saint Sterculius: playing house in a mud puddle. For a fatuous moment I wonder if Mrs. Parsons has designs on me. And then she lets out another sigh and sinks back onto her heels with that listening look. Unconsciously her rump wiggles a little. My ear picks up the operative word: wait.

Ruth Parsons is waiting. In fact, she acts as if she’s waiting so hard it’s killing her. For what? For someone to get us out of here, what else? ...But why was she so horrified when I got up to try to leave? Why all this tension?

My paranoia stirs. I grab it by the collar and start idly checking back. Up to when whoever it was showed up last night, Mrs. Parson was, I guess, normal. Calm and sensible, anyway. Now’s she’s humming like a high wire. And she seems to want to stay here and wait. Just as an intellectual pastime, why?

Could she have intended to come here? No way. Where she planned to be was Chetumal, which is on the border. Come to think, Chetumal is an odd way round to Tikal. Let’s say the scenario was that she’s meeting somebody in Chetumal. Somebody who’s part of an organisation. So now her contact in Chetumal knows she’s overdue. And when those types appeared last night, some- thing suggests to her that they’re part of the same organisation. And she hopes they’ll put one and one together and come back for her?

“May I have the knife, Don? I’ll clean the fish.”

Rather slowly I pass the knife, kicking my subconscious. Such a decent ordinary little woman, a good girl scout. My trouble is that

18

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

I’ve bumped into too many professional agilities under the careful stereotypes. Fm not very memorable,..

What’s in Foreign Procurement Archives? Wittig handles classified contracts. Lots of money stuff; foreign currency negotiations, com- modity price schedules, some industrial technology. Or — just as a hypothesis — it could be as simple as a wad of bills back in that modest beige Ventura, to be exchanged for a packet from say, Costa Rica. If she were a courier, they’d want to get at the plane. And then what about me and maybe Esteban? Even hypothetically, not good.

I watch her hacking at the fish, forehead knotted with effort, teeth in her lip. Mrs. Ruth Parsons of Bethesda, this thrumming, private woman. How crazy can I get? They'll see our smoke...

“Here’s your knife, Don. I washed it. Does the leg hurt very badly?’’

I blink away the fantasies and see a scared little woman in a mangrove swamp.

“Sit down, rest. You’ve been going all out.’’

She sits obediently, 4ike a kid in a dentist chair.

“You’re stewing about Althea. And she’s probably worried about you. We’ll get back tomorrow under our own stream, Ruth.’’

“Honestly I’m not worried at all, Don.’’ The smile fades; she nibbles her lip, frowning put at the bay.

“Ruth, you know you surprised me when you offered to come along. Not that I don’t appreciate it. But I rather thought you’d be concerned about leaving Althea. Alone with our good pilot, I mean. Or was it only me?’’

This gets her attention at last.

“I believe Captain Esteban is a very fine type of man.’’

The words surprise me a little. Isn’t the correct line more like “I trust Althea,’’ or even, indignantly, “Althea is a good girl’’?

“He’s a man. Althea seemed to think he was interesting.’’

She goes on staring at the bay. And then I notice her tongue flick out and lick that prehensile upper lip. There’s a flush that isn’t sunburn around her ears and throat too, and one hand is gently rubbing her thigh. What’s she seeing, out there in the flats?

Captain Esteban’s mahogany arms clasping Miss Althea Parsons’ pearly body. Captain Esteban’s archaic nostrils snuffling in Miss Parsons’ tender neck. Captain Esteban’s copper buttocks pump- ing into Althea’s creamy upturned bottom. ..The hammock, very bouncy. Mayas know all about it.

Well, well. So Mother Hen has her little quirks.

the women men dont see

19

I feel fairly silly and more than a little irritated. Now I find out.. .But even vicarious lust has much to recommend it, here in the mud and rain. I settle back, recalling that Miss Althea the computer programmer had waved good-bye very composedly. Was she sending her mother to flounder across the bay with me so she can get programmed in Maya? The memory of Honduran mahogany logs drifting in and out of the opalescent sand comes to me. Just as I am about to suggest that Mrs. Parsons might care to share my rain shelter, she remarks serenely, “The Mayas seem to be a very fine type of people. I believe you said so to Althea.”

The implications fall on me with the rain. Type. As in breeding, bloodline, sire. Am I supposed to have certified Esteban not only as a stud but as a genetic donor?

“Ruth, are you telling me you’re prepared to accept a half-Indian grandchild?”

“Why, Don, that’s up to Althea, you know.”

Looking at the mother, I guess it is. Oh, for mahogany gonads.

Ruth has gone back to listening to the wind, but I’m not about to let her off that easy. Not after all that noli me tangere jazz.

“What will Althea’s father think?”

Her face snaps around at me.

genuinely startled.

“Althea’s father?” Complicated semismile. “He won’t mind.”

“He’ll accept it too, eh?” I see her shake her head as if a fly were bothering her, and add with a cripple’s malice: “Your husband must be a very fine type of a man.”

Ruth looks at me, pushing her wet hair back abruptly. I have the impression that mousy Mrs. Parsons is roaring out of control, but her voice is quiet.

“There isn’t any Mr. Parsons, Don. There never was. Althea’s father was a Danish medical student...! believe he has gained considerable prominence.”

“Oh.” Something warns me not to say I’m sorry. “You mean he doesn’t know about Althea?”

“No.” She smiles, her eyes bright and cuckoo.

“Seems like rather a rough deal for her.”

“I grew up quite happily under the same circumstances.”

Bang, I’m dead. Well, well, well. A mad image blooms in my mind: generations of solitary. Parsons women selecting sires, making impregnation trips. Well, I hear the world is moving their way.

“I better look at the fish line.”

She leaves. The glow fades. No. Just no, no contact. Good-bye, Captain Esteban. My leg is very uncomfortable. The hell with Mrs. Parsons’ long-distance orgasm.

20

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

We don’t talk much after that, which seems to suit Ruth. The odd day drags by. Squall after squall blows over us. Ruth singes up some more fillets, but the rain drowns her smudge; it seems to pour hardest just as the sun’s about to show.

Finally she comes to sit under my sagging serape, but there’s no warmth there. I doze, aware of her getting up now and then to look around. My subconscious notes that she’s still twitchy. I tell my subconscious to knock it off.

Presently I wake up to find her penciling on the water-soaked pages of a little notepad.

“Whafs that, a shopping list for alligators?”

Automatic polite laugh. “Oh, just an address. In case we — I’m being silly, Don.”

“Hey.” 1 sit up, wincing. “Ruth, quit fretting. I mean it. We’ll all be out of this soon. You’ll have a great story to tell.”

She doesn’t look up. “Yes... I guess we will.”

“Come on, we’re doing fine. There isn’t any real danger here, you know. Unless you’re allergic to fish?”

Another good-little-girl laugh, but there’s a shiver in it.

“Sometimes I think I’d like to go.. .really far away.”

To keep her talking I say the first thing in my head.

“Tell me, Ruth. I’m curious why you would settle for that kind of lonely life, there in Washington? I mean, a woman like you — ”

“Should get married?” She gives a shaky sigh, pushing the notebook back in her wet pocket.

“Why not? It’s the normal source of companionship. Don’t tell me you’re trying to be some kind of professional man-hater.”

“Lesbian, you mean?” Her laugh sounds better. “With my security rating? No, I’m not.”

“Well, then. Whatever trauma you went through, these things don’t last forever. You can’t hate all men.”

The smile is back. “Oh, there wasn’t any trauma, Don, and I don't hate men. That would be as silly as — as hating the weather.” She glances wryly at the blowing rain.

“I think you have a grudge. You’re even spooky of me.”

Smooth as a mouse bite she says, “I’d love to hear about your family, Don?”

Touche. I give her the edited version of how I don’t have one any more, and she says she’s sorry, how sad. And we chat about what a good life a single person really has, and how she and her friends enjoy plays and concerts and travel, and one of them is head cashier for Ringling Brothers, how about that?

But it’s coming out jerkier and

the women men dont see

jerkier like a bad tape, with her eyes going round the horizon in the pauses and her face listening for something that isn’t my voice. What’s wrong with her? Well, what’s wrong with any furtively unconventional middle-aged woman with an empty bed. And a security clearance. An old habit of mind remarks unkindly that Mrs. Parsons represents what is known as the classic penetration target.

“ — so much more opportunity now.” Her voice trails off.

“Hurrah for women’s lib, eh?”

“The lib?” Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. “Oh, that’s doomed.”

The word apocalyptic jars my attention.

“What do you mean, doomed?”

She glances at me as if I weren’t hanging straight either and says vaguely, “Oh...”

“Come on, why doomed? Didn’t they get that equal rights bill?”

Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.

“Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more agressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like — like that smoke. We’ll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will

21

be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You’ll see.”

Now all this is delivered in a grey tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.

“Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch.”

No answering smile.

“That’s fantasy.” Her voice is still quiet. “Women don’t work that way. We’re a — a toothless world.” She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. “What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”

“Sounds like a guerrilla opera- tion.” I’m not really joking, here in the ’gator den. In fact. I’m wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs.

“Guerrillas have something to hope for.” Suddenly she switches on the jolly smile. “Think of opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City.”

I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one.

“Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do.”

22

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

“Do they?” Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars...” Her voice is a whisper. “All the huge authoritarian organiza- tions for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefields. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of — of going away — ” She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”

“Men hate wars too, Ruth,” I say as gently as I can.

“I know.” She shrugs and climbs to her feet. “But that’s your problem, isn’t it?”

End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn’t even living in the same world with me.

I watch her move around restlessly, head turning toward the ruins. Alienation like that can add up to dead pigeons, which would be GSA’s problem. It could also lead to believing some joker who’s promising to change the world. Which could just probably be my problem if one of them was over in that camp last night, where she keeps looking. Guerrillas have something to hope for...?

Nonsense. I try another position and see that the sky seems to be clearing as the sun sets. The wind is

quieting down at last too. Insane to think this little woman is acting out some fantasy in this swamp. But that equipment last night was no fantasy; if those lads have some connection with her. I’ll be in the way. You couldn’t find a handier spot to dispose of a body.. .Maybe some Guevarista is a fine type of man?

Absurd. Sure.. .The only thing more absurd would be to come through the wars and get myself terminated by a mad librarian’s boyfriend on a fishing trip.

A fish flops in the stream below us. Ruth spins around so fast she hits the serape. “I better start the fire,” she says, her eyes still on the plain and her head cocked, listening.

All right, let’s test.

“Expecting company?”

It rocks her. She freezes, and her eyes come swiveling around at me like a film take captioned Fright. I can see her decide to smile.

“Oh, one never can tell!” She laughs weirdly, the eyes not changed. “I’ll get the — the kindling.” She fairly scuttles into the brush.

Nobody, paranoid or not, could call that a normal reaction.

Ruth Parsons is either psycho or she’s expecting something to happen — and it has nothing to do with me; I scared her pissless.

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23

Well, she could be nuts. And I could be wrong, but there are some mistakes you only make once. Reluctantly I unzip my body belt, telling myself that if I think what I think, my only course is to take something for my leg and get as far as possible from Mrs. Ruth Parsons before whoever she’s waiting for arrives.

In my belt also is a .32 caliber asset Ruth doesn’t know about — and it’s going to stay there. My longevity program leaves the shoot-outs to TV and stresses being somewhete else when the roof falls in. I can spend a perfectly safe and also perfectly horrible night out in one of those mangrove flats. ..am I insane?

At this moment Ruth stands up and stares blatantly inland with her hand shading her eyes. Then she tucks something into her pocket, buttoms up and tightens her belt.

That does it.

I dry-swallow two 100 mg tabs, which should get me ambulatory and still leave me wits to hide. Give it a few minutes. I make sure my compass and some hooks are in my own pocket and sit waiting while Ruth fusses with her smudge fire, sneaking looks away when “^he thinks I’m not watching.

The flat world around us is turning into an unearthly amber and violet light show as the first numbness seeps into my leg. Ruth

has crawled under the bromels for more dry stuff; I can see her foot. Okay. I reach for my staff.

Suddenly the foot jerks, and Ruth yells — or rather, her throat makes that Uh-uh-uhhh that means pure horror. The foot disappears in a rattle of bromel stalks.

I lunge upright on the crutch and look over the bank at a frozen scene.

Ruth is crouching sideways on the ledge, clutching her stomach. They are about a yard below, floating on the river in a skiff. While I was making up my stupid mind, her friends have glided right under my ass. There are three of them.

They are tall and white. I try to see them as men in some kind of white jumpsuits. The one nearest the bank is stretching out a long white arm toward Ruth. She jerks and scuttles further away.

The arm stretches after her. It stretches and stretches. It stretches two yards and stays hanging in air. Small black things are wiggling from its tip.

I look where their faces should be and see black hollow dishes with vertical stripes. The stripes move slowly...

There is no more possibility of their being human — or anything else I’ve ever seen. What has Ruth conjured up?

24

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

The scene is totally silent. I blink, blink — this cannot be real. The two in the far end of the skiff are writhing those arms around an apparatus on a tripod. A weapon? Suddenly I hear the same blurry voice I heard in the night.

“Guh-give,” it groans. “G- give...”

Dear god, it’s real, whatever it is. I’m terrified. My mind is trying not to form a word.

And Ruth — Jesus, of course — Ruth is terrified too; she’s edging along the bank away from them, gaping at the monsters in the skiff, who are obviously nobody’s friends. She’s hugging something to her body. Why doesn’t she get over the bank and circle back behind me?

“G-g-give.” That wheeze is coming from the tripod. “Pee-eeze give.” The skiff is moving upstream below Ruth, following her. The arm undulates out at her again, its black digits looping. Ruth scram- bles to the top of the bank.

“Ruth!” My voice cracks. “Ruth, get over here behind me!”

She doesn’t look at me, only keeps sidling farther away. My terror detonates into anger.

“Come back here!” With my free hand I’m working the .32 out of my belt. The sun has gone down.

She doesn’t turn but straightens up warily, still hugging the thing. I see her mouth working. Is she actually trying to talk to them?

“Please...” She swallows. “Please speak to me. I need your help.”

“RUTH!!”

At this moment the nearest white monster whips into a great S-curve and sails right onto the bank at her, eight feet of snowy rippling horror.

And I shoot Ruth.

I don’t know that for a minute — I’ve yanked the gun up so fast that my staff slips and dumps me as I fire. I stagger up, hearing Ruth scream “No! No! No!”

The creature is back down by his boat, and Ruth is still farther away, clutching herself. Blood is running down her elbow.

“Stop it, Don! They aren’t attacking you!”

“For god’s sake! Don’t be a fool, I can’t help you if you won’t get away from them!”

No reply. Nobody moves. No sound except the drone of a jet passing far above. In the darkening stream below me the three white figures shift uneasily; I get the impression of radar dishes focus- ing. The word spells itself in my head: Aliens,

Extraterrestrials.

What do I do, call the President? Capture them single- handed with my peashooter?. ..I’m alone in the arse end of nowhere with one leg and my brain cuddled in meperidine hydrochloride.

the women men DON’T SEE

25

“Prrr-eese,” their machine blurs again. “Wa-wat hep...”

“Our plane fell down,” Ruth says in a very distinct, eerie voice. She points up at the jet, out towards the bay. ‘‘My — my child is there. Please take us there in your boat.”

Dear god. While she’s gestur- ing, I get a look at the thing she’s hugging in her wounded arm. It’s metallic, like a big glimmering distributor head. What — ?

