The Ballad of Beta 2
by Samuel R. Delany
Version 1.0
A #BW release

I

"QUITE SIMPLY, the answer isbecause they are
there!"

White light from the helical fixture struck the
sharp bones of the professor's face.

"But..." began Joneny.

"But, no," the professor cut him off. They were
alone in the office. "It isn't that simple, is it? The
reason is that many of them were once there, and
they did something that had never been done be-
forethat will never be done againand because
remnants of them are there now. That is why you
will study them."

"But, sir," Joneny persisted, "that's not what I
asked. I'm requesting a personal dispensation that will
exempt me from research work on this unit. I ex-
pect to be held accountable for all examination ques-
tions on the Star Folk but I'm already an honors
student and, on the strength of that, I'm asking to
skip the detail work on them. I'm perfectly willing
to put in the time on my thesis topic, the Nukton
Civilization of Creton III, or anything else that's
reasonable, sir." Then, as an afterthought, "I realize

it would be a privileged exemption that only you
can grant."

"That is quite correct," the professor said coolly;
then he leaned forward. "On the strength of your
'honors,' Jonenyand you're more than a good
student, you're an amazing oneI'll listen to your
objections. But I have to admit that there's some-
thing about your request that annoys me."

Joneny took a breath. "I just don't want to waste
my time on them, sir. There's so much needed re-
search in a field like Galactic Anthropology; and,
as far as I can see, the Star Folk are just a dead
end, with no significance at all. They were a very
minor transition factor that was eliminated from the
cosmic equation even before its purpose was achieved.
Their contributions to the arts were entirely deriva-
tiveand they produced nothing else. All that re-
mains of them is a barbaric little settlement, if you
can call it that, which the Federation sentimentally
allows to exist out near Leffer VI. There are too
many cultures and civilizations just crying to be re-
searched to waste time poking through dozens of
chrome-plated eggshells, documenting the history
of aa bunch of chauvinistic, degenerate morons.
And I don't care what anyone says, sir. That's all
they are!"

"Well," the professor murmured. "Well. You are
vehement on the subject." He glanced at the screen
on his desk, flicked a few notes across it, and then
looked sternly at Joneny. "I am not going to grant
your request, but I'll tell you why. In fact, I'll even

argue with youbecause of your 'honors' status.
You say that the culture of the Star Folk was an
insignificant transitional factor, superceded before its
purpose was achieved. Why?"

"Because, sir," Joneny was prepared for that ques-
tion, "they left Earth for the stars in their ships
early in 2242, expecting to cruise through space for
twelve generations before reaching an uncertain des-
tination. They'd only been gone sixty years when
the hyper-space drive became a large-scale reality.
By the time the ten remaining-generation-ships ar-
rived in the Leffer System, Earth had already es-
tablished a going-business of trade and cultural ex-
change, which was already a hundred or so years
old, with scores of planetary systems. And it was
just as well, too, because the level of civilization
on the star-ships was at a primitive-barbaric stage
and the descendants of the proud Star Folk who
had left Earth with such exalted goals would nev-
er have been able to survive on alien planets, much
less make friendly contact with any of their cultures.
So the ten ships were herded into orbit around Lef-
fer, with the imbecilic remnants of their populations
allowed to dodder toward extinction. From all re-
ports, they are as contented as such creatures can
be; so I say leave them there. But I, personally, am
not interested in knowing much more about them."

Certain that he had made his point, he waited
for the professor'sperhaps reluctantacquiescence
to his request, but the silence lengthened. When the

professor spoke, it was in a tone more distant than
before.

"You assert that they produced no significant con-
tribution to the arts. Are you completely familiar
with all the records?"

Joneny's face reddened. "I'm hardly an expert, sir.
But again, you'd think that in twelve generations
there would be one poem, one painting, something
other than those insipid, maudlin, derivative ex-
ercises in nostalgia."

The professor's expression did not change, but he
raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Joneny stuck doggedly to his argument. "I've
looked through the collection of their ballads that
Xamol Nella made in '79, and there's not a single
metaphor or simile that could possibly be called
original or even indigenous to life on the Star Ships.
There's nothing but semi-mythical folk tales couched
in terms of sand and sea and cities and nations-
some of them very interesting, no doubt, but com-
plete fantasies with no relation to the people living
and dying on the ships. I couldn't be less interested
in such cotton-candy effusions."

The professor raised his other eyebrow. "Oh? Well,
before I give you your assignment, I want to stress
what I said in the beginning: the Star Folk did
something never done beforeor since. They trav-
eled through spacea lot of itfor a very long
time. No one else has ever really been there because
the hyper-space drive actually takes you around in-
terstellar space." He laughed softly. "So perhaps

they did find all the sand and sea and cities and
nations there." He raised a hand as Joneny opened
his mouth to object. "You haven't been there, so you
can't disprove it. At any rate they made what is
perhaps the most dangerous journey imaginable, and
for that alone they deserve to be studied."

"What could be safer than interstellar space, sir?"
Joneny's tone was slightly contemptuous. "There's
nothing in it."

Both the professor's eyebrows came crashing
down. "Even if we knew that to be truewhich
we do notwhat in blue blazes makes you think
it would be safe for Earthmen in Earth star-ships?
It's within the realm of possibility that there were
others. I remind you that although twelve ships left
Earth, only ten reached the Leffer system; and two
of those arrived empty. Perhaps there was some-
thing in the 'safety' of interstellar spacein the sand
and the seawhich we do not yet know." The hint
of restrained but intense emotion suddenly went
out of his voice, like a light in a shadowed room,
leaving it dark and cold. "You say you are familiar
with the Nella Ballad Collection. Then no doubt
you know 'The Ballad of Beta-2.' I want a com-
plete, historical analysis of that balladfrom pri-
mary sources. That will be your detail assignment
for this unit."

"But, professor!"

"Dismissed."

II

JONENY SCANNED Samol Nella's laconic footnote:
* "Beta-2 was one of the star-ships that arrived at
its destination, the Leffer System, empty. The bal-
lad is extremely popular among the remaining Star
Folk. (See Appendix for music.) Note the irregular
repetition of the refrain, an original feature of many
of the Star Folk ballads, as well as the slightly el-
liptical syntax."

"That's  really straining  for originality," Joneny
thought as he turned back to the ballad.

Then came one to the City,
Over sand with her bright hair wild,

With her eyes coal black and her feet sole sore,
And under her arms a green-eyed child.

Three men stood on the City wall,
One was short and two were tall,
One had a golden trumpet clear
That he shouted through so all would hear
That one had come to the City,
Over sand... etc.

A woman stood by a market stall,
The tears like diamonds on her cheek,
One eye was blind, she could not speak
But she heard the guards of the City call
Out: "One has come to the City,
Over sand... etc.

One man stood by the court house door
To judge again as he'd judged before,
When he heard the guards of the City cry,
He said, "She is come back to the City to die."
Yes, she's come back to the City,
Over sand ... etc.

Another man stood on Death's Head hill,

His face was masked, his hands were still.

Over his shoulder he carried a rope

And he stood stock quiet on Death's Head slope.

Three at the City wall cried: "Away!
Come back to the City another day."
But down below the woman stood:
I came back like I said I would,

Yes, I've come back to the City,
Over sand with my bright hair ... etc.

A time you gave me to travel far,

Find the green-eyed one who made you what

you are

Well, I've searched a City and the desert dunes,
And I've found no man who caused our ruin.
But I've come back to the City

Over sand... etc.

She walked through the gates and the children

cried,
She walked through the Market and the

voices died,
She walked past the court house and the

judge so still,
She walked to the bottom of Death's Head hill.

Down from the hill came the man with the

rope,

Met her at the bottom of Death's Head slope,
She looked at the City and she turned and

smiled.
A one-eyed woman held her green-eyed child.

Fire and blood, meat, dung and bone,

Down on your knees; steel, stone and

wood
Today are dust, and the City's gone,

But she came back like she said she would.
Yes, one came back to the City,

Over sand, with her bright hair wild,
With her eyes coal black and her feet sole sore,

And under her arms a green-eyed child.

A complete historical analysis from primary
sources meant he would have to visit the star-ships
in person and find out what he could about the
ballad from at least three different Star Folk. The
"lab period" was twenty-four hours but he could
get a time Adjustment through the Clearing Center
of the University, which would mean that he could
spend up to a week at the Ship Colony while only
twenty-four hours passed on the campus. Joneny
had no intention of spending more than the mini-
mum requisite time on this research project. And,
in order to make his task as easy as possible, he
decided to preface his jaunt with a couple of hours
more in the library.

As a start, he rescanned the Introduction to the
Nella Ballad Collection, and found something vague-
ly interesting: "Of course I did not actually go in-
side the star-ships, both because of time limitations
and cultural incompatibilty; but a robot recorder
was allowed entry, and a fair amount of coopera-
tion was shown. The recorder instantaneously trans-
mitted a printed copy of the words, lead sheets of
the music and, of course, made a permanent re-
cording. The only changes I have made are where
an obvious mis-positioning of words or phrases oc-
curred. This project was carried out rather hur-
riedly and such mistakes could be, I must point
out, either a fault in the recorder's copying device,
or simply a mistake on the part of the singer. Con-
sult Variorum Edition for any discrepancies."

Joneny sat back feeling a conscientious research-

er's anger. Robot recorder, no actual entrance, the
entire collection probably made in less time than
he was going to spend on a single ballad. He could
reconstruct it easily: Nella, somewhere in the vicinity
of Leffer, suddenly getting the idea of sending his
recorder in to see what he could pick up from the,
star-ships (probably did it while making some re-
pairs or stuck in quarantine); leaving the machine
on for six or seven hours, and then turning up with
what appeared to be a scholarly collection of inac-
cessible folk songs. Such slipshod investigation infuri-
ated Joneny, and he was sure that there was a lot
of it in the inexhaustable archives of the Galactic
Anthropology Library.

Just for the hell of it, he consulted the Variorum
Edition anyway. The only lines of "The Ballad of
Beta-2" that Nella had amended occurred in the
seventh stanza. The recorder had given the lines as:

"She walked through the gates  and the voices

cried,

She walked through the Market and the
children died."

Well, that was an obvious correctionor was it?
Joneny frowned. No, he decided, Nella was prob-
ably right; otherwise it was a little too surrealand
that was the antithesis of everything he believed
about the Star Folk.

There was a pleasant sort of simplicity about the

song, he realized as he reread it slowly and care-
fully; too bad it wasn't about anything.

He went to the catalogue and selected a couple
more crystal records on the Star Folk. There were
only a half-dozen or so to choose from and he
looked for a blue one (indicating a first-hand ac-
count). To his surprise there was only one. Suspect-
ing an error in the catalogue, he checked with the
librarian and found that it was indeed the only blue.

It was without title and when he slipped it in-
to the player, he was surprised to find that it was
a recording of the primary contact when the al-
most forgotten star-ships hove into the ken of the
Federation, ninety years before.

The voice was that of an Earthman, speaking in
the heavily consonanted and jarring-syllabled High
Centaurian (an extremely compressed language and
therefore eminently suitable for official reports), on
the initial contacts and the first belligerent repul-
sion by the Star Folk:

. . . finally hypnotic vibrations had to be used.
Even so, entry has been extremely difficult. De-
evolution is at an advanced stage. The sleeping
creatures, slumped over their weapons on the
floor of the inner locks, are hairless, naked, pale-
skinned and fragile. Despite their frantic (one
might say 'heroic') efforts, they caused us no
casualties, and the probe shows that they are
not basically hostile. However, they are so en-
slaved by an incredible mythology that has

sprung up among them, based on indecipher-
able incidents of their crossing, that we feel it
advisable to leave them alone. Their technical
means would not suffice for an interplanetary
jump of more than six or seven million miles.
There appears to have been some intercourse
between ships, by radio contact and, it is sur-
mised, by occasional parties making the cross-
ing from one to another.

There was an extended silence and then the
voice continued: They still have writing and,
despite the polyglot nature of the original pop-
ulation, it is English but an English difficult to
follow because of orthographic changes and be-
cause the text seems to be composed entirely of
euphemisms. A great many of the reports we
have studied had to do with trouble in the
'Market,' which we assumed to be the hydro-
ponic gardens or one of the other food-supply-
ing devices on the ship. It took semanticist Bur-
ber an hour to discover that this was a reference
to the complex breeding and birth process that
was devised for the star-ships. To keep the
population stable, birth was to continue artificial-
ly in a mechanical 'Birth bank,' or rather 'birth
market' where the prospective parents would
receive their children. It was intended as a
means of keeping the race fairly consistent and
of safeguarding it against too many radiation
deformities. From the appearance of these poor
folk, it was not entirely successful.

Joneny flipped the switch and reread the two
corrected lines in the ballad. So that's what the
"market" was. Then perhaps "market" did belong
with "children." Undoubtedly the correction should
have been:

"She walked through the gates and the

voices died,

She walked through the Market and the
the children cried."

Or maybe the other way. But if so, why?

He went rapidly but thoroughly through the re-
ports of the individual ships and concentrated es-
pecially on:

. . . Beta-2 we have found to be completely
empty. The long corridors are deserted, the
blue lights still burning. Doors swing open,
tapes are in machines only half played, utensils
lie as if put down because of some inter-
ruption. At the Death's Head there is a sight
that reminds this reporter of pictures and de-
scriptions of the Auschwitz atrocities during the
so-called Second World War. It is completely
jammed with skeletons, as though the popula-
tion had been seized with a sudden suicide
craze or else some unbelievable mass murder
had been committed. Again it was semanticist
Burber who called attention to the fact that
all the skeletons were those of adults. This led

to an examination of the Market which proved
to be hopelessly non-functional. Many of the
tiny glass cells in which the foetuses developed
had been ruthlessly smashed. Obviously there is
a connection between the two horrors but time
does not allow a thorough study. Hypnotic
probing on the other ships revealed an aware-
ness of serious trouble on Beta-2 some genera-
tions back but the exact nature or extent of it
is hazy, inexact and well-clouded by legend. . ..

Again he stopped, then ran rapidly through the
brief remaining text for further mention of the
Death's Head: "Death's Head unit," "put into the
Death's Head," and even "Death's Head slope," but
no clear explanation.

He chose another crystal, the transcription of an
ancient microfilma report on the construction of
the Star Ships in the days before interplanetary
travel:

"... is provided with a Death's Head unit that
acts as a reconverter of waste material. It can
also be used as an instrument for capital punish-
ment in those extreme cases which cannot oth-
erwise be dealt with in such a limited com-
munity."

With something very like interest, Joneny turned
again to the copy he had made of the ballad. There
had been Market trouble on Beta-2. The Death's

Head could be used for capital punishment. Per-
haps there was a meaning to the original version of
stanza seven, the way the robot had first recorded
it.

"She walked through the gates and the

voices cried,
She walked through the Market and the

children died,
She walked past the court house and

the judge so still,
She walked to the bottom of Death's Head

Hill."

At least he had something to start with.

III

HE SAT BACK in the drive-hammock, staring at the
black view screens that were dead to hyperspace.
He was, he realized, bypassing in seconds the im-
mense void through which the Star Ships had crept
laboriously at a few thousand miles a second for
a handful of centuries. Despite stirrings of an ex-
citement that he refused to acknowledge, he still
saw himselfa potential Galactic Anthropologist
on his way to track down a minute, trivial in-
cident pertaining to a cultural dead end.

How he yearned for the city of Nukton on Creton
III, for its silvered halls, its black-stone parksthe
relics of that tragic race which produced amazing
architecture and music, the more amazing since it
had never developed any form of speech or other
means of immediate communication. Its phenomenal
degree of advancement was something worth study-
ing exhaustively.

The slight blurring of sight as his cruiser left
hyperspace snapped him back and he leaned for-
ward in the hammock.

