Beyond the Barrier
by Damon Knight
Version 1.0
A #BW Release

Chapter One

The banked, fan-shaped classroom was silent with attention.

"And now," said Professor Gordon Naismith, "watch closely.
I drop the charged particle into the tank." He tripped the
release of the mechanism suspended over the big glass tank,
and saw a silvery spicule drop, almost too quickly to follow,
into the clear liquid.

"Contact with other partially charged molecules releases the
time energy," said Naismith, watching a sudden silvery cloud
spread from the bottom of the tank, "and, as you see"

The silvery cloud grew rapidly, advancing on a wave front,
a beautifully symmetrical curve that was determined by two
factors: gravity, and the kinetic loss of the conversion process.
It was perfect beauty, far beyond any curve of flesh or any line
drawn by an artist, and Naismith watched it with a painful
tightness in his throat, although he had seen it a hundred times
before.

Now the change was complete. The tank was full of silvery
fluid, opaque, mirror-bright and luminous. "All the liquid has
now been raised to a higher temporal energy level," Naismith
told the class, "and is in the state you may have heard described
as 'quasi-matter.' Tomorrow, when we begin our experiments
on this tank, we will see that it has some very odd physical
properties. However, that concludes today's demonstration. Are
there any questions?"

A student signaled with his desk light. Naismith glanced at
the nameplate. "Yes, Hinkel?" He stood beside the table on the
dais, tall and big-framed in his laboratory smock, aware as he
answered the students' questions that eight other Naismiths, in
the other identical classrooms that radiated from a common
center, were also standing, like eight mirror images of himself,
also answering questions. It gave him an eerie shiver, just for a
moment, to realize that he himself was one of the doppel-
gangers, not the "real" Naismithsomehow that was almost
impossible to accept, no matter how often one went through
the experience . . . then the moment passed, and he went on
talking, calm, self-assured, his voice controlled and resonant.

The tone sounded, and the students began to stir, gathering
their recording equipment and sliding out of their seats.

Naismith turned and fumbled for the duplicator control. The
round brownish-black knob was hard to see, like a floating
shadow on the tabletop. He found it at last, and turned it
clockwise.

At once the half-empty classroom vanished. He was in the
tiny, circular control room, alone except for the duplicator
apparatus. His knees suddenly weak, he leaned against the
demonstration table. Discordant memories swarmed through
his headnine sets of them, all at once, like interfering video
broadcasts. It was hard to take, just for a moment, but after
two years of it he was an experienced multiple-class teacher,
and the nine sets of memories settled quickly into place in his
mind.

As he prepared to leave, he became aware of an odd thing
that had happened. The demonstration itself had been exactly
the same in all nine classrooms, of course; it was only the
questions afterward that had been different, and even those
followed a familiar pattern.

But one of the students inwhich was it? classroom 7had
stepped up to the platform just as he was about to leave, and
had said something extraordinary.

He stood still, trying to bring the memory into sharper focus.
It was a dark-skinned girl who sat in the second row: Lall was
her name, probably Indian, although it was odd that she sat
apart from the whispering, giggling group of Indian girls, bright
in their saris and gold earrings, who perched at the top of the
classroom. She had looked up at him with her oddly disturbing
amber eyes, and had said in a distinct voice: "Professor, what is
a Zug?"

Nonsensical question! It had nothing to do with the demon-
stration, or with temporal energy at allin fact, he was sure
there was no such word in the vocabulary of physics. And yet
it was odd what a shock had gone through him at her words: as
if, deep down in his subconscious, the question did mean
somethingand something vital. He could remember snapping
to attention, all his senses taut, a cold sweat beading on his
forehead. . . .

And then what? What had he replied?

Nothing.

At that moment, the action of turning the control knob had
been completed, and he had come out of the multiple state.
Then the shock of reintegrating his consciousness, and now ...

Zug.

The word had an unpleasant sound, somehow; it made a
shudder of distaste run up his spine. Probably the girl was dis-
turbed, that was all; he would put in a query to the college
psychiatric office.

But as he left the control room, taking the rear stair to his

office, the feeling of vague apprehension and unease lingered.
Perhaps it was the strain of multiple-class work; not everyone
could bear it. But he was proud of his ability to stand up under
the load; he had never felt like this after a class.

He finished his day's record-keeping and left quickly, anxious
to be out in the air. The afternoon was sunny and warm as he
walked across the campus; he could hear the surf in the
distance, and the Inglewood-Ventura monorail went hushing
across, bright cream and tan against the blue sky.

Students were walking in little groups along the gravel paths
between the flame trees. The lawns were richly green, neat and
trim. The scene was familiar, soothing ... and not entirely real.

It depressed him to realize that after four years he still felt
essentially disoriented. Everyone said he had made a remark-
able recovery; he had passed his refresher courses with high
marks, gotten his teaching license renewed: now he was
established, competent . . and after all, these four years were
all the memory he had: so why couldn't he settle down and
feel at home?

Why should he feel there was some terrible secret buried in
his past?

Irritated, he tried to shake off the mood, but the girl and her
question kept coming back to the surface of his mind. It was
ridiculous, and yet he couldn't help wondering if perhaps she
had some connection with the lost thirty-one years of his life
... the blank, the emptiness that was his image of himself
before the bomber crash that had almost killed him. . . .

Zug...

Impulsively, he turned and took the path to the university
library. There was a vacant information machine. He punched
"General," and then spelled out "Z-U-G."

The machine's transparency flashed, "SEARCHING," and
then, after a second, "GEOGRAPHY (EUROPA)." On the
central screen appeared a portion of a page of text. Naismith
read, "Zug. (tsooK) 1. Canton, n. central Switzerland, area
92 square miles. Pop. 51,000. 2. Commune, its capital, on Lake
of Zug S of Zurich; pop. 16,500."

Naismith turned off the machine in disgust. Of course, he was
wasting his time. It was a little surprising that there should be
such a word at all; but the girl had said "a Zug" and besides,
she hadn't pronounced it as if it were German. This couldn't
be the answer.

As he was leaving the library, he heard his name called.
Plump Mr. Ramsdell, the bursar, came hurrying toward him
along the graveled path between the flame trees, holding out
a parcel wrapped in white paper. "How lucky to run into you
like this," Ramsdell panted. "Someone left this at my office
for you, and I absent-mindedly carried it out with me" He

laughed uncertainly. "I was just going to take it over and drop
it at the Science Building, when I saw you."

Naismith took the parcel: it was unexpectedly heavy and
hard inside the white paper. "Thanks," he said. "Who left it
for me, anyone I know?"

Ramsdell shrugged. "Said his name was Churan. Short,
swarthy fellow, very polite. But I really wasn't paying attention.
Well, I must fly."

"Thanks again," Naismith called after him, but the little
bursar did not seem to hear.

Funny that he should have carried the parcel out of his
office, straight to the libraryalmost too pat for coincidence,
as if he had known Naismith would be there; but that was
impossible.

Funny, too, that anybody should leave a parcel for him
with Ramsdell; he had nothing to do with the bursar's office,
except to collect his pay checks.

Naismith weighed the parcel in his hands, curiously. He had
an impulse to open it immediately, but decided not toprob-
lem of disposing of the wrappings, or else carrying them
around. Besides, the thing in the parcel might be in more than
one piece, awkward to carry unless wrapped. Better wait till he
got it home and could examine it properly.

But what could it be? A piece of apparatus? He had several
things on order, but was not expecting any of them immedi-
ately, and anyhow, when they did come, they would be
delivered in the usual way, not left for him at the bursar's
office. . . .

Deep in thought, he walked to the tube entrance. He rode
home with the thing on his knees, hard and metallically cool
through the wrappings. There was no writing on the paper
anywhere; it was neatly sealed with plastic tape.

The tube car sighed to a stop at the Beverly Hills station.
Naismith went aboveground and walked the two blocks to
his apartment.

When he opened the door, his visiphone was blinking red.

He put the parcel down and crossed the room with his heart
suddenly hammering. He saw that the recorded-call telltale was
lit, and touched the playback button.

A voice said urgently. "Naismith, this is Dr. Wells. Please
call me as soon as you get in; I want to see you." The voice
stopped; after a moment the mechanism clicked and the neutral
machine voice added, "Two thirty-five P.M." The playback
stopped; the telltale winked off.

Wells was the head of the college psychiatric office;
Naismith went to him as a patient every two weeks. Two
thirty-five this afternoonthat was when Naismith had been
in the middle of his temporal energy demonstration. He had a

sense that things were happening all around himfirst the girl
with her disturbing question, and the dark man leaving a
package for him at the bursar's office, and

At the thought, Naismith turned and looked at the package
on the table. At least he could find out about that, and with-
out delay. With a certain grimness, he seized the package, put
it on his desk, and with a bronze letter opener began to cut the
tape.

The wrapping came away easily. Naismith saw the gleam of
blued metal, then spread the papers apart, and caught his
breath.

The machine was beautiful.

It was box-shaped, with rounded edges and corners; all its
lines flowed subtly and exactly into one another. On the top
face there were oval inlays, arranged in a pattern that con-
veyed nothing to him, and slightly raised from the main shell.
The metal was satiny and cool under his fingers. It looked
machined, not stamped: fine, micrometically exact work.

He turned it over, looking for a nameplate or a serial number
stamped into the metal, but found nothing. There was no
button, dial, or any other obvious way of turning the machine
on. He could not see any way of opening it, except by remov-
ing the inlays from the top.

Naismith felt cautiously at the inlays, trying to see if they
would depress or turn, but without result. He paused, baffled.
After a moment, his fingers began tracing around the outlines
of the machine: it was beautiful workmanship, a pleasure just
to touch itand yet it seemed without function, useless,
meaningless. .. .

Like the question: "What is a Zug?"

Without warning, Naismith's heart began hammering again.
He had an irrational feeling that he was being carefully
hemmed intrapped, for some unguessable purpose, and by
persons unknown. His fingers left the machine, then gripped it
fiercely again, pressing hard, twisting, trying to move some part
of the mechanism.

He failed.

The visiphone blinked and brrred.

Naismith swore and hit the switch with his palm; the screen
lighted up. It was Wells, with his iron-gray brush-cut and his
deeply seamed face. "Naismith!" he said sharply. "I called
beforedid you get the message?"

"YesI just got inI was about to vise you."

"I'm sorry, Naismith, but I'm afraid this had better not wait.
Come over to my private office."

"Now?"

"Please."

"All right, but what's it about?"

"I'll explain when you get here." Wells' wide mouth closed
firmly, and the screen went gray.

Wells' private office was a big, sunny room adjoining his
home, with a view of the Santa Monica beach and the ocean.
As the door slid open, Wells looked up from his desk, his big,
leather-brown face serious and stern. "Naismith," he said
without preamble, "I'm told you insulted and frightened a
Mr. Churan today. What about it?"

Naismith continued walking toward the desk. He sat down
in the conical chair facing Wells, and planted his hands on his
knees. "In the first place," he said, "I'm not a criminal.
Moderate your tone. In the second place, where do you get
your information, and what makes you so positive it's correct?"

Wells blinked and leaned forward. "Didn't you burst in on
an importer named Churan, over in Hollywood, and threaten
to kill him?"

"No, categorically, I did not. What time was I supposed to
have done this?"

"Around two o'clock. And you didn't threaten him, or break
anything in his office?"

"I never even heard of your Mr. Churan until today," said
Naismith angrily. "What else does he say I did?"

Wells sat back, put a pipe in his mouth and looked at him
meditatively. "Exactly where were you at two?"

"In my classrooms, giving a demonstration."

"What kind of a demonstration?"

"Temporal energy."

   Wells picked up a gold pen in his big, well-kept fingers and
made a note. "At two?"

"Certainly. My afternoon class has been at two since March,
when the schedules were changed."

"That's right, I seem to remember now." Wells frowned
uncertainly, pulling at his lower lip. "It's odd that Orvile didn't
seem to know that, although I suppose it might have slipped
his mind . . . You know, Naismith, this could be a serious
business. When Orvile called me, around two-thirty, he was
shaking all over." Orvile was the head of the Physics Depart-
ment, a nervous, white-haired man. "He'd just had a call from
the policethis man Churan had complained to them, and
naturally, he passed the buck to me. He knows I'm treating
you for that amnesic condition of yours. Now, I'll put it on the
line, Naismithif you did black out and browbeat Churan, as
he says you did, we've got to find out why."

Naismith began to stiffen with anger. "I've told you, I was
in my classrooms at two o'clock. You can check on that, if
you don't choose to believe meask my students."

Wells glanced at his notepad, scratched a couple of aimless
lines, then looked up and said, "You used the word 'class-
rooms.' I take it that means you were teaching by the multiple-
class method."

"That's right. Almost all the undergraduate classes are
multiples. You know how crowded we are."

"Surely. But what I'm getting at is this: at two o'clock you
were in several places at once."

"Nine places, or rather ten," said Naismith. "It's the nine-
unit duplicator in the East Wing of the Science Building."

"All right. My question is this: Is there any possibility that
you were in eleven places at once, at two o'clock today?"

Naismith sat in silence, absorbing that. Then he said, "Off-
hand, the idea is ridiculous. You say this Churan's office is in
Hollywood. The duplicator field has a range of only about five
hundred feet."

"But would you say it's absolutely impossible?"

Naismith's wide jaw knotted. "I couldn't say that, of course.
Impractical, at least, in the present state of the art. What are
you suggesting, that I somehow gimmicked that Hivert Dupli-
cator to project one of my doppelgangers into a stranger's
office?"

"I'm not suggesting anything." Wells' pen made slow circles
on the notepad. "But Naismith, tell me this: why should this
fellow Churan lie about it?"

"I don't know!" Naismith exploded. His hands clenched into
powerful fists. "Wells, something's going on that I don't under-
stand and don't like. I'm completely in the dark now, but I
promise you"

He was interrupted by the brrr of the phone. Without look-
ing away from Naismith, Wells reached over and touched the
button. "Yes?"

The first words swung his head around. "Wells! Now see
what's happened!" It was Orvile's shrill voice, and Naismith
could see his white-haired head, grotesquely elongated in
the visiphone. "He's deadhorribly burned to death! And
Naismith was the last man seen with him! My God, Wells!
Why don't you"

"Naismith is here in my office now," Wells cut in. "Who's
dead? What are you talking about?"

"I'm telling you, Ramsdell! Ramsdell! My God, look here!"
Orvile's paper-gray face withdrew, and after a moment the
pickup tilted downward.

On the gray tile floor lay a plump body, sprawled like a
hideously ruined doll. The head, chest and hands were nothing
but shapeless masses of carbon.

"I'm sending the police!" Orvile's voice shrilled. "Don't let
him get away! Don't let him get away!"

Chapter Two

With Orvile's hysterical voice still ringing in his ears, Naismith
turned: in two quick strides he was at the door.

"What?" said Wells, slow to react. He half rose from his
chair. "Naismith, wait"

Naismith did not reply. He slid the door open, whipped
through, slammed it again behind him and was running down
the walk. Blood raced warm in his arteries he felt no fear, only
an intense and almost pleasurable anger.

In the instant before Orvile finished speaking, the whole
problem had become transparently simple. The police had no
evidence against him in Ramsdell's death, and could not hold
him; but they could, and would, delay him. And he was tiger-
ishly convinced that his only safety now lay in striking back, as
hard and as fast as he could.

At the foot of the hill, he caught a cruising municipal cab,
and ordered the driver: "Hollywood. I'll give you the address
on the way."

As the cab swung around and headed east on the Freeway,
Naismith put a quarter into the phone slot and punched
"Directory, Hollywood." The yellow transparency lighted up.
Naismith punched "C-H-U-R-A-N."

The illuminated image jumped and blurred repeatedly; then
it steadied on a page of fine print, slowly traveling past the
scanner. Naismith punched the "Hold" button. There it was:
"M. Churan, Imprtr," and an address on Sunset Boulevard.
Naismith glanced at his wristwatch: it was just four o'clock,
and most California businessmen did not close their doors till
four-thirty. There was still time.

"This is it, mister," said the driver, reaching over to turn off
the meter. Naismith paid him and got out. The building was a
yellow-stone monstrosity dating from the previous century.
In the lobby, Churan's name was on the ancient white-letter
directory. Naismith took the elevator to the fifth floor. The
office, behind a corrugated glass door with Churan's name on
it, was locked and silent.

Naismith rattled the door in a burst of anger. Raging, he
banged the door back and forth in its quarter-inch of play,
until the corridor rang with the sound.

The office next door opened and a pink young man stepped

out, shirt-sleeved, with his necktie undone. "Here," he said.
"Here, what's the gas with you, son? Don't go like that."

Naismith stared at him. The young man looked surprised,
flinched, and stepped back into the shelter of his doorway.
"Nothing personal, son," he added.

"Do you know Churan?" Naismith demanded.

"Sure, I know him, sonto say what ho. But he's gone,
songonezipped out half an hour ago. I saw him leave."

Naismith stared at the locked door. He had been quick, but
not quick enough. With an impatient surge, he put the full force
of his arm and wrist against the doorknob: with a sharp, ring-
ing snap, the latch broke and the door swung in.

"Hey," said the pink young man, his jaw open. "Hey,
now"

Naismith strode into the reception room. There was nobody
behind the desk, nobody in the inner office. Filing cabinets were
standing open and empty; there was nothing in the desk
drawers, nothing pinned to the wall. On one corner of the worn
carpet, near the desk, there was a large, fresh ink-stain. There
were some jagged pieces of glazed porcelain in the wastebasket,
and a bedraggled bunch of yellow flowers.

Baffled, Naismith paused and sniffed the ah*. The office had
an unmistakable atmosphere of vacancy; but to his sharpened
senses there was a faint, jangling vibration in the roomyes,
and a faint but distinct scent: something cold, musky and
unpleasant.

When he left, the pink young man was still waiting in the
corridor. Naismith said gently, "What do you know about
Churan?"

"Well, son, I never spread the air with him. Just what ho in
the morning, way I told you. But he's a pro."

"A what?"

"A professional, son. You know, show biz." The pink young
man pointed to his own open door, on which was lettered,
"REGAL THEATRICAL ENTERPRISES."

Naismith scowled. "Churan is an actor?"

"Got to be, son. He never got any parts through me, but I
can tell. This importing piece must be a sideline. You looking
for him real bad?"

"How can you tell he's an actor?"

"The makeup, son. Every time I see him, he's made up for
the cameras. You might not notice, stereo makeup looks so
natural, but I can tell. Every time I see him, he's got it on. Who
should I tell him was asking?"

"Never mind," said Naismith, suddenly depressed. He turned
without another word and went away.

In his own doorway, in the act of withdrawing the key from
the lock, he paused and stood still, listening. A prickle of un-

easiness ran over his body. There was a smell in the air, a
sickly, charred, greasy smell....

He went into the living room, through it to the bedroom. At
first he saw nothing. Then, glancing at the floor behind the
bed, he saw a woman's foot and a thick ankle. The smell was
overpoweringly strong.

Sickened, he went around the end of the bed. On the floor
lay a body he at first could not recognize, although he knew
who it must be. Mrs. Becker, who cleaned his apartment on
Thursdaysshe was the only one other than himself who had
a key. She was dead. Dead, and horribly burned. The face,
chest, arms and hands were one shapeless, blackened ruin. ...

Naismith went numbly to the visiphone and vised the police.

They were there in less than ten minutes.

The cell door closed behind him with a sound of finality.

Naismith sank down on the narrow bunk, with his head in
his hands. The police had interrogated him for three hours.
They had been very thorough; their questions had ranged from
his private life, to his previous history and service record, his
amnesiahow they had hammered at that!to his work at the
university, the duplication process, temporal energy, every-
thing. They had even suggested the fantastic idea that he might
have alibied himself in both killings by traveling in time.

"Temporal energy isn't available on that scale," he had told
them. "You don't realize what prodigious forces are involved.
Even with the two thousand megakline tau generator at the
University, it takes several hours to charge the ninety liters of
water we use in the demonstration."

"But the water does move in tune, doesn't it?" one of the
detectives had demanded.

"Yes, but only a fraction of a microsecond, Lieutenant. The
molecules are really only partly out of synch with our t.e.
matrix. If there were a real displacement, they would simply
vanish."

The detectives would not give up. Wasn't it possible to
develop the temporal energy process to a point where a man
could travel in time?

"Possible, yes," he had told them angrily. "For someone
thousands of years more advanced in science than we are. For
us, now, it's a complete impossibility!"

Then they came back to Bursar Ramsdell. What grudge had
he had against Ramsdell? "None! I scarcely knew him!"
Then it was just a coincidence, was it, that Ramsdell had been
murdered horribly just after being seen with Naismith? "Yes!"

Guided by instinct, Naismith did not mention the parcel
Ramsdell had given him. He could not explain the strength of
the feeling to himself, but he was convinced that if he let the

police take possession of the machine, a vital clue would be out
of his hands.

Then the questioners turned to Churan, who had not
appeared to identify Naismith, and could not be found. Had he
murdered Churan, too, and hidden the body?

He patiently recounted what had happened at Churan's
office, and named the pink young man as a witness.

Then what about the death of his housekeeper, Mrs. Becker
was that a coincidence, too?

Naismith grunted, clasping his head in his hands. How
could it be coincidental that two people close to him had been
killed in the same baffling way, within hours of each other? It
was as if he were a sort of Typhoid Mary, an untouched
carrier of disaster....

An idea came to him, and Naismith sat up straight. Erect
and still, he was concentrating furiously when the outer cell
door opened with a clang.

Startled, Naismith looked up. The jailer in his sweaty blue
uniform was entering. He walked to Naismith's door, fitted a
key to the lock, swung the door open. "Okay, you can go," he
grunted.

Naismith stood up warily. "I'm being released?"

"Your lawyer got you out on a writ. Come on, this way."

"My lawyer? But" Naismith fell silent and followed the
jailer. Wells, when they had allowed Naismith to see him an
hour before, had told him he would get a lawyer, but not to
expect anything tonight. It's a first-degree murder charge," the
psychiatrist had said, "and they won't release you on bail, I
know. But I'll have Howard come down first thing in the
morning. Be patient until then."

Had he lost track of timewas it morning already? No, the
wall clock in the jailer's office read 9:05 P.M.

"Here's your stuff," the jailer said, tossing an envelope at
him across the counter. "Sign for it."

Naismith scrawled his name, put the envelope in his pocket,
and followed the jailer again. In the waiting room, a slender
gray-haired man arose to meet them. He was dressed in a dinner
jacket and carried a sleek pigskin briefcase.

"He's all yours," said the jailer, and walked away.

"Mr. Howard?" Naismith said, advancing with his hand out.

"Eh? No, no. Jerome is the name; how do you do." The
gray-haired man shook Naismith's hand perfunctorily, then
dropped it. He turned back his cuff to look at a wafer-thin
wristwatch. "My heavens, it's late. I didn't realizealthough
I must say the writ didn't take long. Well, anyhow, you're out.
I really shouldn't have come down at all." He paused, with a
faintly bewildered expression on his pale face. "Shouldn't
have come at all," he repeated.

They were descending the stone steps of the jail. Naismith
said uneasily, "Did Wells arrange with you about your fee?"

"Wells?" the other man echoed, looking abstracted. "No, not
WellsI don't think I know him. You know," he said, stopping
again and facing Naismith, "it's incredible that I came out
tonight at all. I can't understand it. Why, I was at a dinner
party. Good heavens, my daughter is getting married tomor-
row" His face twitched. "Well, good night then," he said
abruptly, and turned away.

"Wait," Naismith called after him. "If it wasn't Wells who
asked you to help me, then who?"

Jerome did not pause. "Your friend Churan," he said testily
over his shoulder. His footsteps dwindled down the echoing
walk. Presently he was gone.

Naismith woke up, aware that he was not alone in the room.

He had reached home close to midnight, dog-tired, and had
fallen almost immediately into an exhausted sleep. Now he was
wide awake in the darkness, sitting up, every sense alert to a
warning of danger that crawled invisibly in the room.

There was no sound of movement; but the darkness was
electric with the presence of something powerful and
menacing.

Then, slowly, like a mirage in the air, a faint bluish glow
came to life in the middle of the room.

Naismith caught his breath; the blue glow was continuing to
grow slowly brighter, until now he could make out the squat
shape of something hanging in mid-air.