Wait a minute. This morning: when she was gone so long, she could have found that thing. Something they left behind. Or dropped. And she hid it, not telling me. That’s why she kept going under that bromel clump — she was peeking at it. Waiting. And the owners came back and caught her. They want it. She’s trying to bargain, by god.

“ — Water,” Ruth is pointing again. “Take us. Me. And him.”

The black faces turn toward me, blind and horrible. Later on I may be grateful for that “us.” Not now.

‘‘Throw your gun away, Don. They’ll take us back.” Her voice is weak.

“Like hell I will. You — who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Oh god, does it matter? He’s frightened,” she cries to them. ‘‘Can you understand?”

She’s as alien as they, there in the twilight. The beings in the skiff are twittering among themselves. Their box starts to moan.

‘‘Ss-stu-dens,” I make out. ‘‘S-stu-ding..not — huh-arm-ing... w-we...buh...” It fades into garble and then says “G-give...we... g-go-”

Peace-loving cultural-exchange students — on the interstellar level now. Oh, no.

“Bring that thing here, Ruth — right now!”

But she’s starting down the bank toward them saying. “Take me.

“Wait! You need a tourniquet on that arm.”

“I know. Please put the gun down, Don.”

She’s actually at the skiff, right by them. They aren’t moving.

‘‘Jesus Christ.” Slowly, reluc- tantly I drop the .32. When I start down the slide, I find I’m floating; adrenaline and Demerol are a bad mix.

The skiff comes gliding toward me, Ruth in the bow clutching the thing and her arm. The aliens stay in the stern behind their tripod, away from me. I note the ^kiff is camouflaged tan and green. The world around us is deep shadowy blue.

“Don, bring the water bag!”

As I’m dragging down the plastic bag, it occurs to me that

26

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

Ruth really is cracking up, the water isn’t needed now. But my own brain seems to have gone into overload. All I can focus on is a long white rubbery arm with black worms clutching the far end of the orange tube, helping me fill it. This isn’t happening.

“Can you get in, Don?’’ As I hoist my numb legs up, two long white pipes reach for me. No you don 't, I kick and tumble in beside Ruth. She moves away.

A creaky hum starts up, it’s coming from a wedge in the center of the skiff. And we’re in motion, sliding toward dark mangrove files.

I stare mindlessly at the wedge. Alien technological secrets? I can’t see any, the power source is under that triangular cover, about two feet long. The gadgets on the tripod are equally cryptic, except that one has a big lens. Their light?

As we hit the open bay, the hum rises and we start planing faster and faster still. Thirty knots? Hard to judge in the dark. Their hull seems to be a modified trihedral much like ours, with a remarkable absence of slap. Say twenty-two feet. Schemes of capturing it swirl in my mind: I’ll need Esteban.

Suddenly a huge flood of white light fans out over us from the tripod, blotting out the aliens in the stern. I see Ruth pulling at a belt around her arm, which is still hugging the gizmo.

“I’ll tie that for you.’’

“It’s all right.’’

The alien device is twinkling or phosphorescing slightly. I lean over to look, whispering, “Give that to me. I’ll pass it to Esteban.’’

“No!’’ She scoots away, almost over the side. “It’s theirs, they need it!’’

“What? Are you crazy?’’ I’m so taken aback by this idiocy I

literally stammer. “We have to, we »»

“They haven’t hurt us. I’m sure they could.’’ Her eyes are watching me with feral intensity; in the light her face has a lunatic look. Numb as I am, I realize that the wretched woman is poised to throw herself over the side if I move. With the gizmo.

“I think they’re gentle,’’ she mutters.

“For Christ’s sake, Ruth, they’re aliens!"

“I’m used to it,’’ she says absently. “There’s the island! Stop! Stop here!’’

The skiff slows, turning. A mound of foliage is tiny in the light. Metal glints — the plane.

“Althea! Althea! Are you all right?’’

Yells, movement on the plane. The water is high, we’re floating over the bar. The aliens are keeping us in the lead with the light hiding them. I see one pale figure splashing toward us and a dark one

THE WOMEN MEN DON’T SEE

27

behind, coming more slowly. Esteban must be puzzled by that light.

“Mr. Fenton is hurt, Althea. These people brought us back with the water. Are you all right?”

“A-okay.” Althea flounders up, peering excitedly. “You all right? Whew, that light!” Automatically I start handing her the idiotic water bag.

“Leave that for the captain,” Ruth says sharply. “Althea, can you climb in the boat? Quickly, it’s important.”

“Coming!”

“No, no!” I protest, but the skiff tilts as Althea swarms in. The aliens twitter, and their voice box starts groaning. “Gu-give. . . now. . . give...”

"Que llega?" Esteban’s face appears beside me, squinting fiercely into the light.

“Grab it, get it from her — that thing she has — ” but Ruth’s voice rides over mine. “Captain, lift Mr. Fenton out of the boat. He’s hurt his leg. Hurry, please.”

“Goddamn it, wait!” I shout, but an arm has grabbed my middle. When a Maya boosts you, you go. I hear Althea saying, “Mother, your arm!” and fall onto Esteban. We stagger around in water up to my waist; I can’t feel my feet at all.

When I get steady, the boat is yards away, the two women, head-to-head, murmuring.

“Get them!” I tug loose from Esteban and flounder forward. Ruth stands up in the boat facing the invisible aliens.

“Take us with you. Please. We want to go with you, away from here.”

“Ruth! Esteban, get that boat!” I lunge and lose my feet again. The aliens are chirruping madly behind their light.

“Please take us. We don’t mind what your planet is like; we’ll learn — we’ll do anything! We won’t cause any trouble. Please. Oh please." The skiff is drifting farther away.

“Ruth! Althea! You’re crazy, wait — ” But I can only shuffle nightmarelike in the ooze, hearing that damn voice box wheeze, “N-not come.. .more.. .not come...” Althea’s face turns to it, open- mouthed grin.

“Yes, we understand,” Ruth cries. “We don’t want to come back. Please let us go with you!”

I shout and Esteban splashes past me shouting too, something about radio.

“Yes-s-s” groans the voice.

Ruth sits down suddenly, clutching Althea. At that moment Esteban grabs the edge of the skiff beside her.

“Hold them, Esteban! Don’t let her go.”

He gives me one slit-eyed glance over his shoulder, and I recognize

28

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

his total uninvolvement. He’s had a good look at that camouflage paint and the absence of fishing gear. I make a desperate rush and slip again. When I come up Ruth is saying, “We’re going with these people, Captain. Please take your money out of my purse, it’s in the plane. And give this to Mr. Fenton.’’

She passes him something small; the notebook. He takes it slowly.

“Esteban! Don’t!’’

He has released the skiff.

“Thank you so much,’’ Ruth says as they float apart. Her voice is shaky; she raises it. “There won’t be any trouble, Don. Please send this cable. It’s to a friend of mine, she’ll take care of everything.’’ Then she adds the craziest touch of the entire night. “She’s a grand person; she’s director of nursing training at N.I.H.’’

As the skiff diifts, I hear Althea add something that sounds like “Right on.”

Sweet Jesus. ..Next minute the humming has started; the light is receding fast. The last I see of Mrs. Ruth Parsons and Miss Althea Parsons is two small shadows against that light, like two opossums. The light snaps off, the hum deepens — and they’re going, going, gone away.

In the dark water beside me Esteban is instructing everybody in

general to chingarse themselves.

“Friends, or something,’’ I tell him lamely. “She seemed to want to go with them.’’

He is pointedly silent, hauling me back to the plane. He knows what could be around here better than I do, and Mayas have their own longevity program. His condi- tion seems improved. As we get in I notice the hammock has been repositioned.

In the night — of which I remember little — the wind changes. And at seven thirty next morning a Cessna buzzes the sandbar under cloudless skies.

By noon we’re back in Cozumel. Captain Esteban accepts his fees and departs laconically for his insurance wars. I leave the Parsons’ bags with the Caribe agent, who couldn’t care less. The cable goes to a Mrs. Priscilla Hayes Smith also of Bethesda. I take myself to a medico and by three PM I’m sitting on the Cabanas terrace with a fat leg and a double margharita, trying to believe the whole thing.

The cable said, Althea and I taking extraordinary opportunity for travel. Gone several years. Please take charge our affairs. Love, Ruth.

She’d written it that afternoon, you understand.

I order another double, wishing to hell I’d gotten a good look at that gizmo. Did it have a label. Made by

THE WOMEN MEN DONT SEE

29

Betelgeusians? No matter how for Mrs. Priscilla Hayes Smith, that

weird it was, Aow could a person be grand person?

crazy enough to imagine — ? I can only send for another cold

Not only that but to hope, to one, musing on Althea. What suns

plan? If I could only go away.., will Captain Esteban’s sloe-eyed

That’s what she was doing, all day. offspring, if any, look upon? “Get

Waiting, hoping, figuring how to in, Althea, we’re taking off for

get Althea. To go sight unseen to an Orion.’’ “A-okay, Mother.’’ Is that

alien world... some system of upbringing? We

With the third margharita I try survive by ones and twos in the

a joke about alienated women, but chinks of your world- machine... I'm

my heart’s not in it. And I’m used to aliens... She* d meant every

certain there won’t be any bother, word. Insane. How could a woman

any trouble at all. Two human choose to live among unknown

women, one of them possibly monsters, to say good-bye to her

pregnant, have departed for, I home, her world?

guess, the stars; and the fabric of As the margharitas take hold,

society will never show a ripple. I the whole mad scenario melts down

brood; do all Mrs. Parsons’ friends to the image of those two small

hold themselves in readiness for shapes sitting side by side in the

any eventuality, including leaving receding alien glare.

Earth? And will Mrs. Parsons Two of our opossums are somehow one day contrive to send missing.

Herbert Gold’s first story here since “The Mirror and Mrs. Sneeves,” (Dec. 1961) is an amusing new twist on a favorite theme, in which a Harvard MBA deals with the devil on small ticket items only, e. g. free utilities, stamps, under- wear, etc. These things can add up.

Time-Sharing Man

1)y HERBERT GOLD

Back in the old days of pure capitalism, a man could sell his soul and get good money for it right away. Now you might have to go through title search, insurance, not to speak of long lines of price cutters and discount operations; the devil prefers to lease, like other control-conscious mini-conglom- erates. I hate that word “synergy,” two and two adding up to five, but that’s how the fast thinkers work. Stylish.

Mustapha Klein, what a name, didn’t have to tell me there’s over population, as everywhere, among would-be Fausts. Or overcrowding might be the word. Anyway, my interest was in results, not

historical mooning or word picking. So when this piercing-eyed visitor, a sort of a four- thousand -year-old, but well-preserved. Sunset Strip hippie offered me a little deal, no questions asked, I felt inclined to go ahead. What could I lose but his respect? And he wasn’t anybody important in the circles where I travel; nobody is who fluffs himself off into a bit of smoke, fog, smog, or dust before your eyes. But his eyes should have made me think twice: clear, cold, and accurate, all in tones of black and gray, like the best Xerox copy of eyes you ever saw.

Before I tell you about this djin’s deal, maybe I should tell you

30

TIME SHARING MAN

31

about me. I’m an MBA from Harvard — Master of Biz Ad — but I’m not some liberal arts ivy creep. Undergraduate at Illinois. I like results. I have good ideas in franchising, although finito the time of licenses going like hotcakes, when all you needed was some loudmouth athlete’s name for the sign and menu. I’ll do boats, Multilithing, bicycles, turf-surf-n- barf — that’s steak, frozen seafood, and fried chicken, together again in one plate in an atmosphere of highway charm (royal red table- cloths, storm lamps) — I’m ready with the idea and the hard work. I think big. I’ll carry it public. I just hate the details. That’s what you need to know about me, unless you want to hear I’ve let my sideburns grow so I can also make it with the youth market. After all, this is LA, isn’t it?

He appeared out of the box in which I keep used-up ball-point pens. A little economy from my troubled boyhood in Winnetka. I hate to throw them away, in case they happen to regenerate color. First he was a mist, then solid smoke; at last he stood, smiling and bowing, by my desk in the Westwood Apts, as I did the month’s accounts. He was wearing wash-and-wear summer gossamer robes embroidered with peace symbols, American flags. Love It Or Leave It, and Only Outlaws Will

Carry Guns. I suppose some witch was doing his embroidering. His cheeks were pink, his eyes had that cool inkiness I’ve already men- tioned, and his mouth was smiling but not wasteful. It was a smile of intention. “Mustapha Klein, at your service,” he said. “You called?”

“I was just cursing and wishing,” I said.

“You hit upon the formula,” he said.

“I do it every month when I pay the bills,” I said.

“This time you did it right,” he said. “Okay, you made a lucky hit. The devil take it. The devil take it right now. And I just happened to be in a period of recession. So I says to myself when your message came through: \\^hy not? I’ll explain, Alden.”

He knew my name. He used it frequently in conversation like that — blah blah blah, comma Alden. It’s a common trick of stimulating friendly feeling, goes all the way back to Dale Carnegie, but that wasn’t what sold me. What sold me was: I was presold. The market, Alden Keep-My-Name-Out, was ready for the product.

Nevertheless, the deal was a peculiar one. All I got was a small-ticket release from the minor pangs of life: no bills under a hundred dollars. That is, elec- tricity, gas, minor restaurant, taxi.

32

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

telephone, laundry, grocery ac- counts relieved — most of the annoying little expenses which take a lot of time and, finally, add up to a decent sum of money. At the end of the month, nothing much. I could get in and out of taxis and someone invisible would manage. No change jangling in my pocket. At the end of the month my bank statement would have nothing but large amounts on it. A minute’s checking does it.

In return, a 99-year, no-pang lease on my soul. The guarantee: no suffering. There was one additional option: all the money I wanted, riches beyond compare, only with this deal my soul suffered the torments of the damned, boiling oil, wrung through wringers, squeezed through juicers, et cetera, and I decided against it. No thanks. But the pangless arrangement suited me fine. I hated the little routines which sap so much of a fellow’s energy, time, and ready cash.

What a bracing air of freedom! Just stand up and breathe! Look out over the twinkling lights of the Los Angeles basin! Life was good.

“Thanks a bunch, Mustapha,’’ I said.

“You can call me Mister Klein,’’ he said, *‘Alden." It wasn’t so much a reproach as a matter of dignity. He wasn’t into that LA free-and-easy youth thing. He

wanted to make it clear who was the chief: M.K. All right. I’ll play by his rules.

He must have seen I was willing to learn. The American system is okay with me. You give respect, you get opportunities, and later on maybe you can call the Devil by his first name.

“I want you to know I regret nothing, sir,’’ I said. “I feel good about this whole thing, Mister Klein.’’

He winked. Not consistent with his whole dignity trip. Well, when you’re the chief, it’s time to learn to relax. In the first place, promotes good feeling; plus, in the second place, many doctors say it lowers the cholesterol.

As a bonus for prompt reply, maybe just to throw me a little curve offbase after the reproach about overfamiliarity, Mustapha Klein gave me a terrific extra benefit: small-ticket weightless- ness. That is, suitcases, keys, wallets, clothes — no weight at all. I was warm, but naked. I was pretty, but light on my feet. I felt like Cassius Clay (I’ll never learn to call him Mr. Ali, I’m an American fight fan). It was neat. It was much better than a total business manager, plus an English royal flunky. No petty mind dogging your feet. Freedom from minor care. Man, if you could only franchise this.

time sharing man

33

Mustapha Klein got smaller and smaller, he was waving, he was slipping into the little box with the bail-point pens, he was mist, he was smoke, he was gone.