Up in a corner of the screen in front of him was
the greenish glow of Leffer. Close to him, hanging
like a cluster of crescent moons were the star-ships.
He counted six of them, like fingernail parings on
dusty velvet. Each sphere, he knew, was some
twelve miles in diameter. The other three, he rea-
soned, must be in eclipse and, even as he watched,
the pattern of their movementlike a stately, ritu-
alistic dancebecame evident. They had been driv-
en into a very close, delicately-balanced orbit at a
forty-mile distance from one another, and in a ten-
year orbit some two hundred million miles from Lef-
fer itself.

Slowly another crescent began to appear, while
its opposite faded into obscurity. He switched the
view screen to a higher wave-length and the field of
black became Prussian blue, with the crescents ap-
pearing as faintly green rims of shadowy spheres.

Joneny's cruiser was a compact fifty-foot, chrono-
drive, with a six-week time marginwhich wasn't
much for star-hopping. However, they didn't allow
students more, claiming that such unreliable
"youngsters" were always producing paradoxes that
annoyed the hell out of Central Clearing. Some of
the big ships were given a couple of years to play
around with, which was a little more reasonable;
for, in the shorter time, if you got yourself into some
catastrophic situation with a critical moment more
than six weeks in the past, you were simply out of

luck. You had a choice of oscillating back and forth
between critical moment and climax, while broad-
casting wildly for help until someone came along
and got you out (which wasn't very likely to hap-
pen), or you just went through with itand hoped
and there wasn't much hope in a spatial catas-
trophe. As a result, the Powers-That-Be were al-
ways complaining about the number of student ac-
cidents. The whole set-up was unfair.

At a thousand miles' distance, he cut speed to
two hundred miles an hour and crept along beside
them, wondering how he was going to find out
which was Beta-2. And what to do first: identify
and explore the abandoned Beta-2, or talk (if they
would talk) to the inhabitants of one of the other
ships.

A further question nagged him, although it had
nothing to do with his researchdirectly. The last
thing he had learned from the library crystals con-
cerned the other empty ship, the Sigma-9:

". . . Completely gutted," ran the voice on the
crystal. "There is a great, irregular section of
the hull ripped away and the skeletal interior
glints under the light of Leffer with a strange
iridescence. The remainder of the hull is cracked
nearly in two. There is no chance that there
are any survivors. It is amazing that the mo-
mentum and the automatic drive mechanism
kept such a twisted wreck in flight to the ulti-
mate goal."

He increased the magnification on the view screen
until the spheres filled the whole wall. As he
watched, another ship emerged from the cluster and
there was no difficulty in identifying it as the Sig-
ma-9. It looked like a crushed eggshell, with a fine
spider-webbing of girders feathering the edges of
the cracks. The main damage was indeed an enor-
mous area missing from the hull, from which fis-
sures radiated in all directions, a dangling fragment
here and there.

His first thought was that there must have been a
tremendous explosion inside the ship but reflection
on the way that it had been constructed convinced
him that any explosion of a magnitude sufficient to
tear out such a large section of the hull would
have forced the remainder apart. Laws learned in
his course in Collidal Physics ruled out any exterior
impact. It was, in fact, a completely impossible kind
of wreckage. But there it hung, directly in front of
him.

He let the mechano take him into the cluster and
switched the screen to normal magnification, watch-
ing the great spheres grow. When he was seventy
miles from the nearest one, he stopped the cruiser
again and studied it, without result. Finally, at a
speed of only seventy miles an hour (giving him-
self time for further reflection), he moved in. At
the forty-two second mark, he jammed on the Time
Stop.

And time stopped.

For all practical purposes, he was in an envelope

of chronological stasis, his cruiser perhaps ten feet
above the surface of a star-ship. He switched the
screen to mobile vision, and the image grew until
it surrounded him. He lowered the view-pointer un-
til he seemed to be standing on the hull. Then he
looked around.

The horizon was frighteningly close and the plates
which he had expected to be smooth and even
looked like gnawed cheese: they were rotten, crys-
tallized into ruts and flaking mounds, green with
a color of their own, deeper than the light lent by
the far sun. He looked up.

And stopped breathing. Fourteen times the size of
the appearance of the moon from Earth, hung the
Sigma-9. He knew that nothing moved in this sta-
sis. He knew he was safely in his ship, minutes away
from a dozen stars and their safe planets. Yet the
looming, gutted wreck seemed to be careening to-
ward him through the blackness.

He screamed, threw one hand over his eyes and
jammed the other against the mobile vision switch.
Quivering, he was back in his ship; the view screen
was only a six foot window in front of him once
more.

No. The mind was still not ready for unlimited
space. Even the edge of an air-helmet window was
something corporeal to hang onto. But the wreck
itself, shimmering with green fire: there was some-
thing terrible, so that he had been unable to watch
it directly for more than a second before he felt
it was falling to engulf himshimmering?

Joneny took his moist palm off the hammock
arm. Shimmering? It must have been part of the
optical illusion of the wreck's falling. He was in time
stasis. Nothing could be shimmering. But he remem-
bered the gaseous green glow that seemed to spark
over the wreck. He swung the view screen up to
take another look at Sigma-9, this time from the
psychological safety of his seat. Green and broken,
it shimmered against space.

Panic caught his stomach. Something must be
wrong with the time margin. His eyes flashed over
dead warning lights. Nothing was out of place. He
was about to jettison himself into hyperspace before
something went really haywire, but his hand stopped.
There was Leffer. He switched on a filter and in-
creased magnification.

A sun's surface under time stasis looks very dif-
ferent from the view under normal timeflow. Some-
thing known as Keefen's Effect makes it look like
a rubber ball dipped in glue, then rolled in parti-
colored glitter. Each color shines out in a separate
dot, distinct and prismatic; under ordinary chro-
nology, it has the texture of fluorescent orange peel.
Keefen's Effect was in full display.

So he was in time stasis. But something was go-
ing on around Sigma-9 that didn't care.

At a crawl of fifteen miles an hour he switched
back to normal flow and began looking for an en-
trance. It was a corroded blister on the hull, and
he hovered above the lock, for the hell of it, broad-
casting his identity beam to see what it netted. To

his surprise a voice came through his speaker in ac-
cented English:

"Your ears are unplugged but your eyes are black.
Your ears are unplugged but your eyes are black.
No admittance while your eyes are black. Please
identify yourself. Over."

The voice was static, from an automatic answer-
ing station, but its message left him bewildered.
He sent out his identity beam again and this time
spoke as well: "If this is a robot answering, please
get a human agent to let me in. I'd like to talk to
a human agent."

"Your ears are free of wax, free and unplugged,"
came the voice again. "But your eyes are blind. We
can't see you at all."

Then Joneny got the idea. The robot could ap-
parently discern articulation changes. He wants my
visual as well, Joneny thought. He put an image of
himself through on a simple ban and waited for a
return picture on the screen.

"Your eyes see clearly. Just a moment and we
will give you an entrance pattern."

In a corner of the viewing screen the flickering
black and white pattern appeared, a series of white
circles and black lines. Across it was written in block
letters:

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE CITY OF
GAMMA-5

Below, one of the blisters began to turn. The shut-
tle ships it had been built to accommodate were
almost three times the size of Joneny's cruiser.

Shalings from the crystallized hull broke off in
chunks and sent a drift of fine powder. Rotating,
it sunk and divided into thirds, slipping back into
the ship's hull. A mechano maneuvered Joneny's
cruiser over the tunnel. As the ship turned, Joneny
glimpsed the Sigma-9 on the view screen and re-
membered what he had said to the professor: "What
could be safer than interstellar space, sir?" The ships
had supposedly indestructible drives, and hulls of
infinite strength. What had chewed up the plating,
or had smashed the Sigma-9 like a porcelain shell?
He resolved his curiosity by determining to consult
the ship's tiny iridium cell computer on the prob-
lem and see if it could suggest any answer from
a measurement of the stresses and strains still held
in the shattered metal. Before he was finished, he
would go over and make an extensive investiga-
tion. Even the first reporters had done no valuable
research. As the triple doors of the first lock
closed, he made a disgusted sound and waited for
the landing process to finish.

The ship jarred and the indicator light for the
repeller field flashed. These locks were designed to
hold much bigger ships: the grapplers were groping
in thin vacuum. The field held the ship centered
in the lock, but the grapplers were too short. He in-
creased the consistency of the repeller field to that
of titanium steel twenty feet out from his cruiser
in all directions. Let them sink their claws into that.
Clunk. They did. A voice came through the speak-
er:

"Prepare for debarkation."

Here goes nothing, Joneny thought. The pressure
in the lock was Earth-normal. What about the rest
of the star-ship? The robots should have sense
enough not to allow admittance if there was any-
thing wrong. Just in case he slipped a pressure gel!
in with his survival kit. He checked the powerpack
on his belt, tied his left sandal thong which had
come undone, and went to the door.

Selector fields had made double airlocks obso-
lete. The iris of metal rolled away and he was look-
ing across the inside of the star-ship's lock to where
the flexible entrance tube had stuck against the
side of the repeller field.

Though Joneny's ship had a comfortable sem-
blance of gravity, the star-ship was in free fall. He
launched himself across and felt weight leave him.
Then the round end of the tube moved up to en-
gulf him like the mouth of a lamprey eel. The light
was soft blue-white. Inside the tube he brought him-
self to a halt by pressing a button on his power belt.
He caught hold of the rail running down the side
of the tube and hauled himself along.

Rectangular windows looked out into the rest of
the lock, ill lit with the same blue-white. Fifteen
feet later the ribbed wall turned to smooth steel
and the windows ceased. He'd come to the body
of the ship. He turned as a faint sound behind
him lisped through the tube. A triple jaw clamped
over the mouth of the passage. It was compara-

tively cool in the tube and a breeze was coming
from someplace. He reached the end.

Running off in both directions was a triangular
corridor. A spiral bar wound through the middle.
An arrow pointing one way said, "RECREATION
HALL" and one pointing the other said, "NAVIGA-
TION OFFICES." Joneny's English was of the
scholarly type: conversationally adept, but including
few technical words since they had almost all
been superceded. He was acquainted with a good
number of latinate roots that were supposed to help
one out of obscure translation situations.

After racking his mind he decided that the Nav-
igation Offices would prove more interesting. He
was a little curious to see what they re-created
down the first corridor, as well as what sort of
re-creation system they could have. But the idea
of sacrifices to the sea left him completely be-
wildered, so he headed in that direction.

A moment later he came to a small room. A
large post rose in the center. Around the wall were
screens, dials, and seats before numerous desks. The
bulkhead was metal, so Joneny put a light mag-
netic field on his sandal soles, drifted to the floor
and went click. He glanced at the desks. Obvious-
ly this part of the ship had had gravity at one
time.

"Just a moment," a voice said through a speak-
er. "I will try to locate a human agent to deal with
you as requested."

"Thanks," Joneny answered the robot. "Where is
everybody around here anyway?"

"Too complicated a question. I will try to locate
a human agent." After five seconds of silence, the
speaker said, "No human agent can be found who
will respond. Apologies, sir."

"Aren't any people left alive on this ship?" asked
Joneny.

"People are alive," answered the robot. The flat,
automaton voice sounded unintentionally menacing.

On the desk was a pile of books. Books! Real
books were Joneny's delight. Heavy, cumbersome,
difficult to store, they were the bane of most schol-
ars. Joneny found them entracing. He didn't care
what was in them. Any book today was so old that
each word glittered to him like the facet of a lost
gem. The whole conception of a book was so at
odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era
that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of
the paper. His own collection, some seventy volumes,
was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at
the University. The glory of the collection, each
page impregnated with plastic, was the Manhattan
Telephone Directory for 1975.

He clicked toward the desk and lifted the top
volume. It came away with a tug and a tsk as the
magnets came loose. He opened it; the pages were
thin sheets of metal, silver under the blue light.
The writing was machine made. It was a log book
or diary, each entry timed and dated. Turning to

the middle of the book, Joneny read at random:

Have been in the desert now for thirty-nine
hours. Don't know whether the ship can take
much more of this. Sand count varies between
fifteen and twenty-two. The terrifying thing is
that we have no way of knowing how long it
will go on. The first desert we encountered
twelve years ago took us fourteen hours to get
through. Two years later we left the sea again
to travel through light sand for nearly eleven
months. The wear on the ship was incredible.
Much more of this, it was decided back then,
and the ships would not make it through the
third generation. Then again there was sudden
clear sailing with nothing but ocean for al-
most six years. Next there was a sandstorm
of tremendous intensity for almost three
hours where the count was over one hundred
fiftywhich did almost as much damage as
the first fourteen hour one we passed. How
long will this one last? Another hour? A year?
A hundred years? Five hundred?

A later entry:

Sand count has remained fairly steadily at
six for the past nine days. That is something
to be thankful for, but even at one or two
for an extended enough time it will prove fatal
to us. Married this evening: Afrid Jarin-6 and

Peggy Ti-17. There was a celebration at the
Market. I left early, slightly drunk. They have
selected foetus BX-57911, containing some of
my genes. Peggy said jokingly, "Since you're
going to be the god-father, you might as well
have a hand in its genetics." I guess because
it's still primarily Afrid's and Peggy's, Afrid
took the joke very well. I left feeling de-
pressed. Kids like them, who came out of the
Market themselves, seem so flat and bland to
us who remember Earth. Of course they have
been told nothing about the real danger of the
desert. They can milk so much pleasure out
of so little; they believe so strongly in the suc-
cessful outcome of our voyage it would be cruel
to blight what little they can enjoy by the truth
about the sand. I knew it would only make
me feel worse, but I gave Leela a call over in
Beta-2. "How you doing, Captain?" I asked.

"Fine thanks, Captain."

"Want to come over here with me and raise
a kid?"

"You're drunk, Hank," she said.

"Not very," I told her. "I'm serious. Why don't
you chuck up Beta-2 City to your next in com-
mand, take a shuttle boat over here, and I'll
resign to an advisory position and you and me
will live in idyllic free fall in the Center Sec-
tion for the rest of our natural liveswhich may
not be very long, so think it over, Lee."

"This desert got you down, Hank?"

"Lee, it's such a waste! How the hell did
we know we were going to run into this sort
of nonsense? If we had known, maybe we
could have prepared for it. But at this rate we'll
be running through meson fields as thick as this
or thicker all the way out, and they eat through
the hull just like a file."

"Or we could come out of this one in ten
minutes and not hit another one the whole time
left. We don't know what's out there, Hank."

"Hell, a purple dragon with crepe-paper wings
may be out there too, waiting for jelly beans
like us to roll by. But it's not likely. The only
thing that is likely is that we'll be gnawed up
by these damn meson fields until there isn't a
scrap of anything resembling a star-ship left.
The outside viewscope already shows that the
hull looks like a road-map of the North Atlan-
tic states. Three hundred years of this and
we'll be lucky if a lump of Swiss cheese gets to
Leffer. Lee, come over and spend the time with
me."

"Hank," she said. (I couldn't see her. We al-
ways talked to each other with our eyes black.
I hadn't seen her in person since she was twen-
ty-two. The idea of her pushing seventy now
made me feel funny.) "Hank, suppose we do
get out of the desert. I've got at least ten years
of teaching to do if these kids are to get
through the next three hundred years alive, and
look like something Earth would be proud of. By

then we'll both probably be ready for the
Death's Head."

"There're others to teach them, Lee."

"Not enough. You know that."

I was quiet for maybe six seconds. "Yeah, I
know that."

Then she surprised me, and I realized in a mo-
ment how much all this sand count business was
taking out of her. She said very quickly: "The
next time the sand count reaches a hundred
and twenty-five, I'll come to you, Hank." And
she switched off. I feel like a little less than two
cents.

The entry ended and Joneny glanced at the next
"Sand count up to eleven," and the next, "Sane
count down to eight," and the next, "Sand count
down to seven," then: "Sand count steady at sev-
en." For almost a month it continued there. Then
an alarmed: "Sand count up to nineteen." "Sane
count up to thirty-two." An hour later: "Sand count
up to thirty-nine." An hour on: "Sand count seventy-
nine." And the next hour:

How it happened, or why, I don't know. I'd
been watching the needle creep up for the past
three hours. Sand count ninety-four; sand
count one hundred seventeen. I felt like I was
nothing but sweat sherbet, frozen and useless.
Then the damn inter-vessel phone was shouting
at my elbow. When I punched the switch, I

heard Lee's voice: "Oh for God's sake, Hank,
what are we going to do? What's happening?
Why?"