It was a shape like a fat piece of tubing, bent downward to
form an L. It was a gun, he saw now, as the light continued
to grow: a pistol, clearly and unmistakably, although it was
like no pistol that he had ever seen before. The thick handle
was toward him, the barrel pointing away. Heavy and squat,
the gun was a thing of subtle, powerful curves that melted into
one another. Intuitively, he knew it was of the same family as
the enigmatic machine Ramsdell had given him: completely
different in form, they were still alike as brothers.

It hung there, unsupported, solid and real, and yet somehow
spectral-looking in the blue light. It was bigger than any pistol
made for a normal man's hand: Naismith could imagine him-
self getting out of bed, reaching out and taking the handle in
his hand. And he knew that his grip would be barely big
enough to hold it; his finger would barely reach far enough to
press the trigger.

The silence was absolute. Naismith had forgotten to breathe.

The feeling of menace was still in the room, stronger than
before, and it emanated partly from the weapon in the air,

partly from the shadows beyond. The gun radiated a sense of
brutal power: Naismith longed to touch it, and yet he was
instinctively afraid of itafraid of what ravening energies
might be released if he touched the trigger. He knew, without
any doubt or question, that the gun was no ordinary gun.

Then the darkness seemed to lift.

At the far side of the room, where his dresser and wardrobe
should have been, Naismith saw a Something that stirred, with
an impossibly fluid reptilian motion, and looked at him with
tiny red eyes.

He was out of bed without knowing how he had left it,
every muscle taut, the hair standing erect on his head.

The gun seemed to drift closer.

The darkness lifted still more, and Naismith saw the hideous,
insect-reptilian form of the Thing, heard its armored plates
grate together as it moved.

A thin voice suddenly whispered: "The Zug! The Zug! Kill
it? Take the gunkill it, quick!"

Naismith moved faster than he had ever done in his remem-
bered life. With one hand he swept up the wooden chair beside
his bed, swung it hard and let go. The chair crashed full into
the suspended gun.

There was a sound like silk ripping, and a blinding flare of
blue light that undulated across the walls and was gone. Half-
blinded, heart hammering in his chest, Naismith found the
wall switch and lighted the room.

The gun was gone. The Thing was gone. The chair lay
smashed and blackened in the middle of the floor.

Chapter Three

1. The Zug. [Twice underlined.]

2. Miss Lall. (?)

3. Things burnedRamsdell, Mrs. Becker, the chair.

4. Churan. (?)

5. Ramsdell's machine, similar to gun.

6. Why did Churan accuse me, then get me out of jail?

7. Why???

Naismith stared at the list he had written. A pattern was
forming in it, but it was maddeningly obscure. He rose from
his desk and took a turn around the living room, moving

nervously, combing his hair back with an impatient gesture. It
was mid-morning: he had finally fallen asleep again toward
dawn, and had slept until nearly ten.

He sat down at the desk again, staring at the list with nar-
rowed eyes. The pattern ... He drew a light pencil line
between Miss Lall's name and Churan's. The two of them,
evidently connected, similar in origin ... one East Indian, the
other, by the sound of the name, probably Iranian. ... He
felt a touch of uneasiness at this thought, but could not identify
it, and went on. He remembered now that Miss Lall always
sat alone in class; the other East Indian students invariably
sat in close, gossiping groups. Did she avoid them because they
would know she was not Indian, in spite of her name?

Why did Churan wear actor's makeup?

Why, why, why... ?

The pencil snapped between his fingers. Naismith sat back,
deep in thought. He had done the one right thing last night,
he knew intuitively, in hurling the chair at the spectral gun.
Immediately afterward he had felt an overpowering sense of
relief, almost of reprieve. But why? What would have happened
if he had touched the gun?

He thought of the blackened chair, and shuddered. But he
knew, somehow, that was not the answer.

He checked off the points on the list again, one by one.
After a moment, hesitantly, he drew a doubtful line between
"Things burned" and "Ramsdell's machine."

Now the thought that had come to him last night in the jail
cell began to take shape. Ramsdell had died after handing him
the machine from Churan. Mrs. Becker had died after moving
the machine from the desk to the closet. A common denomin-
ator: both had held it in their hands.

Naismith got up and went to the closet. The machine
gleamed dully at him from the shelf. Reluctantly, he reached
up and pulled it down. It lay heavy and solid in his hands; it
was just heavy enough that, to hold it comfortably, an ordinary
person would have to keep it at the level of his chest.

That was what Ramsdell and Mrs. Becker must have done.
And they had been burned in the chest, face and armsthat
is, in a radius of about a foot and a half from the point where
they had held the machine.

If he was right, he had in his hands a thing of frightful
power.

And yet he had held the machine, not once but several times,
just as he was doing now.

Slowly he put the machine back on the closet shelf. He
returned to the desk, leaning over it and staring intently at
the list.

The gunsimilar in appearance to the first machine, and

evidently wielding the same terrible power. He picked up the
pencil, drew another line between the gun and the machine.
Then he traced it again, making it heavier. The gun had
appeared after he brought the machine into the apartment.
There was one more connection: if he could trace them all, he
would have the answer to the mystery.

He frowned at the last items, the questions of motive, then
left them and went back to the head of the list.

The Zug. The word had a teeth-grating unpleasantness for
him now, remembering the shadowy creature he had seen in
his bedroom last night. What was it? He had no more know-
ledge than before: but he knew in his viscera that it was real.

Miss Lall. There at least was a place to start. It was she who
had begun the whole thing, with that abrupt question: "What
is a Zug?" Her voice . . . was it similar to the one that had
whispered to him out of emptiness last night? He could not
remember: but he felt certain that Miss Lall knew more about
what a Zug was than he did.

She had not asked because she wanted to know.

Why then? To start him thinking, to create a state of mind
in which other things might happen . . . ? Naismith's fingers
tightened on the broken stub of pencil. Yes, he wanted very
much to meet Miss Lall again.

He thought briefly of taking the machine with him to the
university laboratories, then dismissed the idea. It was too
dangerous; he couldn't take the chance of injuring any more
innocent people. Actually the thing ought to be in a vault by
itself somewhere . . . but barring that, it was as safe here as
anywhere. He locked the door carefully behind him.

Youngsters were strolling on the shadowed campus lawns,
oblivious as he went past them. Naismith called first at the
Registrar's office. "Dolly," he said to the brown-haired woman
at the desk, "can you tell me something about a freshman
named LallSamarantha Lall?"

The assistant registrar looked up, startled. "OhProfessor
Naismith." She hesitated. "But, Professor, aren't you sus-
pended? Professor Orvile said" She stopped, embarrassed.

"It was all a terrible mistake, Dolly," Naismith told her in
a confidential tone. "I had nothing to do with Ramsdell's
death. They asked me a few questions and then released me.
You can call up the police and verify that, if you like."

"Oh, no," she said, still looking doubtful. "Well, I'm sure
it's all right then. What was the name?"

"Samarantha Lall."

The woman turned to her files. "Yes, here we are. Just a
minute, I'll give you a stat of her card." She dropped the oblong
of plastic into a copying machine, handed the duplicate to
Naismith.

Naismith examined the card. "I see Thurmond has her in
freshman English this morning."

The woman glanced at the wall clock. "Better hurry if you
want to catch her there, Professor.- That class is just letting
out."

Naismith thanked her hastily and left. He knew she would
notify Orvile and there would be troubleperhaps an expul-
sion. But he had no time for that now.

He saw her among a group of students scattering out of the
main entrance of the Humanities Building. She stood com-
posed and erect, in a dark blouse of figured silk and a short
white skirt, with her books and equipment in her arms, waiting
for him while he walked toward her.

Now that he observed her closely, she was an unusual-
looking girl. Her skin was a dull tan, without gloss, even her
prominent cheekbones. Her hair was black and dull. Her rather
heavy features remained expressionless as he approached, but
her long, amber eyes regarded him with veiled amusement.

"Yes, Professor?" she said in her thin voice.

"Miss Lall." He was fighting to control a sudden anger that
made his hands tremble.

"Yes?" she repeated.

"What is a Zug?"

They stared at each other for a moment in silence. "So you
still don't remember?" she said. "A Zug" she pronounced the
word with an intonation of hatred and disgust"is a mutated
ortholidan."

"That means nothing to me."

"An ortholidan is a monster. Some grow thirty feet long.
They are flesh-eaters, very fierce, and the mutated ones are also
very intelligent."

"What species do they belong to? Where are they found?"

"They belong to no Terrestrial species. As to where they are
found" She hesitated. "I can't tell you that yet."

"Why not?"

"You aren't ready. We thought you were, but we were
mistaken."

"Ready for what? What do you want of me?"

She said slowly, "I'm going to be frank. We want you to kill
a Zug. The Zug is in a certain place, very hard to get to. When
you are ready, we'll take you there, then when you have killed
it, we will reward you liberally." She smiled, showing small,
separated white teeth.

Oddly repelled, Naismith said, "Then all this has been just
to drive me into a position where I'd have to do what you
wanted?"

"Yes," She smiled again, and again Naismith felt a wave of
repulsion.

"But why me?"

"Because you're a Shefth. Look" She fumbled in her
handbag. "Catch this." Her hand came up; something small
and white hurtled toward him.

Naismith's left hand went out, caught the thing in mid-air,
batted it violently away. It bounced on the grass and came to
rest.

"You see?" she asked, a little shakily, staring at him with her
luminous amber eyes. "That's why. Your reflexes are twice as
fast as anynormal human being's." She stopped. "But I've
said enough. Just one more word, Professor Naismith! Struggle
against us. That's what we want. The more you struggle, the
more ready you'll be. Now good-by."

She turned away. Taut with anger, Naismith stepped after
her, took her by the arm.

Her bare flesh burned cold into his palm. She was as cold as
a lizardor a corpse.

Naismith let go hastily. Her amber eyes stared coldly into
his as she said again, "Good-by, Professor Naismith." Then
she turned, and this time Naismith did not try to stop her. He
watched until she disappeared around a curve of the flame-tree-
bordered path.

After a moment his eye was caught by a glint of white on the
lawn a few yards away. He went to it, stooped and picked it
up. It was the object Miss Lall had tossed at him: a chrome
tube like an oversized lipstick. He removed the cap gingerly:
there was a brown substance inside, the end apparently worn
by use. On his thumb it left a brown smear, which would not
come off, although he rubbed it vigorously with his handker-
chief.

Turning the tube around, he saw lettering stamped into its
side:

"WESTMORE CHARACTER SKINTONE No. 3:  DARK
SUNTAN."

Naismith went home in a mood of suppressed fury. He
pulled the machine down from the closet shelf again, set it on
his kitchenette table, and stared at it while he ate a sandwich
and drank coffee. The food satisfied his hunger, but his atten-
tion was not on it. He looked at the sleek, gleaming metal case
as if by sheer force of staring he could penetrate its secrets. The
metal was blue, like blued steel, but with iridescent glints of
color. When he looked closely, he could just make out the fine
parallel lines of the machining. That was what, gave it the
iridescence, apparently. He examined the three oval inlays, tried
again to turn or depress them, tried to force his fingernail into
the cracks around them, but the separation was too fine. He
turned the machine over, looking again for any joint, but there

was none: except for the three inlays, the case was all one piece.

A prickle of uneasiness went up his spine. A machine is
incomplete without controls. This had none. Therefore it was
incomplete: the controls were elsewhere.

Someone, out there, invisible ... sitting in a room, watching
Naismith every moment . . . with his finger on a button?

Naismith's fists clenched. The thing was dangerous, lethal;
the fact that it came from Churan was proof enough that it
was meant to work against him. And yet it was the only solid
piece of evidence he had.

What else was there? He cast his mind back over the con-
versation with Miss Lall: all of it seemed subtly unpleasant
now. Like an electric current, that cold touch of her arm had
run back over all his memories of her.

After a moment he got up and took his notepad from the
desk. Sitting again at the kitchenette table, he turned to the
page where he had already listed what he knew about Lall and
Churan, and wrote underneath: "Shefth. Mutated ortholidan
(sp.?). Not Terrestrial species."

Under that again, he scrawled, "Am I?" And immediately
crossed it out with two heavy black lines.

He stood up, paced back and forth twice across the small
room, then went with sudden decision to the visiphone and
punched a number. To the university switchboard operator
who answered, he said, "Professor Sturges, please."

"I'll see if he's available." The screen went gray, then blinked
to life again. A pale young man peered myopically out of the
screen. "Bio office."

"I'd like to talk to Professor Sturges, please."

"Okay, I'll get him." He disappeared from the screen, and
Naismith heard his distant voice calling, "Hey, Harryrun
down and tell Prof Sturges there's a visi for him."

After another wait, Sturges' cropped gray head and sallow,
intelligent face came on the screen. Sturges held the Chair of
Xenology; he was a quiet man, said to be well thought of in
his field; Naismith had only met him once or twice, at faculty
luncheons.

"Sturges, I need some information in your line, if you will."

"Of course, but aren't you" Sturges blinked at him with
faint suspicion.

"It's all been cleared up. I'll explain when I see you," said
Naismith quickly. "Meanwhile, what I chiefly want to know is
this: according to my understanding, no intelligent humanoid
race has ever been discovered off Earth. Is that correct?"

"Quite correct," Sturges replied, still in reserve. "In fact, no
intelligent race at all. One or two are about as smart as a
chimpanzee, according to the Europeans. Why?"

"A student of mine asked me to criticize an imaginative

story of his," Naismith said, improvising. "Now this may be
a little harder. Does the word 'Shefth' mean anything to you?"

Sturges repeated it without interest, then shook his head
slowly. "No."

"Zug?"

"No."

"Have you ever heard of an organism called an ortho-
lidan?"

"Never," said Sturges succinctly. "Is that all?"

Naismith hesitated. "Yes, that's it. Thank you."

"Any time," said Sturges distantly, and broke the connection.

Naismith sat looking at the blank screen. He had been on
the point of asking Sturges, "Could a living human being be
as cold to the touch as a lizard?"

But he knew the answer. Reptiles and amphibia are cold to
the touch because they have no self-regulating temperature
mechanism. The temperature of warm-blooded animals varies
between narrow limits; if it rises or falls beyond those limits,
generally speaking, the animal dies.

But a cold-blooded animal's body temperature is always
within a degree or two of the temperature of the air. And it
had been cool and overcast this morning on the campus, when
he met the Lall creature....

Naismith stood up, his muscles murderously taut. These
people, whatever they were, knew more about him than he did
himself. And that was intolerable.

"A Shefth," he said aloud. The word still meant nothing to
him, called up no image.

Where had he been, what unimaginable things had he done,
during the thirty-one years that were blank in his memory?

Where on Earth... or off it?

Naismith thought frozenly, "Everything depends on what
action I take at this moment." With every nerve alert, he could
sense the gathering danger around him as if it were a visible,
geometric web.

Suddenly he remembered the card the assistant registrar had
given him, and took it out of his pocket. According to the
schedule, Lall had no classes this afternoon. Her address was
given as 1034 Colorado Avenue, Apt. C30, Santa Monica.

The tube took Naismith to within a block of the address he
wantedone of the old gray-stone apartment complexes, built
during the Cold War, with deep shelters and storage vaults
underneath. The "C30" in Lall's address, he knew, meant that
she lived in the third sub-basement of the converted shelters.

The foyer with its peeling plastic walls was empty. Naismith
took the elevator down into a narrow corridor, poorly lighted,
with numbered red doors at intervals. The ceiling was oppres-
sively low; the floor was scuffed gray tile.

In a dead-end passage, he found the door marked "C30." A
plastic card gummed to the door read "Lall."

Naismith paused, listening. There was no sound from beyond
the door, and he had a sudden conviction that the apartment
was empty. He pressed the buzzer.

The door clicked, swung wide.

In the opening stood Miss Lall, dressed as he had seen her
that morning. Behind her he glimpsed a disordered, green-
walled room. Cigarette smoke swirled up through the cone of
yellow light projected by a lamp.

"Come in, Mr. Naismith," the creature said, and moved
aside.

Naismith's back muscles tightened. He stepped to the room,
then paused.

Beyond a table, watching him with cold amber eyes, sat a
brown-skinned man with a beard. After a moment, his resem-
blance to Lall was obvious.

Naismith walked forward. "You are Churan," he said.

"I am."

Naismith said grimly, "You sent me the machine. And you
sent that lawyer to get me out of jail."

"Thank me for that, at least," the man said, narrowing his
eyes. The table before him was littered with food and crumpled
plastic. He picked up a chicken leg, gnawed it, spat out a piece
of gristle. Scraps dribbled into his beard. He gazed up at
Naismith with insolent eyes.

Lall came around and sat on the arm of a chair. Together,
Naismith thought, they looked more inhuman than either
alone. They were like two gigantic frogs, painted and dressed in
human clothing.

A stir of revulsion went through him. "Exactly what do you
want from me?" he demanded.

"To begin with, why not sit down and talk reasonably
together? What can be lost?"

Naismith hesitated, then sat in a leather chair facing the
table. The room, he saw now, was cluttered with an astonishing
number and variety of things. Books and papers were stacked
unevenly on the floor, piled on tables. Naismith saw an icon, a
bronze Chinese dragon, a plastic windup toy, a string of cheap
green beads, a can of soup. Balls of paper and plastic had been
tossed carelessly into corners. There were scraps of food on the
floor. Dust was thick everywhere.

"What can we offer you in return for your cooperation, Mr.
Naismith?" Churan asked. He picked up an orange, began to
tear the skin off with his greasy fingers. "Money?"

Naismith did not reply.

"Knowledge?" Churan said delicately. Both aliens smiled.

Naismith leaned forward. "Very well. You claim to know all

about me. Let me hear some proof of thatgive me details."

Churan shook his head. "Payment in advance, Mr. Nai-
smith? Not a very good method of dealing." He made a face,
spoke a few guttural words to Lall.

"Doing business," she said.

"Yesdoing business. We will not tell you everything now,
Mr. Naismith. You have already learned somethingthat you
are a Shefth, that the Lenlu Din sent you back"

Lall interrupted him with a hissed word. He shrugged. "Well,
it does not matter. There is still much for you to learn." He
stuffed a segment of orange into his mouth and began to chew,
blinking at Naismith in time with the motion of his jaw.

Naismith felt an unreasonable anger. He said, "You're asking
me to go into this blindly. Why should I trust you?"

Churan spat out a seed, stuffed another segment of orange
in. With his mouth full, he asked, "What other choice do you
have?"

"I can refuse," Naismith said. "I can stay here, live out my
life."

"You are already under suspicion of murder," Churan com-
mented. "You will lose your job"

Naismith stood up.

"I am only stating facts, Mr. Naismith," Churan said, staring
up at him. "If necessary, you will be convicted of murder and
will receive a long prison sentence. We can even arrange for
painful accidents to happen to you while in prison."

Lall spoke to him warningly. He shrugged, and said, "Only
facts. Be realistic, Mr. Naismithif you do not agree now, you
will later."

Naismith felt choked with anger. His voice was low. "What
if I kill you instead?"

Churan flinched. "You will not," he said hastily. "But if you
did, who would answer your questions?"

Naismith was silent. Churan's blunt forefinger stirred the
papers on the table. "Meanwhile, if you want proofs, I will give
you some proofs. Look at this, Mr. Naismith."

Naismith glanced down. Churan's fingers were spreading
out a mare's nest of amateur-looking color photographs.
Naismith recognized a dim picture of Fisherman's Wharf in
San Francisco, a shot of the Neumann Obelisk in downtown
Los Angeles, a grinning closeup of Churan himself. Then
something different came into view.

It was an oblong of what seemed to be clear plastic. In it
were three tiny figures against a shadowy background.

The illusion of depth was so perfect that the figures seemed
to be sunken beneath the surface of the table. Two were
shorter than the other; and Naismith recognized Lall and

Churan by their stance, even before he leaned near enough to
make out the features. The third
He stiffened incredulously. The third man was himself.

There was no mistake. Back in his apartment, Naismith took
the photograph out of his pocket again and examined it for
the third tune. He had stared at it on the tube car going home,
until the glances of other passengers had made him feel
conspicuous.

There he was, embedded in the clear plastic, looking almost
as if he might move or speak. Beside him, the two aliens gazed
out with self-satisfied smiles.

"Where was this taken?" he had asked Churan. The alien
had grinned up at him. "Not waswill be, Mr. Naismith. You
are going with us into the future, and this picture will be taken
there. So you see, there is no point in argument." He giggled,
and after a moment Lall joined in. Their hoarse, grunting
laughter was so unpleasant to Naismith that he pocketed the
photograph and fled.

Now, staring at it again, he was compelled to believe. The
background showed a room like none he had ever seen before.
The walls were paneled in magenta and ivory strips of some
substance that looked hazy and blurred at the edges, although
the rest of the picture was in sharp focus. There were chairs,
tables of unfamiliar shapes.

He knew in his bones that the room was not of this place
and time. Either he and the aliens had been together in the
past, in that blank period that was the first thirty-one years of
his life ... or else Churan had been telling the literal truth:
this was a picture of something yet to happena snapshot
from the future.

If the aliens themselves could come back from the future
into present timeif the gun he had seen in his room could be
projected backwhy not a photograph?

But if that were so, how could he possibly escape?

He ate a solitary dinner, went to a movie, but discovered
after half an hour that he had no idea what he had been
watching.

That night, he dreamed.

Chapter Four

In the dream, he wakened to a sense of danger.

He struggled, gasping as he straightened his limbs. A thin
mechanical voice was shrilling, "Attack! Attack in the Fifth
Sector! Guardians, awake! Attack! Attack!"

All around him in the big globular chamber, his comrades
were rousing from sleep, squirming in the air, reaching for
weapons. The automatic guns and other protective devices,
floating at the outskirts of the chamber, ceaselessly revolved,
their red lenses glowing.

The vision was so clear that Naismith accepted it without
question. He had never really been Naismith; that was a
dream. He was Dar of the Entertainer caste, and he was trying
to get his wits about him. He had been on a thirty-hour patrol
in the Eightieth Sector, and had barely fallen asleep, it seemed,
before the robot alarm had wakened him.

His equipment drifted toward him as he grasped for it, half-
blindly. He put on the helmet and plastron, seized the familiar
shape of his flame rifle.

Other men were already pouring through the circular orifice
of the doorway. "Assemble! Assemble!" shrilled the mechanical
voice. Still not thoroughly awake, he aimed his director at the
doorway and followed.

In the huge assembly room outside, throngs of armed Enter-
tainers were moving. "Form squads!" another robot voice
shrilled. Dar set his director to "Group" and felt himself drift-
ing across the chamber.

The whole mass of men were already in motion toward
another open doorway. He recognized the men of his squad as
they drifted togetherYed, Jatto, Opad. They exchanged
glances and a few brief words. "How many?" "Don't know."
The words were not English, but he understood them.

Then they were moving across the room; the doorway
loomed up. Tensing himself, Dar dived through.

Acrid smoke bit at his nostrils; clouds of it rolled down the
green-lit corridor, so dense that he had to switch on his helmet
ultravision. In the luminescent glow, he saw green-skinned
bodies afloat, flesh torn apart, eyes staring blindly, mouths
agape.

There was a thunderous roar from somewhere down the
corridor. Dar felt something pluck at his arm, glanced down
and saw blood welling. There was no pain, only a dull aching
sensation.

A patrol officer came darting by. "All over," he said as he
passed. "We got them. Any wounded here?"

Dar signaled him, showing his pierced arm. The pain was
beginning. The patrol officer signaled a robot, which cleaned
his wound, extracted the sliver of metal, sprayed bandage on it.

"Dismiss," someone was calling. "Dismiss." The men were
crowding toward the doorway again, and Dar joined them.
The press was so great that it was several minutes before he
could go through. Grumbling voices sounded all around him.
"Waked us for nothing." "I'm going back to sleep." "No point
to itthey'll just wake you up again." "Myself, I'm hungry."

They were in the assembly room. Some dispersed through
other doorways, but Dar's overwhelming need was for sleep.
He passed through into the sleeping chamber, found himself a
clear space, curled up in the air and lost consciousness almost
at once.

Naismith awoke and sat up with a start. His heart was ham-
mering. His own familiar bedroom, in the darkness relieved
only by the glow from the living room, seemed almost bizarre
... the dream had been so vivid.