Well, that’s that. I didn’t need a friend, I just needed service. On the first of the month, which is Bank AmeriCard Day all over the nation, unless you happen to celebrate Diners Club Shroveday or Ameri- can Express Eve — or you’re the ecumenical sort who carries a flipout wallet with all your cards, including silly Gulf Oil, enshrined in transparent plastic — on that day I sat home, just answering a few personal letters. I even wrote to one of my profs at Harvard; might be he could get useful someday. Throughout America, young busi- nessmen and professionals were sweating over slimy receipts and carbons and checkbook stubs. I was writing a friendly letter. I was reading Playboy. All those little return envelops with never a stamp on them any more — doctor, periodontist, window-washing ser- vice, Pacific Bell, all those annoyances — were whisked away like dust into a vacuum cleaner. How could I trouble over use of my soul when it caused me no pain? This was a fine offer, thought I, and if he comes to confirm it. I’ll sign once again.

Actually, it was an oral agreement. No signing in blood.

gore, or mucous; none of that hoary, old-fashioned, low-budget stuff. We were gentlemen, Mr. Klein and Alden.

He didn’t appear for renewal. If he checked to see if I’d already sold my soul to another, he must have found it free and clear. The deal was binding for the rest of my life on earth, plus a few extra years, even allowing for the astounding increases in gerontological research these days. Personally, I’m not making any plans to live to more than a hundred.

This special offer, in my neighborhood only, also provided for certain benefits I had not expected. For example, I didn’t renew my driver’s license; a fresh license just appeared on the due date. Occasionally I received by parcel post, prepaid, little useful gifts, just when I needed them — handkerchiefs, underwear, socks, small shopping matters like that. There was a neat stack of shoelaces in my drawer. An endless roll of postage stamps poured from the little dispenser. I would never in my life need to buy another paper clip, 0-tip, or salt cellar. The sudden crisis which sends a bachelor to the corner nothing-store — out. If I married, it would be for love, not housekeeping.

I hardly felt like a human being. I was so free and easy that all my energy could be focused on, on, on

34

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

— what? On the prime matters of life on earth? on destiny? on the meaning of man’s brief span?

Or on getting really rich?

Or on making out with the really terrific ladies who cross a fellow’s path in California and the world?

Or, through gratitude, in finding God? The God who made a devil possible, who relieved small annoyances so completely, like a master dentist getting rid of a place in the teeth that catches stringy food?

The whole situation was enough to turn a fellow back to a belief in God and Immortality, just like Look magazine said before it died. Imagine never having to carry, really carry a suitcase — Cary Grant in those old films, where the suitcases are obviously empty, so why should he sweat or grunt? Imagine no keys wearing holes in the pockets, and the car just starts when you touch the lock; no handkerchiefs balled up and lumpy; no piles of checkstubs at the end of the year. I’m not petty, talking about the money saved. It wasn’t the money. I was doing all right before he showed up. I’m talking about the conveniences, the ease, the carefree float through cruddy experience.

Of course, the truth be told, those things all add up. I had more ready cash in my checking. I was

just a little bit looser for the big-ticket items — sailing, weekend trips to Baja, a definite upgrading in the sports car. It wouldn’t be honest to deny it. I’m not preaching the virtues of thrift, Abe Lincoln, Horatio Alger, none of that Middle-America mush, but the fact

is, even in my bracket, the total of the Kleenex, taxis, phone bills, utilities, all that debris that both oils and pollutes your passage through life — finally it adds up to One Big Ticket. It isn’t the money, you understand. I don’t mean to get eloquent or poetic. That’s not my line. But I was definitely richer in the total capital department, too.

Well, the title of this confession and revelation is not, as you may have noticed, speed-reading care- fully, “How I Got Rid of Small Debts and Found God.” Far from

it. A limited disclosure. If you got me wrong, go back for a refresher to Evelyn Wood. All I’ve mentioned is ignoring bills and keys, weightless suitcases, clean clothes and fresh notions, plus a headstart in gathering the love of beautiful women. It all went nicely together.

As far as the ladies are concerned, I stuck with sweet chickies. I didn’t need a helper or a helpmate. I might, check, fall head over heels for some horsy product with a fantastic family business; that’s always in the realm of possibility; but I try to keep my sex

time sharing man

35

life pure. Pure fun. Pure games. Pure entertainment for a head heavy with care. We MBA’s bear the burden of the fictitious and perhaps so-called American sys- tem. Uneasy wears the head that crowns a lie, haha. I did a lot of humanities as an undergrad because these days, at the top layers of management, it’s not golf any more which gets you the fine contacts, it’s an outstanding ability to work into culture, art, spectator sports, tennis, things like that. I could Shakespeare up a few jokes in both culture and art, plus a little bit of serious theater (think of Lincoln Center, the Forum, Laur- ence Olivier revivals, that type of trip). Also I have this yen for the Radcliffe brand of straight-haired beast, you know, both field sports and meditation. They smile at my style, pure Great Lakes, but they also know I’ve read the same Alan Watts. And I may look simple and once-born, as Amanda Vale told me — “Good Bones’’ Vale, I called her — but she could tell by my nightmares, my persistent mutter- ing in my sleep, that I was really deep, metempsychic, and twice- born, with guilty secrets I knew not of. I was probably dreaming about Mr. Klein. My djin and tonic, haha.

I had troubled sleep, but all I could use. I had active nights, and many. I was suave. When I got tired of Amanda and she cried at the

Black Rabbit as I explained good-by, and I said, “Enough of life in these tears of Vale,’’ and she said, “You’re an asshole, Alden,’’ I only smiled and said, “We both know the waiter. He’s from the Good Earth Commune. You won’t want to come in here again, Amanda, if you make a scene.”

Being a really terrific philo- sophy major only two years away from Cambridge, she understood exactly. She stopped crying and finished her flan and we had a brandy right then and there. Good-by, Amanda, for I am weightless, buzzing, and must move on.

What other total truth can I cop out? The fabric of my dreaming was thin. However, my dreams did come true. When other people’s hair smelled of smoke, mine smelled of piny forests. Or so Debbie, who was Amanda’s former roommate, told me. I used the right shampoo, it seemed, and always found a fresh dab placed in the shower, just a bit in a paper cup, the exact right amount, whenever it was piny forest time again.

Other people’s dreams might be finer, but they forget them when they awaken. And they tend not to come true. Who else follows a delicious Amanda with a supercute Debbie?

How can I explain?

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FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

Space.

Can you believe what I went through?

Think. Dimness.

Oh, ril just tell what happened to me in the passing months. Tm ashamed. It’s the truth. I had made a mistake, that’s all, the classical afterthought of those who sell their souls, even though this arrange- ment was different all up and down the line — regret.

Why the devil regret? Who could have predicted it?

I’ll just tell.

I don’t want to.

Oh, was I bored.

That doesn’t feel too much better, but now I can explain. I don’t mean that man was created and put on earth for small annoyances. I’m not convinced we need dandruff, occasional conjunc- tivitis, rose fever, and minor bills to be fully human. But too much of a chunk of routine was removed. My weekends were emptified, not empty. My evenings were hard and heavy with major thought or activities, none of the make-do annoyances which help pass the minor agony of a lifetime on earth. Too much was given and decided. As far as inner resources are concerned. I’d put myself in the top six or eight percentile at Harvard Business, but still —

Help!

Mustapha Klein, come back!

I stood in front of the Morris Plan — Roll Your Debts into One Big Debt — Office. I lifted my hands to the place where it said Friendly. To the empty air I said, “Sir, I need you.’’

“Hi, there,’’ said Mr. Klein. “How’s it going?’’

I explained.

“Hm,’’ he said. “Exercise, maybe. All that nervous energy — have you tried pushups? Join a gym? We don’t realize how much in the way of calories we burn in those little routines. You’re a little fattish, fatty, Alden, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it. Putting on a little weight is what I’m trying to say. I just thought I might mention it, but perhaps 1 won’t.’’

“Believe you did,” I said with some sulkiness. Well, who likes to hear about puffy jowls?

“There’s a nice health club down on Wilshire. Wouldn’t cost you anything,” said Mr. Klein.

“Are you enjoying my soul?”

“Bitter, bitter,’’ he said. “Shame.”

“I don’t feel used,” I said.

“Does the computer feel used?” he asked. “On a time-sharing deal, busy twenty-four hours a day, you think the computer gets tired?”

“It doesn’t know it’s tired,” I said.

“If it doesn’t know from tired, you think it’s tired?” he asked. “Irritated? grubby? aggravated.

time sharing man

37

even when it works Sundays, nights, and holidays?” He shook his head with technical know-how. “Not on your butt,” he said. “But to answer your question: I’m satisfied with the deal. Pleasure, enjoyment — don’t ask.”

I hated the idea of being used up without knowing about it. I disliked to be used up while having nothing to do. It was distressing to have all my itchy tasks removed and yet to know I was serving someone — something? — con- stantly. I might be a Mark III when a new generation was coming in. I liked Mustapha Klein a lot less than I thought I would when he did me this favor,

“I suffer from Identity Crisis,” I said to him or it.

“Am I a doctor?” he asked. “Do I look like I’m a degree in psychology?”

“Anomie,” I said.

“You talk like a Radcliffe girl, Alden.”

“I feel lonely.”

“So find yourself a chickie. Take iron pills, maybe vitamin E.”

“I’ve got all three of those things in stock, iron, E, and girls,” I said. “I thought it would work out.”

He shrugged out there in the blazing sun while two cops in a car idled at the curb, watching — they were young cops — maybe their first pedestrians in Beverly Hills.

Was that a look of sympathy which crossed Mr. Klein’s head? Did I detect a brother’s compassion? No: the desert mirage makes an oasis of a sandpit. I saw boredom crossing his face, and it made my heart leap. He had given me a new holiday, the first of the month. Bank Ameri- Card Day, and that was all the agreement claimed. He didn’t have to make me happy.

“If I kill myself,” I said, “then what?”

“That’s major medical,” he said briskly. “Not covered by our deal. Of course, your soul is unkillable, my friend.” He sighed. It was as if he were an off-duty cop faced by a messy bar fight. “Okay, what’s the trouble here? Guilt? Fear? What?”

“I’m empty and bored,” I said. “I miss that something to do. The main thing is: Nothing is changed, and when you get your wishes and nothing is changed, sir, hope is removed.”

“Before meeting me you had hope,” he said softly. “That’s a responsibility, isn’t it? All right! Electric, gas, utility, and phone! You pay those bills now.”

“Better,” I said.

“Suitcases are heavy! Laundry needs to be bundled! Buy your own stamps and paper clips! No more free Kleenex!”

There was suddenly a damp chemical breeze in the air.

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FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

something like the smell of a Xeroxing room, minus the hint of stale coffee and surly temporary help. The smell engulfed me, and then subsided.

“Much better,” I said.

“Now you feel okay?”

“It’s a start, Mustapha. Thanks a lot, Mustapha.”

“But of course I still have the lease on your soul. There’s no buyback.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of abrogating — ”

''Trying to, Alden.”

“Trying to abrogate our agree- ment. I made a deal and I’m sticking to it,” I said, thinking of my happy rejoining of the common fate of men. I was in business again.

“You’re satisfied,” he said. I noticed that he was winding himself up, elbows and knees, really graceful, a sort of aikido gymnastic, getting ready to disappear into thin air. He never used a bottle, unlike the djins I’d heard about pre- viously. Of course, I didn’t keep up, once I got interested in Gross National Product. “Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing.” I didn’t tell him. Effective next Monday, there were only ninety-eight years and three months left on his lease. I wouldn’t let him see me gloat. He wouldn’t have Alden What’s-His-

Name to kick around forever.

He left only a pink spangle from his robe winking on the sidewalk. The cops started their car and moved on when Mustapha Klein disappeared into the smog. They saw no reason to make trouble with a disappearing middle-aged white djin when they could be busting corporeal teen-agers down on the Strip. I picked up the spangle as a souvenir. Amanda never littered, either.

Back home at my desk, I was alone with a little heap of mail. I separated the junk from the first-class envelopes with glassine envelopes and bills inside. I made neat piles. I put cream on my hands when I got a paper cut. I had something to do to occupy the long years of a man’s term. I felt a little lobotomized from the claims on my soul, a little empty and distant, a little sad, but that’s not much of a price to pay. Once in a while, as I did my accounts, I caught a flash of pulsating nothing, emitting sparks and oozing acid, a meat computer without the meat, working away in what looked like a Xeroxing room. There may have been others like me in that room, but the receptor only cut in twice, and then they corrected the circuits to my optical nerves. Only ninety-eight plus three to go. Thank you for this special offer, Mr. Klein, sir.

THE DARK CORNER Dover Publications, in its continuing series on past masters of the macabre, has brought out a collection of stories by Wilkie Collins called Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Collins wrote in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, is firstly-known for his The Moonstone, secondly for his The Woman in White, and thirdly for nothing else, as far as the general public is concerned. This book is an attempt to at least partially correct that situation by putting on view some of his shorter neglected works, and there is stuff in it which no one seriously interested in tales of terror and the supernatural should miss. True enough, there is represented that reprehensible flaw of the writings of that period, namely the ghost which is, after all, not a ghost, and my teeth once again gnashed uncon- trollably at yet another encounter with ‘The Dead Hand,” a story which starts out to tell stylishly of a gentleman attempting to share a room at an inn with a corpse which (shudder) moves, then goes on to explain that it wasn’t really a corpse at all, folks, only this person who was very, very ill — but that shouldn’t put you off an anthology containing such undeniable beau- ties as ‘‘the Dream Woman,” ‘‘A Terribly Strange Bed,” and ‘‘Mad Monkton.”

GAHAN WILSON

Books

Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Wilke Collins, Dover, $3.00

The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes, Sterling Lanier, Walker, $5.95

The Rim of the Unknown, Frank Belknap Long, Arkham House, $7.50

Disclosures in Scarlet, Carl Jacobi, Arkham House, $5.00

The Caller of the Black, Brian Lumley, Arkham House, $5.00

Demons by Daylight, Ramsey Campbell, Arkham House, $5.00

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FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

Mr. Sam Moskowitz keeps popping up here, one way and another, and here he is as the editor of the revived Weird Tales, for heaven’s sake! I certainly wish him luck and hope the project succeeds, however I have only seen one copy of the thing on any stand, that in Tuscaloosa, of all places, where I had given an inspirational lecture to an educational establishment the night before, and was killing the morning after by browsing the stands of the local drugstores. It is, by God, authentic enough as its front cover is an unpublished-up- to-now Finlay, and its back is a Rosicrucian ad all the way from San Jose. Inside we have, among other tasty items, the first R. E. Howard story sold W. T. or anybody else, a William Hope Hodgson story not printed since it first showed up in 1905, an excellent essay by the editor on Hodgson’s early life, and a whole bunch of lovingly-compiled material from all over the place, all very much fitting and proper to be housed in Weird Tales, Mr. Moskowitz has started out by producing it as a quarterly, but, obviously, he has hopes. Now if those distributors will just for once co-operate...