"Lee, I-I don't know."

"Jesus Christ, Hank, sand count one-hundred-
thirty-eight, one-forty-nine. Oh Hank, we had a
dream, a dream about the stars! And now we
won't get there. Oh God, we won't get there"
She was crying. I was just numb. When I
looked at the meter, the needle was moving
with the speed of a second hand on a watch.

"It's a hundred-and-ninety-six, Hank. I'm
coming over. I'm coming over to you, Hank."
I could hardly hear her for the tears.

It was at two-hundred-and-nine. "You're
crazy," I cried back at her. "Even the shuttle
boat would be eaten up before you got two
hundred miles. Oh God damn it, Lee, we won't
make it."

She was still crying, "I'm coming to you,
Hank," and the needle soared somewhere up
past three hundred. Thenit just reversed it-
self and whipped back down to zero, paus-
ing for about three seconds at forty-five before
it slipped off the other end of the scale. My
first thought was that the meter had broken.

I could just hear Lee trying to catch her
breath on the other end of the phone. "Hank?"

"Lee?"

"We're out of it, Hank." Nothing was broken,
except maybe something inside me. "We're in the

sea again. It's clear sailing, Hank." Then she
said, "I am coming to see you. I won't stay,
but I want to see you."

Joneny turned the page and read on.

For half an hour the exhaust from her shuttle
boat was like a wisp of wild hair blowing bright-
ly on the viewscope. She came in with her eyes
clear and her ears open and I went down to
the tube to meet her. I saw her walk in. She
must have seen me and paused for a moment.
I think she raised her head, and I saw her
brown eyes sparkling, and her black hair shak-
ing to her shoulders. I saw the slightly pugged
nose, and the clear alabaster skin and the smile
on lips just a trifle full. Then she came toward
meand I realized what I had seen.

"Hank," she said, when she had walkedvery
slowlyalong three-quarters of the way. Now I
went toward her. Her hair was short, white, her
eyes were wide and there was no smile on her
face. She breathed hard. "Hank?" It was as
though she didn't believe it was me. Then she
said, "Hank, you're going to have to get me
out of this gravity before I have a stroke."

"Huh?"

"I haven't been well recently and I've been
keeping to the free fall section."

"Oh, yeah. Sure," I said.

"I'm afraid my feet are killing me." She gave
a little laugh.

The voice was hers. I had followed its aging
over the forty years that separated us from
Earth. But when I put my arm around her
shoulder to help her, the skin was like loose
cloth over her bones. We got to the edge of the
tube and into the lift. When we reached the free
fall section, she got a hell of a lot more re-
laxed. Once she stopped and looked at me. "I
guess . . . you've come through in a little bet-
ter shape than I have, Hank. Well, they say
pretty women age quickly. And I used to be
be very pretty, wasn't I, Hank?" She laughed
again. "Oh, forget ft, Hank. Boy, now I know
what it means to have sore feet."

"Sore feet?" I asked.

"Hasn't that gotten around this City yet?
That's what the kids say now when somebody's
been in free fall too long and they come into
a gravity section. Don't worry. It'll get here. It's
funny the way we pick up the kids' expres-
sions. They pick 'em up from us, make up new
meanings. Then we get 'em back again. They
affect us almost as much as we affect them."
She sighed. "We've put so much Earth into
them, they want everything to be Earth again.
So they keep giving Earth names and Earth
phrases to things that belong out here. Do you
think we'll make it, Hank?"

I didn't say anything. I wanted to, but I

couldn't. She waited with a smile sitting so
strangely on the loose skin of her lips. Then the
smile went and she looked down at her wrin-
kled hands. When she looked up, there was
something like fear in her expression.

"Lee, we're old now, aren't we? It doesn't
seems so long." I said it almost like a question,
as though perhaps she could explain to me how
it had happened.

When she did speak, she just said, "I think
I better go back now."

We exchanged two more words, just at the
shuttle boat door, and both of them were
"Good-bye." I took her in my arms, and she held
onto my shoulders as tight as she could. But
it wasn't very tight, and I let her go quickly.
Then she was just a wisp of silver light on the
view screen.

I was in a bad mood for the rest of the
day and the kids avoided me like plague. But
that evening I put in a call to Beta-8 City.

"Hey there, Captain," I heard a familiar voice
say.

"Hello, Captain," I answered, and we laughed.
Then we did something we hadn't done for a
long time. We talked for an hour and a half
about the stars.

Joneny closed the book. Sand and desert: meson
fields! And City was part of the star-ship's title.
Bright hair: the exhaust from a shuttle boat. Sore

feet, eyes black; of course the Ballad of Beta-2
was from a much later time than Hank and Leela,
the first captains of the star-ships. But almost ev-
erything, at least in the chorus, made some sort of
sense now. He let the words run through his mind
once more, his concentration drifting inward, los-
ing focus upon the dials and screens, even the log
book in his hand:

Then came one to the City,

Over Sand with her bright hair wild,

With her eyes coal black and her feet sole sore,
And under her arms a green-eyed child.

IV

SOMEONE SAID, "Hello."

Joneny whirled and nearly tore himself loose from
his magnetic couplings with the floor. The book
flew from his hand and bounced away, moving fur-
ther from him.

The boy was holding the edge of a circular door-
way with one hand. Now he reached out with his
skinny foot and caught the book in his toes. "Here,"
he said, giving the book a shove so that it went
floating end over end toward Joneny.

Joneny caught it and said, "Thank you."

"Any time," the boy said. He was thin, naked,
with luminously white skin. Joneny would have put
his age at fourteen or fifteen except that his hair,
fine and pale and long, had receded at the tem-
ples like an old man's, throwing off the whole char-
acter of his face. The nose was flat, the lips thin,
and the features all dominated by immense shell-
green eyes. "What are you doing?"

"Justehlooking around," answered Joneny.

"For what?"

"Eh . . . whatever I can . . . well, find." Joneny
was surprised and a little put off.

"You found that?" The boy gestured with his foot
toward the book.

Joneny nodded cautiously.

"Can you read it?"

Joneny nodded again.

"You must be pretty smart," the boy grinned. "I
can read it too, I bet. Give it here."

Joneny couldn't think of anything else to do, so
he tossed the diary back. The boy grabbed it with
his toes again, opened the cover with his other foot,
and reached down and turned the first page with
his free hand. "This is the Log Book of Gamma-
5 City, sole property of Captain Hank Brandt,
begun in the year"

"All right, all right," Joneny said. "I believe you."
A thought struck him. "Where did you learn to
talk?"

"What do you mean, where?" the boy asked. His
green eyes widened in surprise.

"Your accent," Joneny said. "You're speaking pret-
ty modern English." It was a lot more modern
than the clipped distortions of the robot speaker that
had guided him in.

"I just" He paused. "I don't know where I
learned. Just"he looked around"here."

"Where are all the others?" Joneny asked.

The boy let go of the door and began to turn
over slowly in the air, the book still in his toes.
"Other what?"

"The other people."

"On the ships," the boy said. Then he added,
There're no people on Sigma-9 City or Beta-2
City though."

"I know that," Joneny said, mustering an imita-
tion of patience. "Where are the people on this ship?"

"Mostly in the center section, at the Market, in
the Fishstore, in the Mountains, or down in the
Poolroom."

"Will you take me to them?" Joneny asked.

The boy was almost right side up again. "Are
you sure you want to go?"

"Well, why not?"

"They won't like you very much," the boy said
to him. Now he reached with his hand and grabbed
back onto the rim of the entrance. "They almost
killed the last visitors they had. Those stun guns are
still pretty powerful."

"What visitors were those?"

"About ninety years ago some people tried to get

in."

To be sure, thought Joneny, the primary contact
from the Federation explorers. Suddenly the boy
launched from the ceiling. Joneny ducked back and
nearly lost his couplings again. But the boy had
aimed to miss him and simply placed the book on
the table once more. Tsk went the magnets. The
boy grabbed the edge of the desk with one hand
and one foot. Those agile, prehensile toes, Joneny
saw at close range, were over half the length of his

fingers. "Then what are you doing here," Joneny
asked.

"The robot mechano told me you were here, so
I came up."

"Isn't there anybody older than you around, some-
body in charge who can perhaps give me some more
information?"

"I don't think the people in charge  are going
to help you very much."
"Well, where are they?"

"I told you, down at the Market and in the
Poolroom." He turned to the wall and switched on
a dial. "Here, I'll show you."

A gray screen erupted into colors that formed at
last into the view of a large chamber. The particu-
lar room, Joneny noted, had gravity, though not
much. The floor was covered with water that bub-
bled and lapped in slow motion waves. Transparent
plastic tubes crossed and recrossed the room. Im-
mense bus bars of varying sizes plunged into the
water, and there was a bank of good-sized waldoes
along one wall. Through the tubes loped menor
men and women, he couldn't tell: their eyes were
small and pink, probably half blind. They were bald.
Their ear trumpets had grown to their skulls. Round-
shouldered, with nubby, nailless fingers, they
paused and groped mechanically at instrument dials
and nobs, raising and lowering the rods in and out
of the pool below them. Suddenly Joneny remem-
bered the description that the Primary Contact had
given of the Star Folk. These people were a lot clos-

er to what had been reported than this green-eyed
boy with him. Joneny glanced at the boy's hands and
feet. The nails, though somewhat bitten, were per-
fectly in evidence. The boy also had hair, while
thesepeople were completely naked.

"That one's in charge," the boy indicated. As he
said so, the figure on the screen gave one of his
companions a blow on the back of the head. The
other one staggered away, regained his balance,
and went off toward an instrument board. "I don't
think he'd be too interested in helping you. That,
incidentally, is the Poolroom. I don't like to go in
there."

Joneny looked at the figures all firmly anchored
to the floor, then regarded the boy so adept at free
fall. "You get sore feet?"

"You said it."

"What are they doing?" Joneny asked, turning
back to the screen.

"Taking care of one of the temporary reactors. It's
got to be kept under water. It maintains the spin
of that whole section of the ship."

Like a gyroscope spinning inside a beachball, re-
flected Joneny. And an underwater reactor! Just how
primitive were these ships anyway? With that many
moving parts it was a wonder they were around
at all.

"Why don't you look like them?" Joneny asked
as the boy switched off the screen. He might as
well come right out and ask.

"I come from another City," the boy said.

"Oh," said Joneny. Apparently then, this degen-
eration hadn't taken place on all the other ships.
"Isn't there any one around who can help me?"

"Help you do what?"

"Help me get some information."

"Information about what. You're not very clear."

"About a song," Joneny said. "A song about Beta-
2."

"Which song?" the boy asked. "There's more songs
about that City than all the rest put together."

"Do you know them?"

"A lot of them," said the boy.

"This is the Ballad of Beta-2. It starts off, "Then
came one to the City ...'"

"Oh sure. I know that one."

"Well what the hell is it about?"

"Leela RT-857."

Could it be one of the descendants of the wom-
an Hank Brandt had been in love with? "Who was
she?"

"She was Captain of Beta-2 City when"he
stopped"when everythingwhen ... I don't
know how to say it."

"Say what?"

"When everything changed."

"Changed? What things changed?"

"Everything," the boy repeated. "That's when Ep-
silon-7 City and the Delta-6 were attacked, and
the Sigma-9 was crushed, and we were struck in
the desert and the Market crashed, andeverything
changed."

"Attacked? What do you mean, changed?"

The boy shook his head and shrugged. "That's all
I know. I can't explain it any more."

"What were they attacked by?"

There was only silence. The green eyes were wide
and bewildered.

"Can you tell me when this happened?"

"About two hundred and fifty years back," the
boy said at last. "The Cities were still a hundred
and fifty years out. And Leela RT-857 was Cap-
tain of Beta-2 City."

"Then what happened?"

The boy shrugged. "Just like it says in the song,
I guess."

"And that's just what I'm trying to find out."
Joneny thought for a moment, again remembering
the verses. "For instance, can you tell me who the
one-eyed woman was?"

"Her name was Merril. One-Eyed Merril. And she
was .,. well, one of the One-Eyes."

"Well who are the One-Eyes?"

"They're dead now," the boy said after a min-
ute. "They could have helped you. But they're all
dead."

"But what did they do?"

"They kept us from the others. They tried to
teach us. They tried to make it so we would know
what to do. But they got killed finally, by the oth-
ers, the ones you saw."

Joneny frowned. Something was beginning to clear,
but he wasn't sure what it was. "Maybe there's

somebody back at your City who can tell me just
exactly what this is about. Why don't we go back
there."

The boy shook his head. "Nobody there can help
you."

"How can you be sure. Do you know everybody
on the ship?"

Joneny didn't expect an answer, but the boy
nodded.

"How many of you are there?"

"Many."

"Let's give it a try," Joneny insisted.

The boy shrugged.

"They won't be hostile to me, will they?"

"No, they won't be hostile."

"Fine," Joneny said. He was excited by the idea
of something to be uncovered on one of the other
ships. His magnetic soles, however, were weaker
than he thought, for when he turned, he came loose
and drifted away from the floor, helpless.

The boy, still holding the desk, swung his leg out
and offered, "Here, grab my arm."

Joneny flailed at the boy's ankle, caught, and
was pulled back down to where his sandals clicked
onto the bulkhead.

"You're not very used to free fall, are you," the
boy said.

"I'm a little out of practice," Joneny said, releas-
ing the kid's foot and righting himself. "That's
your idea of an arm?"

"What do you call it?" asked the boy, a little
indignantly.

"I call it a leg," laughed Joneny.

"Sure," said the boy. "But a leg is an arm, isn't
it?"

"I suppose technically speaking you could call
anything that sticks out Oh, never mind." It real-
ly wasn't worth going into. As they started for the
door, Joneny reflected: Now here's a piece of in-
formation that could have nothing to do with the
ballad. Legs and arms were both arms: that was
quite logical when under free fall, hands and feet
had developed almost equal dexterity. Under her
legs was a green-eyed child? That was safely in
the realm of nonsense.

Only something from way back in a semantics
course he had taken was jabbing at his mind. What
did they call it? The spiral of decreasing semantic
functionality . . . something like that. Then it hit
him. In an environment where there is no gravity
or little enough gravity to develop this much dex-
terity in hands and feet, words of vertical place-
mentup, down, under, over, above, below
would rapidly lose their precise meanings. Accord-
ing to the spiral, before the words disappeared from
the language altogether, they would stay on a while
as subtle variants of words with more immediate
meaningsinside, through, between(two fine ex-
amples of the spiral of decreasing semantic func-
tionality that Joneny was completely unaware of
were recreation hall and navigation offices). Be-

tween, thought Joneny. Between her legs was a
green-eyed child. He stopped as they were about
to enter the tube to the cruiser. The boy stopped
too, looked puzzled, and blinked at him with his
wide, green eyes.

It was impossible; they were all born from the
Birth Market. But there had been a Market crash,
and everything changed. "Which City did you come
from?" Joneny asked suddenly.

"Sigma-9."

Joneny stopped. Before them, the triple door to
the flexible portion of the tube sank back into the
wall.

"Which lock is your shuttle boat in?" Joneny
asked.

The boy shook his head.

"Which lock?" Joneny demanded.

"No shuttle boat" the boy began.

"Then how the hell did you get over here?"

"Like this," the boy said.

Then there wasn't any boy there any more. Jo-
neny was floating alone in the tube. He blinked.
He decided he was crazy. Then he decided he was
sane and that something strange was happening.
But if it were a fantasy of his own imagining, why
was he aware of the contradictions in it? The boy
had said there were "many" on Sigma-9, and he
had also said there were no people on it. Sudden-
ly Joneny turned and pulled himself back to the
navigation offices. Launching himself into the room
he shouted at the robot mechanism; "Contact me

with somebody who can give me some cogent in-
formation about what's going on here!"

"I am sorry," came the clipped, archaic voice. "I
have called all over the City, sir, and no human
agent has responded to my announcement of your
presence." It was repeated: "No human agent has
responded to your presence."