He got up, turned on a light, stood blinking at his image in
the mirror, then sat down on the bed. "Dream" was not the
wordhe had been Dar. Looking back on it now, the experi-
ence had nothing of the incoherence or fantasy of a remem-
bered dream. Every detail was clear and vivid, and as he
thought about it now, he could even call up things that had
been hinted at in the dream itself.

The "director," for example. Naismith absently stroked his
left forearm. He could almost feel the shape of the thin, flexible
device strapped to his arm. Whenever he wanted to move, in
that curious place without gravity, he had merely had to tense
his forearm slightly, and point in the direction he wanted to go.

That place existed. Sitting hunched on the bed in the pre-
dawn darkness, Naismith grimly strove to bring back all the
details he could.

There were cloudy memories of dances performed in mid-
air by troupes of Entertainers like himself ... a vision of a
girl's face, and the name Liss-Yani. . . . Naismith pinched the
bridge of his nose between his fingers. The memories were
fading.

Disturbed, he sat and smoked for half an hour before he
went back to bed. Even then, he could not rest, and it was
hours before he dropped into an uneasy sleep.

Sometime before dawn, he dreamed again of the staring,
green faces of the dead men in the smoke-filled corridor. It
was truly a dream this time, and he knew it; yet he could not
shake off a feeling of horror as those hideous dead faces swam

up toward him through the mist. They were silently trying to
explain something; one in particular appeared again and again,
face distorted, mouth agape....

Naismith awoke, with a confused sense that he had almost
understood something important. At last, as he stood with razor
in hand in front of the bathroom mirror, he realized what it
was.

The face of the dead man, except for its green color and the
lack of a beard, might have been Churan's.

It was Saturday; Naismith had nowhere to go, but the idea
of staying in the apartment, even long enough to eat breakfast,
was intolerable. He left the building and began walking up the
curving street toward the park on the crest of the hill.

Suddenly and without surprise, he knew what he must do.
He calculated rapidly: he had some four hundred-odd dollars
in his checking account. That would be enough to take him to
the East Coast, and allow him some breathing space to find a
job until he could earn a teaching certificate in whatever state
he chose....

His branch bank was only five blocks away. It would be
better not to go back to the apartment at all.

The teller greeted him pleasantly. "What can we do for you
this morning, Mr. Naismith?"

"I'd like to close my account. Can you tell me what the
exact balance is?"

The teller's smile grew fixed. "I don't quite understand, Mr.
Naismith."

Naismith scowled irritably. "I want to close out my account,"
he repeated.

"But, sir," the teller said, "don't you remember, you closed
it out yesterday?"

"I what?" Naismith said, flushing with anger.

The teller's smile had vanished. "Well, sir, if you'll wait just
a moment, I'll get the records."

He came back with a bundle of papers. "Here is your closing
statement, Mr. Naismithwe were just about to mail it to you.
Here are your canceled checksand here is your withdrawal
slip, dated yesterday."

Naismith stared at the paper. It was exactly what it seemed
to be: a withdrawal form, made out for $412.72, and signed
by himself.

"But this is a forgery," he said at last, and stared at the teller.
"Who paid this putwas it you?"

The man blinked at him. "I can't just recall," he said
vaguely, and turned. "Oh, Mr. Robinson."

The manager drifted over; he was a portly young man with
a pale, dissatisfied face. "Anything the matter?"

The teller explained it, adding, "Mr. Naismith claims the
withdrawal slip is forgedbut I know we paid it to him."

"Well, I'm sure we can straighten this out. Howard, will you
get on the phone to Jack Gerber and ask him to come over
here?" To Naismith he said, "Mr. Gerber is our attorney. While
we're waiting for him, let's step into my office."

Naismith crumpled the paper in his hand. "Never mind," he
said abruptly. He turned and walked out.

He understood now what was happening; but understanding
it made no difference to the wave of helpless anger that swept
through him.

He was being pushed from one untenable position to another,
like a king being driven by a series of checks across the chess-
board.

Lall and Churan were making it impossible for him to leave
Los Angeles, and impossible to stay. Under such pressure, how
long could he hold out against them?

Back in the apartment, he realized abruptly that he still had
one possible way outthe machine. If he could get it open,
discover how it worked...

But when he opened the closet door, it was gone.

That night he dreamed again. He was afloat, in a crowded
spherical room of pale green light. His own body was some-
where off in the darkness, lost in time and space: here was the
City and the time was now.

"... only a few hours' sleep since the last attack," the Dance
Master was saying. His eyes were red-rimmed. "However, it
can't be helped. Assume formation for Turbulent Wreaths.'
We enter at position 25, follow the silver for twenty-one and
one-half spirals, and exit at position 32. Any questions?"

The others stirred in the air around him, beginning to form
a long slightly curved line aimed at the glowing disk of the
doorway. "What about afterward?" called one of the girls.

"Afterward," said the Master grimly, "we regroup for
'Spheres and Fountains.'" There were a few groans, but no
protests.

The Dance Master came nearer. "Dar," he said in a low
voice, "how is your arm?"

Dar flexed his biceps. "Better," he said. "It doesn't hurt."

"I would have let you opt out," said the Master, "but there
simply is not another man available. Do the best you can."

Dar nodded. The Master hesitated, as if about to speak
again, then went back to the head of the line. "Ready," came
his voice.

The Entertainers faced each other, wiped their hands dry
on their clothing, breathed deeply. A tone sounded. The Enter-
tainers began to move, some gripping hands, revolving around

each other, then letting go to dart aheadthe whole ensemble
flowing forward in an intricate pattern.

Beyond the doorway, they emerged into a lighted sphere a
hundred times the volume of the first one. As he went through
his assigned movements, Dar was dimly aware of the crowded
room whirling around himthe gaily costumed Lenlu Din, as
raucous as a flight of parakeets; the robots drifting here and
there, the green-skinned servants.

He gripped hands with the next man, whirled, released,
twisted his body as he flowed forward around the silver streak
of light. There was still no pain in his arm, but it was growing
more and more awkward; once his grip failed, and he barely
recovered.

The ensemble spiraled half across the room, past the little
knot of dignitaries that clustered around the Highborn. Dar
glimpsed her through the crowda fat, puffed little woman
with mad eyes.

The room revolved again. "Turbulent Wreaths" was a
double-spiraled pattern, with a rolling movement that pro-
gressed along the line, checked, progressed again. It was not as
difficult as it appeared, but when properly done it was pretty
to watch.

Around once more. Dar felt a spasm of pain as he reached
for his partner's hand. The man's eyes widened in horror; he
reached quickly for his wrist, but Dar was already off balance,
out of rhythm, the pattern broken.

Cursing under his breath, he spun in mid-air, put full power
to his director and managed to slide into his place in the line.
Somewhere off in the distance, a woman's voice was squawking
indignantly. The Highbornhad she seen?

As they approached the exit doorway, a spindle-shaped
robot drifted up, its yellow signal light blinking into Dar's eyes.
Despairingly, he fell out of the pattern and watched as the rest
of the line swirled through the doorway.

"Your name and designation?" the robot asked pleasantly.

"Dar-Yani, 108 class 3."

"Thank you." The robot revolved, tilted, drifted away.

Dar hung where he was for a moment, then thought of the
marshaling room and dived through the doorway.

The others were waiting for him, pale and anxious. Their
voices came at him all together: "What happened?" "Did he
break the pattern?" "What was the matter?"

"It wasn't his fault," said Ten-Yani. "I saw it. It was his arm."

The Dance Master came forward. "They say a robot stopped
you. What did it want?"

"Just my name and designation," Dar said. He and the
Dance Master stared at each other hopelessly.

"I blame myself," the Master said, drifting away, pounding

one palm with his other fist. "I should have refused the per-
formancetold them we were under strength."

"What about 'Spheres and Fountains'?" someone asked.

The Master's face contorted. He reached out and touched
the doorway, turning the big silvery disk transparent. "Look
for yourself. They're using a recording."

A chorus of groans went up. Through the doorway, Nai-
smith could see a line of Entertainers, apparently solid and
real, gliding through the air.

There were tears in the master's eyes. He reached out angrily,
opaqued the doorway again. "It couldn't be helped. It couldn't
be helped," he said as he turned away.

After a moment the doorway cleared and a robot glided
through. It was dark blue, a complex mathematical shape. It
revolved slowly, picked out Dar, blinked its light at him. "Come
with me, please."

Dar followed it to the doorway. The other Entertainers did
not look at him.

The room beyond was tinted a dim violet rose, and Dar's
heartbeat quickened. This was one of the Lenlu Din retreats,
rooms whose location was known to no one but the owners
and the robots.

Floating in the middle of the chamber was a hawk-nosed
man in flaring striped garments. Various small memocubes
and other equipment were scattered in the air around him.
Faint music came from the wall.

"As you commanded, sir," the robot said. It dipped, turned,
and floated through the doorway again.

"Dar-Yarni," said the hawk-nosed man, consulting a memo-
cube which he held in plump, jeweled fingers. "Number 108,
class 3."

"Yes, sir."

"You spoiled the formation of your dance troupe and caused
acute esthetic pain to the Highborn," said Hawknose severely.

"Yes, sir."

"What punishment do you think you merit?"

Dar swallowed hard. "Destruction, sir."

"True. Well said. Now suppose I were to offer you a
dangerous task insteadsomething to make up for your fault?"

"Sir, you would be most lenient."

"So I think, myself. Well, Dar-Yani" Hawknose consulted
another memocube, pressing its sides impatiently until he had
the information he wanted. "You know, I suppose, that we
have word from the future that a Zug has somehow got through
the Barrier."

"Yes, sir."

"It will be necessary to kill it. The Shefthi, as you also know,
are no longer with us."

Dar's throat was dry. "Yes, sir."

"We are trying to retrieve one Shefth in order to kill this
Zug, but in case of failure, it will be necessary for someone
else to do it. Do you follow me?"

"Sir, I am untrainedI have fought Lenlu Om, but a Zug"

"Quite understood. You need not be afraid of failure. At
this time, we merely want to ascertain if an Entertainer can kill
a Zug. We are not counting too much on you, Dar-Yani;
however, do your best, do your best." He smothered a yawn.
"You will have one hour with the training machines in which
to perfect your approach. Then a robot will take you to the
doorway into the Old City. As you know, there are Zugs in
plenty there. The crucial thing to remember"

Chapter Five

The voice receded, became unintelligible. Naismith awoke.

The dream had been so vivid that for a moment it seemed
absurd to find himself in darkness, pressed by gravity into a
spring mattress, with the smells of fabric and dust around him.

He sat up in the darkness, realizing that another night had
passed without his coming any closer to a solution. The
simplest thing would be to give in to the aliens

"No!" he said aloud, swinging his legs out of bed. He
showered, shaved, prepared food and ate it.

After breakfast, he sat with paper and pencil, drawing up
another list:

1.   Capitulate.

2.   Escape and hide.

3.   Resist passively.

He drew lines through the first two entries; the first was out
of the question, the second impossible. The third seemed to offer
some hope; but he sensed in his bones that it would never
succeed. Again he thought of a chessboard. A player under
attack, his king driven by a series of checks toward the mating
square, had only one chance: not to be driven passively, but to
attack in turn.

He crumpled the paper, tossed it aside, stood up. Slowly a
plan began to take shape in his mind.

In the first place, he must assume that he was under constant

observation, even here in his own apartment. Even if he had
the money, he could not take the risk of buying a weapon of
any kind.

He looked at his broad, powerful hands, the thick fingers.
Once, challenged by another student, he had bent a piece of
iron pipe in half. The aliens had already made it clear that
they were afraid of him ... and, Naismith told himself grimly,
they had good reason.

He set about acting a part for an invisible audience. Pre-
paring to go out, he counted the change in his pockets, closed
his fist on the few coins with a gesture of anger.

He walked for an hour through the streets of Beverly Hills,
head down, shoulders slumped; then he visited an ex-classmate
and tried to borrow money. The man was an electrical engineer
named Stevens; he looked startled at Naismith's request, but
handed over five dollars, apologizing, "Sorry I'm a little short
this week, Naismith, but if this is any help"

Naismith took it, walked two blocks as before, then abruptly
threw the money into the gutter. He said aloud, "I've got to
give in to them. I'm licked." He took a deep breath, turned
back and picked up the crumpled bill he had just thrown away.
He smoothed it out, his face set in lines of despair and resigna-
tion. When a cab cruised by, he hailed it and gave the aliens'
address. Outside, he was all surrender; inside, all murder.

He knocked at the red door. A voice called, "Come inthe
door is not locked."

The room was as Naismith had seen it before. Churan sat
behind his table, staring across at him with hooded amber eyes.
The Lall creature was leaning against a bookcase to his right,
arms folded, smoking a cigarette. Neither spoke.

Naismith moved forward. "I've come to tell you to call off
your dogs."

Churan's smile widened slightly; Lall glanced at him and
blew a long plume of smoke from her lips.

Naismith measured the distance to the two aliens. Half a
step nearer

"Tell me your plans," he began, then launched himself into
motion. One hand stabbed out for Churan's throat, the other
reached for Lall's. Both missed their targets; his hands closed
on air.

Yet the aliens had not moved. With a chill of horror, Nai-
smith realized that his arms had passed completely through
their bodies.

Churan, his face abominably close, began to laugh. After a
moment Lall joined in.

Naismith stumbled backward. The two aliens glanced at each
other, their eyes welling tears of merriment.

"A nice try, Professor Naismith," said Lall. "But not good
enough."

Then, in an instant, both aliens were gone. Shaking, incredul-
ous, Naismith nerved himself to step forward again and stare
at the place where they had been.

On the floor, between Churan's chair and the bookcase, lay
a small black machine with dull red lights fading in its lenses.
When he leaned down to touch it, a numbing electric shock
made him jerk his hand back.

The room was empty. But as he backed away, the aliens'
laughter swelled out again from nowhere, malicious and mock-
ing. Then, close behind him, Lall's voice whispered in his ear,
"A reminder, Professor"

As he tried to turn, something struck the side of his head.
The room darkened.

Without transition, he was in the City, floating in the center
of a vast chamber of carved and fretted ivory, empty and
shadowed. When he moved, the faint sibilance of his garments
echoed back in sinister whisperings from the walls: "Shhh ...
shhh..."

He knew that he was going to die. He had made his fare-
wells to all his friends and the members of his troupe; had
returned his possessions to the central store; and had himself
expunged his name from the register of Entertainers. In a real
sense, he was already dead: Dar-Yani no longer existed. He
was only a nameless and faceless body, a remnant, a fiction,
drifting through the memories of the Old City.

It was the first time he had been here since the building of
the New City. It was strange to see these once familiar rooms
and corridors in their desolation. Built of material substances,
painstakingly decorated and ornamented over a thousand years,
this had been the real and only City until the growing Zug
threat had forced mankind to leave it for new chambers of
Zug-proof energy. After the Barrier was put up, it was said, the
people would all move back here; but the man who had been
Dar-Yani would not live to see it.

An injustice? Perhaps. He thought of the greenskins, and his
lip curled. It was all well enough for them to revolt when they
felt their case was desperate. But the Entertainers had their
traditions.

He paused to listen. The unfamiliar armor was tight around
his chest, and his palms were sweaty where they gripped the
stock of the gun.

The only sounds were the ceaseless, unnerving whisperings
that echoed back from the walls. He hesitated, then moved
toward one of the hundred corridors that gave exit from the
room.

Here, in this famous concourse, Ito-Yani had given his

recitals, holding an audience of thousands spellbound for hours.
Now, like the rest of the Old City, it had been abandoned to
those chill monsters which ...

He froze, listening with all his body. Down the dimness of
the corridor, there had been a faint sound.

When the beast attacks, the training machine had told him,
you will have at most two seconds to aim and fire. Should you
survive the first blow ...

Another sound, nearer.

He backed away from the opening, with a panicky sense
that he was not ready, it was too soon, he needed more time ...

The noise came again; now he saw a pale glimmer of motion
 down in the depths.

Every call of his body shrieked its terror; but he stayed
where he was, teeth bared, his hand tight on the gun.

Without warning, the distant shape grew near. It floated
toward him silently, with incredible speed. Through the view-
disk of his helmet he could see its tiny red eyes, its claws out-
stretched. As if in a nightmare, he strove to bring up the heavy
gun, but he could not move fast enough. As the monster
loomed nearer, its fanged jaws .opened and

Naismith sat up on the floor, with the hoarse echo of his own
shout echoing in his ears. His head hurt. He was shaking all
over, covered with cold sweat. In the darkness, the monster
was still looming nearer, still opening its jaws . . .

The smell of his own fear was thick in his nostrils. His hands
found the shape of an overturned chair . . . Where was he?

He got to his feet, fumbled in his pockets for a match. The
flame showed him a littered carpet, books and papers stacked
against the walls ...

He remembered his last moment of consciousness, and his
fingers went to the swelling over one ear.

The match went out. Naismith lit another, found the lamp
and turned it on. The machine he had seen on the carpet was
no longer there. The apartment was empty.

Naismith sat down for a moment with his head in his hands.
Then, with sudden decision, he rose and went to the visiphone
in the corner. He punched a number.

The screen lighted; Dr. Wells' brown, seamed face looked up
pleasantly. "Oh, hello, Naismith. How have you been getting
along? Is anything the matter?"

"Wells," said Naismith tensely, "you told me once there
was a crash method we could employ to break my amnesia, if
everything else failed."

"Well, yes, but we're not down to that yet, man. Be patient,
give the routine methods a chance to work. Now, your next
appointment"He reached for his calendar.

"I can't wait," Naismith told him levelly. "How dangerous
is this method, and what does it involve?"

Wells put his muscular hands together under his chin. "It's
dangerous enough. Some people have been driven into psy-
chosis by itit's nothing to fool with, I assure you. Essentially,
what it amounts to is a psychic leverage to bring up the material
the patient's mind is holding back. Sometimes, when it does
come up, it shocks him so that he goes off into a psychotic
state. There are good reasons for loss of memory sometimes,
Naismith."

"I'll take the chance," Naismith said. "When are you free?"

"Well now, hold on a minuteI haven't said I'd take the
chance. Really, Naismith, my advice to you is to wait"

"If you won't do it, I'll find another psychiatrist who will."

Wells looked unhappy. "In this town, that wouldn't be im-
possible. Come over, Naismith, and we'll discuss it anyhow."

Wells finished arranging the head clamps and stepped back,
glancing at the meters on the control unit beside the couch.
"All right?" he asked.

"Get on with it."

Wells' brown fingers hesitated on the knob. "You're sure it's
what you want?"

"I told you my reasons," Naismith said impatiently. "Come
on, let's get started."

Wells turned the knob; the machine clicked on, and a low
hum was audible. Naismith felt a curious tickling sensation in
his skull, and resisted an impulse to reach up and tear off the
head clamps.

"In previous sessions," Wells said, "we've taken you back
through your hospital days, covered that fairly well, and your
college experiences after you got out. Now let's see if we can
bring up a little sharper detail from one of those memories."
He turned a dial; the tickling sensation grew stronger.

"I direct your attention to your first day in the Air Force
Medical Center," said Wells. "Try to recapture the image of
your first waking recollection. The first thing you remember,
on waking up...."

Naismith tried to concentrate. He had a vague recollection
of whitenesswhite sheets, white uniforms. . . .

Watching him, Wells did something at the control unit.
Instantly a vivid scene leaped up in Naismith's mind, so clear
and detailed that it was almost like living it over again.

"Yes?" said Wells alertly. "Describe what you see and hear."

Naismith clenched his fists involuntarily, then tried to relax.
"Young doctor just came into my room. I can see his face as
clearly as yours. About thirty, heavy cheeks, cheerful-looking,
but his eyes are shrewd. Looked at my chart, then at me. 'How
are we feeling today?' Nurse glanced at me and smiled, then

went out. Big, pleasant roomgreen walls, white curtains. I
said, 'Where am I?'" Naismith paused, frowning in surprise. "I
didn't remember anything . . . not anything. Not even the
languagehe" Naismith twisted suddenly on the couch.

"Easy," said Wells. "Can you tell me his reply?"

Naismith clenched his jaw. "I can now. He said, 'what
language is that, old fellow?' But I didn't understand it!"
Naismith rose to one elbow. "He was talking English, and I
didn't understand a word!"

Wells pressed him back, looking worried. "Easy," he re-
peated. "We knew you were totally amnesic after the crash.
You had to relearn everything.. Don't let the vividness of this
recollection"

"But what language was I speaking?" Naismith demanded
ferociously. "When I asked him 'Where am I?'"

Wells looked startled. "Can you repeat the actual sounds?"

"Glenu ash i?" said Naismith after a moment, with closed
eyes. Tension was mounting in him; he could not lie still. His
jaw muscles were painfully tight, and he could feel his fore-
head beginning to sweat. "Do you recognize it?"

"I'm no linguist. It isn't German, or French or Spanish, I'm
quite sure. But perhaps Rumanian, or Croatian, something
from that general area? Is there any influence of that kind in
your background?"

"Not according to the records," Naismith said tensely. Sweat
was streaming down his face; his fists clenched and opened,
clenched again. "My parents were both native-born and lived
in the Midwest all their lives. Both died in the Omaha dusting,
and so did all my other relatives; I was the last one. And I
nearly bought it."

"Let's pass on," said Wells. "After this is over, I'll play that
phrase back to Hupka or Leary, and see what they say. Let's
try a little farther back now. Try to compose yourself."

"All right." Naismith straightened out on the couch, arms at
his sides.

"I direct your attention now," said Wells carefully, in a
strained voice, "to your last memory before waking up in the
hospital. The last thing you remember." He touched the
controls again.

Naismith started, as another of those vivid images exploded
in his mind. A landscape this time, misty and gray.

"The crash," he said hoarsely, and licked his lips. "Wreckage
all the hell oversmoking.... Bodies"

"Where are you?" Wells asked, bending nearer.

"About twenty yards from the fuselage," Naismith said,
with an effort. "Buck naked, bleeding. . . . It's cold. Bare
ground. There's a body, and I'm bending over to see who it is.

No face, all smashed. Dog tags. . . . Good Christ!" He sat up
abruptly, trembling.

Wells went pale under his tan and switched off the machine.
"What was it?"

"I don't know," Naismith said slowly, fumbling in his mind
for the image that was no longer there. "I was reaching for the
guy's dog tags, and thenI don't know what. A hell of a shock.
Now it's gone."

"We'd better call this a session," said Wells, about to dis-
connect the control unit. "Next time"

"No!" Naismith seized his arm. "We're close to it now, I can
feel it. I'm not going to quit. Turn that thing on."

"I don't think it's wise, Naismith," said Wells soothingly.
"You're reacting too strongly; this is powerful stuff, don't
forget."

"One more try," said Naismith. "I can take one more, then
we'll pass it till next time." He held Wells' eyes with his.

"All right, then," said Wells reluctantly. "Let's see. . . ."

Naismith lay back. The hum and the tickling in his skull
began again. "I direct your attention," said Wells, "to your
childhood. Any scene from your childhood. Anything that
comes to mind."

Naismith went rigid. Something swam up toward his con-
sciousness, something so dreadful that if he saw it, he would
go mad. Then it was gone.

So it had been a flop. Angrily, as he stood on the path out-
side Wells' home, Naismith massaged his temples with his
fingers. All he had got out of the whole thing was a headache.

He stood in angry indecision for a moment. One by one,
his possibilities of action were being cut off. Ever since that
first day, in class

A thought that had been hovering at the back of his mind
began to take definite shape. It was true that everything had
started there, while he was under the influence of the Hivert
Duplicator. . . . Was it possible that his experiences since then
the dreams, everythingwere due to some alien tampering
with that mechanism? Had they planted something in it to
exercise a subtle compulsion on his mind?

Once he had asked himself the question, he could not let it
alone. He started off down the path toward the tube entrance.

The headache got no better and no worse. It felt as though
the clamps Wells had put on his head were still there, and
although it was senseless, he could not get rid of the impulse
to brush them away.

Going to Wells had been a mistake. All the discomfort, the
paraphernalia, the time wasted, and still they had got absolutely
nothing from the blank period that ended four years ago. Some

few bits of memory from his time in the hospital after the
crashmore than they had got previouslythen nothing at all.

He got off at the University stop, walked to the Science
Building in bright sunlight. A few students he passed stopped
and looked after him; but he met no one he knew well, and
no one spoke to him.