Regular readers of this maga- zine, and I assume we all are regular readers, will be familiar with the gentleman refered to in the

title of The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes by Sterling Lanier as he is, happily, often present in these pages. Those who are not should know that these stories are in the classic form probably best exploited by Lord Dunsany in his Jorkens tales, namely that of the gentleman- adventurer who reminisces on his hair-raising enterprises while we gather about to listen to him in the security of the exclusive club to which we all snugly belong. There is something wonderfully soothing in this format — the ghastly adventures contrasted with the coziness of the crackling fire, the wing chair, the brandy snifter in one’s hand, and, above all, the sure and certain knowledge that the story you are settling back to listen to will be a humdinger. Although the spelling of Ffellowes’ name seems to imply the series is approached with tongue in cheek, such is not the case. There is, now and then, some mild joshing between the Brigadier — one does not call him General — and a nasty fellow named Williams, but once the story proper is launched into, Mr. Lanier permits no kidding around. He wants to give you a bit of a turn, he does, and he usually succeeds. Although I enjoyed the whole book and am looking forward to more of the same, my favorite exploits to date are

books

41

“Fraternity Brother,” “His Coat So Gay,’' and “The Kings of the Sea.” They all have marvelously sinister overtones, and it’s obvious Mr. Lanier does serious homework on his themes as his attention to authenticity in detail is excellent. Very good work, and that last favorite mentioned above has a really lovely and casual zinger at the end.

I have no idea how many stories Frank Belknap Long has written, but Arkham House has gathered up a double armful of them in The Rim of the Unknown, twenty three of them, in all, crowded into almost three hundred pages of small type. The works come from the forties and fifties, mainly, but there are five from the thirties, and a completely unrepentent shocker from 1927 which calls itself “The Man with a Thousand Legs” and lives 100% up to its title. Mr. Long has a way with fiendish invaders from other planets, dimensions, and what you will, and it is very much his own. A particularly pleasing aspect of his work is his relish in describing their looks, their usually baleful attitude towards ourselves, and, in careful detail, their generally dreadful digestive processes.

Another of the old pros, Carl Jacobi, has a new book out called

Disclosures in Scarlet, and it ranges in time from a 1 938 epic about evil European dictator August Straus- vig's really rotten plot to bring the Free World to its knees by means of singing plants from outer space, to a 1970’s fantasy about a super- gadgeted electronic golf course where the thirteenth is a 1,325-yard hole with a dogleg to the right. In between is a wide variety of Jacobian divertissements, my per- sonal favorites being “The Aguar- ium,” a really nasty piece of work, and a sentimental bit of necrophilia named, rather demurely, all things considered, “The Unpleasantness at Carver House.”

Turning from these elder statesmen of the grotesque fantas- tic, we come to a book written by a talent new to this or any other field, a mere lad, if the implications of the jacket copy have been correctly interpreted by me, yet when one reads Brian Lumley’s The Caller of the Black what does one find? One finds a collection of stories which reads as if it had been culled from the oldest, most moldering back issues of Weird Tales, is what one finds! The earliest date on any of these is 1968, it having appeared in that year’s Summer issue of the Arkham Collector, but Mr. Lumley has so deeply steeped himself in his source material, that being the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and his

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circle, that his work seems for all the world to have been written by a younger member of that spooky little group away back when in the thirties. These are unabashed pastiches, obviously written by someone enjoying himself enor- mously, all of them affectionate tributes to Messrs. Lovecraft, Bloch (the horrid endings where the hero rots or gets et being clearly especially dedicated to M. Bloch!), Smith, Derleth and the rest. He uses the props, Gods, italic endings and vocabularies those gentle men held so near and dear, his tales abounding as they do with dreadful books, all too describable things, grisly mutilations brought on by fangs, beaks, tentacles and the like, and, of course, cannibalism. In these pages we team at last what finally happened to Kadath, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, his clock, and even to Queen Nitocris, evil queen supreme, originally created for Weird Tales in 1928 by none other than Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams. It’s been a long wait.

A fellow who began things more or less as Mr. Lumley is commencing, Ramsey Campbell, has come out with a new book. Demons by Daylight, and a number of very interesting turns. Mr. Campbell’s first volume. The Inhabitant of the Lake, was written

mainly when he was a wee tad, and was a collection of sometimes clever, sometimes touchingly naive, but always quite enjoyable stories based firmly^upon the writing of H. P. L. Now he is older, wiser, and a good deal more frightening. I suggest we all keep a sharp eye on him. What he has done is to take Lovecraft’s sinister implications out of the era of bootleg whiskey and the depression into the present one of rather more formidable mind- altering drugs and oddly- unsatislying plenty. He is also abandoning Lovecraft’s extremely guarded hints as to what was going on there at the foot of the six thousand steps hard by the pit of shaggoths in favor of clear specifics as to the activities of the ladies and the gentlemen and the monsters. It makes for a chilling set of stories and promises much for what Mr. Campbell will come up with next. The possibilities inherent in Love- craft’s really sensational vision of sexual-physic-spatial-temporal (or sexual/psychic/spatial/temporal!) warps has been, to date, very largely ignored by those who have been intrigued enough to write in the Mythos mood. Colin Wilson has done an excellent job of extending the intellectual aspects of H. P. L.’s mind-bending insights, but, though he has by no means ignored it, his attention to the physical and emotional end of things has been

books

43

relatively peripheral. Also, quite importantly, Mr. Wilson’s atten- tion has been directed mainly to extraordinarily superior members of our species, Russellian intellec- tuals and the like, and folks like you and me in contact with Them has been only barely touched on in his novels. Mr. Campbell, in contrast, does concentrate on folks like you and me, people whose personalities are — no offense.

mind — by and large sloppily-built, confusingly-motivated affairs; tot- tery at best, downright shoddy, now and then. When Mr. Campbell pits his fallible, commonly lonely, quite generally weak, most human characters against enormous forces bent on incomprehensible errands the results are, as you might expect, often frightening, and, as you might not expect, often touching; even heartwarming.

Checklists and Index received

THE N.E.S.F.A. INDEX: Science Fiction Magazines and Original Anthologies 197T1972. $3.00.

This is a supplement to the Index to the Science Fiction Magazines 1951-1%5 published by Erwin S. Strauss and the Index to the Science Fiction Magazines 1966-1970 published by the N.E.S.F.A. The new 1971-1972 index differs from the previous volumes in that it includes stories published in the original series anthologies as well as magazines. This is a well-prepared and extremely useful series of volumes; highly recommended. Available from: The New England Science Fiction Assoc., Inc., P. O. Box G, M.I.T. Branch P. O., Cambridge, Mass. 02139.

HARLAN ELLISON: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CHECKLIST. Compiled by Leslie Kay Swigart. $3.50.

A chronological listing of Harlan Ellison’s publications through April 1973. Includes not only fiction but also scripts, articles, letters, etc. Silverberg, Asimov, Bova and others have contributed appreciations, and there are plenty of photos of Harlan. A must for anyone with the slightest interest in Ellison and his work. Available from: Leslie Kay Swigart, Box 8570, Long Beach, Calif. 90808.

—E.L.F.

Richard Lupoff’s new story is about one Myron Castleman, trapped in a literally endless Manhattan lunch hour. Mr. Lupoff’s new books Include BARSOOM: EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AND THE MARTIAN VISION (Mirage), THE COMIC BOOK BOOK (Arlington), and INTO THE AETHER (Dell) a novel scheduled for publication in January.

12:01 P. M.

by RICHARD A. LUPOFF

There was the echo of that single, loud sound resembling the crashing implosion of air into a shattered vacuum tube or the report of a small-caliber firearm. The clock on the Grand Central Tower said 12:01, as it always did at resumption time, and Castleman knew that the dateline on the newspapers being hawked at the corner of Lexington and 46th would be the same that it always was.

He waited for the familiar grime-crusted, green-and-silver bus to make its turn onto short Vanderbilt Avenue, dodged the usual yellow taxi while crossing Vanderbilt himself, and passed between the two Cadillac limou- sines waiting at the curb for their passengers to return from whatever errand detained them.

On the west side of Madison he stopped in front of Finchley’s, waited for the middle-aged window dresser to set up the full-length mirror at the back of the display, as he did every time, and perfunctorily inspected himself in its shiny surface. Same tweed suit, striped button-down shirt and modishly broad tie, same haircomb with one stubborn lock sticking out above his left ear. He put a hand to his chin and rubbed vigorously, but there was no particular evidence of stubble.

Not that he could have grown much stubble in an hour, but if the effect of the hours was cumulative for him, it should become apparent after a dozen or two resumptions.

Strolling casually toward the West Side, he decided to stop at the

44

12:01 P.M.

45

first convenient restaurant and get himself a snack. The sky was blue and unusually clear for midtown, the air warm and slightly moist with the moisture of a balmy spring day rather than with the sticky humidity that used to come later in the year. A good thing, Castleman thought, that the resumptions had come on such an afternoon rather than in the middle of a midwinter cold snap with the streets full of dirty slush and everyone sneezing and coughing flu bugs at one another.

He stepped into Hamburger Heaven and surveyed the situation vis-a-vis seating. There were no vacancies but only a handful of people waited ahead of him. No point in waiting in a long line or trying to dine in a fancy restaurant where a fancy lunch could take two hours to consume. If he couldn’t get served and finish his meal by one o’clock, it was a waste.

Which is not to say that it wasn’t one anyhow. At the next resumption he’d be back on the sidewalk gazing up at the Grand Central Tower anyway; he’d have a pleasant appetite anyway; if he took off his tie and flushed it down the toilet in the basement washroom of Hamburger Heaven, he’d find it back knotted around his neck, clean and dry. Or at least he was confident that he would; that might prove an interesting

experiment to try sometime, but the result was pretty well a foregone conclusion.

The hostess had come over to the small group of customers waiting for seats and was holding up two fingers in a V sign. Castleman looked beside him and found, to his surprise, that he had reached the head of the line. He turned to the person beside him and asked if she would mind sharing a table.

“It’ll save time,’’ he said, stifling an urge to laugh at his own line.

The woman nodded agreement, and the hostess showed them to a tiny wooden table near the back of the restaurant. They contorted themselves onto the fixed wooden seats and received oversized, ketchup-and coffee-stained menus. Castleman decided quickly what he wanted and lowered his menu, letting his eyes take in his impromptu companion.

She was obviously a working girl — or woman, more accurately. Slightly overage and overweight for the blouse and modish-length skirt she affected, with her hair done up in an elaborately curled style that almost suited her oval face. She put her menu down, clearly having made her own choice of food, and looked at Castleman.

“Do you eat here often?’’ she said.

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Castleman said, “Not very.”

“I didn’t think so. I come here every day. There are so many regulars, so many transients. As soon as I didn’t recognize you, I knew who you were.’’

“Makes sense,’’ Castleman said. He looked around the room for a wall clock, wishing that he’d had a watch at resumption time, knowing that he could get one easily enough now but that it would be gone at the end of the hour anyway.

There was a clock at the back of Hamburger Heaven. It was nearing half past. Castleman wished that the resumptions came farther apart, really an hour wasn’t long enough to do much. But then, he thought philosophically, it could be a lot worse. Hung up at a period of five minutes, he’d never get anything done. And if it were really short — say, a second or less — it would be a living hell.

You could get a fair amount done in an hour. In fact, in some ways, it was an ideal situation to be in. Anything you do, you can mess up, anything, and get another chance in an hour. On the other hand it wasn’t so ideal to do something worthwhile knowing that it would be totally wiped out, but then the positive and negative aspects of reality often balanced that way.

He looked at the plump woman

sitting opposite him at the little wooden table. “Say, my name is Myron Castleman,’’ Castleman said. “I work for Glamdring and Glamdring up in the Stoebler Building on Forty-ninth.’’

The plump woman looked at him, surprised at the breach of Manhattan anonymity. Then she seemed to decide that he was all right, that she could give him information without his using it in some unspecified way to take advantage of her. “Dolores Park,’’ she said. “I’m a legal secretary. Sometimes I have lunch with friends, but I came out alone today.’’

A waiter arrived and they ordered. Castleman nodded in self-confirmation when Dolores asked for French fries with her Roquefort-baconburger. He also noted that she wore no ring on her left hand, not that that meant much nowadays.

“Do you live in the city, ah. Miss Park?’’ he asked her.

She shook her head. The flesh on her cheeks and neck, although excessive, was still firm. It did not wobble as she moved. “No, I come in on the Long Island. I live in Roslyn.’’ She paused as if surveying Castleman closely. “With my mother.’’

Castleman said, “Oh.’’

“And you?’’ Dolores Park asked.

12:01 P.M.

47

“Oh/’ Castleman said again, “yes, I live up in the Seventies, East Seventy-third.” He looked at the clock again. This was getting him nowhere, and his stomach was beginning to gnaw at him. It was already twenty minutes to one.

Dolores Park said, “What do you do for Glamdring and Glamdring, Mr. Castleberg?”

“Man,” said Myron.

“Man? I don’t understand.”

“Castleman. Not Castleberg.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, ’’Dolores said. She seemed to wilt.

“It’s all right,” Myron com- forted her. “Don’t think of it, names aren’t important, you’ll forget all about it in a few minutes anyhow.

“I’m a personnel manager. In charge of corporate recruiting and career development.”

“Oh,” said Dolores, “that sounds very exciting.”

“A daily bacchanal,” Myron said, “look, here comes our food.”

The waiter dropped Myron’s cheeseburger in the middle of the table, threw Dolores’s lunch at her, and dropped a single check into the jar of piccalilli relish that festered in the middle of the table.

“Ooh,” squealed Dolores, “that waiter was terrible! I ought to report him to the manager. I’ve never had such rude service in this place.”

“Never mind,” Myron told her.

“Better eat your food quick or it’ll be too late.” He dumped a glob of ketchup onto his cheeseburger and took a large bite of it. He savored the mixture of flavors, the toasted bun, the spicy seasoning, the rare meat and hot, melted cheese. As he chewed he let his eyes rove the room.

A cake tray on the counter held a delicious-looking devil’s food cake with dazzling white icing and mahogany-brown chocolate shav- ings scattered across the top. Maybe I should have ordered cake instead, Myron thought. Maybe I’ll have the cake instead of the cheeseburger next time I come in here. Maybe on the next resump- tion, maybe not, but soon.

He swallowed his cheeseburger and smiled at Miss Park. She was chomping on a length of raw carrot. “Enjoying your food?” Myron asked.

She nodded yes.

“Good,” Myron said. He began to hear the familiar crackling, splitting sound that preceded each resumption. “I’m glad you like it, Dolores, since you’ll get to have it again. Good-by,” he said.

Dolores looked at him, sur- prised and puzzled by his remark.

There was a single, loud sound resembling the sound made by the implosion of air into a shattered vacuum tube or the report of a small-caliber firearm. Castleman

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experienced a confusing instant during which he was never able to tell whether there was a flash of light or of darkness, a rush of sound or an instant of total silence, a full-capacity loading of all the senses or a total deprivation of sensation.

Then there was the echo of that single, loud sound. The clock on the Grand Central Tower said 12:01, as it always did at resumption time, and Castleman knew that the dateline on the newspapers being hawked at the corner of Lexington and 46th would be the same as it always would.

He checked his personal appear- ance briefly, using a plate-glass window in a House of Cards shop as an impromptu looking-glass; as he expected, it was the same as always. He licked the heel of his left hand to get a little moisture onto the skin, then used it to try and make that stubborn lock of hair lie down.

The day being as pleasant as it was, he decided that it would be pleasant to spend his hour strolling down to the library and relaxing on the steps in the warm sunshine.

He walked toward Fifth, planning to stroll down to 42nd Street that way. A little past Madison Avenue he stopped and looked in through the front window of a Hamburger Heaven. Inside, a short line of patrons waited for seating. He could see a familiar

figure standing at the end of the line, a woman slightly overdressed and overweight, but still fairly smart looking. Hi there, Dolores, he thought to himself.