Joneny felt chills unraveling up his spine.

V

ONCE MORE in his chrono-drive, sitting back in his
hammock, Joneny watched the twisted shell of Sig-
ma-9 grow in his viewscope. The crushed surface
plates had been chewed up and spit out by a mad
rush through how many millions of miles of meson
showersthose tiny particles bigger than electrons,
smaller than nucleons, that came in a staggering
quantity of masses, spins, and chargesyet what
had caused the catastrophe had been something
else.

Automatically he slowed as the webbing of bare
girders flashed brightly in the direct light from the
sun. He passed over the wreck and a gaping dark-
ness veered beneath. From the distance, the shim-
mer that played over the ruins was invisible. He
switched on the iridium cell computer and let it re-
cord the twists and wrenches in the metal. It might
be able to reconstruct the catastrophe. He drifted
out over the edge of the gaping hull, a blister of
blackness beneath. Slowly the mechano took him
down into the pit. The view screen went black as
they cut into the shadow. He swept the selector

up and down the spectrum. At the violet end
of the band there was enough haze to determine
the details of the wreck. Girders, melted to blobs
on the ends, spiderwebbed in a blue, underwater
fog. Hunks of refuse moved about lazily, caught
by the faint gravity of the ship's mass.

A section of corridor was split below him like a
length of rubber tubing. As he swung his view-
scope around the depths of the Sigma-9 he stopped.
Deep in the marine blueness was a faint red glow.
He flicked his eyes over the dials. No particular ra-
diation to worry about. Double checking, he found
it higher to the left. He wondered again what the
shimmering had been. The ship sank further. Once
he switched to natural light, but immediately the
screen went black.

The computer was chuckling away but so far had
arrived at no conclusion. He got out a pressure gel
as the ship finally anchored itself to a strut. The
gell was a mobile force-bubble composed of a com-
plex arrangement of geodesically crystallized plas-
mas. It held about six hours worth of air, could
be moved from his power-belt, as well as be ad-
justed to become opaque to almost any frequency
of radiation. Delicate work could be done at the
edges of the gell by forming the skin into gloves.

The bubble wavered on the floor, growing. He
stepped forward and it surrounded him with just
a tingle on his skin before the plasmas sealed.

He walked toward the door, the bubble rolling
with him. It was like walking inside a balloon. The

sphincter of metal wings that was the airlock pulled
away in a circular opening on total black. He
touched his belt and the light frequency differential
plunged into far violet: the ship behind him dark-
ened and at the same time the scene outside the
lock began to glow like pale blue milky mist.

The ship had anchored on a wall of girders that
jutted out three hundred yards into the body of
the wreck in a huge, octagonal web. A bank of cor-
ridors twisted out into the cavity like arteries
severed in meat. Raising his eyes, Joneny saw a
sectioning of the ripped outer hull. Lowering them,
he could see where the red glow leaked from be-
hind twisted girders and burst chambers.

Launching from the lock and hovering in the blue,
he looked at his own cruiser, a thin, seamless, silver-
blue oblong. But when he glanced over the octagonal
web floating beside him, he grabbed his belt and
brought himself to a quick stop, banging into the
transparent wall. Something was climbing over the
girders.

It stood up and waved at him.

The boy, still naked, seemed to have no protec-
tion from the hard vacuum of the gutted star-ship.
The shifting of his fine hair increased the submarine
illusion. The boy was about thirty feet away, and
from this distance (and under this particular fre-
quency of light that the pressure gell was translating)
his eyes were black. He waved again.

Joneny's mind jutted toward half a dozen dif-
ferent conclusions, several of which involved doubts

of his own sanity. He rejected all of them, and at
last merely waved back because there was nothing
else to do. Just then the boy left the girder and
sailed through the space between them. With hands
and feet he caught the surface of the gell and
perched there like a frog. Then he washalf inside,
and then all the way in. "Hello," the boy said.

Joneny's back was pressed against the curved in-
side of the gell and his hands spreadeagled over
the transparent plasma. And he was sweating.
"What" he began. Impossibilities fluttered in his
mind like moths. He tried to shake them clear.
People leaping across hard vacuum, climbing
through pressure gells, disappearing, appearing; im-
possible

"Hello," the boy repeated, green eyes blinking.

Now Joneny repeated: "Wha"

"You O.K.?"

"What are you!" Joneny finally got out, and peeled
himself away from the wall.

The boy blinked again and shrugged.

Joneny wanted to scream, "Get out of here"; cover
his eyes until the apparition went away; go home.
He didn't. The same thing which made him collect
impossibly cumbersome books in a world of re-
cording crystals made him look closely at all the
impossibilities around him now.

He saw fifteen of them right off. They were stand-
ing on the web of girders, some upside down, some
sideways, all naked, all watching him and from

what he could make out, all duplicates of the boy
who shared the gell with him.

"I figured you were going to come out here," the
boy said. Then he asked, "Are you sure you're all
right?"

"My adrenalin count I'm sure is way above nor-
mal," Joneny said as calmly as he could. "But that
is because I am in a situation in which lots of things
are happening I don't understand."

"Like what?"

"Like you!" Some of Joneny's calmness went.

"I told you, I don't know what I am. I don't
know." It took Joneny a moment to see through his
own upset and realize there was genuine perturba-
tion in the boy's face. "What are you?" the boy asked.

"I'm a student of galactic anthropology. I'm a
human being. I'm flesh and blood and bone and
hormones and antibodies that can't jump a hun-
dred miles of cold space without protection, that
can't disappear and reappear, that can't walk
through a crystallized pressure gell. I answer to the
name of Joneny Horatio T'waboga, and I may be
stark, raving mad."

"Oh."

"Do you want to give it a try now?"

The boy looked blank.

"Well what's your name?"

The boy shrugged.

"What do people call you?"

"The people call me The Destroyer's Children."

Joneny, as has been pointed out, was not seman-

tically alert enough to catch all he had been told
by that statement; it floated on the surface of his
mind, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the
red glow in the labyrinthine ruin. "What's that?" he
asked, again because he could think of nothing else
to do.

"A Death's Head," the boy told him.

Now his eye caught again the boy's duplicates on
the webbing. One leapt off and sailed by some ten
feet away, peering back over his shoulder until he
grew too small to make out. "What about them?"

"Huh?"

"Are they Destroyer's Children too?"

The boy nodded. "Yeah. They're the rest of me."

Again Joneny turned his mind away from the
syntactical discrepancies which would have given
him many of the answers he sought. Now he looked
back at the Death's Head.

He touched his belt and the gell began to drift
toward the glow, gaining speed. He wouldn't have
been shocked if the boy had simply slipped out of
the gell once it started moving, but he came along
predictably inside the bubble.

"Incidentally," Joneny said, "how much air do
you breathe? This has only got six hours for one
person, and I didn't bring a renewer."

"It depends," the boy said. "I don't have to
breathe any."

"Then don't."

"All right. But then I won't be able to talk."

"Well breathe when you want to say something,
O.K.?"

"O.K."

They neared a wall of refuse. The junk floated
closely, but there were paths through. "Which way?"
Joneny asked.

"You can go through a corridor," the boy said.
Then he added in a strangled voice, "I ... just . . .
used ... up ... two . . . seconds ... of ... air."

"Huh?" asked Joneny. "Which corridor?"

"You can go through that one," the boy said.
"One . . . and ... a ... quarter . . . seconds
... more ..."

Joney moved the gell into the end of a tubular
corridor that had been crushed and broken open.
The walls were bare and set with free-fall hand-
holds. They passed a place where another corridor
had joined this one. The intersection was ripped
raggedly away at the seam.

"Where are we heading for now?" he asked again
over his shoulder.

"We'll be coming to the Mountains soon." The
strangled voice once more: ". . . one . . . and . . .
a..."

"Oh cut it out," Joneny said. "I don't care what
you use up. I don't intend to stay that long any-
way."

"I was just trying to be helpful."

They turned another comer, passed the next sec-
tion where the wall had been ripped back, and
sailed down the straight away. At the end of the

corridor, Joneny brought them to a halt and
gasped.

Before them in blue mist a vast auditorium rolled
away. In the center, above a raised dais was a huge
sphere. Even at this distance and in this light, Jo-
neny could see etched on the surface was a repre-
sentation of the lands and oceans of Earth. The
scooped immensity of the hall, the rings of seats,
the isolated globe, gave the place a comprehensible
air of hugeness, completely different from his glimpse
of empty space in which the wreck hung. This
feeling of contained size was calming, nearly re-
ligious. "What's this? Is it the Death's Head?"

"It's the Court House," said the boy.

"The Court House?" Joneny looked from the
smooth, vaulted ceiling down to the tiered seats,
at last back to the globe. "What happened here?"

"Trials." He added, "Of criminals."

"Were there many criminals on board the star-
ships?"

"Not many, at least at the beginning. Toward
the end there were a lot more."

"What did the criminals do?"

"Mostly went against the Norm."

"The Norm?"

"That's right. You can hear the records if you
want. They were all recorded."

"Does the mechanism still work?"

The boy nodded.

"Where is it?"

"Down there." The boy pointed toward the dais.

Joneny touched his belt and the gell floated down
over the seats toward the globe. He paused just
above the stage, adjusted the gell for hyper-malle-
ability and magno-permeability. His sandal soles
clicked as he hit the floor, a drop of an inch, and
stuck there through the pliable surface of the gell.

When he glanced for the boy, he saw that he
was hovering on the other side of the dais now,
outside the bubble. The boy motioned to him, and
Joneny carefully walked the bubble around the
edge of the dais. When he reached the other side,
there was a small pop as the boy stuck his head in-
side. (Joneny jumped a little) and said, "The index
is right there." He popped out again.

Joneny reached for the slanted desk through the
molding skin. It molded to his hands. He ran his
fingers around the edge of the desk, till he found
a catch. He pushed it, pulled at the desk top again,
and this time it came up. Revealed was a com-
plicated mosaic. Bending closer, Joneny saw that
it was actually a matrix of pentagonal labels each
holding two names. The top of the desk snapped
up and then slid back down into an envelope. Jo-
neny squinted in the blue:

45-A7 Milar vs. Khocran, 759-V8 Travis vs. The
Norm, 654-M87 DeRogue vs. Blodel, 89-T68L One-
Eyed Davis vs. The Norm.

The tray of labels was on a very long conveyor
that moved upwards. It was arranged in some sort
of five coordinate index system that was roughly
chronological. As he perused the labels, one thing

became quite clear. There was a marked increase
of trials between One-Eyed Someone-or-other and
The Norm. Joneny came to the place where the
crystal labels stopped. The last trial was 2338-T87
One-Eyed Jack vs. The Norm.

Joney looked up as the boy popped inside the
gell again. "What do you do with these?" Joneny
asked.

"How do you mean?"

"Just press one and it'll play back."

"Press?"

"With your finger, or your toe, or your elbow,"
the boy said, a bit indignantly. "Just press it."

Joneny reached out and pressed the last labeled
pentagon. Then he jumped back as a roar swelled
around him. The sound was being transmitted
through the soles of his feet. The whole floor of the
dais was acting as the vibration plate for some sort
of loudspeaker. The roaring was the sound of many
people talking at once.

A staccato tattoo rang out above it, and an el-
derly baritone, oddly accented cried out, "Order in
the court! Silence! Please! Order in the court." The
roaring stilled, became the rustling of someone
twisting here in a chair, there coughing behind a
fist.

Joneny looked across the empty chairs in the blue
auditorium.

"Order in the court," the voice repeated unneces-
sarily. The baritone voice paused, then went on,
"There has been a slight deviation from normal

proceedings. Captain Alva, before we make the of-
ficial opening, you may make your statement."

"Thank you, judge." It was the voice of a younger
man. Also a very tired man, Joneny thought. His
phrases were measured, with long pauses between.
"Thank you.  Only it isn't exactly a statement I
want to make.  It's  a requestof the Court,  and
appeal to the leniency of the citizens of the City of
Sigma-9. I would like to request that this trial not
take place . . ."  (in the pause a murmur began
among the people) ". . . and that One-Eyed Jack,
in fact all the One-Eyes remaining in Sigma-A-9, be
placed in the custody of the City's navigation staff,
with myself fully and finally responsible for their
conduct" The murmur broke out into expletives of
indignation. Above them the judge's gavel crashed
and the judge's voice cut sharply over the noise:
"Captain Alva, this is most"
And above even this the captain's voice came
sharply:   "I make this request,  not only in my
own name, but with the full consent and encourage-
ment of the Captains of every other City in the Na-
tion. We have been in radio contact with each oth-
er constantly since the tragedy of Epsilon-7. Cap-
tain Vlyon of Alpha-8,  Captain Leela of Beta-2,
Captain Riche of Epsilon-6every single Captain of
every City in the Nation has begged me to make
this request, Your Honor, and they are all making
similar request of  the  courts  of their respective
Cities."
The crowd sounded chaotic. The gavel pounded

again. When something like order was regained, the
judge's leveling voice led over the noise: "Captain
Alva, may I remind you that as Captain of this
City, you are in charge of its physical welfare. But
there are other issues involved here, and as the
Spiritual Head of the City, as the repository for
moral cleanliness, and as representative of the
Norm, I must certainly, in the name of the City,
refuse your request. I most certainly must refuse!"

The murmur rose again, this time an inrush of
relief. Not so heavily the gavel sounded, and more
responsively silence came.

"To continue with the formal opening of the trial:
Case 2338-587 Jackson O-E-5611, physical and men-
tal deviate of the first magnitude, alias One-Eyed
Jack, versus the Norm. Are you in Court, Jackson?"
Momentary silence. "Are you present at court, Jack-
son?"

A voice came back, curtly, shrill, yet with the
same tiredness Joneny had heard in the Captain's
words. "You have eyes. Can't you see I'm here?"

"I must ask you to follow the prescribed forms
set down by the Norm, and not to ask impertinent,
irrelevant questions. Are you present at court?"

"Yes. I am present at court."

"Now will you describe, please, your deviation
from the Norm as you understand it."

A hiss of air drawn quickly between teeth. "This
is not an irrelevant question. It is a declarative
statementyou have eyes and you can see."

"Jackson E-E-5611," a defensive listlessness oozed

into the judge's voice "the code of the Norm re-
quires that a deviate, to be held responsible, have
understanding of his deviation. Now, will you please
describe your deviation as you see it to the court."

"I had the misfortune to emerge from the Market
with a full set of brains in my head. That's not
normal around this place. Or perhaps I'm a deviate
because there was a certain amount of informa-
tion about Earth and our goals that I felt was im-
portant to study without the permission of the Norm.
Or because I decided it was worth joining others
like me to pursue these studies. But to you that
makes me a One-Eyed monster who's got to be
exterminated before he thinks in the wrong direc-
tion and corrupts somebody."

"Obviously Jackson is not aware of his deviation.
That relieves him of having to sign his own re-
conversion certificate. There will be no difficulty
now in returning you to the Death's Head."

"For God's sake, I've got arms, legs, hands, feet.
My eyes see, my ears hear. All right. You tell me
what's wrong with me."

"Will the medical examiner please make her com-
parative Norm report?"

There was a rustling of papers, someone rose to
standing. A contralto voice said, "Medical report,
taken two days ago, of Jackson O-E-5611 corre-
lated with the Norm of the City of Sigma-9."

"Go on, Dr. Lang."

"Thank you. Jackson O-E-5611, height six feet,
one and a half inches: the Norm for the City of

Sigma-9 is five feet-nine and three quarter inches.
Of course this discrepancy does not indicate any-
thing definite, but it is a deviation nevertheless.
Jackson O-E-5611 is a chronic nail-biter, and has
been so since early childhood. This is quite far away
from the Norm, a condition that exists in less than
.08 percent of the population, definitely marking him
for consideration."

"I notice you are skipping the more standard
criteria, Dr. Lang," the voice of the judge inter-
rupted.

"Yes, your Honor. But, as you advised me ear-
lier, in view of the destruction of Epsilon-7 so short
a time ago, I thought I might skip to the more
drastic deviations."