As he climbed the rear stair to the classrooms, he met
jittery Donald Klemperer coming down, followed by a young
preparator named Irving; both were wearing lab smocks, and
looked startled to see him. Klemperer was the youngest mem-
ber of the Physics Department, an anxious, blinking youngster.
Irving was dark, heavy and placid.

"Oh, uh. Professor Naismith," Klemperer stammered. "Pro-
fessor Orvile said"

"Have you been taking over my classes?" Naismith asked
pleasantly, continuing to climb the stairs past them.

"Yes, yes, I am, but what I wanted to say"

"How did the demonstration go today?" Naismith was at
the head of the stairs, turning his head to look back. Klemperer
and Irving, craning up, both had their mouths open.

"All right, ah, pretty well, but"

"That's good, keep it up." Naismith started briskly down the
hall.

"But Professor Orvile said if I saw you, I was to be sure
and get your key!" Klemperer wailed.

Naismith did not answer. He unlocked the door of the
duplicator room, slipped inside, slammed it behind him. Re-
acting to his presence, the lights slowly glowed on.

He looked around the room, examining the familiar equip-
ment as if he had never seen it before. The duplicator mech-
anism, in three metal cases grouped against one wall, and in
the two units above and below the object platform, was a
standard nine-gang Hivert Duplicator outfit. It had an object
field six feet in radius, here marked off by a low railing. The
table and apparatus were set up much as he had left them: the
tank, the tau accumulator, the release mechanism, now pushed
to one side. Several items had been added: a photometer and
interferometer, a small theodolite, some prisms, the usual
equipment for demonstrating the optical properties of quasi-
matter. In addition, the heavy base-plate of a hydraulic jack
had been bolted to the floor, and a small traveling crane had
been positioned to take the weight of the tank when the table
was removed.

Naismith recognized the preparations for the third in the
series of quasi-matter demonstrations; Klemperer and Irving
must have been setting them up just before he arrived.

He glanced thoughtfully at the tank itself. The liquid inside,
still in the quasi-matter state, reflected light like a tankful of

mercury. The reflections of the walls, the door and the equip-
ment around the room were distorted by the tank's curvature,
and by something else. From where he stood, Naismith could
clearly see the image of the duplicator machinery on the wall
to his left, whereas his own reflection was a barely visible stripe
at the right rim of the tank.

With some difficulty, he got the front panels off all three
units of the control mechanism, and examined the massed tubes
and wiring inside. He was not an expert on the Hivert, but was
generally familiar with its design, and as far as he could tell,
there were no signs of anything unusual. The units in floor and
ceiling were less readily accessible, but both were thick with
dust and grime: obviously they had not been opened for
months.

His ears caught a faint click, and he turned in time to see
the door swing open.

In the doorway stood two broad men in maroon jackets.
Light glinted from the guns in their hands. "Hold it!" said one
sharply.

Caught off balance, with no time to think, Naismith instinc-
tively slammed one hand down onto the light button on the
control pedestal. He pivoted in the same motion and kept going,
while the room lights winked out and the room darkened,
except for the broken shaft of illumination from the doorway.

Someone shouted. Naismith was moving fast, swinging
around the corner of the table. There was a deafening roar as
one of the guns went off; then Naismith was crouching, shel-
tered by the tank. Only two or three seconds had gone by.

In the ringing silence, one of the men called thinly, "Come
out of there, Naismith! You can't make itthere's only one
door!"

By the flickering of the light from the doorway, Naismith
could tell that both men had come farther into the room,
moving apart, one to each side. Poised and alert, his heart
thudding steadily, Naismith was able to think with cold pre-
cision: The tank rotates momentum 90 counterclockwise.

Both hands went quickly to the tabletop. One closed on the
heavy brass theodolite, the other snatched up two of the prisms.

In his mind he was keeping track of the two men's positions,
diagramming them like an elementary problem in trigonometry.
He waited until the last instant, then sprang up and threw the
prisms at the man on his right.

The room roared again, with a volume of sound that made
the walls shiver and hurt his eardrums. The glass tank dis-
solved into a hundred fragments, but the silvery cylinder of
quasi-matter stood unchanged. As he ducked down behind the
tank, Naismith heard the shots continue: three, four. . . .

There was a faint clatter and a thump from the other side of
the room, to his left.

Naismith risked a look: the man on his left was kneeling,
arms crossed tightly over his stomach, head forward. His gun
was on the floor. The man swayed and began to topple.

Naismith gathered himself, swung the heavy theodolite over
the table with all his force, and instantly followed it, vaulting
the table. The second man was down, off balance, having
ducked to avoid the missile. He snapped one shot at Naismith,
filling the room with sound: then Naismith was on top of him.
Naismith felt a brief shock in one hand, and the man was
sprawling limply under him, his neck unnaturally bent.

Naismith was up again almost without a pause, running out
the door, past the white faces of Klemperer and Orvile; then
down the stairs, out into the sunshine. He discovered that he
was bleeding freely from a cut on one cheek, probably where
one of the slivers of glass had struck him.

Realizing abruptly how fast he had been moving, he forced
himself to walk at a normal pace across the lawns toward the
tube entrance. A few students were gathered around a gray
and blue copter parked on the lawn: the bubble was empty,
the blades still. On impulse, Naismith went that way. A prickle
of uneasiness went up his spine as he walked. It had been too
quick: he had not had time to do more than act instinctively.
There had been a threat to his life; he had met it with the means
at hand, making one of his attackers shoot the other, by de-
flection from the kinetically inert quasi-matter. If he had
thought at all, he had assumed the two men were gunsters
hired by Lall and Churan. But...

He was at the copter, ignoring the students who turned to
stare. Inside the bubble, a radio voice was muttering indis-
tinguishably. Naismith opened the door, stepped up and leaned
his head in to listen.

The uniformed patrolman in the tiny visiscreen was saying:
"... detention and interrogation. This man is wanted for the
murder of Dr. Claude R. Wells, a psychiatrist at the University
of California in Los Angeles. Wells was battered to death, and
his office completely wrecked an hour ago. Naismith is con-
sidered extremely dangerous. He is not known to be armed, but
is to be approached with caution. His description again,
W.M.A., six feet two inches..."

The last words barely registered. Naismith turned away, with
a roaring of doom in his head. When they saw his face, the
students looked alarmed and backed off. He went through
them, past them, moving like a somnambulist.

He could not even reject what he had heard in disbelief. He
had realized instantly at the first words from the copter radio,
that he had no memory of Wells at all beyond that frightening

unseen thing that had come up out of his childhood. After
that, a blank.

"Struggle against us," the Lall creature had said. And he had
done it; and this was the crushing result. He had killed Wells
and two detectives. Now he was "ready"; he had nowhere left
to go, except to Lall and Churan.

Behind him a weak, distant voice was calling. "Hey . . ."
came faintly over the lawns. "Hey, stop him! Stop him!
Hey..."

Naismith glanced back, saw two doll-figures emerging from
the Science Building. One had white hair, and he identified it
instantly as Orvile. Both running, waving their arms.

The students around Naismith turned their heads indecisively
from the two figures to Naismith. Like most people, they were
slow to react. Naismith turned his back on them, careful not to
move too quickly, and started to walk away.

At the last moment, a husky senior blocked his path. As he
opened his mouth to speak, Naismith straight-armed him and
began to run. His last glimpse of the senior showed him on one
leg, windmilling his arms for balance, his mouth all amazement.

Naismith sprinted. He had taken four strides when the sound
he dreaded broke out behind him: a chorus of yells from many
young throats; the sound of mob in pursuit.

As he ran at full speed toward the tube entrance, a second
police copter was sidling down out of the sky.

Chapter Six

With the sound of the mob in his ears, Naismith ducked into
the tube entrance and went down the stairs three at a time. He
had one chance in a thousand. If there should be a train just
pulling out.

The station was empty.

He saw that in one instant. In the next, at the edge of his
vision, he saw a door open. He whirled. It was the door to a
maintenance room; as it swung open, he saw it was blank
except for ventilation louvers, and a number painted in white.

Inside the room, dark in a shimmer of faint colors, stood
Miss Lall with Churan behind her. She held out her hand.
"Come in!"

He sprang toward the doorway, aware as he did so that there
was something abnormal about the walls of the room. They
were curved and insubstantial, with a soap-bubble shimmer
about them; they were partly transparent. Beyond them, he
could dimly make out the real walls of the room, with clothing
hanging on hooks, a mop leaning against one corner.

Then he was inside. Lall sidled past him and closed the door.
Churan remained seated. The three of them looked at each
other. They were enclosed and huddled together by an oval
shell of transparent, streaming color. The light was strange; it
was like being inside an egg made of rushing shadows.

Outside, an instant later, the rattle of footsteps and a frantic
baying of voices poured down the stairs, onto the platform.

Naismith took a deep breath, let it go, relaxed deliberately
with his hands at his sides. "All according to plan?" he asked
ironically.

"According to plan, Mr. Naismith," said Churan. He was
seated on a stool which appeared to be part of the substance of
the shadow-egg. The dancing prismatic colors streamed out
from the base of this stool and disappeared at the apex of the
shell over their heads.

Churan's stubby, short-fingered hands lay casually upon the
blued-steel object in his lap. With a shock, Naismith recognized
the machine that had disappeared from the closet of his Beverly
Hills apartment.

Churan's eyes flickered. "We have saved your life, Mr.
Naismith," he said hoarsely.

"All right, let's say you did. You must have done it for some
reason. Here I am. Just what is it you want?"

Lall, her eyes shining, said something swift and emphatic in
a language that sounded tantalizingly familiar to Naismitha
curious combination of liquids and deep gutturals. Churan
nodded, wet his lips nervously. "We want you to come with
us," he said. "A long journey, Mr. Naismithtwenty thousand
years. Does that interest you?"

"What if I say no?"

Churan's amber eyes glinted briefly. "We want you to come
willingly, Mr. Naismith."

Naismith gave a mirthless bark of laughter. "Is that why you
did all thiskilled Ramsdell and Mrs. Becker?"

The woman bent toward him slightly. "I'm not sure you
understand, Mr. Naismith. The machine killed Mr. Ramsdell
and Mrs. Becker. It is tuned to our mind patternsyours, his
and mine. You see, for anyone else, it is not safe to touch. A
precaution against theft."

Naismith felt his anger growing in spite of himself. "Are you
saying that two people died just for nothingjust because you
wanted to get that machine into my hands?"

"No, on the contrary," said Churan. "Sending the machine
to you was merely a device to kill Mr. Ramsdell, so that you
would be suspected of murder. Our aim was to weaken your
associations here. You were too well convinced that you were
really Gordon Naismith."

Outside, the noise of the crowd was dwindling; Naismith
could hear isolated querulous voices calling from one end of
the platform to the other. From time to time, someone would
approach the maintenance room, try the knob, find it locked,
and go away again.

Defeated, he made his decision. "All right, I'm ready. Let's
go."

Lall and Churan exchanged a quick glance. Then the man's
stubby fingers moved on the surface of the machine.

Naismith watched in fascination as the inlays, which had
resisted all his efforts, depressed and moved under Churan's
fingertips. As they did so, although there was no sense of
motion, the walls of the maintenance room, hanging garments,
mop and all, gently receded. In the act of turning, Naismith
felt a psychic shock as the closed, shadowy door drifted through
his own body.

Then they were moving across the station, a foot or two
higher than the young men who stood in postures of arrested
motion, scattered here and there about the platform. There
was no sound. Every form was still, although some were caught
in mid-stride. Faces were contorted, eyes glared blindly.

Moving at the same even pace, they drifted into the wall of
the station. Another moment of darkness, then they emerged,
on a shallow upward slant, into the open air.

Naismith watched everything with intense concentration,
trying to fathom the relationship between their movements
and Churan's handling of the machine.

"What I fail to understand," he said abruptly, "is how the
energies you are using can be contained in so small a space."

"They are not, Mr. Naismith," said Lall with a look of
respect. "The forces we use are generated in the future. This
machine that you see is only the control unit. We call it" She
uttered two throaty monosyllables. "In English, what would it
be?" She paused, and said doubtfully, "Time sphere? No, be-
cause it is not a sphere. But the name means something that is
lowered in time, as you lower a bathysphere in the ocean. How
would you sayyou ought to know this, Mr. Naismitha
temporo-... ?"

Outside, the bright campus was like a color transparency:
the two copters, the students on the lawn, all were caught in one
frozen moment. Naismith stared in fascination as the shadow-
egg drifted, now more rapidly, eastward across the lawns.
Buildings, flame trees and people receded in perspectivenot

like a photograph now, but like some incredibly detailed and
lifelike miniature model.

"Temporoscaphe?" he suggested wryly, after a moment.

"Good, temporoscaphe. But it is a very ugly word. . .. You
see, we can control our position in both space and time. Just
now, we move in space while remaining fixed in time. Later on,
the other way around."

Below, the landscape was now flowing back more rapidly.
Sunlight glinted yellow off the tip of some building on the
northern horizon. Rising on a slant, they were now passing
over Burwash Park. Naismith could see the gravel walks, the
pedestrians frozen in place like bright-colored dolls, the silvery
lake and the handball courts. It flowed away and was gone;
the densely packed buildings of metropolitan Los Angeles swam
into view, all in the same unearthly silence.

Standing there in the confined space of the shadow-egg,
Naismith was abruptly aware of something that had been at
the edge of his consciousness: the smell. It was cheap perfume,
with an undertone, almost masked, that he recognized: the
same cold, musky odor that he had smelled in Churan's office.
Looking at the two of them now with renewed attention, he
realized again how quite astoundingly ugly they were when seen
together. What might have been an accidental cast of features
in Lallthe flat, wide-nostriled nose, the long amber eyes, the
thin mouthbecame, in this doubled image, the pure stuff of
ugliness. They were like two painted frogs, there in the
shadow-egg, both staring at him with unwinking amber eyes
frogs, obscenely vivisected to stand erect and wear human
clothing. And remembering the cold touch of Lall, Naismith
shivered.

The foothills were sliding away beneath them now, yellow-
brown and bare in the sunlight, then the mountains rose slowly
into view. Naismith glimpsed sunlight winking from the win-
dows of a canyon-perched house, tiny with distance. As they
crossed the mountains, still gaining altitude, he could see the
whole circle of the horizon, misty blue, with flecks of cirrus
floating high in the pale vault. Something else caught his eye, a
bright glint above the clouds, rapidly coming nearer. Now he
could almost make it out; now it grew plaina blue and silver
Trans Am airliner. They were going to pass it almost on the
same level. As it swelled nearer, brilliant and solid in the sun-
light, Naismith flinched involuntarily; he could see every rivet
in its polished skin. He could see, too, that it was hanging
absolutely motionless in the air, as if embedded in gelatin.
Behind the windshield, the pilot and copilot were stiff wax
dummies; faint spears of flame were frozen in the jets. It
whipped past and dwindled behind them, still hanging immov-
able.

The two aliens were watching him with intent, unreadable
expressions. Naismith's lips were dry. He said, more harshly
than he had intended, "Where are we going?"

"Not so far now, Mr. Naismith," said Churan. Below, the
round world was rolling back at an incredible speed; there was
a glint of silver that Naismith recognized as Boulder Dam;
then the mighty scar of the Grand Canyon, filled with shadow,
passed beneath. Then there were more mountains, and a
threadlike river that must be the Colorado. Down on the plain
beyond the mountains, Naismith caught sight of a city sprawled
like a scattering of silver dominoes. It glittered in the parched
land. "Denver," he said.

"Not the city itself," said Churan, glancing down at the
machine in his lap. "We use it for a landmark." Now his
pudgy brown fingers were dancing over the machine, and
Naismith saw the odd-shaped inlays depress one after another,
glimpsed a shimmer of light that floated briefly over the
machine. Then there was a spot of angry red light that pulsed
slowly and regularly; then more rapidly as they crossed the
city, slowing now, then more rapidly still as the shadow-egg
drifted to a stop; and after a moment the red light shone
steadily, with the faintest suggestion of a shimmering motion.
The shadow-egg came to rest.

"From Los Angeles to Denver," said Naismith, "inwhat?
Five minutes? Four?"

"In one sense, no time at all," said Lall. "You realize, this
is still the same instant as when we left the tube station. No
time has elapsed."

Churan grinned up at him, showing yellow stubs of teeth.
"Now we have reached the right position in space," he said.
"Therefore we shall begin to move in time. Are you ready,
Mr. Naismith?"

Without waiting for an answer, he touched the machine
again, and as if in response, the whole vast landscape beneath
them dimmed, went dark, glowed to light again. Looking up,
Naismith was in time to see the sun arching overhead like a
fireball. It plunged into the western horizon with a flicker of
red; then all was dark again. Light! The sun sprang up in the
east, hurled itself overhead, plunged, and the world was dark.
Light! Dark! Light! In the shadow-egg, Naismith saw the faces
of Lall and Churan lit by the flickering alternation of days and
nights. The landscape below, trembling in the swift waves of
darkness and light, was tortured, changing, shaking itself into
new forms. Naismith saw the city put out new tentacles, under-
go writhing transformations, sprout taller buildings. It was like
a grotesque animated film: the city had a rhythm of growth,
rest, growth again.

Then, abruptly, there was a gigantic crater where the eastern

half of the city had been. The growth cycle stopped. Naismith,
rigid with fascination, saw areas of the city darken slowly,
saw parts of it collapse into black ruin. "What year?" he asked
hoarsely.

"Toward the end of the nineties, I think," said Lall's in-
different voice. "It's not important."

"Not important!" said Naismith automatically, but his voice
died away as he watched the landscape below. The dead
metropolis sank. It went down as if into quicksand; the earth
visibly swallowed it. Then there was only a featureless plain,
shimmering in the ghostly twilight. For what seemed like hours,
there was no change.

Again Churan touched the machine. The flickering alter-
nation of days and nights abruptly stopped. It was early
evening, the clear sky darkening to a steely blue in which one
or two stars were visible. The whole landscape, as Naismith
looked around from his elevated position, was unearthly vacant
and still. Not a roof, or a wall, or the trace of a road in the
whole immense plain; not a light anywhere.

"What year?" he asked again.

No one answered. Churan touched the machine again, and
the shadow-egg began to drift down in a long slant. They were
skimming along at ground level now, through the knee-high
grasses, toward a long, low mound that was just visible against
the sky. The rest of the landscape was empty and dark.

As they drifted nearer, Naismith felt his body trembling
with the shock of visceral realization: this was realthis earth
and its wet grass, this dark sky overhead. He was here,
physically and inescapably.

Back in Los Angeles, Klemperer was taking his classes;
someone else would be living in his Beverly Hills apartment...
No: they were all dead, dead and forgotten. The thought gave
Naismith an extraordinary feeling of release and pleasure.
Whatever was going to happen to him now, at least it would
not be the safe, dull middle age he had looked forward to....

The mound they were approaching was both larger and
nearer than it had appeared at first: perhaps thirty feet high, it
was immensely long and straight, like one of the long barrows
of Wiltshire. There were faint, earthy and woody smells in the
cold air; but the black hulk of the mound hung silent and still.
It was covered with the grasses that grew on the plain; on the
skyline, against the moonlit clouds, Naismith could make out
an occasional small shrub or tree.

They drifted into the blackness of the mound, which closed
like a stifling curtain about their heads: then, with shocking
suddenness, they were dazzled by golden light.

Chapter Seven

The room in which the shadow-egg now floated was a gigantic
hall, paved with some gleaming, hard substance that was at
once like marble and like metal. The golden light surrounded
them only in a circle a few yards wide; but in the darkness
beyond, Naismith could make out the gleam of a pillar, a distant
wall, the shapes of furniture. Here was the future: and it was
a deserted marble hall, buried under a mound of earth.

"What is this place?" Naismith demanded.

"A ship. A buried ship." The echoes of Churan's voice
whispered away into emptiness.

Naismith thought, A ship. What kind of a ship?

Now, in their circle of golden light, they were drifting along
a spattered trail of bright-red pigment that began a few yards
from the door. It looked as if paint had been dripped from a
can along the shining floor, and then as if something else that
Naismith could not quite understand had happened to it: the
red pigment was crazed, checked, almost like weathered paint,
and it was powdering away visibly, in streaks, toward the
nearby wall.

Naismith bent to examine it as closely as he could through
the shadow-egg. The only thing it suggested to him was a wind,
drifting sand away from a dune: as if there were an impalpable
slow wind here, drifting molecules of the red pigment across
the floor....

He followed the red streaks to the wall, where, by squinting,
he could make out a hairline of bright red along the join
between wall and floor, running out of sight in either direction.

Did the floor reject anything that did not belong there? Were
dust, dirt, and red pigment swept away automatically and
disposed of?

He straightened. The wall itself was of the same metallic
marble as the floormarble, if such a thing were possible, with
flecks and veins of gold diffused uniformly through it. A few
feet farther on there was an elaborate metal frame on the wall,
and Naismith's interest quickened: but the frame was empty.

They floated through an archway, into a chamber only less
gigantic than the first. Divans and tables stood here and there,
in little, widely separated groups. Rich, soft rugs covered the
floor; the red trail had been dripped indiscriminately over
them, but here, too, the pigment was drifting away in long,
faint streaks.

Some of the furniture looked like parodies of the over-

stuffed sofas and armchairs of his own timepuffed, bulging
things, looking inflated rather than upholstered, and apparently
made all in one unitno separate cushions, no legs underneath.

Other pieces were built on a different principle: these were
suspended, like porch gliders, from metal frameworks which
rose to cylinders at either end. Between these cylinders swung
chairs and sofas which appeared neither stuffed nor inflated,
but were as if poured from some taffy-like substance, in silky
bright colors and with a curious, eye-deceiving mistiness of
surface. They were like shapes of bright smoke poured out of
the cylinders at either end; and Naismith had the fanciful
thought that if one turned off the mechanism in those cylinders,
the chair or sofa would dissolve into vapour.

The red trail led them down a corridor lined with more of
the empty metal frames; then through another archway, up a
stair and around a gallery, over an empty chamber still larger
than anything Naismith had seen; up another stair, down a
hall, through another doorway.

The room they now entered was a small lounge from which
other doorways opened on all sides. Naismith's first impression
was of a fully illuminated room, more cluttered and disorderly
than anything he had seen until now. Then his attention came
to a sharp, incredulous focus: across the room, he saw the
shadow-egg plainly reflected in a mirror ... but his own image
was not there.

He blinked and looked again. There was no mistake; only
the reflections of Lall and Churan stared back at him ... there
was something wrong about them, too, in the way they were
dressed, or

Then the vision faded, became transparent and was gone.

There was no mirror. He realized abruptly that the image had
not been reversed; his mind had supplied the mirror, an effort
to make an intelligible pattern out of what he saw. But what
had he seen? ...

Beside him, Churan laugheda hoarse, nervous bark. "Don't
worry, Mr. Naismith," he said.

Naismith turned. Both aliens were glancing at him with
malicious smiles, but their attention seemed elsewhere. Churan
made a final adjustment on the polished surface of the machine
as the shadow-egg touched the carpet: then, leaning upon the
machine with one hand as if it were a table-top, he got his legs
out from under it and stood up. Over the stool on which he had
been sitting, the machine hung in air, unsupported and im-
movable.

Churan exchanged a few words with Lall; both looked
serious and intent. Bending over the machine, Churan did
something to it that Naismith could not follow: and the
shadow-egg burst like a soap-bubble.

They were standing in the middle of the brilliantly lighted
room, all three; Churan tucked the machine under his arm like
a briefcase.

There was movement in one of the doorways, and a small
creature walked out into view. Naismith had to look twice to
see that it was a child.

Lall bent over the creature, smoothing its dull black hair
mechanically with one hand. The child spoke to her in a high,
thin whine; she answered perfunctorily and pushed it away.
With an incurious glance at Naismith, the child stumped off
on its thick legs, sat down and began to play with a rag doll.

It was a quite incredibly ugly creature, greenish-brown-
skinned, with sullen features. It looked like a caricature of Lall
or Churan, everything about it coarsened and exaggerated.

"Is this your child?" Naismith asked, turning to Lall.

She nodded. "It is a femaleher name is Yegga." She added
a sharp sentence to the child, which was picking its nose; it
left off and screamed once at its mother, without changing its
sullen expression, then bent over its doll once more.