For a moment the notion of entering the restaurant and making conversation with her flitted through his mind, but he rejected it with hardly a moment’s considera- tion and walked on toward Fifth. As far as Dolores Park was concerned, she’d never laid eyes on him in her life. She would be puzzled at a stranger’s talking to her, calling her by name. It would only spoil her hour, and even though it would be wiped out at the next resumption, Castleman didn’t have the heart to do that to an innocent stranger.

He reached Fifth Avenue and walked downtown toward the library. He went past the Israel Bank, stopped and examined the window display at Record Hunter, then waited for the lights to change and made his street crossings, to the downtown side of 42nd and then to the west side of Fifth.

He glanced at the newspapers on sale at the corner. There was the Times with its staid front page, the News with its screaming headline and a photo of a train wreck near New Brunswick, and the first edition of the Post with a blue banner proclaiming another chap- ter in the inside biography of Yosef

12:01 P.M.

49

Tekoah. The news stories of all three dealt with the prediction of Nathan Rosenbluth that a disfigur- ation of time would shortly take place, with the entire world snapping backwards for the period of an hour, to resume normal progress as if nothing had ever happened.

Castleman laughed bitterly at the front pages and their different approaches to the story, then ambled down the broad sidewalk, stopped in front of the giant neo-Grecian library and began to ascend the long flight of steps toward its portico.

Near the top of the stairs a small group of young people were seated, talking. An intense young man was holding forth, his eyes glaring through tiny, wire-rimmed glasses as he waved his arms with each sentence.

Castleman stopped a couple of steps below the group and listened.

“Rosenbluth is absolutely right,” the young man was saying. ‘The world has come to a state of affairs where things cannot go on any longer. We have to repair the social order to get things going again, or we’ll soon be stopped at one place; we’ll have to go back. The administration in Washing- ton....”

He got no further, cut off by another young man, a round-faced individual sitting patiently with a

spiral notepad and pencil in his lap. “You don’t understand, Oswald,” he interrupted the intense man with the beard. “Rosenbluth isn’t talking about the social order at all. He’s a physicist, and he’s talking about purely physical phenomena.”

“Besides,” put in a slim, short-haired girl with faded jeans and a moderate case of acne, “LIU. I mean, a physicist from LIU. If he was from Columbia or even City College....”

“With imperialist forces threat- ening all people’s progressive movements on every continent,” the first speaker resumed, “how can you waste your energy quarreling about physics? Radical and revolutionary elements in every stratum of society....’^

The round-faced man said, “If you’ll just stop emoting and listen for a minute, I have the figures right here.” There was a brief silence as he brandished his notebook. Castleman saw that the page Was indeed covered with finely penciled mathematical calcula- tions.

“From LIU,” the girl in jeans said.

“Look,” the round-faced man said, “Rosenbluth claims that the total energy content of the universe we live in is mirrored by a counteruniverse made of anti- matter, coexisting with our universe in terms of three-dimensional space

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but separated from us by a fourth dimension or vibrational plane.”

“Betrayal of laboring masses by yellow-dog sellout trade union bosses,” put in the intense man.

“Yes, Oswald,” the round- faced man continued. “Rosenbluth claims that by random but not acausal processes the two universes, moving in opposite temporal directions, attempt to emerge from their dimensionally separated states and merge. If this should come about, they would cancel each other because of their opposite energy pobrities, but the phe- nomenon of opposing time-vectors prevents this, and they will instead rebound from each other, each universe snapping backwards into its own past — that is, the other universe’s future — and....”

“How far?”

“Hah?”

The girl in jeans said, “How far will it bounce?”

“Oh,” said the round-faced man, “Rosenbluth claims an hour.”

“Just like daylight-saving,” said the girl. “We bounce back an hour then. Or do we go forward an hour?”

“Spring ahead in spring, fall back in fall,” Castleman put in, inserting himself into the conversa- tion.

“Yeah, thanks, mister,” the girl said.

Castleman hunkered down on the step between the girl and the intense man with the beard, facing round-face. “You don’t think Rosenbluth is right?” Castleman asked the mathematician.

“No, I don’t. If Rosenbluth were right, what would happen after the bounce? We’d resume normal temporal processes and so would the counteruniverse. But since our bounce into our own past would put us in their future and their bounce would put them in our future, what would happen next?”

“What do you think?” Castle- man asked.

The round-faced man studied the math on his lined papers before replying. Castleman used the time to lean over toward the girl with acne and examine jthe old watch pinned like a brooch to her blouse. It was very nearly one o’clock.

“Better think fast,” Castleman told the round-faced man. He was already hearing the familiar crackling sound. It was hard to tell just what the sound reminded him of — a hard-boiled egg being peeled? Chinese sizzling-rice soup?

The round-faced man said, “If that happened, why, after the hour was up again the two universes....”

There was a single, loud sound resembling that made by the implosion of air into a shattered vacuum tube or the report of a small-caliber firearm.

12:01 P.M.

51

Castleman looked up at the clock on the Grand Central Tower. It was 12:01.

Castleman sighed once, took a deep breath and started to walk briskly toward the West Side. Just before crossing Vanderbilt Avenue he stepped down from the curb, dodged a yellow taxi halfway across the street, and passed between two Cadillac limousines waiting at the curb. ^

He headed up Madison Avenue to 49th Street and entered the Stoebler Building, took the elevator up to Glamdring and Glamdring and pushed open the heavy glass doors that marked the entrance to the company’s headquarters suite.

“Back so soon, Mr. Castle- man?’’ said the receptionist as he strode past her desk.

“Decided to skip lunch today,’’ Castleman told her.

“But it’s so lovely out today, hardly any smog, and it’s warm for early spring. I think I’d just take a walk even if I didn’t have an appetite.’’

“Another time,’’ Castleman said.

He walked down the corridor to his own department, went into his private office and sat down behind his desk. He looked at the digital clock beside his note box. It was 12:09 PM.

He picked up the telephone, punched local and got his own

secretary on the line. “Stephanie,’’ Castleman said, “do me a favor. Would you get information, find out the number of Long Island University, and call a Professor Nathan Rosenbluth. I’m not sure what department he’s in, probably physics or math.’’

Stephanie’s voice came back briefly.

“Yes,’’ Castleman said, sighing, “Rosenbluth the time-bounce man. Oh, he was on TV this morning? Fine. Yes, see if you can reach him. Yes, ring me back.’’

He hung up the telephone and reached for a copy of this morning’s Times lying on a low table near the couch in his office. He reread the small story near the bottom of the front page, about the professor — ah, it was physics — who had predicted the odd time-bounce phenomenon. As far as Castleman could figure out — but his telephone rang.

“1 have Professor Rosenbluth’s secretary,’’ Stephanie said. “But she claims he’s swamped with calls and not taking any.’’

“Ahah,’’ said Castleman, glanc- ing at the digital clock on his desk. It was 12:17. “Look, Stephanie, I can understand how the guy feels but this is really urgent. Pull rank — tell his secretary that it’s a big shot in Glamdring and Glamdring, pull out the stops. Yes, the works. Thanks.’’ He hung up.

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He threw down the Times and picked up the Wall Street Journal. There was a one-paragraph sum- mary of the Rosenbluth story in the Journal's world news roundup column. It gave the same informa- tion that all the other versions gave. Castleman dropped the Journal in his wastebasket and looked at the clock again. It said 12:27. In thirty-three minutes he knew that he’d be Outside near the Grand Central Tower again and that the Journal would be back on the coffee table along with the Times in his office. He pushed his chair back from the heavy desk provided by Glamdring and Glamdring, pushed himself out of his seat and strode around his office impatiently, glancing out the window toward the East River and the factory smokestacks of Long Island City beyond.

His phone rang and Stephanie’s voice said, “Professor Rosenbluth on the line, Mr. Castleman.’’

Castleman gripped the receiver tightly to his ear, looked at the digital clock again — it was 12:31 — and heard his own voice say quiveringly, “Professor? Listen, Professor Rosenbluth, about your theory of time snapping back- wards....’’

“Yes, yes,’’ the voice came back from the receiver, “I know about that, it is my theory, everyone knows that, you do not have to tell

me about it. What does Glamdring and Glamdring want of me? I am available on a consulting basis. They can hire me by the day. My rates are very reasonable.’’

“Professor, listen please. I happen to know that your theory is absolutely correct, but the bounce has already taken place.’’

“Nonsense, nonsense. Are you a mathematician? Are you a physi- cist? Are you a scientist? How can you claim to understand my theory? Have you read my papers? What is your name, young man?’’

Castleman swallowed.

“Hah?’’ asked Professor Rosen- bluth.

“My name is Myron Castle- man.’’

“Of Glamdring and Glam- dring? Yes? Yes? That’s a very good firm, a very big firm. I am not prepared to resign my professor- ship as yet, but I am available on a consulting basis. What precisely do you require, Mr. Castleberry?’’

“Professor, what I want to know is, once the bounce happens, when we get back up to the moment we, ah, bounced from, what happens then? Won’t we just bounce again? Won’t we get stuck at one point and just keep repeating that hour?’’

“No no no, Castleberry. No, no. The energy of the temporal redisplacement will be dissipated, and we will pass through the point

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12:01 P.M.

of intersection with the counter- universe and no one will ever even notice it. That is the beauty of my theory. That is its greatness, its elegance. Do you understand scientific elegance? Economy of detail? Parsimony? How can you comprehend me?”

Castleman looked at his clock. It said 12:51. “Professor,” he said desperately, “once the bounce takes place, everything is restored to its previous condition. The world is set back exactly where it was. Only nobody notices because their minds are set back too. Don’t you see?”

“What are you trying to do, Castleberry, horn in on my theory? I don’t think I can talk to you any more. You are trying to steal ideas. If you want my services, you have to hire me. I cannot afford to give away my thoughts. How can I support myself? How can I support my family, Castleberry?”

“Everybody bounces back and forgets everything that happened during the bounce, but I don’t. I don’t! Do you understand me, professor? The whole world is stuck here, recycling this single hour!”

He looked at his clock. 12:52.

“Professor Rosenbluth,’’ he said, “in precisely eight minutes the world is going to flash one hour into the past. From one o’clock it’s going to go back to one minute after noon. Everything will be

restored to its condition at 12:01. You’ll be back doing what you were doing. I’ll be back outside my office, standing near Grand Cen- tral.

“Nobody will remember this hour. It will, uh, unhappen. But I remember! I’ve relived this one hour over and over!”

“Mr. Castleberry,” the pro- fessor’s voice came sharply, “I am a very busy man, but I will give you a few more minutes. Here is what you must do. Stay there on the telephone. When the time is up, I will still be here as well. That will disabuse you of your silly notion.”

Defeated, Castleman said, “Very well.” He looked at his clock, waiting for the digital neons to flash 1:00. They did. There was a familiar crackling sound followed by a single, loud report.

With the echo of that crack still in his ears, Castleman looked up at the Grand Central Tower clock. It said 12:01. He turned ninety degrees and sprinted west, bounc- ing off startled pedestrians and recklessly dodging cars and buses as he crossed the avenues.

At Madison he turned and continued uptown, his sprint slowing to a dogged trot as his breath came with" increasing difficulty. At 49th Street he entered the Stoebler Building, mopped his sweating forehead with a soft handkerchief while he waited for

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FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

the elevator to arrive, rode up to his office and snatched up the telephone after brushing past the receptionist and his secretary with breathless grunts.

“Stephanie,” he gasped, “get me Rosenbluth back!”

“Back, Mr. Castleman? I don’t understand.”

“I was just talking to — him.” Castleman stopped, held the receiver away froih his ear and looked at it as if to discover some secret in the official Glamdring and Glamdring beige plastic piece. “No, of course not. I’m sorry, Stephanie.” He looked at the digital clock on his desk. It said 12:06.

“Will that be all, Mr. Castle- man?” Stephanie asked.

He thought for a few seconds. “I want you to call Long Island University, physics department, and get me a Professor Nathan Rosenbluth. This is extremely urgent, Stephanie. I’ll stay on the line while you place the call.”

He dragged in a deep lungful of air while he waited. His eyes roamed to the low table where the morning Times and Wall Street Journal lay. In the telephone earpiece he heard Stephanie calling information, then placing the call to Rosenbluth’s office, wheedling a line to the professor from his own secretary.

Then Rosenbluth’s voice came

over the line. “This is Rosenbluth. What is it? Who is calling from Glamdring and Glamdring? Don’t you realize that I am a very busy man? What do you want?”

Castleman moaned. Well, give it a try anyway, he thought. “Professor,” he said, “this is Myron Castleman at Glamdring and Glamdring. We were talking on the phone just a few minutes ago, do you remember that?”

“Nonsense,” Rosenbluth’s voice came sharply. “I never heard of any Castleton, never spoke with you, and besides I just arrived here from conducting a doctoral seminar. So I could not have spoken with anyone on the telephone.”

“I’m very sorry to have disturbed you, sir,” said Castle- man. Slowly and carefully he hung the receiver back onto the telephone desk set.

His digital clock said 12:22.

He stood up and walked around his office again, stopping to gaze out the window at the grime of industrial Long Island City. Of course, for all that Rosenbluth was the one to discover the time-bounce phenomenon, he was as much subject to its influence as someone who’d never heard of it. Castleman could talk to him all he wanted, could possibly even convince him of what was happening during the hour-long period of a resumption, but once the bounce took place and

12:01 P.M.

55

time resumed its progress — for a single hour — Rosenbluth would be back at 12:01 just like everybody else.

What frustration, Castleman thought, if he ever did succeed in making Rosenbluth realize that the strange phenomenon he had theorized was an actuality, had taken place, and was recurring at one-hour intervals. At the end of the hour the next resumption would find Rosenbluth as ignorant as ever — and Castleman back at his familiar post looking up at the Grand Central Tower, the place where he’d happened to be at one minute after noon. Resumption time.

He picked up the phone again and buzzed his secretary. “Steph- anie,” he said to her, “I want to do some heavy thinking for the next few minutes. Please don’t put through any calls or visitors until one o’clock.”

He hung up, paced, stared out the window, paced some more and flung himself onto the couch. The peculiarity of the time bounce, as he mulled it over, was that the resumption of the earlier state of being not only set physical objects back to their former positions, it actually wiped out the events of the lost hour. Like daylight saving indeed!

With the lost hour unhappened, even memories of the time were

obliterated. As far as anyone else was concerned, the hour hadn’t been spent and then undone — it seemed never to have happened at all! Thus no one was aware of the bounce. They might be reliving a given moment for the fifth time, the fiftieth, the five millionth, and never notice it! And never get past one o’clock this afternoon, either....

The entire universe hung up on a single, sixty-minute period, eternally repeating the events of that hour. As Castleman contem- plated the prospect, his head spun.

Strangest of all was the fact that he — and as far as he could tell, no one else in the world — retained his memory of the lost hour even after the bonne:. He had already piled up a whole series of memories of that hour, and by recalling those experiences and by understanding the phenomenon, he could vary his behavior each time, while everyone else simply repeated the same hour over and over — except when Castleman influenced them.

Once Miss Dolores Park had had a different luncheon compan- ion at Hamburger Heaven.

Once the trio on the library steps had had a fourth member for part of their debate.

Once — no, twice — Professor Rosenbluth himself had had odd phone calls when he got back to his office from conducting his graduate seminar.

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But those aberrations no longer existed even as memories for the persons they had happened to. Only Castleman retained those events in his mind.

It was a curious sort of immortality. Everyone in the world would repeat one hour, forever, and never realize that time had come to a quivering halt at that point. And Myron Castleman would be per- mitted to live forever, piling up experiences and memories, but each of only an hour’s duration, each resumed at 12:01 PM on this balmy spring day in Manhattan, standing outside near the Grand Central Tower.