"Very well. I just wanted it on record that I
did so advise you. I saw Captain Alva about to
raise an objection."

The Captain's voice: "Not an objection, Your Hon-
or. I only wanted to say that the destruction of the
City of Epsilon-7 is exactly the reason why Iand
the other Captainsbelieve that"

"Very well," interrupted the judge's voice, "then
Dr. Lang will give a thorough report on the de-
viation."

"Your Honor, that wasn't my object"

"I have requested a thorough report from Dr.
Lang. I can see no other reason for you to object.
Proceed, Dr. Lang."

"But, your Honor"

"Dr. Lang, if you will."

A murmur in the audience again, then the con-
tralto voice went on. "Weight, 169 pounds as com-
pared to the Norm of 162. I might well mention
that this difference is only significant when looked
at along with the height, where it becomes apparent
that the subject, though above the Norm, is still
underweight for his own physical development."

Jackson's taut voice jutted in, "Isn't that a hell
of a complicated way of saying I haven't had a
decent meal in three months, thanks to the hound-
ing of your goon squad?"

"Jackson!"

Dr. Lang went on, "He conforms quite well to
the Norm in dexterity. He's righthanded, and the
Norm is 89 per cent of the City's population also
righthanded."

Again Jackson's voice, sharp and darting: "I no-
tice you hold your stylus in your left hand, Dr.
Lang. Would you say that marks a significant de-
viation?"

"Jackson, need I remind you that in several Cities
One-Eyes are not allowed to speak at their own
trials, and occasionally not even allowed to attend
them. I would dislike to find such an arrangement
a temporary necessity."

"Captain Alva . . ." The tautness had gone from
Jackson's voice and a pleading replaced it.

"Jackson, I'm doing everything I possibly"

"There is a slight difference in length of limbs,
right arm nearly a centimeter and a half longer
than the left. The Norm is a discrepancy of only a

centimeter. Legs are identical length. Norm of Sig-
ma-9 is a two millimeter extension of left leg over
right. Note the gauntness of his face, for which I
have no figures, but it is definitely away from the
Norm. His nose has been broken twice. The per-
centage of the population to break bones is 1.6
per cent. This puts him quite definitely out of the
Norm. A small birth mark on his right shoulder is
completely away from the Norm. In situations of
great strain, artificially induced, his perspiration in-
dex is 9.75 as opposed to 8.91 for the Norm. There is
also a marked . . ." and the contralto voice continued
to outline a list of glandular secretions, sub-metabolic
functions, and tropal differentiations that sounded like
the cataloguing process a modern biologist might
go through in defining a newly discovered Me
form; nothing less, mused Joneny, could merit such
detail. After fifteen minutes, she paused; then, in
a staccato epilogue, in which Joneny could hear the
lack of conviction, Dr. Lang declared: "And due to
the extremity of our situation, I believe all this taken
together is deviation enough to recommend recon-
version in the Death's Head."

Approving whispers rose and fell.

"You may, if you really want to, question Dr.
Lang on her findings," said the judge. "If you want
to take the time."

"Yes, I want to." The answer was quick and des-
perate.

"Go on. But the questioning is only a formality."

"You've reminded me of a lot of things  today,

your Honor." There was an expectant pause, but the
judge was silent. "Dr. Lang, you're a woman of
science. You deal closely with the biology staff,
and the Market Research staff; you're friendly with
many of the Navigation Officers."

"That's right."

Dr. Lang's voice was covered immediately by
the judge's: "I don't see what this has to do
with-"

"Please let him go on," from Captain Alva.

Silence. Then Dr. Lang repeated, "That's right. I
am."

"Do you remember, Dr. Lang, two years ago
when a thirteen-year-old girl named Tomasa was
discovered to have the first case of carcinoma of
the pancreas on record in the ten generations of the
City's history."

"I remember."

"And how was Tomasa's life saved?"

"By an ancient technique of radio-micro surgery."

"Where did you find out the existence of this
technique and its application."

"From an old woman named"

"named Mavle TU-5 who, six months later,
was condemned as a One-Eyed deviate and ex-
ecuted in the Death's Head!"

"I fail to see what this has to do with" began
the judge. Disorder had begun again and the gavel
now covered the voice, rapping loudly. But the mo-
ment half silence was restored, Jackson's voice
came again: "Captain Alva, when the gyroscopic

centering for the multiple gravity distributor failed,
didn't you come to Ben Holden I-6 for a two-week
cram course in general relativistic physics before
you even dared to open the housing?"

From the judge: "This has nothing to do with
your case! You were asked only to question Dr.
Lang's report on your deviation!"

"For the love of knowledge, I am questioning.
I'm telling you we're not a bunch of mutant mon-
sters. I'm telling you we're only people who are try-
ing to guard what's left of wisdom in this bar-
baric cave you call a City. Your beloved Norm! To
close off twenty people in a section and gas them
for their love of history; to chase a man out of
hiding with a herd of specially bred twenty pound
rats because he knows multiple calculus; to inject
a woman with half-a-dozen pathological viruses un-
til she confesses Goedle's Law and then sentence
her to the Death's Head as an unredeemable mu-
tant; what Norm does this conform to? Does this
meet any standard of human"

"Silence!" The gavel thundered. Then, slowly but
mounting, "Our ancestors charged us with bring-
ing human beings to the stars. And no deviation
will be tolerated. How long ago was it that One-
Eyed conspirators took over Epsilon-7 and destroyed
it?"

Three voices attempted to interrupt, the Captain's,
Jackson's, and Dr. Lang's: "But your Honor, we
don't-"

"That the last communication came from One-

Eyes is proof enough that they were the last ones
in charge, and therefore that they must have over-
thrown the leadership of the Norm. Fifteen thou-
sand people on Epsilon-7 all dead: the Sigma-9
will not be next. In view of the threat such devia-
tion poses, I cannot but give my assent to Dr.
Long's recommendation of death by"

"Excuse me, your Honor!" It was Captain Alva's
voice, desperate. "I've just received a message from
the communications gate. Static has blanketed our
connection with Delta-6. Faint messages are com-
ing through asking for assistance. They seem to
have"

A sound like an explosion, only it didn't stop.

Joneny jumped. At first he thought the people in
the court had rioted. Then he realized it was rag-
ing static. He punched the label again; the static
stopped. Confused, with long rollings of terror in
him, he stepped back from the trial index, pulling
his thoughts to the present. The auditorium before
him was no longer empty.

He started. Nearly a quarter of the seats were
filled with azure-skinned youngsters, boys, all of
whom had been paying silent attention to the record
of the trial. As Joneny watched, open-mouthed, sev-
eral of the audience, now that the record was over,
floated from the seats and listed to one side or
the other. Joneny looked around for his guide and
saw him at last stretched out across the upper sur-
face of the gell.

"Whatwhat are they?" Joneny motioned again,
to the figures in the auditorium.

The boy stuck his head in and said, "I told you.
They're the rest of me . . . the Destroyer's Chil-
dren."

"Then what are you?"

The boy slipped the rest of the way into the gell,
shrugged, and when Joneny glanced at the audi-
torium again, it was empty.

"Didn't you say you wanted to go to the Death's
Head?"

Joneny shook his head, not in negation but to
clear it. He was still trying to figure out why the
ending of the last trial record was so sudden, as
well as make some judgment on the situation be-
tween the One-Eyes and the Norm. And there was
no explanation for these green-eyed youngsters who
seemed so capable of navigating in a vacuum.

"You said you wanted to see it."

"Huh?" Nothing would resolve. "Oh, yeah. I
guess so."

"You just follow me," the boy said; then he added
in what seemed a consoling tone, "You'll see."

The boy popped out of the bubble, and nervous-
ly Joneny propelled the gell after him.

VI

So THAT WAS what the ballad meant by "Death's
Head hill."

The gell, with Joneny inside, had just entered a
room larger than the auditorium. The walls curved
toward a vaulted peak. The blue glow was replaced
by crimson. The floor .sloped upward, the ceiling
came down, and joined in an immense funnel that
was stopped by a skull-shaped grate. The wide door
at the bottom where the mouth would be in-
creased the resemblance. Joneny stood at the bot-
tom of the curved metal slope and stared for a
full minute.

At last his eyes fell away from the heights and
he caught sight of an alcove at the bottom. At the
back of the alcove was a door. His sandals click-
ing on the plates, he started toward it. A moment
later he pushed open the door and blinked as the
light went again to blue. It was a living apartment;
it had not been set up for free fall which held this
part of the ship now. Books had drifted from shelves

and settled like barnacles on the walls. A lamp
had done the same. As Joneny stepped in, the bulb,
disturbed after aeons, blinked on and went out
again. Who had lived here, Joneny wondered.

His eyes roamed the books: Moby Dick, Les Il-
luminations de Rimbaud, Voyage Orestes, The
Worm Ouroboros. He had read none of them and
only heard of one.

Across the room was another door. He gloved
the gell again and pulled it open. One instant he
was terrified that the black thing billowing out was
alive. But it was only cloth. Surprise still held, but
he reached out and took the suit of clothing from
the closet and spread it out. There was something
on the shoulder, and when he pushed back the black
folds, he saw it was a rope; a rope had been
coiled about one shoulder like an emblem.

Without bellying, the cloth waved and floated,
and a part of the suit he hadn't seen rose into sight
from behind the collar. It was a black hood that
would mask the entire face save two ominous eye-
holes.

Joneny frowned. He put the suit back in the closet
and shut the door. One sleeve caught outside and
flapped slowly in the windless space like a trun-
cated arm. Again he looked at the books quivering
among the shelves.

One was large, black, and familiar. It was the
some sort of book that Captain Hank Brandt had
kept his log in. Joneny pulled it to him and opened

the silvered pages. It was no diary. The entries were
statistically terse. On the opening page the epigraph:

Lord, what do I here ...

Then:

Executed today at 2:00 P.M. . . . name and date.
Executed this morning at 6:30 . . . name and
date. Executed this afternoon ...

The book was only half filled. Joneny turned to
the final entry: . . . this evening at 11:45, One-
Eyed Jackson-O-E-5611.

The words that started in his mind were also
sounding inside the gell. He turned to listen to the
boy singing to an odd, bare melody:

"Another man stood on Death's Head hill,
His eyes were masked, his hands were still.
Over his shoulder he carried a rope,
And he stood quiet on Death's Head slope."

Joneny let the book float away, went to the door
of the executioner's apartment, and looked toward
the Death's Head.

The Destroyer's Children, several hundred of
them now, all standing over the floor that sloped
toward the skull, turned and looked at him. Their
lean bodies cast thin shadows on the crimson vault.

Joneny turned back again. The boy was outside
the bubble now. The words, What are you? came
into his mind again, but before he said them, the

boy shrugged again. Joneny thought about this for
three whole seconds before he asked, "You can read
my mind, can't you?"

The boy nodded.

"Is that why you speak so well?"

The boy nodded again.

"And you say you don't know what you are,"
said Joneny trying to control both voice and
thoughts.

A third time the boy nodded.

"Why don't we try to find out?" He motioned
for the boy who came forward and stepped (pop)
into the bubble. "Let's go back to my ship, all right?"

"All right," the boy said.

They made their way from the Death's Head,
along the blue corridor, through the courthouse, and
out into the hollow wound of the star-ship in which
Joneny's cruiser hung against the girders.

The gell plunged through the open space toward
the silver oblong. A few yards from the door, Jo-
neny slowed down. "I want you to stay outside
the ship until I call you in," he said.

"O.K."

Joneny moved the gell forward and the boy
popped out the back wall. The selector field passed
the gell and Johnny felt gravity strike him again.
He collapsed the bubble around him and kicked it
into the corner like a pile of cellophane. Then he
looked out the door again. In the light from his
cruiser, some twenty feet away, the boy waved at
him. Joneny waved back and went to the controls.

Once more he glanced at the boy before he
jammed the ship into time stasis. Again he went
to the door and looked out. Nothing in that black-
ness should be able to move now, reflected Jo-
neny, for, relatively speaking, everything outside
the ship was caught in time, though one could say
that it was Joneny's cruiser that was caught.

"You can come in now," he said. Joneny was ex-
pecting one of two things to happen. Either the
boy would stay put, suspended and immobile. Or
he would come drifting in through the door: Jo-
neny rather hoped for the latter. It would correlate
with the strange flickering he had seen before on
the Sigma-9 that also ignored time stasis. It would
be at least a stab in the definition of just what the
boy's lack of humanity was, and his ignorance (in
the sense of ignoring) of time would make his
disregard of space less strange.

Joneny expected one of these two things to hap-
pen. Neither of them did. Instead, everything ex-
ploded.

Outside the door a wave of purple light rolled
across the girders. The gravity of the cruiser went
crazy; he got heavier and lighter in sickening waves.
The figure of the boy erupted into a geyser of
green sparks which swept for the door of the
cruiser and missed.

Every loudspeaker in the ship began to moan
in different keys. As Joneny stumbled for the con-
trols, something happened to his eyes. The room
went double, quadruple, octuple, and his hand,

searching for the switch to throw the ship back
into normal time, was lost among infinite deci-
sions and choices. Then his head twisted.

He was falling, orbiting great pulsing luminosi-
ties of thought. A white light glowed before him
so beautifully he wanted to cry. He turned from
it and was confronted by blindingly cool green,
that was hysterically funny. He slid toward it and
was enveloped in sad heat. There was a face roll-
ing toward him down a long hall, the face of a
man, with green eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones.
The face rolled over him and he reached out to
push it away, but his hand kept going, for miles
and miles, until it fell on the time margin switch.

And he was standing before the control board,
slightly nauseated, but all right. He sank in the
hammock and turned to face the door, just in
time to see the boy step through.

"What happened?" Joneny asked.

"Youyou called me in.  But I  couldn't .  .  ."

"Couldn't what?"

"I couldn't hear you. So my . . . father . . .
father? . . . you don't have the words. My father
told me you called."

"What are you talking about?" asked Joneny.

"My . . . father ... but not father. The De-
stroyer."

"What's the Destroyer?"

"He's wherewhere I came from."

"When I asked you where you came from be-
fore, you said from this star-ship, Sigma-9."

"That's right. That's where my father is."

"Whereabouts in the ship is he?"

The boy frowned. "All over it."

Joneny closed the portal. "I'm going over to
Beta-2," he said. "Maybe I can find something
there." He tried to put off the paralysis that the
last strange incident had pushed him toward, de-
tached the cruiser, and aimed for the rent in the
hull of the Sigma-9.

The iridium cell computer, which had been hum-
ming all this time, suddenly flashed its completion
light. Joneny opened the tape case and ran the
answer through his fingers. All that the computer
had been able to come up with was that the Sigma-
9 had been torn opentorn open from the out-
side, the way one might tear off the skin of an
orange!

"Hey, stop," the boy said. They were halfway
between the two ships.

"Stop what?"

"Stop your ship."

"For what?"

"You'll see. Just stop it."

Joneny turned the ship into a slowing spiral.

"Now put it in time stasis."

Warily Joneny put the ship in stasis. Nothing
happened.

"Now look back at Sigma-9 and you'll see my
father."

Puzzled, Joneny turned the view screen back
toward the wreck they had just left. As before, it

glowed and shimmered in complete disregard for
their chronological position.

"The flickering," the boy said, pointing. "That's
it."

"That's what?"

"That's the Destroyer."

VII

BETA-2 WAS SILENT. The locks opened without any
address from the robot mechanism. Here the cor-
ridors, though filled with air, were without grav-
ity. "I'm looking for records," Joneny told his com-
panion as they threaded the triangular halls.

"Here," the boy said.

They turned into a room that must have been
the ship's library. "These are the rest of the rec-
ords," said the boy, going to one wall of books be-
hind glass. Joneny opened the case door. Black
tomes ranged along the shelves, log books for the
duration of the crossing. Joneny took first one out,
then another. There were records of the Market,
food production; he had absolutely no idea where
to begin when the boy picked one and handed
it to him.

"This one was my mother's."