Naismith glanced around the room. Clothing was strewn
over chairs and carpet; there were crumpled papers, even bits
of food dropped here and there.

The high walls were paneled in vivid magenta and ivory: the
ivory, Naismith discovered, was the wall itself, a dull, texture-
less surface; the wide magenta strips were hangings of the
same substance as the suspended furniture, and had the same
smoky outlines. Some of the chairs were of the same bright
magenta; others were electric blue or ivory; the deep-piled
carpet was apple green. The clothes piled carelessly here and
there were of all hues.

"You left her here when you went back to my time?" Nai-
smith asked, indicating the child.

Lall nodded again. "She would have interfered with our
work."

'What if something had happened, and you'd never come
back?"

"But we knew we would come back, Mr. Naismith," said
Churan, stepping nearer. "We saw ourselves arrive, just as we
saw ourselves leave just now... remember?"

A tingling sensation went down Naismith's spine as, with
a renewed shock, he thought of the vision he had seen. If
Churan were telling the truth, for an instant, just then, time
had been doubled back on itself.

Naismith sat down on one of the armchairs, watching
Churan as he stepped to the wall, opened a panel, and thrust
the machine inside. Lall was stretching herself, looking relieved
but abstracted, like any housewife returning after an absence.

"Let me understand this," Naismith said vehemently. "You

knew that your mission would be successful, thenbecause
you saw yourselves coming back with me, before you left?"

"Yes. We knew." Churan began unfastening his jacket and
shirt, pulling them off. He threw them on the nearest sofa with
a grunt of relief. His hairless chest from the neck down, and
his arms as far as the elbow, were a brownish-green color, the
green of algae; it was apparently the natural color of his skin.

"Sit down, Mr. Naismith," said Lall, taking off her blouse.
"Dial for some food, Gunda." Her body, the same brownish-
green as Churan's, was squat and soft-looking; the proportions
were not quite human. Their bodies were mammalian, but
entirely hairless, and, compared with a human being of
Naismith's time, hardly sexed at all. Lall's breasts were almost
as small and flat as Churan's.

The child glanced up from its play, then bent over again. It
was, Naismith saw with a shock of distaste, pushing long pins
or wedges of metal into the soft body of the doll.

"There's a paradox here, then," he said, looking away with
an effort. "Why not turn me over to your earlier selves? Then
you wouldn't have had to go at all."

"No paradox. If we did that, it would pinch out the loop;
then we would have to go just the same." Seeing Naismith's
frown, Churan added. "Think of it as a short circuit, Mr.
Naismith; then you will understand."

Ignoring the two men, Lall dropped her remaining garments
and left the room. Churan, wearing nothing but sandals, went
to one of the wall panels and paused with his hand on it. "You
would like some food?" he said to Naismith. "Something hot?"

"I'm not hungry," Naismith said.

"But you must eat to live. Let me offer you something, Mr.
Naismith; perhaps you will like it." Pulling the panel aside, he
rapidly thumbed down several movable strips, checkered green
and white, which seemed painted on the wall and yet slid freely
under his thumb. Interested, Naismith moved nearer, but
Churan finished aligning the strips, closed the panel, opened
another one. He reached in, took out steaming dishes one
after another, and dropped them casually on a low, round
table. "Please sit down, Mr. Naismith. I am going to wash
now, then we shall eat and have a talk." He smiled, showing his
yellow stumps of teeth, and followed Lall into the adjoining
room. The child got up and followed him, squalling something
in its thin voice.

After a moment Naismith began to examine the food. There
were four dishes, each containing a different mess, from which
the diners were evidently intended to help themselves with their
fingers. One was dark green and smelled like seaweed; one
cream-colored, with pink lumps; one was a pasty mound; and

the fourth was a varicolored mixture, with shreds of what
looked like meat and vegetables in it.

From the other room came the muffled sound of voices.
Naismith turned, stepped to the wall where he had seen
Churan put the machine away.

He touched the panel, tried to move it aside as Churan had
done, but the stuff was half like cloth and half like waterit
resisted, then seemed almost to flow between his fingers. The
look and feel of it, no more definite of outline than it had
seemed from a distance, were subtly unpleasant, and after a
moment he gave it up. As he turned, Lall came out of the
adjoining room, fastening a short-sleeved white tunic around
her waist. Her skin, where it was visible, was now a uniform
brown-tinted green; she had removed her makeup. So had
Churan, who appeared behind her, dressed in sleeveless red
pajamas. His pointed beard was gone; the whole shape of his
face seemed different, and uglier, without it. Now Naismith
realized something that had eluded him beforethe Churan
in the other shadow-egg had been beardless.

The child wandered in, seized a bowl of food from the table,
spilling it, and took it to a corner, where it sat down and began
stuffing itself.

"It is good to be clean again," said Lall. "Pardon me, I did
not think. Perhaps you would also like to bathe before eating,
Mr. Naismith?"

"Later," Naismith said. "Right now, I want to talk."

Churan had seated himself at the table, and was tucking gobs
of food into his mouth, using two fingers like a spoon. He
grunted, chewing a mouthful that bulged his cheeks. "Good."

Lall sat down and offered Naismith the place beside her.
"Please help yourself, Mr. Naismith. Forks are not used here,
but I am sure you can manage."

"I'm not hungry," Naismith said impatiently. He sat; the
cushioned stool was uncomfortably low, and he had to jack-
knife his legs to get them under the table. "You eat, and I'll
ask questions. To begin with"
'  "Something to drink, then. Gunda, a cup of water."

Without looking up, Churan reached out to the wall beside
him, opened the panel, and withdrew a porcelain cup which
he set on the table.

Naismith took it in his hand; it was half filled with clear
water; the cup was chill to the touch. He hesitated, then put it
down. Bathing had apparently removed the aliens' perfume as
well as their brown makeup; under the odors of the food and
water, he could smell the cold, reptilian scent of their bodies.
I'm not thirsty, thank you."

Lall paused with her fingers in the dish of cream-colored
substance. "Mr. Naismith, our foods may be unfamiliar to

you, but surely you can drink our water, which is chemically
pure."

Naismith stared at her. "Even water can be poisoned, or
drugged."

"Drugged!" she repeated, and wiped her fingers slowly on
the side of her patterned tunic. "Mr. Naismith, if you could
be drugged, do you think we would have been to so much
trouble to get you here?" She paused, glanced at her fingers,
then sucked them slowly clean. She pushed the dish away from
her, leaned her elbow on the table, staring at him. The folds
of her eyelids were odd, not quite human. "Think about it, Mr.
Naismith. Do you remember Bursar Ramsdelland the lawyer,
Jerome? The peculiar things they did and said? They were
drugged; that was simple to do." Churan had stopped eating to
listen; his amber eyes were narrow and watchful. "But you
are an altogether different problem, Mr. Naismith. Don't you
realize, haven't you any idea Think a moment, have you ever
been ill?"

"My memory goes back only about four years. I don't
know."

"But in those four years? An upset stomach? A cold? Even
a headache?"

"I had a headache when you knocked me out, and another
one when I left Wells' office this afternoon. I mean" He
groped for a word to express the time that had elapsed, gave it
up.

"Indeed? I don't understand. Did he use drugs?"

"No, some gadgeta headband, with clamps."

She raised her eyebrows. "Ah, I see. And the gadget gave
you a headache. But aside from that, can you remember any
slightest illness?"

"No," Naismith admitted.

"No, of course not. The Shefth does not become ill, cannot
be drugged or hypnotized; his body rejects most poisons. He
is very hard to deal with, Mr. Naismith; he must be treated
with respect. So if you are thirsty, please drink without fear."

Naismith glanced down at the cup of water, then at the two
aliens who sat watching him, motionless and intent. "I'll drink
this," he said slowly, "when I understand one or two things a
little better."

"Ask," said Lall, dipping up another lump of the cream-
colored food.

"Let's begin with this placeyou call it a ship. Who left it
here, and why?"

"It's an interstellar liner. When the colonies were abandoned,
in the hundred tenth century, there was no more need of it,
they just left it. That was about a century ago."

"Why did you bring me here?"

"To teach you, Mr. Naismithcertain things which"

Naismith made an impatient gesture. "I mean why here?
Why couldn't you have taught me things, whatever they are,
back in Beverly Hills?"

She chewed, swallowed. "Let us say, there was a need to be
inconspicuous. This is a dead period, for hundreds of years
on either side. No one knows about this abandoned liner except
us, and no one would think of looking here."

Naismith knotted a fist impatiently, stared at the taut skin
over the knuckles. "This is getting us nowhere," he growled.
"You talk about a dead period, Shefthi, Zugsit's all Greek
to me. How do I know there's a word of truth in it anywhere?"

"You do not," said Churan, leaning forward earnestly.
"You're right, it is futile for us to talk about these things. Talk
goes around and around, endlessly." He made a circular motion.
"But there is another way."

He got up, crossed to the opposite wall, where he opened
one of the panels. He reached in and took out a metal frame-
work, with an oblong box dangling from a strap. "This, Mr.
Naismith."

Its resemblance to the machine Wells had used was obvious
at a glance. Naismith pushed his stool back. "No," he said.

Churan paused, disconcerted. "But I haven't even told you
about it yet."

"It doesn't matterI've tried one. Once was enough."

"You tried one?" Lall repeated, with a disbelieving smile.
"Where was this?"

"At Wells' office. I blanked out, evidently But you know
all about thatthat's why the police were after me, back there
at the campus."

Both aliens looked alarmed. Lall turned and shot a question
at Churanrapid guttural syllables, in which Naismith caught
the name "Wells." Churan answered explosively, then both
turned and stared at Naismith.

"This may be tremendously important, Mr. Naismith. Please
describe the machine he used, and the effect it had on you."

Naismith did so, as best he could. As he spoke, both aliens
visibly relaxed; after a few moments, Lall raised her hand to
stop him. "That's enough, Mr. Naismith. It's apparent that this
was not exactly the same kind of machine."

"I never said it was. But nobody is going to monkey with
my mind again, with any kind of machine."

"What are you afraid of, Mr. Naismith?" Churan asked
softly.

Naismith said nothing for a moment. Then: "You're the
one who ought to be afraid. I killed Wells while that machine
was operating."

"Evidently because there is something in your past that you

subconsciously did not wish to remember. That is not hard to
understand. Let me put it this way, Mr. Naismith. This machine
will not bring back any of your own memories. Instead, it will
add certain memories which you never had before."

"It's put of the question," Naismith said flatly. "Teach me
the ordinary way, if it's so damned important. Start with the
language. Give me books, records, whatever there is. I happen
to be quick at languages. Even if I weren't, you've got plenty
of time."

Churan shook his head. "Books and records could be falsi-
fied, Mr. Naismith."

"So could that thing."

"No, it could not," Churan said hoarsely, blinking with
anger. "When you experience it, you will know. That is why
no other method will serve. It's not just a question of time,
Mr. Naismith. You must be convinced, beyond any possible
doubt, that what we are going to tell you is true."

They looked at each other in silence for a moment.

"Why?" Naismith asked bluntly.

The two aliens glanced at each other with resigned expres-
sions. Churan sat down, holding the helmet and the control
unit on his lap.

"Mr. Naismith," Lall said after a pause, "what if you knew
that the ruling class of your own people had deliberately
thrown you back in time, to the year 1980, believing you
would be killed?"

"Why should they do that?"

Her fingers stretched into claws, then relaxed. "Because they
are selfish and cowardly. After they had made up their minds
to create the Barrier, they felt the Shefthi would be more a
danger than a"

"Wait," said Naismith with an impatient gesture. "The
Barrier... tell me about that."

"In our own time, the ruling caste found a way to make a
Time Barrier that would pass only the Lenlu Din into the
future. It would be tuned to their mind patterns, you see; in
that way, on the far side there would be no more Zugs, and
also no more Lenlu Om. Just Lenlu Din, all by themselves,
safe and contented. You understand? But it is not going to
work. We know, because they are sending back messages
through the Barrier. There is one Zug up there, still alive. And
they are very frightened." He grinned unpleasantly.

"If none of this has happened yet, what makes you so sure
it's going to happen?"

The woman sighed. "These are only ways of speaking. Surely
you understand that by now, Mr. Naismith. From your point
of view in 1980, all this 'has not happened yet.' But here we are.
As for the Barrier, we know it exists in the future. We know it

is going to work, except that one Zug will be left alive. As
Gunda has just told you, we know all this because we have
received messages from beyond the Barrier."

Naismith sat back. "The future can communicate with the
past?" he asked disbelievingly.

"Haven't you seen that it can? Didn't we go back to the
twentieth century, and scoop you up like a fish in a net?" Lall's
amber eyes were brilliant, her fingers tense.

"Then why don't they simply tell their earlier selves to do
things differently, and eliminate the trouble?"

"They can't find the trouble," said Lall, her eyes shining. "It
is impossible for a Zug to pass through the Barrier alive. But
their detectors show that there is one, and that's why they are
so frantic. When we learned that, we saw our opportunity."
She leaned forward, intent, lips moist. "We searched the main
stem as far back as the twentieth century. Every anomaly above
a certain value had to be investigated. It took years, subjective
time. It was only the most incredible luck that we found you at
all. Then we had to prepare this place; then go back to 1980
and learn the language, customs, everything, from the begin-
ning. And now it all comes together. Because you see they are
desperate. If you return, with some story of having built your
own time generator, they will believe youthey have to, you
are the last Shefth, and they need you." Both aliens were
breathing heavily, staring at Naismith across the low table.

"Then a Shefth can go through the Barrier?" asked Nai-
smith.

"The Shefthi are Lenlu Din," Churan answered. "If they had
let well enough alone, all the Shefthi would be on the other
side of the Barrier, and there would be no problem with the
Zug. But they didn't want any warriors in their safe future,
without Zugs, without Lenlu Om. They would have killed you,
but they were afraid. So they invented a story about an expedi-
tion to kill Zugs in the past, and threw you all back. At random,
without destination. Without protection. The shock of landing
was to kill you all. Even if it did not, without equipment, you
could never get back to bother them. That was their plan."

"I see," said Naismith.

"What is your reaction to this, Mr. Naismith?" Churan's
voice was strained.

"If it's true, I'm . . . very interested," said Naismith. "Now
one more point. What's this about the Lenlu Om? You said
the Barrier was to keep them out too. Who are they, or what
are they?"

"We are Lenlu Om," said Churan quietly. "The name means
'the Ugly People.' We are their servants. They brought us from
another place, centuries ago. We are not considered to be
human."

Naismith glanced up: the faces of all three aliens had turned
hard and expressionless. He put the cylinder down carefully
and stood up slowly, feeling their eyes on him. "And all this,"
he said, "in more detail, you would have taught me with that
thing." He nodded toward the device in Churan's lap.

"As well as many other things. The language. We can teach
you to speak it perfectly in less than two hours. And you must
speak it perfectly. Then the City itselfthe castesforms of
courtesya thousand and one things you must know, Mr.
Naismith. You can learn it all by primitive methods, of course,
but believe me, it is not worth the effort."

"But you used so-called primitive methods to learn English."

Churan hesitated. "Yes and no. We employed the educator
we recorded disks from the thoughts of natives whom we
captured and drugged. But that is not the same as having an
edited subject disk all prepared. It was tedious, it took time.
Then we also had to spend time establishing identities for our-
selves. We took, I don't know, perhaps six months, subjective
time. Without the educator, it would have taken years."

Something that had been bothering Naismith came abruptly
into focus, and he swung around, with one foot up on the
bench, facing Churan. "Tell me this," he said. "Why not simply
go back, learn what you need to knowthen put it all on one
diskmeet yourselves arriving, and cut out all the trouble?"

Churan sighed. "As I told you before, it would pinch out
the loop. You cannot use time in that way."

Chapter Eight

After a moment Lall and Churan yawned together like two
frogs, showing the dark greenish roofs of their mouths: the
effect was grotesquely unpleasant. "We are tired," Lall said.
"It is late." She rose, followed by Churan, and led the way to
the room opening off the far end of the lounge, opposite the
one she and Churan had used. The child trailed after them,
dragging its doll by one arm.

The door was closed, but opened at Lall's touch. She stood
aside. "This will be your sleeping room, Mr. Naismith. I think
you will find all you need."

The three stood waiting. Naismith glanced in; there was a

low bed, a footstool, some ambiguous half-real draperies on
the wall. He made no move to. enter. "Thank you," he said.

"You will sleep here?" Lall asked plaintively.

"When I am ready. Good night."

"But at least you will inspect the room, to see if everything is
to your liking?" Churan demanded.

Lall turned her head and said something to him in their own
hissing, guttural speech. She turned back. "Just as you wish,
then, Mr. Naismith. We will talk again in the morning."

The three aliens crossed the lounge and entered their own
room. The door slid shut after them.

Naismith paused a moment, listening: he could hear Lall
and Churan moving about in their room, talking sleepily
together, with occasional bursts of acrimony. There was no
point in waiting any longer. Naismith moved noiselessly out
into the corridor. The drifting red trail guided his feet; at the
first turning, he deliberately left it. He went down a flight of
stairs, stepped through a narrow doorway, and found himself
in darkness relieved only by spectral, phosphorescent glows
from the outlines of machinery here and there. He kept moving
down the narrow aisle, under a low ceiling, not pausing to
examine any of the machines he passed. For the moment all
he wanted was to put distance between himself and the three
aliens.

After a quarter of an hour, even the phosphorescent mark-
ings thinned out and ceased. He was groping in total darkness,
thoroughly lost in the interior of the great ship.

Satisfied that he was secure for the moment, Naismith sat
down in the darkness and considered his position. In spite of
its immense, almost overwhelming implications, the problem
was basically that of buyer against seller. Each party had
something the other wanted, and each was determined to give
as little as possible. Naismith's first objective was to keep the
aliens from coercing him: that was now accomplished, since
he was out of their reach. His next objective must be to im-
prove his bargaining position. That meant, above all, increasing
his knowledge: for it was knowledge that Lall and Churan held
out as bait, and knowledge again that gave them a tactical
superiority. His course, therefore, was clear. He must begin by
exploring the ship, no matter how many weeks or even
months

The thought broke off. A breath of danger was passing down
the narrow corridor, making his skin prickle and his nostrils
widen. He stared blindly into the darkness: was the shadow-
egg, invisible and intangible, passing there?

Whatever it was, in a moment it was gone. Naismith rose
and once more began feeling his way down the corridor.

Hours later, he found a narrow passage leading off at right

angles, and crossed the waist of the ship, emerging finally in
a huge deserted salon. Here the moving overhead lights fol-
lowed him again, but there were no red trails on the floor, and
he guessed that Lall and Churan had never been in this area.

In the days that followed, Naismith prowled the empty ship
alone. Its gigantic scale never ceased to oppress and astonish
him: it was impossible to imagine what kind of people could
have built a vessel like this, equipped it so massively and
elaborately, and then left it to be mounded over on the
Colorado plain.

Wherever he went, the lights winked on ahead, winked off
behind. There must be some way of illuminating whole rooms
at once, but Naismith had not found it. He moved in a moving
circle of pale light, while all around him was green silence.
There were cyclopean galleries and choirs, around which he
crawled like a fly; there were baths, gymnasia, theaters, game
rooms, machine rooms, all empty with an inexpressible empti-
ness, hollow, not-quite-echoing....

Never once did he catch a glimpse of the aliens or their
shadow-egg, although he felt sure they were trying to find him.
Everywhere he went, there were enigmatic, silent machines,
including some that he guessed were television instruments, but
he could not make them function. Here and there he saw
symbols printed on the walls; they were in an alphabet resem-
bling the Cyrillic, but with many added characters. Nowhere
could he find a deck plan of the ship, a directory, a travel
booklet, anything that would give him the least clue to the
object of his search.

At last, on the fourth day, entirely by accident, he found it.

He was in a room filled with the omnipresent balloon-like
armchairs and with tall, angular devices, chest high, on which
square greenish plates of metal were arranged in two slanting,
overlapping rows, forming an inverted V. They might have
been magazine racks, with the thick metal plates substituting
for magazines. As the thought came, Naismith put his hand
casually on one of them, and the thing flapped open with a
clatter. Crouched, ready to fight or run, he stared at it.

The rank of overlapping plates had opened, exposing the
whole face of one of the plates: and where a blank square of
greenish metal should have been, he saw a moving, brilliantly
colored picture.

Naismith's breathing quickened. He hardly heard the voice
which spoke casually and incomprehensibly from the machine.
This was it; he had found it: this was the library,

The picture he was watching showed a woman in an oddly
cut red garment, posturing before a background of vaguely
Oriental domes that gleamed in bright sunshine. The picture
changed; now he was looking at a passageway between earth-

colored buildings, down which men in white robes walked with
heads bowed. It might almost have been a street scene in
ancient Turkey or Egypt, except that the men were leading
bright blue, hairless beasts of burden....

The picture changed again. Now, under a gigantic orange
sun, stick-thin brown creatures with many legs were building
a scaffold of wooden rods. Naismith understood that he was
being shown an interstellar travelogue: ports of call at which
this very ship had touched, perhaps . . . He watched until the
pictures stopped, then closed the machine, opened it at a
different place.

A new picture sprang into being: this time he saw two men,
with thin, bearded faces, demonstrating some sort of physical
apparatus. There was a thing that looked a little like a Crookes
tube, and what might have been a series of accumulators. He
could not understand a word of the spoken commentary,
though the language sounded hauntingly familiar. The subject,
at least, was apparently unrelated to the previous one. The
arrangement, then, was either random or alphabetical, with
a strong probability of the latter ... all he had to do was to
find the key to it.

That took him two more days. Then his progress was rapid.
The written language was a much modified English, phoneti-
cized, with a simplified grammar and many vocabulary changes.
The spoken language was more difficult to follow, slurred and
elided that it was almost impossible to follow, but Naismith
found he could neglect it by concentrating on reference codes
which produced displays of printed books, page by page. By
the end of his fourth day in the library, he had an accurate
conception of the world these star-travelers had inhabited.

He had found out two things of importance, and another of
possible significance. First, the entries under "Time Energy" in
the library showed that the state of the art had not advanced
since his own era; in fact, the temporal energy generator was
regarded as a toy. There was no possibility, therefore, of his
discovering another shadow-egg aboard the ship or being able
to construct one: that invention was still to come.

Second, the Lenlu OmLall's peoplewere natives of a
planet of 82 Eridani, and had been introduced into the Solar
System in about the year 11,000. They were not called by that
name, but the characteristics of those shown in the pictures
were unmistakable.

Third, the framed pictures Naismith found on the walls, in
places where Lall and Churan had apparently never been,
were paintings and stereographs of Terrestrial scenes, including
a number of portraits. The people represented, like those in
the library machines, were ordinary native Terrestrials, in no
way remarkable to Naismith's eye except for their costumes.

As far as Naismith could tell, pictures were missing from
their frames wherever the aliens had gone. It was conceivable
that this was simply the result of looting, but Naismith did not
think it likely. The aliens seemed indifferent to all the other
articles of value around them in the ship, and had apparently
taken nothing from the world of 1980. It was Naismith's
tentative opinion that something in the pictures was distasteful
to Lall and Churanthat they had taken them down, and
very likely destroyed them, in order to be rid of an unpleasant
reminder.

Naismith sat up in bed. The room lights slowly came on as
he did so, showing the unfamiliar walls paneled in magenta
and apple green. As usual, he had worked in the library until
he felt it unwise any longer to ignore his increasing fatigue;
then he had chosen a new suite of roomsthere were hun-
dreds, in this section of the ship alone, and he never used the
same one twiceprepared and eaten his dinner, and gone to
bed. But the thought that had come to him was so radical, so
breathtaking

In all the time he had spent aboard the ship, although he had
many times wondered what had become of its passengers and
crew, it had never once occurred to him to look for any per-
sonal possessions they might have left behind. The spotless,
orderly appearance of everything in the ship had made him
assume unconsciously that the rooms had been cleaned out and
set in order when its passengers left.

And yet he knew that this ship cleaned and tidied itself. Dust
deposited anywhere in a room slowly crept toward the nearest
baseboard gutter, where it ran into channelsNaismith had
traced them in the narrow passages behind the wallsleading
to storage bins and, Naismith guessed, eventually to conversion
chambers. Clothing taken from a closet and dropped on the
floor would slowly, over the course of a few hours, creep back
to its proper place, shedding its dirt in the process. Even the
trails of sticky pigment Lall and Churan had left to guide them
around the ship must have to be renewed every few days. And
therefore

Naismith swung himself out of bed in mounting excitement.
Having examined a few of the wall closets in these living suites
and found them empty, he had lost interest in them. But some
of the bedroomsthis one, for examplehad clothing in their
closets!