He looked at the clock on his desk and sighed. It was nearly one o’clock. He closed his eyes and folded his hands behind his head, waiting for the crackling sound.

A few minutes later — or perhaps it was an hour earlier — he found himself standing in midtown, looking up at the clock. He ran to the corner United Cigar Store, hurled himself into an unoccupied phone booth, dropped a dime in the slot and dialed his own office.

“This is Myron Castleman speaking,’’ he began as soon as he heard his secretary’s voice. “No, listen, this is extremely urgent. I want you to telephone Long Island University, physics department. Get hold of Professor Nathan Rosenbluth.’’

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

A query.

“R-o-s-e-n-b-l-u-t-h. Right. Tell him that I’m a big shot at Glamdring and Glamdring, that I have to talk to him immediately about his time-bounce theory. That I’m on my way now, and please to be ready for me, in the lobby.

“Tell him that it’s a vital matter, and we must complete our conversation by one o’clock or all is lost.’’

A few words in response.

“Fine. Good.’’

He pulled open the door and vaulted from the booth, leaving the telephone hanging by its reinforced cord. He ran from the store, into Grand Central, fishing for a subway token as he ran. When he reached the lower level, he jammed the token into its slot, shoved through the turnstile, saw an express at the platform just closing its doors and managed to wedge an arm between the rubber seals.

Reluctantly the doors rolled open again, and Castleman col- lapsed into a vacant seat on the half-empty noontime train. He sat gasping for breath, feeling sharp pains in his chest and shoulder. With his right hand he pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and ran it around the inside of his collar.

When he reached his stop, the pains had partially subsided and he had his breath back. He climbed

12:01 P.M.

57

the stairs laboriously, crossed the wide plaza and pushed his way into the building where he hoped to find Nathan Rosenbluth.

Inside the lobby was a receptionist’s desk manned by a bored-looking student. Castleman gasped his name and asked if Professor Rosenbluth was expect- ing him.

The student jerked a careless thumb over his shoulder, indicating a shabby-looking figure examining a wall plaque nearby.

Castleman staggered to the man and introduced himself. It was Rosenbluth. Castleman said, “We only have a few minutes.” He looked frantically for a clock in the wall, saw one high on the wall behind the desk. It was eight minutes until one. He put his head into his hands and began to sob.

Rosenbluth said, “What’s the matter? What kind of thing is this? Are you really the man from Glamdring and Glamdring? What’s going on here? I’m a busy man!’’

Castleman tried to explain his situation to Rosenbluth, tried to make him understand that the time bounce had occurred, was contin- uing to occur at hourly intervals. Rosenbluth seemed a mixture of disinterest and hostility.

Castleman’s chest pains were growing worse. He could feel a cold sweat on his brow, feel perspiration

dripping down his sleeves from his armpits. He pulled off his jacket and threw it onto the floor, pleading with Rosenbluth to find a way to get time flowing normally again.

“I don’t want immortality,” Castleman wept, “not this way, anyhow! Everybody else has it, but they don’t know it! I know it and it’s unbearable. I can’t go on living this hour over and over!”

Rosenbluth demanded to know what evidence Castleman could give him.

Castleman looked at the clock. It said 12:56. The pain in his chest and shoulder became excruciating; a hot wave seemed to pass through his entire body, and he couldn’t breath.

He pitched forward onto the floor of the room; but before he ever felt the impact of his body on the dirty terrazzo, a roaring filled his ears, a red film seemed to cover his eyes, and then everything went blank.

Death! Death was Castleman’s last thought. Death, oblivion would help him to escape from the maddening trap he’d found himself in, would bring him dissolution and release frorn the terrible form of immortality that fate had thrust upon him.

There was total oblivion.

For Castleman, time was meaningless, but for the rest of the

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world, just over three minutes ticked away while Rosenbluth and the student receptionist worked over Castleman’s inert form, massaging the chest and forcing air futilely in and out of Castleman’s lungs.

Oblivion.

There was the echo of a single

loud sound resembling the report of a small-caliber firearm. Castleman found himself looking up at the clock on the Grand Central Tower. His tweed jacket was back on his body, and an unruly lock of hair stood out over his left ear.

It was 12:01 PM.

Coming every month

Each month we publish a couple of pages of small print that are well worth your attention. We’re talking about the F&SF Marketplace. If you're not doing a bit of browsing there each month, you're missing out on some unusual and interesting products and services.

Especially noteworthy are the book and magazine dealers, who offer many fascinating and hard to find items. We use them ourselves. So if you are not already a classified reader, give ours a try; pages 159-160 in this issue.

'"Hello! You have reached the number of Harold Mayberry. I am sorry, but Mr. Mayberry is not in. I am a simulation of Mr. Mayberry. Please leave your name and number and Mr. Mayberry will call you back when he gets in. Thank you very much!"

Here is some good, strong science fiction, the first of what will hopefully become a series about the character who comes to be called Blacklantern. Jack Williamson has been writing sf for some 40 years; his most recent novel Is THE MOON CHILDREN (Berkley). Mr. Williamson is a professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University where he set up and still teaches one of the first college courses in Science Fiction.

The Power of Blackness

by JACK WILLIAMSON

1

The guide was a time-dried Nggonggan black, hopping ahead with dazzling agility on his one good leg and waving his single yellow-painted crutch like a banner to guide his company of tourists. They were a motley group of sunburnt other-worlders in bright shorts and black glasses. Nggongga was too hot for them, and most wore coolers that wrapped them in tiny individual cloudlets of conden- sation.

“Follow my crutch!”

He went bounding down the ramp to a reserved -seat section on the shady side, just above the barrier. His flock shuffled behind, grinning at his capers, squinting down into the painful blaze of the sun-flooded arena, gawking at the

Nggonggan natives that packed the cheaper sunlit seats beyond it, a little apprehensively sniffling the rich scents of a world not yet fully sterilized.

“Respected guests of Nggo- ngga, you are lucky today — ”

Booming out of his scrawny frame, the guide’s voice had an unexpected mellow resonance, but he had to stop for his listeners to adjust their translators and re- corders to his Nggonggan clicks and gliding tones.

“Nggonggong-Nggongga smiles on you today,” he resumed. “You are about to see a veteran champion risking his title and his life to an unknown challenger. Most of you on your own far worlds have heard of tly-binding — or you

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61

wouldn’t be here. If you know anything, you know that it is more than a very dangerous game. It is a traditional ritual that reflects the history and the spirit of Nggongga.”

Drums began to throb.

“The challenger!” The yellow crutch pointed. “A young man brave enough — or fool enough — to risk his life for glory... What’s his name? Madam, he has no name. He was born outside the Nggo- nggan clan system, by which we are named. If he upsets the champion today, he’ll be asked to join.. .Yes, sir, you could say he’s fighting for his name.”

Marching to the measured drumbeat, he came out of a dark archway. A lean youth, quick and supple, head held high, sweat bright on sleek black skin. He wore a flat black hat, a brief black kilt, a short jeweled dagger in a jeweled belt. Two black attendants marched behind, one trailing a black banner from a gilded lance, the other with a white pack rolled on his back.

”His weapon bearer,” the guide boomed. “And his surgeon.”

The three marched in single file to a wide circle of smooth black sand spread over the glaring white at the center of the arena, knelt before it while the drums paused, marched on toward the flag- wreathed stand where the judges sat.

“I know the boy.” The guide’s voice rose against the drum throb. “He used to clean my boots. An abandoned bastard. Grew up on the streets. An independent sort. He asks no favors and takes no orders. He’s got brains and guts. He’s coming up on his own, and I wish him luck. ...See that, sir?” He chuckled suddenly, waving the crutch. “He has found at least one friend, I see. He’ll be fighting for more than fortune and a name.”

The crutch picked out a striking red-haired girl leaning from a box near the judges. She screamed and waved until the challenger turned, screamed again and blew him a kiss. Nodding very slightly, he knelt 'to the judges again and turned with his attendants to face the black circle.

“You have a good guide today.” The crutch tapped the floor, accenting the rhythm of the drums. “I know tly-binding, because in my own youth I was once a tly-binder. That’s the way I lost my leg.” He hopped and bent to listen to a sun-broiled woman, grinned and shook his head. “Another story, madam. Too painful to retell. But I do know tly-binding.”

He waved away a grimy black urchin offering a basket of spiny native fruit.

“The last living relic of our historic...” He leaned again into the drifting condensation. “No,

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madam. He won’t use the dagger. Or any modern weapon. Everything will be authentic. The costumes and the code have not changed in seven thousand years.”

He hopped back to face his flock and raised his bugle voice.

“Respected voyagers of the eye, here you will find the real Nggongga. We’ve been touring our metropolis — Nggonggamba means Eye of Nggongga — but the city is not our world at all. These hotels and shops and tourist traps — they’re an ugly scab, grown around the eye.”

He scowled back into the fog.

“No, sir. I’m not speaking as a Nggonggan diplomat. Not even as a courier for Universal Travel. I’m only a native Nggonggan, saying what I feel. Nggonggamba, to me, is a rank thorn weed, planted by the traders who come through the eye for our rich metals and the richer scents distilled from our desert musk weed. But it is not Nggongga.. ..You say the eyes bring progress, sir? What I call the eyes will not translate.”

Listening, he fanned himself with the wide flat yellow cone of his Nggonggan hat.

“The machines of the eye, sir?... Yes, of course they are clever beyond imagination. Every man of reason must bow to those who understand how to fold our space through other spaces, to bring a

doorway on one world against another doorway a hundred or ten thousand light-years off. I know it takes brave and able people to carry a new transflection station on a twenty-year flight or a fifty-year flight to open another new eye on another new world. But progress — for that new world?”

Swaying on his single leg, he flailed the yellow crutch as if to sweep aside the clinging cloud wisps.

“As you say, sir.. .But I don’t speak of such new planets. I’m sure the eyes are fine for new worlds, where men have never been before. The colonists can step out into virgin lands, with all the gear they need. They can step back again, if they don’t like what they find. But things were different, sir, when my own forefathers reached Nggongga, twelve thousand years ago. Space had not been folded then. Their starship had been in flight for forty years, and its fusion fuel was gone. Most of them were killed by what they found, but they had to stay. They could not refit or refuel their ship. Four thousand years had passed before the next one arrived.”

He stabbed the crutch toward a fat man masked with white suncreams and harnessed with multiplex recorders.

“I speak of worlds like this one, sir. Worlds already old, rich with

the power of blackness

seasoned cultures of their own, when the eyes are opened on them. ..Yes, sir. I’ve seen others. Couriers travel, too... On every settled world it is the same. But look around you at Nggongga.”

He whirled the crutch above his head.

“We Nggonggans had been evolving here for many thousand years. We are black because our sun is hot. We live in communal clans because our deserts are too harsh for men alone. We had shaped a way of life to fit our world. A harsh life, you may think, but it was good for us. I am sad to see it lost. We used to know what was true, what was just, what was good. Now nobody knows.”

A quaver broke his mellow voice.

“Now, since those first galactic strangers in their starship brought machines to open the eye, our old world is sick. Hordes of sneering strangers came pushing through the eye, bartering bright new gadgets we never needed and spreading doubt of all we used to live by. They drained off our portable wealth and left such broken men as I am, grieving for the spirit of old Nggongga. When those first greedy robbers and desecrators went on to loot newer worlds, another waver of strangers came, like yourselves, to explore the wreckage they had left. To

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stereograph the ruins of our holy places. To record the relics of our lost culture. To toss a few coins at the broken human beings — ”

The fat man’s muttering checked him.

“No, sir. I’m not an anthro- pologist. I’m just an old Nggo- nggan. As poor as the boy yonder, except that I do have a name.. .No, sir, it’s nothing you could pronounce, but people call me Champ... Till I lost my leg, I was a binder of tlys. Since, I’ve been escorting tourists for Universal Travel. Sometimes I long for my youth.”

The drumbeat had changed, and he glanced into the arena.

“Here come the egg bearers.”

They were two slim young black girls in crimson hats and crimson aprons, marching proudly to the drum, bearing the tly’s egg between them on a cushioned litter. It was an ash-white globe, the size of a child’s head.

“Listen.” He held up the crutch. “You hear it screaming.”

The faint shrieks rose fife-like above the drums as the girls reached the black-sand circle. Moving to the rhythm of the drums, they placed the egg at the center of that circle and drew back from it. Gliding through a ceremonial dance, they swept out their footprints with green-wreathed brooms from the litter. They stood

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facing the young challenger, who now marched slowly back with his two attendants to face them across the black circle and the screaming

egg.

“Our most ancient history is represented here,” the guide was chanting, in time to the drums. “Our pioneer forefathers came near failing to survive. The sun was too hot, the whole planet too hostile. The ultraviolet wilted their crops, and the native predators killed their animals. Some wanted to refit their starship, which was still out in orbit. But they could not reach it. Their ^shuttles had both crashed. They were desperate — until they found a hero.”

He waved the crutch at the young contender, who was kneeling now, facing the girls and the wailing egg.

“The stinging things they called tlys had been their most savage enemy. These winged predators had been spoiling their fields and killing their cattle and even carrying children off to dens in cliffs that men could not climb. Now a young hero caught and tamed the first tly.

“The domesticated tly kept the wild ones off More useful than the legendary falcons of old Earth, it caught edible game creatures on the uplands and brought edible fish from the sea. Others were tamed, and they kept the pioneers alive. In

gratitude, they gave the young tamer a new name. They called him Ngugong — which means Sky- man.”

Down in the arena, the kneeling challenger had risen. Removing the belted dagger, he buckled it on his weapons bearer, who tossed him in return a short length of rope.

“Yes, madam,” the guide said. “Skyman used only a rope. The dagger is not for the tly at all, but for the binder. The tlys disable their game, you see, with a paralyzing venom which causes unending agony. No antidote is known. If the binder should be badly stung, it is the surgeon’s duty to give him comfort with the dag »»

The drums abruptly stopped. With ritual shrieks, the two girls fled into the archway. The surgeon and the bearer retreated hastily toward the judges’ box. The young contender stood outside the black circle, swinging the short rope and facing the whining egg.

“He is not allowed to step into the black,” the guide whispered hoarsely. “Or to use any weapons save the rope and his own body. However, tradition does allow him one advantage over the old hero whose role he plays.

“The keeper of the tlys is allowed to milk the venom from the sacs, so that the sting is not always disabling. In these days the daggers

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65

are rarely required. My own leg was lost because my tly had not been milked with care enough. The amputation saved my life.”

The drums rolled briefly.

“Watch! The tly!”

An iron gate clanged open. Sunlight burned on crimson armor, and the whole arena rang with a howling that seemed to have no source. On dead-black wings, the tly climbed and wheeled above the whimpering egg and the waiting man. Wings arrowed back, it dived.

The other-worlders gasped at its sleek deadliness. Burning scales flowed in graceful lines from five-eyed head to tapered tail. Its five-angled mouth yawned black to bellow, showing five flashing fangs spaced around a pentagon of jaws.

“The binder has a choice of several strategies,” the guide was whispering. “He can try to mount the tly at a point above the wings, where the sting cannot quite reach. He can try to catch the sting itself, to break it off the tail. With clever footwork, he can evade the jaws. His aim is to tie the wings flat and disable the sting, so that he can carry the creature out of the arena.”

He grinned into the condensa- tion cloud.