Before the thought sank and bloomed to mean-
ing, the cover fell open and he read: "This is the
Log Book of Beta-2 City, the sole property of Cap-
tain Leela RT-857."

"Mother?" Joneny remembered his interpretation
of the lines:

Under her arms a green-eyed child.

The boy nodded. "Turn to when the first ship
was attacked." He reached over Joneny's shoulder
and flipped the pages. It was near the end:

The report came in this afternoon that we had
left the sea and entered light sand. The count from
the first half an hour was in the high thirties which
caused me an odd paralytic alarm I have been so
subject to lately with all the nonsense over the
One-Eyes. But it dropped to three and has been
there for the last couple of hours. Any sand is
dangerous, but as long as it stays down there, we
can sustain it for a few years. The uncertainty of
when it will increase or end is unsettling.

Earlier this evening I left the staff meeting and
decided to visit the One-Eye quarter. Passing
through the City Concourse, I met Judge Cartrite.

"What brings you to this part of the ship?" he
asked.

"Just walking," I said.

"Taking stock of all your charges, Lee?" He ges-
tured to the people around us.

"Just walking, Judge," I repeated.

"Well you seem to be going in my direction. We'll
go together a ways and give a picture of official
solidarity."

"I'm turning off shortly," I told him, but he ac-
companied me across the walkway.

"Have you heard anything about the new ritual
group they've started over in Quadrant Two?
They're evolving some elegant complexities on some

of the rituals I initiated back ten years ago. It
makes a man feel he's accomplished something.
You know," and the tone of his voice dropped
slightly, "I hardly ever hear of any of the City's
officers attending the ritual groups. You ought to
encourage them to go, Lee. Solidarity again."

I smiled at him. "We're a busy bunch, Judge.
And let's face it, the rituals are mostly time-con-
sumers." I smiled to avoid spitting, I think.

"They mean a great deal to a lot of people."

"I'll put up a notice," I said. I'd like to paste it
over his face.

Judge Cartrite grinned. "Can't ask more than
that." As we reached the other side of the con-
course, he stopped. "Do you turn off here?"

"I'm afraid I do." I left him at the lift to the
administrative sphere.

The tall corridor was empty. My feet echoed.
Then the hall ended at the web, spreading out in
front of me, dim and huge, run through with cat-
walks and free corridors. It's such a tangle that
you can't really see more than a hundred yards
into it. I remembered as I stood on the edge of
that spreading gulf how as children we had played
near the exit. We were always terrified of getting
lost inside. But now I took a short breath and
pushed over the edge. Gravity left me and I was
floating toward the tangle of beams that was the
web. It takes skill to leap from normal gravity into
free fall. A lot of people never learn to. More than
one body has gone into the Death's Head with its

neck broken from a head-on crash with anything
from a bus bar to a plate wall. I caught myself
against a ground sheet and pulled around on the
handholds. It's pointedly obvious that this section
of the ship was not intended to be lived in; certain
repairs for the rest of the ship must be made here,
but the hidden ways and mechanical caverns, niches
and paths of the center, are never used by people
of the City. Nevertheless it holds some six or
seven hundred inhabitants. From the other side of
the plate I could see the housing for the little de-
tractor gyro, a riveted sphere of metal seventy-five
feet in diameter. I launched for one of the guy
cables. It sailed up to me, I caught it, and pulled
myself down to the surface. Just from playing at
the very edges of the web with other children of
the City I had learned that one magnetic boot was
useful. Two were a nuisance. So now I stood, an-
chored by one foot to the housing.

I beeped a few times on my belt communicator
just to let them know I was there when a soft,
familiar voice behind me said, "What are you do-
ing that for?"

I avoided the impulse to whirl and perhaps tear
loose from my position. The voice chuckled, and I
tried to look over my shoulder. "Every time I come
here, Ralf tells me you know I'm here as soon as I
leave gravity, but just in case, I like to let some-
body know. I haven't got time to stand around on
one leg all day."

The voice chuckled again.

"Is that you, Timme?" I asked. I was turning
slowly, and he, who could maneuver five times as
fast as I could, was keeping out of my field of
vision.

"Here I am," he said.

I turned quickly the other way and he was float-
ing in front of me still chuckling softly.

Timme is maybe seventeen or eighteen. He's a
dark boy, his hair uncut, black, his clothes, non-
descript rags. Timme is missing an arm and his
left sleeve is just knotted at his shoulder. "You want
to go to Ralf's?" he asked.

"That's what I came here for," I said.

"Aye, aye, Captain Lee," he said, nodding his
head slightly with his vaguely mocking smile.

With his one hand he untied a coil of rope from
his waist and threw me an end. I made a loop in
it and slipped it around my back, under my arms,
and held on in front.

Timme looped the rope a couple of times around
his wristwhich always struck me as a trifle inse-
cure, and said, "Kick free!" I let go my hold with
my boot. "We go that way," he said, pointing off
between two large columns with a ten foot space
between them; then, crouching like a frog, he leapt
off from the housingin the entirely wrong direc-
tion! This is the thing that always confuses me
about free-fall travel: how can they calculate the
whole business? The rope went taut, I was pulled
along (nearly three times as fast as I'd ever dare
go myself), but when Timme reached the end, the

rope made him swing around, and our whole tra-
jectory changed. The two of us on the ends of the
rope were a complex rather than a simple weight,
and together we were spiraling directly toward the
space between the bars.

The trip into the web probably beats what our
ancestors called a roller coaster ride hands down.
Every five or six seconds we went jutting off in
another direction.

Then we were in the clear again, and rotating be-
fore us was the Ring. Amidst the confusion of the
web, a circular path three hundred feet in diam-
eter had been discovered that would admit of ob-
jects throughout its circumference of thirty or forty
feet. In it the One-Eyes had constructed a metal
ring, rotated by the City's excess power on which
were attached small dwellings where four-fifths nor-
mal gravity was maintained. The houses themselves,
terribly flimsy contraptions that occasionally broke
loose and caused a bit of damage, flung out like
seats in the old pictures of a ferris wheel. I'm sure
boarding a moving train was no more difficult
than getting into the Ring. I always did it with my
eyes closed and simply let myself be pulled.

Timme launched himself toward the whirling
sheet-metal shacks, and I held on and closed my
eyes. A moment later I was hauled, pulled,
pushed into gravity again. In general the One-Eyes,
even those who are physically deformed like Timme,
have developed a physical dexterity that leaves the
less adventurous majority of the City's population

aghast. I'm sure that's a good reason for so much
of the fear.

When I opened my eyes, Timme was closing the
trap door. I was sitting on the floor, and Merril
was standing over me saying, "Well, Captain Lee,
what brings you here this evening?"

"I wanted to talk to you and Ralf about a num-
ber of things. Do you know about the desert we've
entered?"

She gave me her hand as I stood up. "Yes. But
there's nothing that can be done. Would you have
come all the way out here just to tell us some-
thing our instruments show as well as yours?" There
was the same slightly mocking tone that Timme
used.

"There's more than that," I said. "Is Ralf here?"

Merril nodded. The two of them, Ralf and
Merril, were more or less the leaders of the One-
Eyes, though the fabric of their society was so
amorphous, vertically and horizontally, that per-
haps the term was too precise.

"Come with me," she said. "He got your beeps;
we were expecting you."

We went down a low-ceilinged corridor. Through
a window, light from the outside shifted across
the far wall to remind us of the whirling frame
we were on. As we stepped into the next room,
Ralf looked up from his desk, smiled, and rose.

"Captain Leela, what can I do for you?"

We were in an informal office with a few filing
cabinets along the walls. There were two paintings

hanging. One was the Assumption by the old earth
painter Titian. The other was done by a second
generation artist of the City, abstract, troubling
darkness lapping one another, full of blacks and
greens.

"What can you do for me?" I asked. "Talk to
me like intelligent people in sentences I can put
in logical order. Maybe even say a few funny things
about the more ludicrous stupidities of the City,
maybe drop some advice my way."

"Is it that bad?"

I sat down in the suspended hammock across
the office. Merril took a seat near the filing cabinet.
Timme, I saw, had sat quietly in a corner on the
floor though nobody had invited him to stay. But
then neither Ralf nor Merril seemed to want him
to go, either.

"While I was coming here I ran into Judge Cart-
rite. He suggested that the official staff start attend-
ing the rituals. Hell, it's all I can do to keep them
away now."

"What do the rituals do?" Timme asked from
the corner.

"Fortunately you'll never have to be bothered
with them," Ralf told him. "That's one of the ad-
vantages of living out here with us. You came here
when you were only three. But some of us who
took a little longer to get here know a little too
much about what they do."

TimmeRalf told me this last time I visited him
had fallen into the web as a child and floated

around for more than thirty hours before he was
discovered. He had eventually been sucked to one
of the great ventilator ducts that drew in air at
seventy miles an hour. His arm had been squeezed
between two grill blades and chewed off by the
fan above his elbow. Instead of sending him back
to be persecuted by the Norm that was going
through a particularly rigid enforcement on chil-
dren that year, they kept him among the One-
Eyes and nursed him back to health.

"A lot of people get together and do perfectly
meaningless things for hours at a time, for which
impossible reasons have been calculated; like stand-
ing on their heads for five minutes in the corner
and then drinking a glass of pink-colored water,
seventeen times in succession, in honor of the seven-
teen times an hour the Poolroom revolves to main-
tain gravity, and the pink liquid in honor of the
red shift of Sol-"

Timme laughed. "No, I know what they do, or
some of the things. But I mean what do they do
it for?"

"Damned if I know," I said.

"Is that true?" asked Merril.

"What do you mean?"

"Why do you think they have the rituals?"

"Because they have nothing better to do. They
need something to occupy their minds, and they
haven't got the guts to come out here in the web
and struggle for themselves."

Ralf laughed now. "If they all migrated out here,

Leek, there would be no struggle. We'd all die.
In our own way we live off you people in the of-
ficial quarter of the City. We struggle, perhaps a
little officious stealing from the surplus farm stores,
bargaining with your people when there's some spe-
cialized knowledge we have that you don't. All we
are, Lee, is the people rituals couldn't work for, the
ones who'd go a little crazy if we didn't recon-
struct the City's radar sector; in miniaturefor a
hobby; make improvements on a model hydropon-
ics gardennot for food but for fun; or put colors
and shapes on canvas simply as an organization of
forms: maybe just different rituals."

Just then Timme stood up. "Isn't it about tune
for Hodge to come over?"

"That's right," Merril said. "He'll make it to the
edge of the track. Just go out to bring him over
to the Ring."

Timme bounced out the door.
"Hodge?" I asked.
"Um-hm," nodded Merril.
"Does he come to visit you too?"
"He gets lonely," she said. "Probably lonelier than
you do."

"That's funny," I said. "Sometimes I've seen him
walk in the concourse. Nobody talks to him, every-
one backs away. But he walks around, looking at
things, at people. I don't think anyone talks to him.
If that's true in the official quarter, I'm surprised
anyone even allows him in here."

"Why?" Merril asked, with the slight smile again.

I shrugged. "Well ... because he's been respon-
sible for so many of your people's ... I mean
whenever the legal department takes it into its head
to start enforcing the Norm" I stopped.

"Responsible?" questioned Merril.

I shrugged. "I see what you mean. He's only
carrying out orders."

"Hodge is a very lonely man," Ralf said. "Most
of us are lonely out here in the web. Yes, maybe
there should be that sort of fear, but we're also a
pretty suicidal bunch as well."

"Hodge comes out here twice a week," Merril
said. "He spends the evening with us, eats here,
plays chess with Ralf."

"Twice a week?" I said. "I'm surprised when he
comes to the official sector twice a year."

"You know, sometimes I've thought that you and
Hodge have a lot in common."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, you are the only two people who aren't
allowed to choose mates and go to the Market and
raise children."

"With the exception," I reminded him, "that I can
resign and play mother any time I want, where
Hodge is stuck with his job for life."

Ralf nodded. "Then, also, you both are, in your
ways, responsible for the entire ship, not just your
sector. Even Judge Cartrite doesn't have any real
control over the One-Eyes, except when he catches
us. But we're bound to obey you as much as any-
one else in the City."

"I know," I said. Then I said, "The responsibility:
Ralf, Merril, that's what I really wanted to talk to
you about. Somehow I feel that even by letting the
rituals go on, I'm betraying that responsibility. Oh,
a couple of times when we've argued you've told
me that we all have our rituals, from my duties as
Captain to some poor creature who pushes a small
steel ball up a metal ramp with his nose in honor
of the Journey to the Stars, to your studies in An-
cient Earth Political Sciences. But there has to be
some way to distinguish between them. I look at the
kids walking around the official sectors, and then I
look at Timme. One-Arm and all, Timme is alive,
alert, you can see it in his face. There's a kid Parks
is training in Market Research, a bright boy; but
every response comes out in slow motion. Parks
tells me the boy's appalled at the lack of interest
we show in the ritualsthinks we're all oafish brutes
with no interest in the higher things."

Ralf waited for me to go on as I turned in my
seat.

"What it all comes down to, is that someday
and this seems to be the thing they've all forgotten
someday there won't be any more Cities. There
will be a bright new world hanging in the night
before us, with natural forces to fight and food to
be searched for, tracked, and hunted; not handed
to us on a conveyor belt from the hydroponics gar-
den. All right, you and I will never see it, but it's
not five or six hundred years from now any more;

it's only a hundred and fifty, two hundred years
away. And one and the other considered, I'd rather
turn Timme out on a new world to struggle for his
own than Parks' little bright eyed boy. If I let the
City become a bunch of blank-faced ritual follow-
ers, then I'm not fulfilling my responsibility."

There was silence for seconds as Ralf thought. I
wondered what answer he might make. Merril did
not seem to have one.

Just then Timme called in, "Here's Hodge."

And the answer, whatever it was, was delayed.

I turned as Hodge reached the door. He was
tall, with high cheek bones and deep eyes. The
black hood was pushed back from his face and as
he stopped on the threshhold, the emblem of rope
he carried over his shoulder swung around against
his chest. His black uniform made me conscious of
all the other colors in the room; the paintings which
I had thought somber now seemed very bright.

We talked a little more, and when dinner time
came, I excused myself and Timme took me through
the hectic journey back to the mouth of the web.
This time I kept my eyes open. I saw many of the
One-Eyes making the fantastic leap onto the Ring,
as though they were stepping off a curb.

Timme, as he towed me along, guessed my
thought. "You know Hodge can get around the
web almost as well as a One-Eye," he said. "But
he still needs help over the jump. Just takes prac-
tice though."

He cut me loose and gave me a shove into the
corridor. Gravity returned and I staggered for-
ward. Then I turned, waved good-bye to Timme,
and started back to my office.

VIII

Second entry:

Parks woke me up at three thirty this morning
to give me the first report. He was on Night Watch
in the Market so of course he noticed it first. I got
out of my bed, went over and jammed the Receive
Button on the emergency intercom. "What the hell's
the matter," I said. "Has the sand count gone up
again"

"Captain,  this  is  Parks  down  in  the  Market."

"What in the world do you want at this hour
of the morning?"

"I just checked the sand count, Captain. It's been
steady. But there's something else, even worse"

"Huh?"

"The hard radiation all over the City has just
tripled. It's not enough to bother anyone where you
are, but I'm worried about its effect on the foetuses
down here. I've tried to shield the stalls off, but
I don't know how much good it's doing."

"Well, what's gone wrong? Have you found out
which one of the reactors is haywire?"

"That's just it. None of them. It's coming from
outside the City."

"Are you sure? Have you contacted any of the
other Cities to see if they've registered the same
thing?"

"I wanted to call you first, Captain, and see
what you said."

"Then I'll call up Alpha-9 and see what's going
on."

"Right, Captain. Can I listen in?"

I got the Nine and waited for about five minutes
for Riche to answer. Finally his voice came over:
"Leek, well how's my girl today?"

"She's puzzled," I said. "We've got radiation flood-
ing our City. As of yet it's not very high, but it's
coming from outside, so they tell me."