He cursed his own stupidity. If clothing were part of the
rooms' standard equipment, as he had unthinkingly assumed,
why would some rooms have it and not others? But if this
room had been occupied at the time the ship made its final
landing, and if the occupant had left his clothing behind, then

it was an almost foregone conclusion that he had left other
possessions as well.

Naismith went straight to the largest wall panel, thumbed
the control strip to open it, found it empty. He tried the smaller,
cubical one on the adjoining wall.

At first it seemed equally empty; then he saw a scrap of paper
or foil on the bottom of the compartment. He drew it out.
Printed on the foil in luminous purple letters were the words,
"GIGANTIC ALL-NIGHT GALA! Dancing! Sensorials!
Prizes! Y Section ballroom, beginning 23 hours 30, 12th day
of Khair ..." followed by a date which Naismith translated as
11,050.

It was little enough in itself, but Naismith clutched it as if
it were precious. He went on from one wall to another, search-
ing out panels and opening them. But the results were dis-
appointing: a plastic identity card made out in the name of
Isod Rentro, and bearing the stereo picture of a man's lean,
foxy face; a bundle of metallo-plastic tokens strung on a wire;
and a toy of some sort, a gray plastic box with a tiny view-
screen.

Absently Naismith pressed the button on the side of the box.
The viewscreen lighted up, and he was looking into the pale,
lean face of the man on the identity card. A voice began to
speaka nasal, negligent, cultured voice. Naismith caught a
few words, recognized them as a date a few weeks earlier than
the one on the "all-night gala" announcement.

He set the box down with reverent care. He had had an
incredible piece of luck, and had almost failed to recognize it.
He was looking at the journal of Isod Rentro, a passenger
aboard this ship in the year of our Lord 11,050.

Rentro was dressed in a loose-fitting blouse of metallic
silver-white, with a violet scarf at his throat. His skin was pale
and unhealthy-looking, very faintly freckled, as if it had seldom
been exposed to the sun. His hands were thin. He gestured
wearily with a long carved holder in which a green stick of
something was smoldering.

The scene flickered, changed. Naismith was looking out at
a vast space in which crowds of colorfully dressed people
moved, while Rentro's commentary continued. He was looking,
Naismith realized, at the spaceship's berth before the takeoff.
Another ship was visible in the distance, under the dome of a
gigantic transparent roof. Music was playing; colored streamers
were twisting through the air.

A chime sounded, and Naismith saw faces turn, hands begin
to wave. Like an elevator dropping, the whole vast concourse
slowly began to drift downward. Above, the transparent roof
parted, opened out into two graceful wings. They, too, drifted
downward and out of sight.

Naismith had a glimpse of a misty landscape, quickly and
silently shrinking. Clouds whipped past and were gone. The
horizon grew round, then the earth assumed the shape of a
bowl, a sphere, visibly dwindling. The sky grew purple, then
black; stars appeared.

The screen flickered again. Rentro came into view once
more, still sitting calmly in his cabin, with an expression of
amused boredom. He spoke a few final words, gestured, and
the screen went dark.

It lighted again immediately. Rentro appeared, dressed in a
different costume, against a background Naismith recognized.
He caught his breath involuntarily. This was a place he knew
the great lounge at the end of this section, the one with the
enormous central chandelier and the tiers of balconies.

Walls, furniture, everything was exactly the same: but the
vast room was brilliantly lit, aswarm with people. It was like
watching a corpse suddenly grow vividly, beautifully alive.

Rentro turned, faced the screen, spoke a few words. A young
woman in a white gown came into view; her complexion was
rosy, her eyes surrounded by startling blue rings of cosmetics.
Rentro took her casually by the arm, spoke her nameIzel
Dormayand added a few words which made them both
smile. The view changed again....

Naismith followed the record through the first few weeks
of the voyage. Allowing for the difference in technology and
in the incredible consumption-level of these people, it was very
much like a luxury cruise of the twentieth century. The pas-
sengers played games, watched the entertainment screens, ate,
drank, strolled about. Once or twice a ship's officer appeared,
spoke a few polite words into the screen. The crew and most
of the passengers were human, but Naismith occasionally
glimpsed members of Lall's race.

Then there was a change. It happened so gradually that
Naismith was not aware of it at first. The crowds in the lounges
and game rooms grew less. Crew members in their gray and
black uniforms were more in evidence, and moved more pur-
posefully. Once Naismith saw a stumbling, slack-jawed man
being helped out of a room by two crewmen: he looked
drunken or perhaps drugged. Rentro's commentary was dis-
dainfully cool, as usual, but Naismith caught a worried expres-
sion on his face.

A day or so later, there was no mistaking the difference.
Few people were in the lounges or on the promenades. Rentro
ventured out briefly, then went back to his cabin; his next entry
in the journal was made there, and so were all those that
followed. His expression grew daily more strained: he looked,
Naismith thought, like a badly frightened man. Once he made
a long speech into the machine, which Naismith would have

given much to interpret, but he could only catch a word here
and there, no matter how often he played it over"carrying,"
"danger," "contagion."

A day later, the entry was brief, and Naismith was able to
make it out: "We are returning to Earth."

The rest of the journal consisted of brief entries, only the

date and a few perfunctory words, with two exceptions. In the

first, Rentro spoke at some length, seriously and soberly, from

time to time consulting a tablet he held in his hand: it occurred

to Naismith that he was making his will.

The second time, after announcing the date and repeating a
phrase he had used several times before, Rentro suddenly and
horrifyingly lost his composure. With a distorted, writhing face,
he shouted something into the machinefour words, of which
Naismith could make out only one. It was "Greenskins"
the contemporary name for Lall's people.

Two days after that, the journal stopped. It simply ended,
without any clue to what had happened next.

Naismith searched the adjoining suites, then and on the
following day, and found three more such personal journals.
When he had run them all off he was no wiser: all told essen-
tially the same story, and all ended abruptly, at varying times,
before the ship reached Earth.

For the time being, he gave it up. Naismith had been two
weeks alone in the ship, enduring its green silences, and the
solitude was beginning to wear on him. He began to think of
going back to the aliens. He had explored the ship as thoroughly
as he could, in the limits of the time he had spent, and without
going near the red trails left by Lall and Churan.

It occurred to him for the first time that this precaution might
have been unnecessary.

Suppose the aliens had begun to use the time machine to
search for him as soon as they had found him missing. Almost
certainly they would have begun by searching their own lounge
and the corridor outside it, for a month or so into the future.
If they had done that, and found him, there would never have
been any necessity to search elsewhere in the ship. Accordingly,
if Naismith was in fact going to be found in the aliens' suite or
near it, he could roam anywhere he pleased until that time,
elsewhere in the ship, without any fear of discovery.

It was a curious sensation, following the fading red trail on
the carpet. Here and there still fainter trails branched off.
Doubtless the aliens had first explored the ship at random, as
he himself had done; these early trails led nowhere. But the
strong red trail, recently renewed, meant that there were places
in the ship the aliens wanted to revisit. What were they?

The path led through empty galleries and lounges, down a
broad corridor, up a stair ... Naismith's own knowledge of the

ship soon failed him; he no longer knew where he was except
in a general sense.

He passed through an anteroom into a vast, echoing
natatorium surrounded by balconies. Cushions and reclining
chairs were strewn beside the pool; the tank itself was filled
with clear water. There was no debris on the bottom, not a
particle of dust visible on the surface. Remembering the color-
ful crowds he had seen in Rentro's journal, Naismith was
oppressed by the sense of their almost-living presenceas if
they had only stepped into the next room for a moment....

Beyond the natatorium was a row of dressing rooms, and
beyond that, unexpectedly, a small gymnasium. Here, for the
first time, there was evidence of an alien presence. The parallel
bars, horses, trampolines had been pushed aside, and three
small black-metal boxes lay in the middle of the polished floor.
One had a line of transparencies and dials on its upper face.
Remembering the machine the aliens had used on him in their
Los Angeles apartment, Naismith was careful not to approach
them. He skirted the room cautiously, looking for a continua-
tion of the red trail, but there was none: it ended here.

He turned. And Churan was standing in the doorway, with
a black, lensed machine on a tripod beside him.

With shock tingling through his nervous system, Naismith
took a step forward; the machine swiveled slightly on its
mounting to follow him. He stopped.

"Don't do it, Naismith," Churan said tensely. "This is a
force gun, locked onto you as its target. If I press the re-
lease" he showed Naismith a tiny control box in his hand
"or if you move too suddenly, the gun will fire."

Naismith forced himself to relax. "Why the armament?" he
asked contemptuously.

"We have decided it is safer. If you have no plan to attack
us, it will make no difference to you. Now follow, please, and
make no sudden moves for your own safety."

He backed away, and the machine rolled back beside him, its
glittering lenses swiveling to stare at Naismith, almost with an
air of intelligence: as if the machine were alive, watching
him....

I should have looked for the arsenal, Naismith thought, with
a sick feeling of defeat. But perhaps it would not have made
any differencethey would have found me there before I
could take anything ...

Churan backed out into the middle of the corridor and
stopped. The headband with its metal box lay on the carpet.
"Pick it up," he ordered curtly.

Naismith moved forward as slowly as he dared. "Where are
Lall and the child?" he asked, temporizing.

"Safe," Churan spat. "Pick up the headband!"

Naismith stooped, got the thing in his fingers. Tell me,
Churan," he said, "why all this caution? Why can't you just go
forward in time and see if everything turns out all right?"

Churan's amber eyes gleamed. "We did that, Mr. Naismith.
The resultswere ambiguous. We decided to take no chances
with you. Put on the headband."

Naismith raised the headband, weighing it in his hands. He
swayed slightly, watching the feral head of the machine turn,
almost imperceptibly, on its oiled socket. What was the principle
involved? Heat? If he could somehow manage to reduce his
body temperature

Churan glared. "Put it on!"

Naismith's body tensed. For reasons he could not clearly
understand, the thing he held was intensely abhorrent. It might
be better to jump, take his chances

"I warn you!" said Churan, holding the control box in squat
fingers.

Naismith's lips pulled back in a grimace. He raised the
headband, slowly fitted it over his skull.

The last thing he saw, before darkness crashed around him,
was Churan's triumphant smile.

Chapter Nine

His head ached. He was sitting on the floor, holding his head
in his hands to quiet the throbbing pain. He looked around,
moving with exaggerated caution, for the slightest motion made
his head feel as if it were about to split.

The headband lay across the room, bent out of shape. Churan
was staring at him, breathing hard; sweat was beaded on his
narrow forehead.

"How do you feel?" he asked hoarsely.

Naismith tried to sit up, groaned and slumped back. "Pain
in my head," he answered indistinctly. "What happened?"

"You tore off the helmet halfway through," Churan mut-
tered. "It's lucky for you that I had neutralized the gun. Make
no mistakeit's locked on again now!" He twitched, and
resumed, "I don't understand how You are not supposed to
be able to resume voluntary control until after the memory
unit has stopped working. ... Do you understand everything
I say?"

"Why shouldn't I?" Naismith asked, and then halted, trans-
fixed by a realization that almost drove his pain into the
background.

He and Churan were not speaking English. They were talking
in the language of his dreamsthe same hissing, guttural
tongue the aliens usedbut now every word was clear.

"Who is the Highborn?" Churan demanded, inching nearer.

"The hereditary aristarch," Naismith answered impatiently.
"She" Once more he stopped, in total dismay. The knowledge
that he found in his mind, a complete and detailed history of
the Highborn and her court, had not been there before.

"The process was successful, then," Churan said with evident
relief. "You missed the end of the disk, of course, but we can
supply that later, if necessary. I was afraid that Sit still until
you feel better." He turned, retreated.

He was back in a moment, followed by Lall. Both aliens
were staring at him with an air of suppressed excitement.
Churan, muttering something under his breath, stepped over
to the wall and picked up the damaged headband, showing it
to Lall.

Her muddy complexion paled. She held out her hand for the
headband, fingered the bent metal unbelievingly. "He did that?
While the educator was turned on?"

Both aliens stared at Naismith. "Does he have the com-
pulsion?"

"Obviously not."

Lall snarled at him, "How do you know?"

The pain in Naismith's head had eased a little. He got
gingerly to his feet and retreated with cautious movements to
the wall. He leaned back, watching and listening, while the
aliens erupted into a sudden furious argument.

"How, then?" Churan demanded, thrusting his face into
Lall's. "Tell me how."

"Try it yourself!" she returned, and thrust the headband into
his hand.

Churan looked at it with surprise; his amber eyes narrowed,
then glinted with understanding.

"The disk will begin at the moment it was interrupted,"
Lall said. "Go ahead, put it onwhat harm can it do you?"

Churan grinned mirthlessly. "True. Very well." He pried
dubiously at the bent framework. "I do not know if it will
function" He shrugged and put the headband on. His eyes
closed, then opened again.

"Well?" the woman demanded.

Churan took the headband off slowly. "You were right. The
compulsion formula was almost all therehe could have heard
only the first syllable of it."

Again the two aliens stared at him, with something like
respect in their faces.

"This changes matters," Churan muttered. He glanced side-
long at Naismith, and added, "Don't forget, he understands
what we say now. Come" He took Lall's arm, drew her aside.

Naismith straightened up. "Just a moment!" he said. "Are
you going to go on trying to keep me in the dark? Because if
so, I give you warning now that my cooperation is over. He
gestured at the gun on its tripod. "Turn that thing off, and
tell me what that machine was meant to make me do."

The aliens looked at him sullenly. "There was a compulsion
formula in it," Lall said at last, "to make sure you would do
as we wish, when you are past the Barrier."

Naismith said, "Then the story you told me about myself
was false?"

"No, it was true, every word," said Churan earnestly, coming
forward a step. "We only wanted to make sure"

"Wait," Lall interrupted. She peered into Naismith's face.
"Mr. Naismithdo you hate the Lenlu Din?"

Naismith opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again. At
her words, memories had begun to swim up out of some black
place in his mind.

"The Lenlu Din . . ." he said. Plump, floating people in
puffed costumes of scarlet and gold, peach, frost-white, orchid,
buff. Shrill overbearing voices, glittering eyes. . . .

"This may be the answer," the woman was saying in a tense
undertone to Churan. "Forget the compulsionif he really
hates them, he will do it because he wants to. Let us try him
on the lie detector. What can we lose now?"

Churan looked uncertainly at Naismith, and there was a
flicker of anger in his eyes. "How can I tell?" he muttered. "He
is a Shefth."

"All the more reason. We will do it. Come." She beckoned
to Naismith, started off down the corridor.

"The gun," said Naismith, not moving.

"No," she said. "We are going to be frank with you, Mr.
Naismithbut the gun stays, a little longer."

Naismith shrugged and followed. The gun retreated as he
moved, rolling smoothly along beside the two aliens, with its
lensed muzzle trained steadily on him.

It was that way all the way back to the aliens' suite. The
pain in Naismith's head was receding, only a dull ache now,
but his mind was confused by an insistent crowd of images,
sounds, voices babbling together, faces that were unknown and
yet familiar...

Yet he was dimly aware that there was something unex-
plained about what had just happened. Why had Churan

found him just there, in the corridor outside the gymna-
sium? ...

They entered the lounge, where Yegga sprang up from the
floor, spilling a bowl of something greenish-yellow, and went
to its mother with an angry squall.

She cuffed it aside impatiently. "Sit down, Mr. Naismith.
Gunda, get the detector."

"It will take a few" Churan began. "No, I am wrong, I
have to retrieve the time vehicle anyway. I may as well do it,
and then"

"Go, get it," she said impatiently. Churan went out, with a
last sullen glance at Naismith.

Naismith lowered himself into a chair, thinking hard. Lall
sat down opposite him, her long amber eyes hooded and
watchful. "What were you doing in the ship, all that time until
Gunda found you?" she demanded.

Naismith stared back at her somberly. Twice now, he was
thinking, someone had tried to tamper with his mindfirst
Wells, now Churanand twice, while he was unconscious,
something in him had exploded with incredible violence . . .
some thing buried in his mind. Naismith felt the birth of an
angry impatience. This must not go on; sooner or later he must
find a way to reach those buried depths, force them to give up
their knowledge....

"I was in the library," he answered.

Lall's fingers curled tensely on the table. "And what did you
find there?"

She was so evidently nervous, anxious about his reply ...
Naismith considered her narrowly, and said, "I found out that
the time vehicle is not a part of this era's technology."

Her body visibly relaxed. She laughed. "I could have told
you that much, Mr. Naismith. No, if you are going to build
your own time vehicle, you cannot do it here. For that we must
take you many centuries forward."

"How far?"

She shook her head. "When the time comes, Mr. Naismith."

Churan came in, carrying the machine under one arm and
an oblong gray case in the other. He set the gray case down on
the table, with a curt "Here," and crossed the room to deposit
the other machine in the wall cabinet.

Lall was removing the cover from the oblong box, revealing
a smooth gray-metal base with two protrusionsone a dull
pinkish-gray ovoid, the other a more complex shape, some-
what like a misshapen mushroom.

"This is an ordinary lie detector, Mr. Naismith," Lall said,
pushing it toward him. She moved her chair quickly, stood up
and stepped back. Churan was at the farther wall, watching
intently. The gun on its tripod pointed steadily at him.

"Try it," said Lall. "Pick up a dish in one hand, take the
grip of the machine in the other. . . . Now say, 'I am not
holding the dish.'"

Naismith followed directions. Nothing happened.

"Now say, 'I am holding the dish.'"

Naismith repeated it after her. The oval bulb flared into
pink, hot brightness.

"Now, this is all you have to do," Lall said breathlessly.
"Put your hand on that grip and say to me, 'I hate the Lenlu
Din.'"

Churan moved his hand slightly: in it was the control box of
the automatic gun.

Naismith stiffened, aware that he had let the crisis find him
unready. If he refused, he would be shot. If he took the test,
and failed

Once more the images of those bright, bloated people drifted
up to the surface of his mind. He examined his own feelings
dispassionately. He neither hated nor loved them. To part of
his mind they were utterly strange; to another part, they were
familiar and almost commonplace....

"Now, Mr. Naismith," said Lall sharply.

Naismith put his hand on the rounded mushroom-top of the
grip. It was a shape that smoothly fitted his palm. He tensed
his muscles, without hopehe knew he could not move fast
enough to escape the gun. Because he could think of nothing
else to do, he said, "I hate the Lenlu Din."

The oval bulb burned fiercely for a long moment, then
slowly faded, glimmered, went out. Naismith heard Lall's and
Churan's intake of breath, saw them relax and begin to move
toward the table.

He stared blankly at the detector, thinking, But that's im-
possible!

The staggering thing was that the aliens themselves showed
no suspicion. As far as they were concerned, the detector test
was obviously conclusive. Lall said briskly, "One more day
here will be enough. You will put on the educator headband
once morewithout tricks, this time, Mr. Naismith. Then it
will take you some twelve hours to absorb all you have learned
... the process is sometimes fatiguing, and it is important that
you rest during that period. After that," she finished, "you will
be ready to begin building your time vehicle."

Naismith looked at her sharply, but there was no humor in
her expression. "Do you mean that literally?" he demanded.
"I thought"

"How else can we get you into the City?" she countered.
"You may be positive they will check whatever story you tell.
If you say you materialized in the factory city of Ul in the

fifth century before the Founding, they will go there in their
own time vehicle to see. Therefore, you must not only tell the
story, you must actually be there, building that vehicle, when
they come to look. It will take you a little over ten years."

"Ten years" said Naismith, stunned by the matter-of-factness
in her tone.

"Understand this," she said harshly, leaning toward him.
"It's that or nothing. Make up your mind."

Her glance was sullen. Churan, across the room, was looking
at him with the same expression, his eyes hooded and dull.

Naismith shrugged. "What choice do I have?" He held out
his hand. "Give me the headband."

... Afterwards, he lay back in a soft chair, his mind a cloudy
confusion of new thoughts and images, while the three aliens
prepared a meal and ate it.

"We are going to bed now," Lall said dully to Naismith.
"Your room is there. Till the morning, then."

They went into their room and closed the door. Naismith sat
where he was for a while, then went to the room Lall had
pointed out, examined the door controls. There was nothing
unusual about them as far as he could determine; the door
closed and opened again easily.

He went inside and lay down on the bed, half aware of his
surroundings as the stream of memories, voices, faces came and
went in his mind. When an hour had passed, he sat up.

He rose, opened the door and listened. There was no sound
from the aliens' room. He closed the door behind him and
moved quietly across the lounge. Outside, he followed the red
trail, heading directly for the place where Churan had found
him a few hours ago.

He passed through the natatorium again, into the gym-
nasium . .. and stared with speculative interest at the pieces of
equipment lying on the polished floor. Something had been
prepared for him here: but what?

He moved closer, bent to examine the black case with the
transparencies and dials. It was evidently the control box;
three of the dials were calibrated and set. A fourth had only
two positions, marked by a red dot and a white one. The pointer
lay on the white dot.

Caution held him back, but Naismith had a sense that there
were too many things still hidden in the background. Events
were sweeping him on, and ignorance was still his most danger-
ous weakness. Certain risks had to be accepted.

He made up his mind. Kneeling, he turned the dial from
white to red, then got to his feet and stepped back.

Not quickly enough.

The far end of the gymnasium darkened suddenly. Out of

that blackness, like a vault opening where the far wall should
have been, something stirred.

Fear entered the room. It came like a cold wind out of that
darkness. Naismith's fingers were cold; his skin prickled.
Straining his eyes, he could make out a glint of light here,
another there, as something impossibly huge came toward him
in the blackness. It was the monster of his dream! Two little red
eyes stared at him, and there was a faint rattle of bony plates.
The head of the thing began to emerge into the light. . .

Naismith forced himself to remain still as that immense
body came fully into view. It was a shape of tremendous
animal power, armored and clawed, many-limbed . . . but the
most frightening thing about it was the look of intelligence, of
merciless, ancient wisdom in its eyes....

With a bone-chilling roar, the thing sprang. In spite of him-
self, Naismith flinched back. The gigantic body swelled, filled
the universe ... and was gone. The darkness winked out. The
gymnasium wall reappeared.

Naismith found himself trembling and covered with sweat.

The far wall darkened again. With a sense of panic, Nai-
smith realized that the experience was beginning once more.
Again the stirring in the darkness, again the red eyes, the
emergence: but this time the beast sprang more quickly. The
lights came up; after a moment, the darkness fell a third time.
Grimly, Naismith watched the same terrifying bulk appear
even more quickly, spring with less delay. A fourth time, and a
fifth, he watched, before the lights came on and stayed on: the
cycle was over.

And that, he thought bleakly, was probably only the begin-
ning. The beast itself must move incomparably faster than
that...

He left the gymnasium and went into the corridor where
Churan had found him before. Almost absent-mindedly, he
glanced around. His attention sharpened, as he thought again
of the anomaly of Churan's finding him just here. Why not
in the gymnasium itself? Why in the corridor outside?

A little farther down the corridor there was an open door-
way. Naismith remembered glancing in before, and finding
only a small, uninteresting room. He went over to it, looked in
again. It was as he recalled it, a tiny green room, hardly larger
than a closet.

He stood in the doorway, frowning. There was a small bare
desk, the same green as the walls, a simple-looking vision
instrument over it, and an array of green and white panels on
the wall behind.

The little room might have been a storeroom of some kind:
but it was the wrong size. Either it should have been much
bigger, Naismith thought, or else there should have been no

desk, no vision apparatus. In sudden excitement, he rounded
the desk, began to fumble at the control strips of the panels.
This might, just might, be the purser's office, with all the
records of the voyage ...

But it was not. It was the dispensary.

The wall panels held rack on rack of drugs in cylindrical
bottles, each elaborately labeled. Probably most of them were
worthless by now. Naismith examined a few, put them back.
He tried another section of the wall.

Inside were gleaming, ranked strips of metal, each labeled
with a name and a date. Naismith touched one experimentally,
and it tilted out into his hand, a metal-bound sheaf of papers.