“No, madam. The tly is not exactly a mother. The female tly is a helpless slug-shaped thing that never leaves the burrow. The males

watch the eggs and feed the young. This creature is male enough — the sting is also a penis. Yet if^s fighting for its egg, as you can see

The black challenger bounded nimbly on the balls of his feet and waited almost casually. The egg chirred behind him. The diving tly came level, sting reaching for him. The rope flicked upward — and a roar of triumph rolled across the hot arena from the packed sunlit seats.

The challenger was still easily erect, twirling the rope. The egg still squalled on the sand. The tly had flown on past. With a hollow yell that seemed to fill the hot sky, it climbed and wheeled to dive again.

“A cool man.” The guide glanced briefly back at his staring flock. “He knows that the tlys strike instinctively at motion. He led its sting from his body to the moving rope.”

As the tly came back from a new direction, the challenger danced and paused to wait between it and the egg. Again it came at him on black wings, a flashing red projectile. Again the rope flicked upward. Again it stung the air and hurtled on. The bright-kilted blacks were on their feet across the arena, roaring their approval. Thrown like boomerangs, flat bright conical hats began sailing

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out toward the wheeling tly and sliding back into the stands.

“No!” the guide breathed suddenly. “No — “

The roar of the crowd fell into a hush of taut alarm. The returning tly had dived lower. Now it came at the man not with its sting but with scarlet-armored bulge of its five- eyed head.

The encounter was a blur of motion, half obscured by furious black wings. In fragmentary glimpses, the other-worlders saw the lithe challenger in midleap over that crested head, saw him astride the tapered body, saw his rope whipping against the searching sting. Man and beast rolled on the sand, hidden in white dust rising.

The arena lay hushed, till a drum throbbed once. The con- tender stumbled out of the dust, bent with the weight of the hissing tly slung over his shoulder, black wings bound against its armor, broken sting dragging crookedly. The drums were thundering now, and many-colored hats sailed like strange birds above the staggering man.

“I think we have a new champion,” the guide was mur- muring. “The boy has earned his name — ”

The drums stopped. Silence froze the crowd. The contender had stumbled again, reeling backward into the forbidden circle around the

wailing egg. He slipped to his knees, and the tly flopped on the black sand. The last bright hats rained out of the air. In the stillness, the egg uttered a shrill little crow.

“The boy was stung!” the guide gasped. “The venom sacs of his tly had not been fully milked.”

2

He stood swaying with pain from the venomed scratch along his upper arm. It hashed him in unbearable fire, choked him with dry nausea, bathed the whole arena with murky red. It howled in his ears like a desert khamsin. It spun him into a tight cocoon of raw agony, and nothing outside mat- tered.

Yet he knew what was happening. He heard the egg chittering happily, heard the tly slithering out of the loosened rope, glimpsed it soaring away with the pipped egg safely wrapped in its quick prehensile tongue,

He watched the girl whose name-symbol was Sapphire. She had been halfway to him when he began to stumble. Red hair flying, white arms wide, green eyes smiling for him. Now she had stopped. Her bright eagerness faded into shock and pity and aversion. Suddenly she shrugged, bent to pick up a

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67

jeweled hat that someone else had thrown, scurried back toward her box.

His two attendants bustled past her. The bearer waved his lance foolishly after the tly, which was already gone. The surgeon swabbed at his wound, peered into his face, and reached for the mercy dagger.

No! I don 't need that — not yet

He thought the words, but his dry throat made no sound. Desperately, he tried to shake his head. The effort made the whole arena rock and pitch beneath him, but he could not be sure his head had moved.

“...wait.” Fragmentary words broke through the gusts of pain, “...relatively superficial.. .survival... amputation. ..a crime the venom had not been milked...”

They took his arms, tried to walk him out of the arena. He resisted. Still he couldn’t talk, but he tried to pull back toward the benches. He had to see what happened next. If the champion had to take the dagger, he thought the judges might still be forced to declare him the winner.

“Come on, kid.” The surgeon tugged at him. “If you want to keep your arm — ”

But now he could hear the drums again, beyond the walls of pain. They were a faint, far rattle, like footsteps in dry grass. The two

men muttered and helped him to the benches. Swaying between them there, blinking across the barrier,

he watched the champion strutting in.

A man of the Wind clan, the champion had a name. It meant Storm Stalker. Perhaps he had once been as noble as that title, but time had begun to overtake him now. His belly bulged too far above his dun-colored kilt, and his massive muscles shone with too much sweat.

Yet the black stands screamed a welcome, and thrown hats swarmed like bright moths above a light. He knelt to the judges, knelt to the egg. The drums paused, and the handlers released his tly. It looked smaller than the boy’s had been, its flight erratic and slow.

“A sick one!” he heard his surgeon muttering. “Or perhaps underfed.”

Through a dull haze of pain, he watched the contest. Three times the tly dived at the black sand circle. Three times the Stalker led it by with an easy flirt of his rope. Three times the hats sailed out from the roaring stands.

On the fourth slow dive, the tly seemed to waver. The champion flicked the rope to lead it down and sprang heavily upon it. The thin red tail struck and struck, but the stings had no effect. Man and tly toppled into blinding dust. Though

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what happened was hard to see, the boy thought the black wings had stopped flapping before they were bound.

His fat blackness splotched with wet white sand, the champion knelt to the judges, knelt to his shrieking fans. Panting through a gap- toothed mouth, he bent to hoist his lifeless tly.

“Stalker!” Sapphire was screaming. “Stalker — you prom- ised the egg to me.”

The boy turned his throbbing head enough to see her scrambling down from her box. The champion nodded to his men. The bearer picked up the egg and brought it to meet her. She brushed it aside and ran on to seize the Stalker’s sweaty arm. In a final hail of hats, he stumbled out of the arena with the clinging girl and his limp-tailed tly.

As the cheering died, the boy limped stiffly after them. Dirty urchins were picking up the hats, but they paused to mimic his painful gait. His bearer had to push them aside with the black- bannered lance.

The sun was suddenly too hot, the air too thick to breathe. His feet began to drag the sand. The jeering of the urchins became a senseless howling. The walls of pain turned dark around him, and he knew that he was falling.

He waited for the dagger.

But then the sun was gone.

Dimly, he recognized the low gray walls of the dying room — the surgery beneath the stands. Vague- ly. he wondered how much time had passed. Faintly, he could remember the tiny his^ of red-hot needles thrust into his wound and the choking reek of burnt tly scales that was supposed to drive away the venom.

He remembered fragments of a quarrel. His surgeon’s voice, shrill with anger, protesting that his clan had handed down their secret remedies five thousand years. The worried chief handler, insisting that the new doctors who came through the eye had better medicine than the dagger.

He didn’t know how the quarrel came out. He lacked the life to care. But a pale young stranger in white was bustling around him now. He felt cold metal that stung like the tly, heard the click and hum of unknown devices, relaxed at last beneath a warm red glow. The pain began to drain away. He wanted to thank the pale man, but he was too sleepy to say anything.

He woke again in the dim cool stillness of the dying room, somehow quite alive. Stretching himself, he found no pain. Even his arm felt smooth and sound, where the scratch had been. His body moved well when he sat up, and he felt a pleasant stab of hunger.

His attendants and the pale

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man were gone, but an old black came shuffling toward the bed. A handler he knew. Although the man had never been a binder, his leathery skin was seamed with accidental scars, his gaunt frame stiff and palsied from accidental stings.

“Lad — lad!“ His shrill voice cracked. “I’ve been waiting to beg your forgiveness.” He knelt beside the bed. “It’s all my fault you are not the champion.”

He ducked the boy’s clutching hand.

“There’s a stranger — a gray-skinned other-worlder called Wheeler. One of those rogues who come through the eye to prey on Nggongga. An importer of for- bidden drugs. A crafty gambler. He bet on the champion. Arranged for you to lose.”

“You — ” The boy slapped the bent bald head, before he could check himself. “What did you do?”

“Mercy, lad!” he whimpered. “I’ll tell you everything. I was the milker. They had come to the arena to look over the tlys. Wheeler and the champion. A whore with them. They whispered together, with their translators set for privacy. Then the champion spoke to me.

“He made me promise to leave poison enough in the sacs to cripple you. In return, he promised that Wheeler would bet five hundred gongs for me and take me along to

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a richer world beyond the eye when he went on. — Don’t hurt me, lad!”

His gnarled hands lifted, twisted and trembling from old stings.

“I did try to put them them off. Believe me, lad! I had always been an honest handler. I like your courage and your style. But I’m an old man, remember. I’ve been stung too many times. When I tried to say no, Wheeler promised that his other-world doctors could stop the pain that twists me. So I did what they wanted.”

“I — I forgive you,” the boy whispered. “But not the Stalker!”

“Now they won’t — won’t pay me!” Bitter tears burst out. “Wheeler says he never saw me. The champion kicked me out of his way, and his whore laughed at me. They say the stings have curdled my brain. That’s why I came back to you.”

“Why tell me?” The boy laughed harshly. “I have no clan, no name, no rights. The entry costs took all I could raise. All except my hat and dagger. What can I do?”

“Kill the Stalker!” the old man gasped. “Kill Wheeler, too!”

Trembling suddenly, the boy slid to his feet. He shoved the old man aside, snatched his dagger belt from its hook behind the bed, buckled it around him.

“Why not?” he breated. “What have I to lose?”

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“Wait, lad!“ The old man whined. “What Tve told you is only half the story. Both tlys were fixed. Yours unmilked. The other drugged and dying.”

He turned back, staring.

“Another handler told me. Wheeler’s girl promised him money — three hundred gongs bet on the champion — to slip the Stalker’s tly a black capsule with its last feed. When the handler pushed it out to meet the Stalker, he says it was already weak and twitching. But now he says the whore won’t pay.”

“So I should kill all three?” The boy chuckled. “Perhaps I will.”

He clapped on his black hat — the color of the clanless man. He thumbed the dagger’s edge with a bleak black smile and strode out of the dying room into the clangor of Nggonggamba. Somehow, in spite of the tly’s sting, he felt quite fit. All his pain was gone. Each bounding stride felt good, as if that pale outsider had oiled every joint, restrung every muscle.

An open freightway gave him a heady whiff of musk weed. He breathed deeper and walked faster. The gaudy towers all looked brighter, the rush of the rolling ways sounded louder, the tly pens behind him stank with a sharper fetor, as if his senses had all been renewed. He found himself peering aside into the glittering perfume shops and ahead at the mobs of

black-skinned workers and the paler troops of merchants and shoppers and lovers and tourists, as if they had all been new.

The odor-lure of an eating place wet his mouth and stabbed him through with hunger — the quickest, keenest, brightest hunger he remembered. Searching his belt, he found one worn iron five-gong coin and a bright two-gate bit of portal money. Enough for dinner and a tip. He walked inside to eat. Stalker and Wheeler could wait. After all, he felt too good to kill anybody. Perhaps, over good food and drink, he might decide to forget —

“Hold up, boy!” The black doorman stopped him. “See that sign?”

It was the swirling disk of rainbow color that meant clansmen only. Beyond it, he saw old champ hopping nimbly about the tables, waving his crutch at the bowing waiters seating his pale other- worlders.

“They aren’t clansmen.”

“Honorary clansmen,’’ the doorman snarled. “You get out.”

That turned his hunger into anger. He clutched at his dagger, let it go again. It was not the stupid doorman but the Stalker who had earned it.

In the native market, he shopped for a weapon. Wistfully, he tried the balance of the sleek

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man-guns, weighed the tapered rockets, peered at the cunning booby-bombs. Each was priced at many hundred gongs. So were the night glasses, the seismic traps, the chemical trackers. He was fingering the lower priced knives and poison darts and lethal baits when a clerk frowned at his black kilt and began asking whom a clanless man had any right to kill. He spent his five gongs for a hunting lantern, and the two-gate bit for glasses to see its light.

The builders of the eye had chosen an arid site on the arid planet. The portal itself stood on a rocky ridge between a dry salt lake and a narrow arm of Nggongga’s single landlocked ocean. The new

city ringed it now with enormous looming towers that mixed the styles of a hundred other worlds. Power plants and rolling ways honeycombed the rock beneath. New barge docks lined the ocean inlet, and new air pads dotted the ancient lake.

Only the arena was old. It stood southward on the same ridge, with an av/esome view of desert and sea. Once it had been the common ground of a dozen roving clans, with domesticated tlys allowed to burrow in the cliffs around it, but the mirror-domed suburban villas of wealthy other-worlders shone on the slopes below it now.

Storm Stalker was a Ngugong of the Wind clan, and his loyal clansmen had long ago rewarded his prowess with the historic fortress of his clan, which perched like a resting tly on a naked peak above the arena. Though it was two thousand years older than the eye, he had opened it to progress. The new robot keeper at the street door ignored the boy when he asked to see the champion.

Yet the boy was not defeated. Growing up in Nggonggamba without clan or rights or name, he had learned to use the dust traps beneath the rolling ways. He rode a freightway, climbed a disposal shaft into the castle, crept past the Stalker’s sleeping attendants into the tower where he lived.

Nothing stopped him until the flitting ray of his lantern shivered and came back to the long rows of black heads grinning at him from the trophy cases in the hall. For one frozen instant, he felt as if the tly had stung him again. As he tried to breathe, his last qualms faded. The Stalker had also been a hunter of men. He dimmed the lantern and gripped the dagger and moved noislessly on.

The bedroom door was locked, but a roving other-worlder had taught him how to deal with bedroom locks before he was eight years old. Inside, he turned up his hunting light to fill the great stone

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room. He heard the Stalker’s wheezing breath and found the ancient bed. Thick-pillared, cov- ered with a khamsin canopy, it loomed like a dark inner fortress.

The old floor took all his skill, but he had almost reached the bed without a creak when an odor checked him — the rose-tempered musk that Sapphire wore. Though he tried to tell himself that he should not have been surprised, her scent shook him like an unfair blow.

He stopped where he stood, breathing carefully. When he dared move again, he pushed up the hunting glasses to make sure his light could not be seen and pushed them back to survey the huge room again — the massive old armoire that towered like a second fort beyond the bed, the alternating tly’s eggs and black heads that decorated the high stone mantel, the window slits that looked out across islandlike airpads on the dark sea of desert.

Calm again, he framed his plan. He turned the black lantern high, its whole globe glowing, and placed it gently on the floor. He drew back into the shadow of the bed, lest the Stalker have hunting glasses of his own.

“Stalker!” His hand settled on the dagger. “Wake up. Stalker.”

Sapphire screamed. Stalker’s last snore became a grunt. His

fat-jowled head thrust through the heavy curtains, darted back. The girl gasped something about “the stung man.”

“You pitiful kid.” The hoarse startled voice had a rasp of seeming sympathy. “A bad break you got.” Behind the curtains, there was motion. “What are you doing here?”

“Asking — asking questions. Stalker.” He had thought he was calm enough, but his voice tried to stick. “Why was I stung? What killed your tly? If I like the answers. I’ll let you live.”

“Fool kid!” That croaking shout failed to cover a click of metal and a scrambling in the bed. “You’ve been listening to some brain-stung handler — ”

White light blazed. Feet thud- ded beyond the bed. The kicked lantern clattered across the floor. The Stalker loomed where it had been, crouching and blinking, swinging a heavy man-gun. The boy slung his black glasses away, threw his poised dagger, dived aside.

The rifle crashed once, rattled on the floor. With a soft, childlike cry, the Stalker toppled backward. Inside the canopy. Sapphire choked back another scream. The boy scooped up his lantern and the gun, got his dagger back. When he stood up, he found Sapphire trembling beside the bed, clad only in her long red hair.