"You too?" His voice grew a bit worried. "About
twenty minutes ago somebody over here woke me
up to tell me the same thing. I told him to go check
everything from top to bottom and then went back
to bed. I had a hard night over here arguing with
Judge Philots. Somebody in one of the free-fall sec-
tors pushed off too hard and smashed his head.
Two One-Eyes found him and tried to help him but
he died. Now the good Judge wants to press charges
on them for interfering with a citizen. So I yelled
at him all evening till he got tired. But I'm bushed
too. What about this radiation business? I knew
we'd hit light sand yesterday"

Suddenly there was a burst of static in which I
could detect voices that lasted for nearly a minute.

Then it stopped and Captain Riche said, "Hey,
what happened?"

"I don't know," I said. "Everything's all right
over there?" But in the middle of my sentence the
static started again, and this time the attention lights
all over my desk began to blink at me.

I answered the closest one.

Meeker from Communications answered, "I don't
know, but whatever it is, it's happening on Epsilon-
7. They're trying to contact us, but something's way
the hell wrong."

"Switch me on, will you?"

"O.K."

The static returned, and with it the unintelligible
voices. Meeker overrode it once more with: "Turn
on your video, Captain, and I'll relay what I'm get-
ting."

I switched on the large screen above my desk. It
went from gray to black, and a handful of luminous
disks appeared against the far speckling of stars. It
was the radio view of all the cities.

Somehow they cut through the static and the
voiceswhich I now realized was only one voice
echoing back on itself again and againwere in-
telligible for a brief period.

". . . Epsilon-7 this is Epsilon-7, emergency red,
emergency red, can anyone read me, can anyone
read me . .. Epsilon-7"

The other Cities must have all been tuned in by
now. Finally another voice came in, completely
static-free. "This is Captain Vlyon of Delta-6. I read

you clearly. Go ahead." Apparently Delta-6 was hav-
ing a lot less trouble with interference than we were.
"Thank God. This is One-Eyed Pike, calling from
the One-Eyed Quarter of Epsilon-7. The rest of
them are dead, the whole official quarter. I don't
know, they went crazy or something. Someone came,
or something, a man with green . . ." Static again,
and when it cleared Captain Vlyon was saying:
"I'm sorry, I don't understand your story. Please
calm down, Pike, and tell me again."

"The whole damn ship nearly exploded, I think.
Maybe forty minutes ago. It was night cycle in the
City, but there was a huge jerk, everybody woke
up. A couple of people got hurt, and then they
started to go crazy, because they didn't know. And
in the ConcourseI didn't see, but they told me
a figure, all on fire, with green eyes began to walk.
No, I don't understand it. But they died. Twenty
minutes ago, a group of us tried to get into the
official sector, and there were corpses all over, just
dead, all over, and a few screaming still, trying to
tell us, and then we saw a light, and we fled back
here."

"Now look a minute, Pike"

"Now you look. God damn it, you come here and
get us out! We're hiding out in the web, but you
can take the shuttle boats across. For God's sake,
come over here and get us out of this" Over Pike's
voice came a scream; then Pike cried out. Then I
saw why Meeker had put me onto visual.

One of the circlesEpsilon-7wasn't right. There

was a nimbus around it and the ship was quiver-
ing. Then suddenly the radio went completely dead
and on the screen Epsilon-7 began to break up.
First it crushed in; then five or six fragments sped
off in different directions as though they had been
hurled. What was left just cracked apart like an
eggshell. Within five minutes the twelve-mile hunk
of metal was torn to bits in front of my eyes and
the pieces scattered through space.

By now there must have been people on all eleven
remaining Cities watching what I had just seen. For
ten minutes there was silence. I was beyond speech.

Finally Captain Alva's voice came through. "Cap-
tain Vlyon, are you still there? What happened?"

A very strained voice came back. "Yes. I'm . . .
still here. I don't..."

He didn't finish. I felt that perhaps Captain Vlyon
was not the same man whose voice we had heard
before; I don't mean anything mysterious. Were any
of us the same?

"I don't know," he repeated.

Third entry:

The shock had worn off, and in cessation, the
rumor has fled over the City. Light sand con-
tinues, but compared to the destruction of a City,
that is no problem. There is a still panic, no way
to protect ourselves. Judge Cartrite greeted me af-
fably this morning: "Well, at least one good thing

has come out of this. A good many people have re-
turned to the rituals."

I suppose he expected me to be overjoyed. Meek-
er and three other communication engineers in
three other cities had enough presence of mind to
record everything that went on that evening. Com-
munications was busy all morning making a de-
tailed comparison, as well as trying to unscramble
some of the staticked out sections. They cleared up
perhaps ten more words by the end of the after-
noon which added nothing to what we already
know. There was a depressing inter-city conference
that afternoon during which we were supposed to
offer suggestions.

First, five minutes of silence; then fifteen minutes
of embarrassed, preposterous speculation. Finally
the meeting was abandoned.

It was nearly dinner hour when Captain Alva
called me again.

"What's happened now," I asked. "Something
come up?"

"Just more trouble. Somehow the rumor got
out that the One-Eyes on Epsilon-7 had taken it
over and managed to blow it up."

"What?"

"Oh, it's nothing serious, but there's talk of put-
ting rigid enforcement on the Norm again."

"Who came out with that idea?"

"I don't know. The idea that the City could just
go up like that is too much for most of them. You

can almost watch each person turning around and
around, looking for someone to blame it on. The
One-Eyes are the easiest."

"But why?"

"Oh, the logic works something like this: the
last report we got from Epsilon-7 came from a One-
Eye, so therefore they were the last people in
charge of the City, therefore they must have taken
it over from the officers, and so on and so forth."

"And managed to destroy the whole City?"

"Don't ask me. One of the ritual groups here has
already incorporated it; they get themselves high
on ether, then all stand around while their leader
puts out the left eye of a large doll. Then every
one moans and has visions of destruction."

"Ether?" I asked. "I don't like that at all."

"Neither do I. As far as I'm concerned, the
rituals can get as involved as they want to, but I
draw the line at the use of narcotics."

I agreed with him. "I just hope this ritual busi-
ness doesn't get completely out of hand. This af-
ternoon I got a complaint from Parkshe's my
head Market Research manabout the kid he's
training to be his assistant. Parks told me that the
kid always brought a little pad of paper and pencil
to work with him and would take it out and
doodle on it occasionally. Parks always thought
the kid was using it to figure out something. But
when the kid came in today Parks couldn't get any
work out of him. He just sat there and doodled,

and when Parks asked him why, he said that his
ritual group always wrote down certain signs when
certain categories of thoughts entered their heads.
He wouldn't say what they were but apparently
he was thinking them all the time and had to sit
in the corner making circles, crosses, and parallelo-
grams."

"I can believe it," Captain Alva told me. "This
whole business has me worriedwhich is the
euphemism of the day."

Fourth entry:

I had been at work in my office for perhaps fif-
teen minutes when Judge Cartrite sent through a
request to see me.

"Come right in," I said into the intercom, and a
moment later the judge entered.

"Good morning, good morning. I just thought
I would stop up and check through you before
I got busy. There'll be a lot of changes to be made
now, a lot of lax laws will have to be enforced more
strictly."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, has it or hasn't it been adopted as the
official explanation of the catastrophe of Epsilon-7."

I put my fingers together and leaned back. "As
far as I know, there has been no vaguely plausible
explanation advanced."

"Oh, come now," said Judge Cartrite. "You don't

mean you haven't heard. That's why I came to see
if it was official. It's all over the City."

"What's all over the City?"

"That the One-Eyed sector of Epsilon-7 tried to
take over their City, slaughtered the population,
and blew up the ship."

"Nothing of the kind has even been considered."

"Well then perhaps you ought to"

"And it's preposterous."

"Are you sure you can say that?"

"I am. Here, I want you to listen to a tran-
scription of everything that came across from Epsi-
lon-7 the night she went."

I called Meeker and got him to pipe up the play-
back on both sound and video. The judge sat
through it perfectly still. I'd seen it fifteen times so
I'd forgotten what a shock the first run-through
could be. He was silent and his face was drawn.
At last he muttered, "Well..."

"Did that sound like a man who had just taken
over a ship to you?"

"Well," he repeated. "Perhaps it . . . wasn't real,
or was fixed or something. After all, what did take
over the ship, then? The green man with the flam-
ing eyes, or whatever that nonsense was?"

After the judge left, Parks gave me a ring. "You
know, Captain, the radiation is still pretty high. The
mutations that are going to come out of this will
set the Norm jumping something awful."

"I'll come down and take a look."

"Not that there's anything anybody can actually
do," Parks said. Then he added, "But it would
make us feel better."

The Market is bright with fluorescent fixtures and
stall after stall is sided with glittering tubes where
infants are brought to term. The front of the Mar-
ket is occupied with the genealogical files where
the chromosome pattern of each person in the City
is on record.

Parks' assistant sat at the desk, blond head down,
absorbed in his pad. A moment later Parks came
up. "Hello," he said, smiling. He saw me glance at
his assistant and made a hopeless gesture. "Ignore
him. I'll show you what I've done."

We went toward the back. "I've put lead foil
around the early blastulas. They need it most. I
don't think anything over four months will be af-
fected, but it's still going to be nip and tuck." One
section of the glittering rack was dark where the
tubes had been wrapped in lead.

Looking at the dull, crinkled foil, I suddenly felt
the heaviness of the responsibility to these born and
unborn thousands, hurtling between stars, lost some-
where in timelessness, sea and desert, life and catas-
trophe, spinning around one another like dots on
dice.

"Well," I told Parks, "like you said, there's not
much I can do. This place is depressing. Or maybe
it just brings out the mother in me."

Parks laughed. I left the Market and went back
up to my cabin.

Captain Alva called this evening from Sigma-9,
very upset. "Lee, what's your situation with the
One-Eyes."

"Cartrite's been annoying the hell out of them,"
I told him.

I heard his breath whistle through the speaker.
"It's worse over here," he said. "I'm going to ask
something strange of you right now."

"Go ahead," I said, question mark implied.

"Will you join with me in an official request to
the judicial offices of all the Cities not to persecute
the One-Eyes. I'm asking all the captains to do the
same. The way things are going here, they'll be
extinct in no time, and when their knowledge is
gone, so is all humanity."

"We're not supposed to meddle with the judicials,"
I mused.

"Lee-"

"Shut up, Alva, I'm just thinking out loud. But
we're not that far away from where you are. If you
already had the consent of the other captains, I'd
feel better about the whole thing. Oh, hell, what am
I, a woman or a mouse? Sure, you've got my con-
sent, Captain Alva; just send a wording of the
statement to me before you present it."

"Thanks, Lee." The gratitude in his voice re-
flected the relief even I felt. "You're the third cap-
tain who's gone along with me."

"I think you'll get us all," I told him, "if the con-
dition in this City is any indication." Then I added,
"I hope it does some good."

I heard Alva sigh. It was a long sigh; I bet it
sent the stars outside shaking. "I hope so too, Lee."

Sixth entry.

They're gone. Must I cry, rage; the City of Delta-
6 is destroyed. This time it took ten hours. It began
with a blast of static that wiped out the broadcast
of One-Eyed Jack's trial which we were all moni-
toring. Faint signals started coming through, panic
had broken out on the ship, then a call for help
from the Communications Department. Then more
static. Apparently the green-eyed being was back.
It was fantastic. I don't know how to take it seri-
ously. It would be easier to think it some cosmic
joke. But it is real, and the lives of all the citizens
of the City depend on perceiving the reality cor-
rectly. Toward the end, the only communication
was from the One-Eyes. Help, help, and help again.
Some green-eyed being who stole their sanity as well
as their organization marched among the survivors
on that ruined ship for ten hours, and at the end,
there was destruction. At the end, I relayed to Cap-
tain Alva: "Can't we do something? What if I go
over there... ?"

"Don't be silly, Lee. What can you do?"

"At least find out... at least..."

Over the intercom someone was screaming.

"If you die, will that do any good, Lee?"

"It will if I can find out what's killing off the

rest of them."
Then on the vision screen, the ship began to

break apart... God, the screaming

IX

"SKIP THE NEXT couple of pages," the boy said.
So Joneny turned them over. His eyes caught up
the words again at:

And when I heard Captain Alva shrieking over
the clattering speaker, "Help, oh, for God's sake,
will somebody help us," what could I do?

I radioed down to Meeker, "Get an inter-city
ferry ready. I'm going over there to take a look."

"But Captain," Meeker said, "if you get caught..."

"The last one lasted ten hours. That should give
me time enough to get there and back."

"The one before that lasted sixteen minutes. This
one could be longer, shorter, or the same. And what
about the sand count...."

"I'm going, Meeker. Get the shuttle ready."

When I was swinging out of my office five min-
utes later, suddenly someone from an adjoining cor-
ridor barked, "Captain!"

"What is it, Judge Cartrite?"

"Meeker just informed me you were heading over
to Sigma-9."

"And what the hell business is it of yours?" I
snapped angrily.

"Captain, I forbid you to go. And if you do go,
I certainly forbid you to come back."

That brought me up short. "And where do you
come off with the authority to say what I can or
cannot do?"

"If you remember, I have charge of the respon-
sibility of morals on this ship. I feel, that if you
returned from Sigma-9 it would be demoraliz-
ing. . ..."

"For God's sake, Judge, what are you afraid
of... ?"

"Well suppose you bring the Destroyer back with
you?"

"The Destroyer... ?"

"Yes, the green-eyed creature that is wrecking"

I interrupted him. "Well, at least you're off blam-
ing it on the One-Eyes. I'm going, Judge ..."

I wasn't paying too much attention to him be-
cause I was both frightened and furious.

I got to the boat, locked the locks behind me,
unplugged my ears, opened my eyes, and radioed
myself clear. The triple ports swung back and I
barreled out into the sand. The meter read three
point seven. The Sigma-9 grew in the view screen
like a shimmering egg.

The robot receiver announced: "Your ears are un-
plugged" I switched on my radio"and your eyes
are seeing."

The hatch opened up and as I drifted into the

lock, the sand meter swung down. The tunnel at-
tached itself, and as I stepped out, my stomach re-
treated against my backbone in fear of what I might
find. I felt a slight metal tingling, which I assumed
at first was part of my own anticipation. As I walked
up the corridorit was emptyit grew stronger,
until, as I was walking toward the navigation of-
fices, I realized there was something ringing in my
head like a buzzer. I turned toward the City Plaza,
wondering where on the road to destruction I was.

Suddenly I saw a few people ahead. They were
staggering silently away from me. One fell, then
two more. The other wove to the sideone leaned
against a column for a moment, then she too slipped
to the ground.

I tried my belt radio, thinking maybe I could
zero in on where the remaining forces of the City
were held up. When I turned the switch, the buzz-
ing left my head and became real. Just as I was
trying to figure out what to do, the hum on the
speaker began to rise and fall, and then articulated
into a voice. "Who are you?"

"Huh?" I said in surprise, and wanted to know-
though I didn't say itwho the hell are you?

"I am the Destroyer. Jour people call me the
Destroyer. Who are you come to hunt the Destroyer?"

It was weird. I thought maybe somebody who'd
lost their nuts had gotten hold of what communica-
tions devices were left.

"Where are you?" I demanded. The radio wasn't
two-way, but in the frustration, I guess I must have

forgotten it. I remember I called out, "Where are
you? I'm trying to help you!"

And the radio, blared out in the oscillating voice:
"I'm here."

Then it happened. I think most of it happened
in my head. Things just went crazy, emotions,
thoughts, impressions, and through the whirling
chaos around me, something great and shimmering
staggered into the concourse, the great form of a
mannaked, huge, but like some sort of ghost, with
flowing eyes.

The whole thing took me so I just cried out,
"Stop that!"

And it stopped. My head jarred back into place
on my shoulders, and I could see the figure glit-
tering, fading, disappearing and reaffirming itself
across the shattered wreckage over the plaza.

"I am here," it repeated, but this time the voice
reverberated from the vague area of its head.

"What are you doing!" I demanded, and was
only then struck by the impossibility that I had all
along been communicating.