It was the case-history of a passenger aboard the ship: the
others were the same.

In five minutes the whole story lay under his hands. A virus
carried by the green skinned people had mutated; the new
form attacked homo sapiens. The symptoms were fever, nausea
and intense feelings of anxiety, followed by collapse and coma,
then a slow recovery. Death ensued in only a small percentage
of cases: but every recovered victim had suffered severe and
irreparable brain damage. There were stereo pictures, from
which Naismith averted his eyes: vacant faces, dull eyes, jaws
hanging....

The epidemic had broken out on the same day the ship left
Earth. In the end, it must have been only the greenskins,
immune to their own infection, who had been able to bring
the ship back and land it safely with its cargo of mindless
human beings. All over the Earth, the same tragedy . . .

Naismith could imagine the shambling aments who had
been the luxury ship's passengers, wandering out onto the
plain by ones and twos . . . out into a land where nothing
waited for them but death by exposure arid starvation . . .

Naismith closed the book slowly and put it back in its
place.

He understood now why this was a so-called "dead period."
Only a handful of immune human beings must have survived,
along with the greenskins, to rebuild civilization slowly and
painfully over the course of centuries. Yes, that explained
many things....

Chapter Ten

In the morning, both aliens were sullen and heavy-eyed; they
spoke to each other in monosyllables, and to Naismith not at
all. The child, Yegga, alternately screamed and whined.

After they had breakfasted, Lall and Churan seemed to come
sluggishly to life. The woman began to dress in the same short
robe she had worn yesterday, saying over her shoulder to
Naismith, "Today you will train in the gymnasium there is
some equipment there which will prepare you to hunt Zug."

"I know. I found it there."

She turned to look at him expressionlessly, then went on with
her dressing. "Very well, that will save us time. You saw the
Zug, then? What did you think of it?"

"Very impressive, but I don't see why it was necessary."

"You are to play the role of a Zug hunter," she said, fasten-
ing the robe around her waist. "If you should see one without
preparation, you would betray yourself immediately."

"I see." Remembering the vision that had come to him that
night in his Beverly Hills apartment, Naismith asked, "And
the gun? What was that for?"

She turned with a questioning expression. Churan, who had
just entered the lounge carrying the time vehicle, paused to
listen. "Gun?" asked Lall.

"Yes, certainly," Naismith answered with a touch of im-
patience. "That night, in my bedroom. Tell me, just what would
have happened if I had accepted that gun?"

The two aliens looked at each other. Churan opened his
mouth to speak, but Lall said sharply, "Be still!" She turned to
Naismith, fumbling in the pocket of her robe, and produced a
black cylinder. She pushed bowls and plates aside, and rapidly
sketched a pistol recognizable as the one Naismith had seen,
with its flowing lines and massive grip. Churan came to watch
over her shoulder; there was something strained in his silent
attention.

"Was it a gun like this?" she asked.

"Yes, of course."

She turned away indifferently, putting the cylinder back in
her pocket. "It would have given you a compulsion to kill
Zug," she said. "Only a precaution."

Churan was staring at her silently. "Well, are you ready?"
she snapped at him. "Why do we have to waitwhy can't
we go?"

Churan shrugged, held up the machine in both hands. He
touched the controls; the shadow-egg sprang into being around
him. With a last quick glance to left and right, Lall herded the
child inside, stood back for Naismith to enter, stepped in
herself.

It was more crowded than ever in the shadow-egg, and the
scent of the aliens' bodies was oppressively heavy. By their
tense attitudes and their sidelong glances at him, Naismith
could tell that his presence made them equally uneasy. Seated
on the stool, Churan touched the controls, and they drifted
up from the floor, across the lounge and into the corridor.
Once more they followed the red line; blackness swallowed
them as they passed through the mound, then they were in
dazzling sunlight.

Suddenly, the contrast between the unpleasant closeness of
the shadow-egg and that clean brightness outside was more
than Naismith could stand.

"Wait," he said. "I want to get out."

"What?" Lall and Churan stared at him.

"Set me down there, on top of the mound," he said, pointing.
"I want to breathe the fresh air for a minute."

Churan said impatiently, "We have no time to wasteyou
can breathe where you are." He put his hands on the controls,
but Lall stopped him.

"After all, you want to practice using the ejector," she
muttered. "What harm can it do? Set him down."

Churan grumbled, but in a moment the shadow-egg swung
up along the steep slope, rose to the summit and hovered there,
a few inches above the grasstops.

Churan stared down at the machine in his lap, rubbing his
squat fingers together and grunting. At last he said, "Miko,
move back a littletake the child. Mr. Naismith, you stay
where you are."

The woman and child crowded back beside Churan. Nai-
smith waited tensely. Churan's fingers touched the controls
again, and abruptly Naismith felt himself picked up, swung
out away from the aliens. The shadow-egg had bulged out-
ward; now it was like two eggs, connected by a narrow tube of
shadow. Then, without warning, the bulge vanished. Naismith
was falling....

He landed with a jar, arms out for balance. When he looked
up, the shadow-egg was drifting off on a long slant down
toward the base of the mound.

He stood looking around him, breathing thankfully deep.
The greenish-yellow plain rolled away unbroken to the horizon.
It was early, the sun low in the east, and the thick grasses
around his legs were beaded with dew. The sun was warm, but
the air had a bracing coolness. Naismith filled his lungs again

and again; earth smells, green smells, scents of spring flowers.

He sat down and watched the great wrinkled sheet of cloud
drift slowly toward the west. Down below, the shadow-egg
still hovered over the plain, a hundred yards or so away. He
could just make out Lall's and Churan's faces: they seemed
close in conversation. Farther out, a flock of birds arose from
the grass and settled again. Still farther away, Naismith saw
a larger body moving through the grassy hummocksa quad-
ruped, too large for a deer; perhaps an elk. But there were no
men. Not a thread of smoke; not a cloud of dust.

From this height, he could see the immense buried shape of
the ship more plainly. The world around him was peaceful and
empty, as if waiting for another Creation.

Naismith thought of the blank thirty-one years of his life, and
of his four years in California, now seen as futile and mis-
understood; then of the tremendous distance he had traveled
in the shadow-egg with Lall and Churan-over nine thousand
years; and the Earth was still here with its seasons. ... He
thought of the distance he had yet to go"twenty thousand
years, Mr. Naismith," Churan had said. And it seemed to him,
as it had from the beginning, that there was a monstrous mean-
ing hidden in all this. It was all around him, in the slow drift
of the clouds across the sky, in the sense of the buried giant
under his feet. For the first time, he felt less as if he were
fighting a battle than as if he were engaged in a quest for
knowledge.

He stood up again. Who am I? he thought; and unexpectedly,
his body began to tremble. Images floated up into awareness:
he could see the corridors of the City, and the colorful, float-
ing throngs of Lenlu Dinall clear but distant, like figures in
a peepshow. He knew who the Shefthi were, and could even
conjure up some of their faces . . . but there was no image of
himself. Who and what was he? . . . that was what he had to
find out.

He stared down at the shadow-egg. The two aliens were
still talking together, but in a moment they glanced up. Nai-
smith gestured. Churan raised his hand; then the shadow-egg
began to drift nearer, growing larger as it swept up the side
of the mound. There was something incongruous about the
egg's absolute internal stillness as it movedas if the egg itself
were really fixed, in some transcendent dimension, while the
world swam under it.

The thought ended as the shadow-egg came to rest, near
enough to touch. The orifice opened. "Get in!" said Lall.

. . . Then he was inside, in the suffocating closeness of the
shadow-egg, while the landscape receded beneath. They were
rising, moving more and more swiftly northeastward; and
Naismith saw that time outside was at a standstill: there was

no movement of wind in the tall grasses below, and the clouds
overhead were as solid and motionless as if painted on the sky.

"Where to now?" he asked.

The aliens glanced up but did not speak. Even the child
Yegga, was staring at him silently.

The Earth became a blurred green ball, spinning massively
below. The sense of motion was so powerful that Naismith
had an impulse to brace himself against it. But when he closed
his eyes, there was no feeling of movement at all.

When the Earth's giddy motion slowed, Naismith saw a
glint of silver ahead, and realized that they must be approach-
ing one of the Great Lakes, probably Lake Michigan. Now
they were dropping closer to the ground, skirting the rim of
the lake . . . slowly, now, almost at a walking pace . . . The
egg came to rest.

Churan's fingers touched the controls. Outside, day was
abruptly replaced by night: then day again, like a sudden white
blow. Night, day, night, blending now into a shivering gray-
ness. Once more Naismith saw the sun arching over them like
a fireball, and the ground below seemed to heave and then
subside, while a mist of foliage came and went, came and
went.

Abruptly, there were roads. They sprang into being as if
die-stampedreal highways, crisscrossing the land. At the foot
of the lake there was a blurred city, growing and changing too
fast for Naismith to catch its outlines. There was an impres-
sion of mud-brown hovels, replaced instantly by taller, paler
buildings; then skyscrapers were sprouting upward, glittering,
like a sudden growth of crystals.

Now the growth stopped, fell back. In another moment the
city was gone; the roads were gone: nothing was left but the
bare earth and a scattering of tiny, cone-roofed structures no
bigger than barrels.

"What's happened?" Naismith demanded.

"They went underground," Lall said tonelessly. "The city is
still there." A breath of darkness crossed the sky; there were
glints of fiery light in it, gone almost too quickly to see. "There
was a war," she added.

"Here?" Churan asked.

"A little farther," the woman muttered.

Day again: night; day. And the shadow-egg was hovering,
under a late-afternoon sky. It moved, drifting down toward
the nearest of the cone-roofed objects. Naismith saw now that
the thing was a ventilator.

The shadow-egg went on dropping. The ground came up
around them like a tide of darkness, and Naismith held his
breath instinctively as it mounted over their heads. There was
an instant of stifling blackness, and then they were dropping

down through a blue-green cavern ... a vast place, acres of
gigantic machines under a rock ceiling, illuminated by the
eye-hurting glare of mercury vapor lights. The place was
gigantic, throbbing with power . . . and empty.

Naismith looked around as the shadow-egg touched. "Where
are all the people?"

"Dead," said Lall tensely. "There was a war. They are all
dead." She moistened her lips. "Now let me give you your
instructions. You realize that once we have dropped you here,
you are on your own. When you were thrown back in time,
this is where you will say you landed. You will find here an
unfinished time vehicle, the first crude prototype. You will
complete it, following the plans you find beside it. Then you
will go forward to the City. After you get through the Barrier,
the rest is up to you." The shadow-egg was drifting down a
wide corridor between gigantic machines.

"There it is," she said.

Naismith saw a clear space, some low workbenches, and
leaning against the wall, a thing that might have been the
skeleton of a rocket-sled. It was a tapered bar of metal, six
feet long, with two crosspieces. Controls were set into the
upper crosspiece, and Naismith could imagine the rider lying
on the shaft, feet on the lower crosspiece, hands gripping the
upper one like handlebars....

"That is the time machine?" he asked, half incredulously.

"No, not yet. It can be adapted as such. The inventors were
trying to make a device for exploring the interior of the Earth.
They hoped in this way to escape the devastation which over-
took them. But all they succeeded in doing was to neutralize
matter. If you boarded the machine as it now is, you would
simply fall through the Earth, and go on falling. The pro-
pulsive unit is not installed."

Naismith glanced around. Tools lay on the workbenches,
among scattered papers, as if someone had laid them aside only
an hour ago. ... He felt a touch of uneasiness. "What hap-
pened to them?" he asked.

"Killed in the first attack," Lall said emotionlessly. "That
black cloud you saw, just before we stoppedthat was the
bombs."

"How?" began Naismith. But already Lall was drawing
the child back beside her; Churan's fingers were busy on the
controls. Naismith felt himself lifted as the shadow-egg bulged
again. Then he was dropped unceremoniously on the stone
floor. The shadow-egg hovered a few feet away.

"One thing she forgot to tell you," said Churan, with an
unpleasant smile. "The second attack is going to take place in
just thirty seconds. That is the one that pulverizes this City to
a depth of fifty meters."

 It was like a pailful of icy water in the face. Naismith found
himself thinking with cold clarity, Then the workers must have
gone down to shelter. That's why there are no bodies.

"But why?" he said, taking a step closer. His mind was
ferociously concentrated on the shadow-egg: he must succeed
in getting back in, somehow ...

"You should not have told us about the gun, Mr. Naismith,"
said Lall, watching him through narrowed eyes.

Realization struck him. The aliens had not sent the apparition
of the gun. They had not sent the dreams, either. Then there
were others, who

"Ten seconds," said Churan, glancing up from his controls.

"The lie detector" said Naismith desperately.

"They know about you," replied Lall. "Therefore you are
useless to us." Her face went hard and ugly. "The whole effort
is wasted."

"Five seconds," added Churan. "Four. Three. . . ."

Naismith whirled. In one leap he reached the skeletal
machine; feet and hands were on the crosspieces. He found a
lever under his fingers, pulled it over hard.

The world went grayish and unreal around him. As it toppled,
the machine began to sink into the floorfalling, as if the
stone floor and the earth beneath it were so much mist.

Once more, before the darkness closed over his head, the
last things he saw were the triumphant smiles of the aliens.

Chapter Eleven

Naismith's first emotion was a consuming rage. Gathering
himself, he kicked against the crossbar, flung his body upward
and was hurled back again by a curved, elastic wall. He
landed hard against the metal framework, which began to
revolve slowly and dizzyingly around him. The falling sensa-
tion continued.

His one opportunity was gone: for a moment that was all
he could think of. If he had been able to leap out of the
machine's field during the first second of its fall . . . but it was
impossible to get out of the field without turning off the
machine, as he had just discovered.

In fact, the opportunity had been illusory. He had been

doomed from the moment he turned on the machine. Now he
was falling, falling endlesslyto what fate?

The aliens had told him one truth and one lie; he had taken
the lie for the truth, exactly as they had intended him to do.

Rage and despair all but choked him, as he clung to the
metal frame work, falling, in darkness and silence. He wanted
to live!

A faint hope came, as his fingers touched the control knobs
on the crossbar. If the aliens had lied about this, too . . .
Cautiously he tried one knob after another, avoiding the lever
which had turned the machine on. There was no perceptible
result, except that, when he had turned the third knob, he felt
a cool breath of air.

There was something he had not even considered: at least
he would not smother on his way down. . . . But he did not
succeed in arresting his fall, or changing its direction, so far as
he could tell, by a hair's breadth.

The thought of the gulf below him was hideous. What,
actually, was happening to him at this moment? The answer
came at once. He was acting out one of the oldest physics
problems in the book, something that every freshman "was
familiar withthe imaginary tunnel drilled through the Earth.

In fact, his body was a harmonic oscillator. Assuming a
homogeneous Earth and a non-rotating frame, he would de-
scribe a long narrow ellipse around the Earth's center. His grip
on the crossbar tightened convulsively. Of courseand unless
friction retarded him too much, he would rise at the antipodal
point to exactly the same level he had started from!

Wait, nowhe had fallen from the floor of an underground
chamber perhaps a hundred feet or so under the surface . . .
Where was he going to come out?

The moment the question occurred to him, he realized that It
was of vital importance. He had entered the Earth near Lake
Michigan, probably not far from the site of Chicago. If he
went straight through the planet, he should come out some-
where in the Indian Ocean ... and Chicago, he was sure, was
several hundred feet above sea level!

Wait a moment ... he was neglecting the rotation of the
Earth; that would bring him out some distance westward of
the antipodal point. How far depended on the period of his
motion. . . . Call the radius of the Earth four thousand miles
about twenty million feet, for convenience. Gravity at the
surface of the Earth, thirty-two feet per second per second. The
square root of twenty million over thirty-two would be two
hundred and fifty times the square root of ten ... times pi...
about twenty-five hundred seconds. Call it forty-two minutes.
He ran through the calculation once more, found no error.

Very well, in forty-two minutes, if he was right, he would

be emerging from the far side of the planet. In the meantime,
the rotation of the Earth would have brought his exit point
about ten or eleven degrees westward. ... It was all right: that
would still be in the ocean.

He took a deep breath. At least he would come out, not
cycle inside the Earth until his momentum was used up. If his
calculations were right

How long had he been falling?

Cursing himself, he fumbled for his wristwatch. The dial was
not luminous, but with a nail-file from his pocket he pried up
the crystal, felt the hands with his fingertips. They indicated
about ten minutes after nine. He had been falling for what
seemed half an hour or more, but was probably less than five
minutes. Assume, then, that he had begun his fall at 9:05 by
this watch. The time it showed was local California time as of
1980 A.D.curious to think of this mechanism still faithfully
keeping track of the minutes now buried thousands of years
in the past... but that did not matter.

At 9:47, he should emerge. If friction was a negligible factor,
and he could not assume otherwise, then he would rise to a
height of two or three hundred feet above the ocean . . . top
high. He felt himself begin to sweat, as he realized that it
would be necessary to chance falling back through the Earth
all the way through to the Western hemisphere, then back
again, hoping that in those two additional passages, friction
would bring him out at a level from which he could hope to
fall safely.

Luckily, there was plenty of room in the ocean. Two
more passages would bring him westward only twenty-odd
degrees. ...

A feeling of discomfort drew his attention. He was uneasy:
what had he been neglecting?

Friction: what if it were not negligible? For that matter,
what about the interior heat of the Earth?

He was to pass near the center of the core, which was
thought to be at about four thousand degrees centigrade . . .

Something was wrong. He reached out quickly, touched the
hollow curve of the force-shell. It was neither warm nor cool
to his senses. But he had already been falling ... he felt the
hands of the watch again . . . more than six minutes . . . t
squared, call it a hundred thirty thousand, times one-half the
accelerationtwo million feet, or something close to four
hundred miles.

While part of his mind to grasp that, another part went on
coldly calculating.

Temperature of the Earth's crust increased with depth, by
about thirty degrees centigrade every kilometer. And the shell
he was in was transparent to visible light. Therefore . . .

He was through the crust, falling through the mantle.

He should have passed the red-heat stage long ago; by now
he should be well into the white. And yet

He touched the shell again. It was still neither hot nor cold.
The darkness was unbroken.

Doubt struck him. Was he really falling? Suppose he was
simply hanging here, suspended, without gravity . . . drifting,
like a disembodied spirit, forever under the Earth?

He gripped the crossbar fiercely. The Universe obeyed
certain laws, among these were the mutual attraction of
material bodies and the equivalence of gravity and inertia. His
senses told him that he was falling, and in this case it happened
to be truehe was falling.

He touched the hands of the watch once more. They seemed
hardly to have moved. He held the watch to his ear to listen
for the whirr of the motor, then swore at himself impatiently.
Of course the watch was running: it was his own perception of.
time that was at fault.

If he only had a light. .. He would be seeing what no man
had ever seen, the rocks of the deep mantle. In a few minutes
he would be passing through the rim of the outer core, into
that curious region where nickel-iron was compressed into a
liquid. ...

The watch again. The minute hand had moved, just per-
ceptibly. Falling into this dark emptiness, Naismith could not
help thinking again of lost spirits, wandering forever under the
Earth. The Greeks had imagined a Hell like that; the Egyptians,
too. A phrase from some chance reading came back to him:
"the chthonic ourobouros."

He shuddered, and gripped the crossbar hard. I am a man,
not a ghost.

He wondered if what he was experiencing had ever hap-
pened before: if any other living soul had made this incredible
plunge. Such a man, failing to reach the surface again, swing-
ing back and forth, thousands of times ... until eventually his
lifeless body came to rest at the center of the Earth.

What would have happened then, when the machine's power
ran out? A gigantic explosion, probably violent enough to
cause vulcanism all over the planet, perhaps even shift the
balance of the continents.... Therefore it had probably never
happened.

But suppose the power had never run out? Then what was
left of the man must be still hanging there ... or perhaps a
cluster of corpses, each in his shell of force . . .

Time passed. In the darkness and silence, Naismith found
himself becoming intensely aware of his physical substance
his body's attitude, the partly flexed limbs, the sense of half-
perceived processes going on inside him. What a curious and

almost incredible thing it was, after all, to be a living man!

For four years he had believed himself to be Gordon
Naismith. Then he had been told that this identity was a mask,
that in reality he was a member of a different race, from a
world twenty thousand years in the future.... But this identity
was no more real to him than the other.

What was the truth? Where had he really come from, and
what was the goal to which he felt himself so irresistibly
driven?

Blurred, illusory shapes swam before his eyes in the darkness.
He blinked irritably, then closed his eyes, but the shapes re-
mained. He felt himself growing drowsy.

He came awake with a start, realizing that time had passed.
He felt the hands of the watch. It was nine-thirty. Twenty-five
minutes had gone by. But

Naismith clutched the crossbar hard, as the icy shock struck
him. In twenty-two minutes, he should have reached the center
of the Earth. Surely, at that depth, there would have been some
rise in temperature in the capsule!

He reached out, touched the shell. It was just perceptibly
warm.

He deliberately let five minutes go by, then touched the shell
again. It was definitely warmer....

Was there a delay factor in the capsule's transmission of
heat? Or had he somehow taken longer than twenty-two
minutes to reach the center? But that was impossible.

Again he waited five minutes before he touched the shell.
This time there was no mistake: it was hot.

After a moment, even the air in the capsule began to seem
unpleasantly warm and heavy. Naismith found he was sweat-
ing; his clothes began to stick to him.

After five minutes more, it was not necessary to touch the
wall again. It was glowing dull red.

Two minutes dragged by. The shell brightened through the
red, into the orange, yellow, then white.

Naismith was in agony. Even with his eyes tight shut, the
glare and heat were unendurable. He was being burnt alive.

He buried his face in his arms, sobbing for breath. The heat
pressed in relentlessly upon him from all sides; he could feel it
like a heavy weight on his clothing. Now he could smell his
hair beginning to crisp and smolder.

The metal framework grew too hot to touch. Naismith
retreated from it as far as he could, touching it only with the
soles of his feet; but to do so was to draw nearer to the white-
hot shell of the capsule.

He groaned aloud.

It seemed to him, after a moment, that the heat and glare
had abated a little. He opened his eyes warily. It was true: the

shell had turned from white to orange. As he watched, it faded
slowly onto the red.

Naismith breathed in a great, tortured gasp of relief. The
crisis was overhe was going to live!

Timehe must notice the time. Ignoring the pain of his
blistered skin, he felt for the hands of the watch. It was exactly
ten o'clock.

His passage through Inferno had taken about fifteen
minutes.

Ten o'clockfifty-five minutes from the beginning of his
fall. By now, if his calculations had been correct, he should
have emerged on the far side of the planet.

But he had just passed through a zone of heat that could
only be the core!

The air in the capsule was growing cooler by the moment.
The shell faded from dull red into hot darkness again. A few
minutes later, Naismith dared to touch it cautiously; it was
hot, but bearable.

Naismith felt totally bewildered. The period of his transit
through the Earth had to be approximately forty-two minutes,
no matter from what height he began his fall. Could his watch
be running too slowly? Was time in the capsule moving at a
rate different from that of time outside?

As the fall continued in darkness, Naismith grew aware of
both hunger and thirst. He had been penned up here for only
about an hour, and that ought to be well within his tolerance;
but how long was this going on? How long could he last?

Once more, by an effort of will, he calmed his mind. The
shell steadily cooled; otherwise no change was perceptible.

If he assumed a lag in the capsule's absorption and re-
radiation of heat, Naismith drowsily thought, then it could
be supposed that he had reached the mid-point of his orbit in
just about twice the predicted time. That would imply that
there was a difference of time-rate inside the capsule, or
else that some other factor had been reduced for unknown
reasons... .

For a moment he allowed himself to speculate on what he
would do to the two aliens, if by some incredible chance he
came out of this alive and met them again; but he cut off the
thought. He felt himself drifting again into sleep, and aban-
doned himself to it willingly.

He snapped back to awareness with a start. How long had
he been dozing?

He felt the watch. It was 10:17. He had been in free fall for
seventy-two minutes.

Tension began to build in him again. Unless his understand-
ing of the situation was simply, grossly wrong, then the zone

of heat he had passed must have been the core of the Earth;
and his period must be about twice what he had originally
calculated. But why?