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“No Name — “ Huskily, she breathed the half-mocking term she had found for him the night after he first saw her in a tourist group old champ was leading through the arena. “No Name, you know I always — always wanted you to win.”

“Once 1 thought you did.” Half afraid to look at her, he bent to wipe the dagger on Stalker’s naked belly. “But we’re done with your game. If you still want to play, we’ll play mine.”

“With you. No Name — ”

He felt her flowing motion toward him, and her rose-tempered scent turned him giddy. For a moment all he could hear was his own blood pounding.

“I’ll play any game with you.”

“I won’t kill you. Sapphire.” He pushed her back with the muzzle of the man-gun. “I’ll even play fair. Show me his winnings, and you can keep half.”

“You hurt me, No Name.” She cringed backward. “There’s forty — forty thousand gongs. There in his safe under the hearth. I said I’d play your game.” She tried to smile, swaying toward him. “Just tell me. No Name.”

“I’m sliding through the eye

He heard pounding boots and shouting in the hall.

“Your part is to get me out alive,” he whispered. “If these seed

eaters know you’re here, convince them the Stalker isn’t hurt. Maybe he shot at something in a dream. Dig up the loot. Find me a cooler-cloak to cover the gun. If you try one trick — ”

“Trust me. No Name!” Her white arms opened. “Take me — take me with you.”

“Not yet!” Grinning at her, he waved the man-gun toward the door, where the Stalker’s people had begun to hammer. “First we’ve got my game to play.”

3.

Old Champ was guiding a group of native black Nggonggans around the terminal complex. Members of the Sand clan, in brown hats and kilts, they were rare-earth miners and musk-weed cutters and crawler drivers from the equatorial uplands half around the planet. Rollways and towers and the eye itself had humbled them with awe, and he was snappish with them, suspecting that they dis- approved the other-worlder custom of the tip.

“See that dome?” He waved the yellow crutch. “It covers the transflection portal.”

They marveled at the dome, which was wide enough to cover the largest village in their desert highlands. They stared again at his agility, as he hopped up a rolling ramp and led them along the high

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gallery that belted the dome above the terminal doors. They gasped when he turned a section of the inner wall transparent, to let them look down into the dome.

“The portal,” he bugled, in their own tonal dialect. “The eye itself.”

The floor was a vast circular plain. Rollways entered it from hundreds of terminal entrances three levels deep, spaced all around the rim of the dome. They flowed together into six broad trunks, all at the same level, that converged into the actual eye.

“Monstrous!” A hulking miner shivered. “Forty yards wide — and looking straight at me.”

“An optical effect,” old Champ said. “The same from every direction. The blue iris is a circular image of all the other portals — some of them ten thousand light-years off in ordinary space. The black pupil — the engineers call it a circle of inversion — reflects the darkness of all the unknown spaces collapsed between the open eyes.”

He waved the crutch at the unending streams of traffic — piled freight containers and crowded passenger floats — flowing into the eye on one side and out on the other.

“Ring-fields around the iris push the traffic through — ”

“A forbidden thing!” A stooped weed cutter shrank fearfully back.

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“People and things go into that eye and come out — different! Bales of weed turn to big black boxes.”

“It only looks that way.” Old Champ rapped the deck impa- tiently. “What goes in is scattered through other eyes to destinations on many thousand planets. What comes out here has been gathered from those same far eyes. A ticket through costs more than you have, but it does save travel time. A thousand gongs can save you a thousand years in a starship — if you could live so long.”

He paused to let them gape.

“The operators and the inner guards are stationed on those six islands.” He pointed at the triangular platforms that stood between the converging rollways. “They sort and watch the traffic. But what you see is less than half the eye. The computers and the power installations fill nine more levels, under the floor.”

“Sir!” A curious crawler driver stopped chewing the sweet-seed that colored his mouth vividly orange. “Can we go down there? I want to see — ”

“Not without your ticket.” Old Champ snorted. “Not without your exit visa. Not without being screened for weapons and contra- band and bad ideas.”

“Why?” The driver looked for a place to spit and gulped uncom- fortably. “I don’t see why — ”

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“Eyejackers!” snapped the guide. “A lot of con men and bigger thieves do get through the eye with loot collected on Nggongga — but they’re the slick ones. The eyejackers are the fools. They rob somebody and turn up here with a gun or a bomb for a ticket. Every one gets caught, but more keep coming.”

“How do they catch them?” The miner squinted through the crystal wall. “I don’t see any guns.”

“You won’t see — ”

The wall turned suddenly opaque, now the color of polished steel.

“Trouble inside — but we won’t see it.” Old Champ rapped with the crutch and hopped toward the ramp. “They’ve cut us off. We’ll have to move along. Your good luck. Our next stop is a perfume factory, and now we’ll have time enough to shop. The manager is my clan-kin. Highly reliable. If you decide to purchase anything, I can get you wholesale rates.”

The boy had never been inside the portal dome, but he had begun cleaning boots and sometimes picking pockets on that sight-seer’s gallery before he was seven. Tourists had told him of other worlds where all people had rights and a name was not too hard to earn. Never expecting to have the money or the right to buy legal

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passage, he had brightened many an hour of hunger and despair with schemes for illegal transit to some kinder place. That converging web of rollways was mapped in his mind, and off-duty workers had told him how the eye was run.

Now, with twenty thousand gongs in his belt, he might have paid his legal way, but he could not expect the dead Stalker’s fans to leave him time enough to comply with legal regulations. He rode a low-level freightway into the dome, crouching between piled bales of cured musk-weed.

When it slowed to pass an inspection station, he dropped off the rollway behind the bales and slipped into a washroom. He waited there for an inspector, took the man’s uniform and eye-badge, climbed a ramp to the main level, sprang boldly on a passenger float.

The man-gun slung across his back as if it had been official equipment, he moved briskly between the files of standing passengers, asking to see their departure papers. With a hard-won deftness, he extracted transit coupons from one folder, the visaed passport from another, gathered a medical clearance and a credit disk and a universal translator, working his way along the float until it was entering the slot between two control islands, within moments of the portal.

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“Documents,” he was rasping. “Departure doc — ”

When he glanced up toward the eye, his voice caught. Already overhead, the brilliant blue flicker of the iris was many yards across. The black stare of that vast solitary pupil struck him with a terror as keen as his breathless hope. All around the iris was a haze of colorless nothingness — already swallowing the front of the float. In a few heartbeats, he would see a new world —

The roll way stopped.

“Get off!” That amplified command thundered from some- where above, and blinding search- lights blazed down on him from the island wall. “Get off that float!”

Plunging into a knot of startled tourists, he unslung the man-gun.

“Eyejack!” He fired a short burst upward, at the island’s crystal wall. “Cut the light!” he screamed through the slam and howl of his ricocheting bullets. “Take me through. I won’t hurt anybody — unless you stop the float.”

Crouching, he swept the shriek- ing passengers with the muzzle of the gun. The searchlights went out. The float lurched ahead. The eye swelled, till it was half the world. Men and women ahead toppled into the hueless nothingness around the iris. He would be next.

“Keep it rolling!” he screamed

at the island. “Take me through »»

The rifle tore itself out of his hands to vanish into that flickering blankness, drawn by some savage force he could not see. Desperately, he plunged to follow it. Something smashed him back, as if he had struck an invisible wall.

Something hurled him off the float, crushed him to the floor. The searchlights blazed again. He was groping for his dagger, but heavy boots came thudding down around him. A gas gun thumped. He caught one bitter whiff, and the blinding lights dimmed again.

He lay sprawled on a wet metal floor, too numb at first to move. He was bruised, naked, drenched. His chest felt raw where the gas had burned him. When he moved his throbbing head, he struck a steel cell wall. Dagger and money and clothing were gone, even his translator. He sat hunched and shivering on the edge of the bare metal bunk, waiting miserably for anything to happen.

“Wake up, lad.” A big paunchy black in the blue kilt of the Sky clan rattled the bars and hailed him in his own dialect. “So you’re the rascal who stabbed the Stalker and tried to eyejack your way off the world?”

The boy nodded dully.

“Idiot!” The scolding tone was oddly mixed with kindness. “You

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never had a chance. I guess you got closer than most, but the operators can work those ring-fields like their own hands. I hear they grabbed your gun with a magnetic vector and tossed you back to the eye-guard gang.”

“They got me.”

“I see you’ve had a working over — but don’t blame me. I just came on. I’ll get you a towel and something to wear. Wait right here.”

Chuckling heartily, he vanished and came back with the towel and a tattered black kilt.

“I saw you in the arena.” He held the kilt while the boy dried himself. “Lost ten gongs on you — but don’t mind that. I like the cool way you played that tly. I think you earned the title fair enough. I guess old Stalker stung us both.”

“I killed him, anyhow.” The boy grinned with a brief satisfac- tion. “But they’ve got — got me.”

Something like a sob caught his voice. “What will they do with me now?”

“Nothing good.” The guard clucked with sympathy. “The eyejack by itself would probably get you a free trip to the world they call Abaddon Nine. But the Stalker’s fans won’t let you get off alive. A mob of them is marching on the municipal tower. They want you hunted.”

“That’s their old tribal law.”

The boy nodded bleakly. “Stalker was a hunter himself.”

When the guard was gone, the boy sat trying not to think about the grinning heads he had seen in the Stalker’s trophy cases and arranged with tly’s eggs on his mantel. He reviewed his eyejack attempt, trying to pick out his blunder, but he could see no blunder. He simply hadn’t known ' how the ring-fields could be used to disarm a man and toss him to the cops.

“Come along, boy!’’ That cheery shout broke into his dismal abstraction. “Good news! Maybe a chance to save your head. An agent of the Benefactors wants to talk to you.”

“The Benefactors?” He sprang upright and sat heavily back, resolving not to hope too much. “What’s a Benefactor?”

“You’ll find out.” The guard returned his translator, squinted sharply at him, nodded in bland approval. “I think you’ll do. Just speak fair to the agent. If you please him, he can take you through the eye to a better place than Abaddon Nine. Now come along.”

Two levels up, the guard let him into a bright, quiet room where two others waited.

“No Name!” Sapphire ran to greet him with a hot wet kiss. She led him to meet her companion, a

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pale outsider with a puffy face and glassy eyes. “My friend Wheeler.”

The other-worlder gave him a sullen stare.

“Don’t mind Wheeler.” The girl made a face. “Of course he blames you for his own arrest. But we’re all three in this together — and we can all get out together, if we can only play the Benefactor’s game.”

“I think I’ve played too many games.” The boy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stepped back from the hostile other-worlder. “What are Bene- factors?”

“Friends of humanity, they say.” Wheeler spoke in a raspy whisper. “No friends of mine.”

“Play along.” The girl glanced at the farther door and dropped her urgent voice. “Both of you. Promise to befriend the human race, if that’s what the agent wants. Let him get us off Nggongga — before these black hunters take our heads. We can walk out later — ”

Wheeler hissed softly to stop her. The farther door slid open. Two uniformed blacks stalked through, gas guns ready. A pale, worried portal official appeared behind them, the blue eye-symbol staring from his silver tunic. He scowled at the prisoners, called the policeman sharply out.

A tall man walked in alone. Wheeler flinched away from him.

with a startled grunt. Sapphire gasped. The boy blinked and stared, trying to resolve his confused emotions of dread and wonder and even delight.

Standing very straight in a queer, close-cut uniform of some blood-red stuff, with a black weapon-shape at his belt, the stranger looked severely stern, till he smiled at the three. With the snowy hair flowing to his shoulders and the lines around his pene- trating eyes, he looked old, until the boy saw the firmness of his deep-tanned flesh and his youthful ease of motion. His quiet voice carried invincible authority, some- how mixed with appealing warmth.

“Call me Thornwall.’’ He paused to greet each of the three with a searching look and an oddly casual nod. The boy shrank a little from the blue directness of his eyes. The girl darted impulsively toward him, but Wheeler snatched her back.

“Sit, please.” He waved them toward the chairs. “Before you speak, you should know that I’m here as an agent of the Fellowship of Benefactors. We’ve arranged this meeting to discuss the possibility that you might join us.”

“We’re ready, sir!” the girl cried. “You’ll find us willing — ”

“Not yet!” Wheeler rasped. “Let’s hear the conditions.”

“We’ve time enough.” He

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leaned against the desk, smiling easily. “First of all, you should understand your difficult legal situation.” Sterner than the smile, his blue stare probed them, one by one. “Here in Nggonggamba, you are subject to a triple jurisdiction. The portal complex has laws of its own, in force on many planets, recognized here by both the city and the adjacent clandoms. The city has its own legal authority, created by the treaty of entry. Under the same agreement, the aboriginal clans retain certain paramount rights, to which city and eye must yield.”

The boy waited blankly for meaning to emerge. The words were a frightening jangle, yet he wanted to trust the voice that spoke them. Wheeler sat staring glassily when he looked at the others, and Sapphire was wetting her full red lips!

“Each of you is charged with grave offenses against all three jurisdictions.” Thornwall’s young face was warm and brown and casual, yet his old eyes froze the boy. “Yours include the killing of a treaty clansman, not yet avenged, armed robbery and transportation of stolen property within the municipal limits, and numerous violations of the portal code, even space piracy.”

The boy gulped. “Guilty, sir.”

“We’re not concerned with

guilt.” A lean red arm waved his words aside. “Only with the truth.”

The boy sat uneasily back, and Thornwall turned to the girl.

“My name-symbol is Sap- phire.” Very pale, she stood up as if somehow lifted by his pointing finger. “I was with Stalker when he was killed. I was caught at the portal with part of his stolen money.”

“I believe you’re also involved with him.”

The finger moved on to the puffy man, who sat in stubborn silence.

“You face a long list of charges, Wheeler. You are accused of misusing the portal on many occasions, to ship illicit drugs, to dispose of stolen property, to avoid arrest. Here on Nggongga, the clans and the city officials suspect you of controlling a dope ring, adulter- ating perfumes and counterfeiting containers, even of fixing the tly-binding contest that led to this boy’s arrest.”

“No comment,’’ Wheeler

rasped. “My lawyers will speak for

^ ♦» me.

“You have no lawyer here.” Thornwall shrugged. “If you wish to petition for fellowship, you’ll have to speak for yourself.”

“No comment — ”

“Don’t be a lunatic!” the girl flared at him. “The Wind clan will get us all, if the Benefactors don’t

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decide to save us. The clans don’t like other- worlder lawyers, and you know how their law works. They’ll turn us loose in some salt sink, naked in the sun and five hundred miles from water. They’ll hunt us down with trained tlys and man-guns — and mount our heads for trophies!” She glanced at Thornwall and sank back into her chair. “Sorry, sir.”

“I’m afraid that’s an accurate statement of your situation.” The tall man nodded with an uncon- cerned emphasis. “Under the treaty agreement, the portal municipal authorities will be compelled to release you to the jurisdiction of the clan.”

“But you can save us?” The girl’s green eyes searched him desperately. “You will save us?”

“That same treaty does grant the Benefactors a superior juris- diction,” Thornwall said. “But only over our own people. We are not yet ready to offer membership to any one of you. Perhaps some of you are not yet ready to accept. I want to explain what we are. Any invitation to join our fellowship will depend on your own responses.”

4.

Old Champ was guiding a new tourist group into the perfumers’ quarter when the rollway stopped, the street blocked ahead by a mass of chanting blacks in dun-colored

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hats and kilts. Most of his flock clustered uneasily around his lifted crutch, but a