"Help me," it said. "II don't know."

"You're killing us," I cried. "That's what you're
doing!"

"I approached slowly," it said. "Very carefully
into their minds, but they died screaming. Their
minds are not big enough." It swayed and stag-
gered, gaining form and losing it like a dream.

My heart was pounding, though I was beginning
to recover. "But you're not killing me," I said.

"You told me to stop. I'm not in your mind now,
just the image in your eyes and ears"

I wasn't too sure what it was talking about, so I
said, "Well bring your image a little closer, but
don't do anything that will . . . hurt my mind. I
want to see you."

Three steps carried him across the floor, till he
stood green eyed, towering above me.

"You don't really see me," he said. "I took this
image from their minds, to try and come closer with.
But their minds break up, even when I come slowly."

"And what about me?" I asked, unsure what I
was really talking about.

"I came to you fast, and you yelled stop, so I
stopped."

"Oh," I said, "well, thanks." I remembered what
coming fast had meant. Suddenly I remembered.
"Where is Captain Alva?"

"He's dead, and so are most of the others . . .
there, they are all dead now."

"All... ?"

"They didn't say stop."

Suddenly it hit me. "Well then you stay stopped,
damn you. All? What in the Don't move ever
again. Why didn't you stop anyway? What the hell
do you think you are?" I screamed it, and maybe
some more besides; I don't remember. When I
stopped I was quivering, mad, and scared.

It didn't say anything, it just shook there in
front of me. At last I could only ask, "What are
you?"

And more softly, as if it had understood on a
deeper level, it repeated, "I don't know."

Then it occurred to me to ask: "Where are you
from?"

"Outside, outside the City. I exist In thethe
sand, you call it, the meson fields outside the star-
ships."

"You're" The idea came to me as something too
big trying to fit in the too small space of my head.
"You're ... a living being from the sea and the
sand?"

He nodded.

I had been going up till now on a hysterical drive
that had battered up against what it met without
question. But now the impossibilities began to flood
my mind and I struck at them with questions.

"But whohowhow can you communicate with
me?"

"I cant, really" it explained. "I took apart their
minds, and I know your words and your images,
but your minds are too small for me. I cant really
communicate with you, but I know what you are
thinking. I took the image, so you could see some-
thing of me. But I took the image from your people."

I let the breath, which had somehow stopped,
come back into my lungs. "I see."

"I did not realize," it went on, "that you were
alive until fust now when you told me to stop. That
was the first time any of you addressed me directly."

Again I nodded.

"The image comes to me of one of your people

breaking open an anthill to see what is inside. That
is how I broke open your ships. I saw the confusion,
but I did not realize it was wrong until you told me."

"You are a very different sort of life form than
we are," I said. "Are your people common all over
interstellar space?"

"No people. There is only me."

"You must be very lonely," I said.

"Lonely...?"

And I actually heard the rising inflection of in-
terrogation.

"I... lonely," and then something odd happened.
The room began to quiver around me, and for a
moment I thought the chaos was going to begin.

"Yes, I am very lonely. But I did not know it un-
til you told me the word."

The quivering began again, and there was a shift
in color values.

"For pity's sake," I called out, "what's happening
to you?"

And from the green eyes I suddenly saw tears
flowing, flooding over those shimmering cheeks.

"You see, I am doing what you would call cry-
ing."

"Try and control yourself," I said. "I ... under-
stand. ... It would be hard to discover that you
were all alone. You discover that as soon as you
meet somebody."

"Yes." There was a pause. "As soon as you meet
somebody who is not alone, like you."

"You don't think I'm alone?" I said.

Again a pause, and the colors returned more or
less to normal. "You are, I see from your mind, but
not as much as I am." Again the pause, then the
quivering, then the kaleidoscope. It said, "I love
you."

"What?" I said.

The words repeated, and there was less sensory
confusion.

"You love me?" I asked. "Why?"

"Because you are a power among your people,
you are alone, and not alone"

It was complete confusion, and at the same time
I thought I saw.

"That's ... very flattering."

"Will you love me?"

That brought me up short. I had been feeling all
sorts of empathy with this creature, had begun to
understand, if not forgive its destruction, but this... ?

"I don't even know what that would mean," I
said. "I don't want to laugh at you, but I couldn't
even begin to comprehend what loving you would
mean."

"The word is from your mind" came its answer.
"If I give you something that you want very much,
will you love me?"

"I still don't. .."

It interrupted me: "More than anything else, you
want descendants who will be able to live among
the stars, and you know as well that most of your
people could not do so now. I will promise you
that I will break apart no more of your ships, and

that your progeny will be able to live among the
stars, as well as communicate with me, throughout
all time...."

I guess everybody has a pressure point that you
just have to touch to make everything go bang. The
colors changed this time because my irises suddenly
opened. The quivering was inside me. I don't know
what the emotion was:

It said, "You love me," and opened its great glit-
tering arms. "Come," and I started forward.

What happened next, oh all the powers and au-
dience of the stars, what happened? I don't know
the colors, the pain, the flood of sensation that
caught me up and broke me apart in swirls of metal-
lic ice, that burned me with myriad thoughts, com-
plete and incomplete. The color, breaking from
white through red, down through cascading green,
soaring through gold that glittered and turned to
emeralds, emerald as his eyes. The pain, transparent
as unbearable pleasure, loosed in my knees and
cool in my loins, to surge again and flood the whole
column of me, explode and glisten on my fingers,
writhe in the center of tension, wave upon wave,
gleaming on a clean beach. The flood, it rose, rose,
fell, and rose again mounting till I screamed and
laughed and covered my mouth with open fingers,
as the whole musculature of my body tensed and
flattened against itself, quivering toward a release
that came like thunder surging forward through
my pelvis from the base of my spine to flower there,

burn, and bloom. ... I held all his flickering pres-
ence, gentle as mist in my arms, hard as metal.

Next entry:

The Sigma-9 tore apart, heaving, two minutes
after my inter-city shuttle took off. The radio inter-
ference knocked my eyes coal black and something
was goofy in the gravity spin so I drifted all the
way back in free fall, feeling like I had a stiff hang-
over.

I radioed for entrance, and after the robot went
through its little bit, suddenly a voice cut in. "This
is Smythers of the judicial office, Captain Lee. Judge
Cartrite has told us we are not to allow you en-
trance to the City."

"You what?"

"I said Judge Cartrite doesn't want.. ."

"You open that damn lock this instant, or when
I get in there I'll tear you to pieces."

"I'm sorry . .."

"Put Cartrite on the phone. He's been waiting for
me to jet outside the City; but he's out of his mind
if he thinks he is going to keep me locked up here."

"We have two others here and the three of us
are to examine you. Maybe if you went away and
came back some other time, Judge Cartrite . . ."

"Have you all gone nuts?"

"No, Captain, but our rituals."

"I don't give a damn about your rituals."

"Captain," it was another voice, "can you tell me
what note this is?"

Something that sounded for all the world like a
trumpet rang through the speaker.
"No I can't," I said. "Why should I?"

"Well, it's part of the ritualistic examination Judge
Cartrite set up for your entrance. The note of the
trumpet signifies the call that came to our ances-
tors ..."

"I'll kill you," I said. "When I find out who you
are, I'm going to declare you insane and have you
put in the Death's Head. Now let me in. I said I
was coming back and I've come back. Suppose I
told you I've found out what caused the wreck of
the other cities. Suppose I told you that I can stop
it from happening here ... if you let me in."

There was silence.

"You've found the green-eyed leader of the rebel-
lious One-Eyes?"

"You haven't brought him back with you?" de-
manded the other.

"Of course I haven't," I snapped. "And it's no
man, one or two-eyed."

"Well what was it?" asked the third lawyer, the
one with the trumpet.

"Why don't I just sit here and let you guess,
until you decide time is running out."

"I'm going to get Judge Cartrite," I heard one
say, and tootle his trumpet.

Two minutes later, before the judge got there,

one of themyou could hear him gnashing his nails
said, "I'm going to let her in."

And the triple lock rolled back. I figured they'd
be crying before the judge got through with them,
but I didn't really care.

Twenty minutes later I was talking to Judge Cart-
rite on the phone, and I told him enough that I
think his hair began to singe. But I didn't let the
cat out of the bag. For the next week I kept to my
quarters. The first day my feet were sore from the
no gravity of the ride back, but after that I was
just being careful.

Finally I went down to the Markets. "Parks," I
said. His assistant was doodling over at the desk.
Behind us the rows on rows of embryo flasks were
banked to the ceiling. "Parks, I've got a problem;
maybe you can help me."

"What is it, Captain?"

"I'm pregnant, Parks."

"You're what?"

"I said I was going to have a baby."

He sat down on the desk. "But... how?"

"That's a very good question," I said. "And I'm
not too sure of the answer. But I want you to get
it out of me."

"You mean an abortion?"

"Hell, no," I said. "I want you to remove it with
tender loving care and get it into one of those em-
bryo flasks of yours."

"I still don't see. ... I mean everybody on the

ship is kept harmonically sterile. How did you . . ."
Then he said, "Are you sure?"

"Examine me," I said.

He did, and told me, "Well, I guess you are.
When do you want it transferred?"

"Right away," I said. "Keep it alive, Parks. I'd
bring it to term myself, but there's nobody in the
whole nation that has the muscles left to go through
labor, and come out alive."

"It'll be alive," said Parks.

I had a local anesthetic and watched the whole
business through a series of mirrors. It was fasci-
nating, and when I was finished, I was hungry as
could be. I went upstairs, had dinner in my room,
and thought some more.

While I was thinking, Parks suddenly buzzed
me from the Market. "Captain Lee, Captain Lee"
and then he got caught on something that sounded
like choking.

"Is the kid all right?" I demanded.

"Oh, yeah, he's fine. But Captain, the rest, they're
dying. They're dying all over the place. I've lost
half the supply already."

"Has the radiation on our ship gone up?" My first
thought was that the Destroyer had broken its
promise and moved in on us. But the wreck of the
Sigma-9 still drifted along with us.

"It's you, Captain. Check yourself, that's all I can
think of. I checked your embryo, and it's soaked
with radiation. I can't understand why it's still
alive. But is is, and doing very well. But some-

time or other, this place was blasted by enough
hard gamma to upset everything and kill off half
the stores here. Even I'm feeling a little woozy
and had to undergo decontamination."

"I see," I said. "I'll call you back and tell you what
I find."

I switched off and turned to the scintillator. It
said that I had been dead since I arrived on the
ship. I was going to phone Parks when I was inter-
rupted by a beep. Judge Cartrite's face came to-
gether on the screen.

"Captain, I'm sorry to bother you, but I thought
this was something I'd better see to in person."

"What is it?"

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to place you under
arrest."

"Arrest? For what?"

"Leek RT-857 vs. The Norm."

"And aside from the trivia, how do I differ from
the run of the mill?"

"It's not trivial, Captain. You were pregnant. And
in this City that's unforgivable as well as illegal."

"Who told you?" I wanted to know. I couldn't
imagine Parks giving out something like that.

But the answer when it came was all too believ-
able. "Parks' new assistant overheard...."

After a few more lines, the entries stopped.

Joneny closed the book. The boy, still in the gell,
was holding another book, a similar diary. "This
one is Hodge's," he said. "Hodge, the executioner."

Joneny took it, frowning, and as he turned
through the laconic mentions of death after death,
verses of the ballad threaded through his mind
once more:

"She walked through the gate and the voices cried,
She walked through the market and the chil-
dren died,
She walked past the courthouse and the judge

so still,
She walked to the bottom of Death's Head hill."

And the one-eyed woman who held her green-eyed
child? The last few pages were in more detail:
Hodge had written:

The trial is over now. It went very quickly.
There was no defense. I was not there, but I
heard.

I see her in the death cell every few hours
when she walks slowly in front of the long thin
window. Death is heavy on her shoulders. I
do not think she is afraid. Once she stopped
and called to me. I came over, opened the little
door in the top so I could hear better, and
she said: "Hodge, what's happening in the rest
of the City?"

"It's in chaos," I told her. "The rituals have
gotten out of hand, and people have raided
the web and are killing the One-Eyes. They go
out in hunting parties now, with gas and spears.

Ralf is dead I know. I don't go there any more."

She had looked calm before but her face
seemed struck now. "Can you get Parks here to
see me?" she said softly.

"I'm not supposed to," I said. "But I will,
Captain."

Parks, from the Market, hurried up there so
fast he was panting. He looked at me like he
wanted me to go away, but I couldn't do that.
So finally the Captain told him to go ahead
anyway, and that I could be trusted. When she
said that, he glanced at me with hate and said,
"Trusted to kill you?"

"That too," said the Captain. "Go on, Parks,
what about the child. Is it safe?"

He nodded. "They tried to break in, and a
lot of the tubes were smashed. But after the
first attack . . . well, I got an idea. You see,
Captain, someone's with us now."

She frowned.

"After one of the raids on the web, when
Ralf was killed, Merril came to us in the Mar-
ket. She knows I'm friendly, anyway. And, well,
the same way we took it out of you, we put it
into her. She'll hold it up until a week or so
before normal labor would occur, and then
we'll remove it by Caesarean. At least it will
be in a mobile container, and any more stupid
tube-smashing parties won't get it."

"Good," I said.

"Just what does that child mean, Captain?"

Parks asked. "There's something special about
it, isn't there? It has to do with what hap-
pened on the Sigma-9?"

"That's right." And then she told him. It didn't
make too much sense to me. But she said a lot
of scientific-sounding things, and at the end,
Parks said, "Then we will make it to the stars,"
very slowly, very softly. Then, "They won't get
at it. The One-Eyes who're left will raise it.
Merril thought it was something like that. But
I didn't realize" He stopped. "Merril cried
for you, Captain. When we were in the Market,
there, talking about your execution, shewe
cried."

She just held on to the edge of the window,
hard, and a muscle in her jaw jumped a few
times. All she said was, "Make sure it lives."

The last two entries in Hodge's Journal were:

"The riots are growing, they are threatening to
come even here."

And:

"Executed today, four o'clock in the afternoon,
Captain Leela RT-857."

Joneny turned to the Destroyer's child. "It lived,"
he said.
The boy nodded. "After I was grown, I could

make as many duplicates as we wanted, without
going through the whole birth process."

Joneny suddenly frowned. "And that explains all
your antics, then. You, like your father, exist a lit-
tle outside time, and that's why the shimmering and
the movement during time-stop." Suddenly Joneny
frowned. "But the promise, he made her a promise,
that you would someday reach the stars, and be
able to make contact!"

"He didn't say when. Aren't you going to take
me back to the University for study?"

"Well of course, but . . ." Suddenly Joneny began
to laugh. "With your mind reading, you can make
contact with any race. And that coupled with the
extra-time facility, why this might be the biggest
discovery in galactic anthropology since . . . since
I don't even know."

The boy nodded. "That's what we were made for.
We can bring all the information back to my father,
and he will digest it for you, and then we'll give it
to you. You'll take us to the places where you want
to make contact, and that's what we'll do."

Joneny was about to burst. "And that's living up
to the promise more than ever, because you'll be
making contact for not only half humans, but for
them all, the great-grandchildren of completely gene-
tic humans as well. And you'll be sort of a go-be-
tween for you and your father. Are you in contact
with him all the time, no matter where he is, and
no matter where you are?"

The boy tilted his head and nodded. "My father
and I are one," he said.

Back in his cruiser, Joneny once more reviewed
the whole of the Ballad of Beta-2, and marveled
at how clear it seemed now. The story of Leela's
attempt to save her people was as immediate to
him through those compressed verses as many inci-
dents he had lived through. Who had written the
Ballad, he wondered. Some last One-Eye? Or per-
haps someone from the official sector in whom im-
potent compassion turned potently to words? He
was already planning how to make use of the De-
stroyer's Children in his research into Creton III,
yet through his planning, still the closing verse of
the hymnit was a hymn in a waycame back:

Fire and blood, meat, dung and bone,

Down on your knees, steel, stone, and wood

Today are dust, and the City's gone,
But she came back like she said she would.