Time dragged. It was 10:19; then 10:23; then 10:27. Nai-
smith waited tensely. Ten-nineteen. Now, if ever

One moment he was still in utter blackness. The next, stars
bloomed out beneath him, a galaxy of them, blindingly brilliant
in their half-globe of night. Above him was a dark orb that
occluded the other half of the sky; it was drifting away as he
watched.

Naismith blinked up at it in uncomprehending wonder for
a moment, until he realized that it was the night side of the
Earththat he had burst out of it feet-foremost.

His breath caught, and tears came to his eyes. He was out,
out in the fresh air at last! He made an instinctive attempt to
squirm around right-side-to, but gave it up immediately; that
did not matter.

What did matter, he realized with sudden alarm, was that
he was rising too high! The wrinkled, starlight face of the water
was drawing away overheadfive hundred feet, a thousand,
with no sign of slowing down.

The time had been top long; his speed was too great.

Coming down, Naismith realized with horror, he would be
going much too fast to dare turn off the machine ...

He would have to go all the way through, past that inferno
of heatat least once, perhaps twice. He was grimly sure that
he could not survive even one more passage.

The globe above him continued to recede. Now it was con-
cave, a gigantic silver-lit bowl: now it turned convex. The sky
beneath changed from blue-black to purple, to ebony. The
stars shone with a crueler sharpness.

Veils of cloud whisked by and receded, dwindling. How was
it possible that he should be rising so far? He must be nearly
into the stratosphere.

Now his speed was diminishing. He hung fixed in space for
an instant, then saw the Earth creeping nearer again.

On the whole broad, overhanging curve of the ocean, there
was not one light, not a ship. His ascent had taken perhaps a
minute and a half; in the same length of time he must plunge
back into the sea.

Naismith stared at the immense globe as it swelled toward
him. There must be some explanation! It was out of the ques-
tion for a falling body to come up ten or fifteen miles higher
than the point it had started from... Unless

Suddenly Naismith remembered the instant of his fall, and
the seeming nightmare slowness of it, while he fought to escape
the shell of the force-field he was in.

Make this assumption: that the relation of the machine to

the normal physical universe was such that its gravitational
interactions were reduced . . . that it fell, say, with half or a
quarter the normal velocity.

He ran through the calculations quickly, with growing
excitement. Substituting one-quarter g gave him a figure of
eighty-five minutes, which was almost exactly right.

There was an apparent violation here either of the conserva-
tion of energy or the principle of equivalence, but never mind
that now . . . The consequence was that during his fall, he
would tend to swing out away from the Sun, being less attracted
to that body than the Earth was. The center of his orbit would
be displaced a few miles, just enough to account for this
rise....

The globe of the Earth was rushing toward him. Naismith
watched it grimly, thinking that the next time he approached
the surface it would be somewhere in the Pacific, about forty-
two degrees west of Lake Michigan. Then eighty-four minutes
back again; this time he would come out somewhere near the
63rd meridians, still in the Indian Ocean.

Now the dark surface was hurtling down at express-train
speed. Naismith involuntarily braced himself, even though he
knew there would be no sense of contact. He saw a whorl of
bluish light just above him, expanding, rushing down. His
eyes widened; he had just time to gasp, then something struck
him a murderous blow.

The universe wheeled majectically around him; there was
pain deep in his head. The stars slowly darkened and went out.

Chapter Twelve

He was aware of having been unconscious, of a pain in his
head, and of a wordless anxiety that had driven him up out of
sleep.

He opened his eyes.

He was looking up into a gulf of blue sky, dotted with
clouds. Hardness pressed against his back; the air he breathed
was cool and pure. Something dry and flexible brushed his
cheek as he turned his head; vague yellowish rod-shapes moved
across his vision. He sucked in a breath, rolled over and sat up.

He was on the ground, with grass shoulder-high all around

him. A few feet away, on the trampled grass, lay a small blued-
steel machine.

Naismith stared at it in frozen surprise for an instant, before
he realized it was not the same one the aliens had used: the
shape was similar, but not identical.

He reached for it, and found himself held back, although he
could neither see nor feel any obstacle. Incredulous, he put out
his full strength, straining until the blood roared in his ears;
but he could not force his body an inch closer to the machine.

After a moment he gave it up, and cautiously got to his feet.
He felt no restraint, and was able to stand; but when he tried
to take a step toward the machine, the same impalpable barrier
held him back.

He straightened again, looking out over the sea of grass. At
first he saw only the rolling yellow waves, with an occasional
green treetop in the distance, and a line of misty hills along the
horizon. Then he became aware of movement.

A few hundred yards away across the plain, a human form
was moving slowly through the grass. It was a girl, the upper
part of her body either nude or lightly clothed; her legs and
hips were hidden by the grass. She was walking with leisurely
grace, halting occasionally, with her face turned up to the sun.
He could not make out her features, but something in the lines
and the motion of her body made him think she was young.

She had not noticed him. Naismith glanced again at the
machine on the ground, then crouched out of sight and once
more began a desperate effort to approach it. He found that he
could walk in a circle around the machine, but could never
come any nearer. He dug his feet in and pushed, with some idea
of forcing the machine to move ahead of him, but did not
succeed.

He stopped, gasping for breath, and looked over the tops of
the grasses again. The girl was much closer. This time she saw
him.

Naismith stood up and waited.

The girl walked unhurriedly toward him. Her skin was
tanned, her hair coppery, shining in the light. She was dressed,
or half dressed, in bits of contoured metal and fabric that clung
to her body here and there, in a pattern more esthetic than
functional. Her eyes were narrowed as she walked, as if she
were aware of nothing but the caress of sun and air on her body.

She waited until she was only a few yards away before she
spoke. "Awake already?" she said. The language she used was
BoDen.

Naismith did not reply. Seen so near at hand, the girl had
a startling, provocative beauty. Her skin was satiny, as if
covered by an almost invisible sheer tissuespiderweb-stuff
that ended, without a visible border, at the edges of her lips and

eyes. The red-violet of her lips might have been natural or
artificial. Her eyes were pale green, fringed with dark lashes,
startling against her brown face.

She was watching him with an amused expression. "Well,
don't stand thereback away."

Naismith did not move. "Who are youwhat is this place?"

"Earth, of course. Now back off so that I can get in."

Naismith glanced down at the machine, then back at the
girl. "What if I don't?"

"I'll leave you here until you get hungry."

Naismith shrugged, backed off a few steps into the tall grass.
The girl waited, then darted forward to the machine. She sat
down on the ground beside it, folding her legs neatly, and
looked up at him with a mocking smile. "All right, you can
come back."

Naismith looked at her, then stared around at the grassy
plain, peaceful and silent under the sky.

Absently he let his fingers trail through the dry, bearded
grasses.

Far off, the tiny dot of a bird launched itself from one of
the isolated treetops; he followed it across the sky until it
alighted again.

"This is a beautiful spot," he said.

Her laughter made him turn. "Like to see what it's really
like?" she said. She tossed something toward him. "Here."

Naismith's hand went up automatically to bat the thing away;
at the last moment he changed his mind, plucked it out of the
air.

It was a shaped blue grip of some smooth, waxy substance.
When his hand closed around it, a disk of dark color glowed
into being just above it.

He stared at the thing in perplexity for a moment before he
realized that he was looking through the disk, at a three-
dimensional scene beyond. He turned the grip this way and
that, swung it around, and discovered that the view through
the disk corresponded with the landscape around him
horizon, hills, the plain itself were all there, but all changed.

Grass and trees were gone; instead, there was raw earth and
rockblackened, cratered and barren under a starred purple
sky. The sun blazed overheadnot the ordinary ball of light,
but a monstrous thing with flames spreading high from either
side. Naismith lowered the disk, puzzled.

"What is thatanother time line?" he asked.

"I told you," she said looking up at him serenely. "That is
what is really here. Everything you see is only a clever illu-
sion." She indicated the landscape around them. "Earth is a
dead planet nowdestroyed by wars. You could not even
breathe here, if you were not protected by this machine."

Naismith frowned, and put out a hand to touch the nearest
clump of grass. The dry stems, the bearded tips, were real to
his fingers. He pulled up a few, wadded them in his palm,
watched them fall.

"I don't believe you," he said flatly. "Who would do such a
thing?"

"They say Zugs did it," she answered indifferently. "The
proof is that only human beings see any of thisa camera will
not photograph it, and the illusion will not pass through that
viewer. Give it back."

After a moment's hesitation, Naismith tossed the grip to her.
The disk winked out as it left his hand, winked on again as she
caught it. She glanced through it, said with a trace of bitterness,
"All dust and stone," and put it away in her silver belt.

"Then why were you walking out there?" Naismith asked
curiously.

She shrugged her bare shoulders. "It's beautiful," she said.
"Why shouldn't I enjoy it, just because it's an illusion?" She
gazed up at him. "Well, get in."

Naismith stepped closer, watching as she picked up the
machine. "Where are you taking me?"

Without replying, she touched the controls of the machine.
A faint jolt came, and they were enclosed in a transparent
bubble, through which the landscape shone spectral blue.
Almost at once, without any feeling of motion, the earth
dropped away underneath, the sky began to darken.

Naismith leaned forward slightly, found that the same barrier
kept him from approaching the girl. She smiled up at him
mockingly, and lit a green cigarette with jeweled fingers that
trembled slightly. "Sit down, Shefth."

Naismith obeyed slowly, staring at her. "I remember now,"
he said. "I saw something blue coming up, then"

She nodded, blowing a jet of greenish smoke. "I didn't dare
take a chance with you," she said. "I hit you with a force-rod
as I pulled you in. Then I thought I might as well wait till you
woke up, so I went forward a few thousand years and landed
down there." She moistened her lips. "You're strong," she said.
"By all the rules, you should have been unconscious for at least
another twenty minutes. Anyhow, I had time to put a mind
helmet on you and read all your little secrets."

Naismith felt his body tensing. "What secrets?"

"I know them all," she said, wagging her head wisely. "All
about California, and the two Uglies you called Lall and
Churan." She laughed. "And what they wanted you to do."

Naismith stared at her, eyes narrowed. "Do you speak
English?" he asked abruptly.

She did not respond.

"Do you know that you are a dirty little slut?" he asked in
the same even tone.

Her eyes blazed at him. Her lips pulled away from her teeth,
and for an instant Naismith felt a chill of alarm. Then it was
gone.

"I won't kill you now," she whispered in English. "That
would be too easy. When I kill you, it will be slowly and
painfully, to teach you not to speak that way to Liss-Yani."

Naismith caught his breath, then pointed a finger at her.
"Now I know you," he said. "It was your voice, that night,
when I saw the Zug. You said 'Kill it' in just the same tone.
You sent thatvision, whatever it was. And those dreams
Why?"

She blinked at him. "Aren't you afraid?"

"Why should I be? You said you're not going to kill me
now."

"And later?"

"Later, maybe I'll be afraid."

"I wonder," she said, licking her moist violet lips. She
stubbed the cigarette abruptly into a hole in the floor, and it
vanished. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Gordon Naismith."

"Not that. Your real name, what is it?"

"I don't remember," said Naismith.

She looked at him thoughtfully. "And you don't remember
anything about the City, or the death collars, or Thera-Yani?"

"No."

She sighed. "I wish I could believe you. Come here and kiss
me." She tilted up her face and sat waiting, hands on the
control box.

After a surprised instant, Naismith slid toward her. The
invisible barrier halted him, then seemed to soften; it melted
away until his face approached hers; but when he tried to
extend his arms, they were stopped in mid-air.

"Well, come on," she said, half-closing her eyes.

Naismith, half annoyed, half intrigued, leaned forward and
kissed her. Her lips were soft, hot and moist; they parted
under his at once, and her soft tongue probed into his mouth.

After a few moments, she lay back and pushed him away.

"Is that your best effort?" she asked. "Go on, sit down."
She plucked another green cigarette out of the floor and lit
it. "Well, I never heard of a Shefth that could kiss."

Nettled, he asked, "Then why did you suggest it?"

"I wanted to see what you would do. A real Shefth would
not kiss a Yani." She cocked her head at him. "Actually, it
was not too bad."

Naismith stared at her in surprise for a moment, then
laughed. Remembering the world of his dreams, he thought,

No, of course a Shefth would not kiss a Yard; and she had
all the stigmatathe coppery skin and hair, green eyes, slender,
tapering fingers....

"How did you know where to find me?" he asked in BoDen.
"Were you watching, all that time I was with Lall and
Churan?"

"Of course. Uglies are very stupid. They thought you would
simply drop into the Earth and never come out again. But I
knew better. I computed your orbit, and" She shrugged.
"Then it was easy."

Her fingers were slowly stroking one of the buttons on the
control box she held on the floor. Naismith said, "You know,
of course, that it was on your account the Uglies decided they
couldn't trust me?"

"I know."

"Then why can't you trust me?" he demanded. "Either I'm
on one side or the other."

"Because there's something wrong about you," she said, and
blew green smoke at him. "I felt it when I kissed you, and I
am never mistaken. I don't know what it isyou seem to be
just what you say, a Shefth who has lost his memory. But
there is ... something. Oh, wellforget it." She touched the
control box, then leaned back against the wall. "Are you
hungry? Thirsty?"

At once Naismith was again acutely aware of both needs.
Watching nun, the girl reached behind her to the wall, with-
drew a cup of foaming white liquid and a brownish, solid cake.
She broke the cake in half, offered him the cup and one piece
of the brownish stuff.

Naismith accepted both, but cautiously watched the girl
nibble at the cake before he tried it himself. It was chewy and
rich-tasting, something like figs. He sipped the liquid, found
it agreeably astringent.

The girl laughed suddenly.

"What is it?" Naismith demanded, lowering the cup.

"You were so easy," she said. "How do you know I did not
put ten-day poison in the fruit or wine?"

Naismith stared at her. "Did you?"

"Maybe." Her eyes glittered with amusement. "If I did, you
can only get the antidote from me. So if I ask you a favor, later
on, you may want to do it instead of taking a chance."

"What sort of favor?" Naismith asked. He glanced at the
food, laid it down.

"Go on, eat! If there is poison in it, you've had enough
alreadythe rest won't make any difference."

Naismith looked at her grimly, then nodded and took another
bite of the cake. "What sort of a favor?" he repeated.

"I don't know," she said indifferently. "Things were becom-

ing a little difficult when I left. The Barrier is so close now. It
doesn't hurt to have friends at a time like that."

In spite of himself, Naismith smiled. "Is that your idea of a
friendsomeone who has to do what you say because you've
poisoned him?"

"Please don't be dull," she said, with a moue of distaste.
"After all, we are going to be in this traveler together for
another ten minutes."

"Then what happens?"

"I hand you over to the Circle," she said without interest.
She thrust out one hand, looking complacently at the nacrous
violet of her nails. "Do you like this color?"

"It's very pretty. The Circlewhat do they want from me?"

"They think you can kill the Zug. They are terribly worried
about it."

"Then that part was true?"

"About the Zug? Oh, yes. This is total-access clothing, did
you know that?" She touched the curved and ornamented
plaques that clung to her body one after another. Each one
winked briefly out of existence, revealing an arm, a breast with
a rather startling violet nipple, a hip, a thigh.

Naismith felt an intense, momentary interest in that tender-
looking flesh, but he put it aside. "Which faction is ascendant
in the Circle now?" he demanded.

The girl frowned. "What a dull thing you are! You Shefthi,
actually ..." She yawned once more and stretched back against
the curved blue-mist wall. "I think I shall take a little rest," Her
eyes closed.

Naismith gazed at her in annoyance, but before he could
speak, something new in the sky caught his attention. It was a
mass of spectral blue globes, hanging motionless at eye level:
it had not been there a moment ago.

"What is that?" Naismith demanded.

The girl opened her eyes briefly. "The City," she said.

At first her words seemed irrelevant. Then a shock went
through Naismith's body. "Do you mean that is the City?" he
demanded.

She sat up, eyes wide open. "What's wrong with you?"

Naismith did not reply. His pseudo-memories of the City
were all of gigantic rooms, corridors, floating shapes, crowds of
people.

Now that he looked for it, the knowledge was there: but it
had never once occurred to him that the City was not on
Earth.

His inner agitation increased. Here was the danger, not in
Liss-Yani's petulant threats.

His knowledge of essential things was incomplete, badly
organized, not readily available. What other blunders might

he not make at some crucial moment? . . . And how much
longer did he have to prepare himself?

Outside, the huge, complex shape ponderously revolved as
they drew nearer. A bull's-eye pattern rolled into view, centered
itself in the mass, grew steadily larger. The inner circle yawned
and swallowed them. They were inside.

Chapter Thirteen

Through the walls of the time vehicle, Naismith found him-
self looking into a huge globular rooma hollow, pale-green
sphere, with regular markings at intervals on its surface, in
which floated a confusing array of objects.

Liss-Yani smiled at him sidelong, her hand on the control
box. "Are you ready?"

He stared back at her, said nothing.

Smiling, she did something to the controls. The time vehicle
winked out of being.

At the same instant, something dark and incredibly swift
flapped toward them, enclosing them. Naismith flung up his
arms in instinctive defense, then relaxed. Somewhere a bell
was ringing.

"What is this?"

"A precaution," she said, enjoying his reaction. "What if we
had been Uglies?"

Through the dark transparency around them, Naismith
could dimly perceive motion in the great globe. Angular
machines drifted nearer, lenses glowing sullen red, like coals in
the heart of a fire. A little above them, another shape was
moving: Naismith realized suddenly that it was a man. Some-
thing was wrong with the legs, but he could make out pipe-
stem arms, a head, the glint of eyes staring.

Abruptly the bell stopped; the darkness winked out. They
were floating in the middle of the green sphere, surrounded by
machines in whose lenses the red glow was dying. Nearer, the
man Naismith had seen before was floating towards them, body
at an angle to theirs, hands gripping his forearms, like a
Mandarin. He was dressed in a fantastic, puffed and ruffled
garment of yellow and white stripes, the top a short-sleeved
singlet, the lower part a tube covering both legs and closed at
the bottom with a yellow bow. His face was lean and gnomish,

at once anguished and ironic. His eyes glittered; his wide mouth
twitched. "You got him, I see," he said.

"Yes, here he is, Prell."

"Is he dangerous?"

The girl turned slowly in mid-air and gazed at Naismith.
"I'm not sure," she said thoughtfully.

"We'd better keep the automatics on him, for the time being.
Later they'll give him a collar." Prell turned in the air, spoke a
single, harsh word.

Out of the clutter of objects hanging in the vast space, one
drifted nearer: it was a miniature sarcophagus, with a design
painted on it in blue and yellow. The drawing was a crude
sketch of a young girl with yellow hair, eyes closed, lips
demurely smiling. Her hands were crossed over her breast.

"Tell the Highborn," said Prell, "the attempt was successful.
We have the Shefth."

The sarcophagus clicked, hummed, drifted away again.

"Probably it will take a while to get her attention," said
Prell. "Do you want to look at the work, in the meantime?"

"Yes, all right," said the girl indifferently. The two of them
turned, drifted rapidly away from Naismith. After a moment,
already tiny in the distance, they paused and looked back, with
comical expressions of surprise on their faces.

"I forgot," said Prell's distant voice; "he doesn't have a
director. Wait a moment." He spoke the harsh word again;
another machine drifted toward him. This one was box-shaped,
ornamented with red and green arabesques on a black ground.
"A director for that man," said Prell, pointing.

The box dipped slightly, turned, and came rocketing down
at Naismith. At the last moment it slowed, came to a halt facing
him a yard away.

"For my information, sir," said a musical voice from the
box, "what is that man's name?"

"Naismith," said Naismith, looking at it curiously.

"Excuse me, sir, but that is not a catalogued name," said
the box politely.

The voices of Prell and the girl murmured together a
moment; then Prell said, "We'll get him a name presently. For
now, just call him 'that man.'"

"Thank you, sir," said the box. A hopper in its center slowly
opened; out floated a narrow, flexible band of some cream-
colored substance.

"Put it on your wrist," called the girl. Naismith did so, and
the stuff curled around his wrist as if half-alive, clung to itself
and seemed to melt together; the seam disappeared.

"Now point in the direction you want to go and just tense
your wrist slightly," her voice went on.

Naismith did as he was told, and found the vast green

sphere rotating slowly around him, while certain distant clumps
of machines drifted nearer. When Prell and the girl came into
view again, he pointed toward them, and this time managed to
keep them centered. He lowered his arm, came to rest a few
feet away.

"You'll get used to it," said Liss-Yani. "Come on!"

She and Prell moved off again, but came to a halt almost
immediately. Naismith jockeyed up beside them. Prell was
moving some small glittering object across the vacant air before
him: suddenly there was a shimmer, a crackle, and a great
round sheet of silvery reflection came into being.

Prell touched it again; the disk turned transparent, and they
were looking into another room, darker and even more enor-
mous than the one they were in. In the vast space myriads of
tiny shapes were moving: some were human, some were the
symmetrical forms of machinesboxes, sarcophagi, vase
shapes. As Naismith's vision adjusted to the scene, he began
to make out serried ranks of dark objects, not visibly con-
nected to one another, among which the human and robot
forms came and went.

Prell reached out again, and the scene appeared to drift
nearer. They were looking down upon one of the thousands of
ranked machines, over which a gnomish young man in a dress
like Prell's was hovering.

"This is the Barrier control network," the girl's voice ex-
plained. "They've been working on it for five years. It's almost
finished."

"Is this an actual entranceway into that room," Naismith
asked, fumbling for words, "or aa viewscreen?"

Prell looked at him curiously. "What is the difference?"

Naismith realized, in confusion, that there was no difference,
in the question as he had asked it: the two phrases, in BoDen,
were almost identical.

While he was still thinking dazedly of the implications of
this, Prell reached out again.

"Would you like to see what they're doing?" he asked. With-
out waiting for a reply, he gestured once more with the shining
object in his hand.

Part of the scene before them seemed to expand. Where one
of the floating machines had been, there was a dim lattice of
crystals, growing more shadowy and insubstantial as it swelled;
then darkness; then a dazzle of faint prismatic Lighttiny
complexes in a vast three-dimensional array, growing steadily
bigger . . .

Naismith caught his breath. He realized that he was seeing
the very molecules that made up the substance of the machines
that were being built in the next chamber.

"This is why it takes so long," Prell said, rubbing his fore-

arms nervously. He grimaced. "Every channel has to be built
up molecule by molecule, under rigid control. Like to see it
closer?"

The magnification increased. In luminous darkness, Naismith
saw molecules scattered like tiny planets. A moving dot of
light appeared, slowly traced a mathematical arc across the
blackness. Other arcs of light sprang out from it, like ribs from
a spinal column; slowly, the dots that were molecules drifted
across to take position upon them.

"Is that direct vision, or a display of some kind?" Naismith
demanded, fascinated.

"It's a mathematical analogue," Prell answered. "Just a toy,
really." His mouth twitched; he scrubbed at his wrists as if in
pain.

"It's beautiful," said Naismith.

Prell shot him a startled glance, then seemed to go into a
reverie.

The sarcophagus robot drifted up, said discreetly, "The
Highborn has received your message. She asks you to send that
man to the social room."

"All right," said Prell. "Liss-Yani, you might as well take
him over. Come back later, I want to talk to you."

"Yes," she said. Turning, she took Naismith's arm. "This
way."

Naismith's body was trembling in alarm. The thought came:
Prell is dangerous. He knows what I am.

Brain working furiously, he allowed the girl to lead him
away from Prell. His reactions are slowhe is still thinking
about it. But in another few seconds . . .

The girl came to a halt in mid-air; awkwardly, Naismith
stabilized himself beside her. Before them, faintly, he could
make out a silvery circle in the air. Liss-Yani reached out,
touched it with a glittering object, as Prell had done before.
The ten-foot circle quivered, rippled: they were looking into a
gigantic room full of color and motion. "Come," said the girl
again, pulling him through.

On the opposite side, Naismith brought himself to a halt,
looking back. He could still see the scientist, hovering in thought
beside one of his machines. The girl's arm reached past him,
touched the circle, and the scene blanked out, was gone.

Naismith whirled. "Teach me how to operate these door-
ways," he said angrily.

"It's perfectly easy," she said, staring at him. "You just
touch them with the opener and think about where you want
to go. There'll be plenty of time for thatcome on."

"Give it to me," he said, holding out his hand. After a
moment she shrugged, put a smooth silvery object into his
palm. It felt like plastic rather than metal; it was an elongated

ovoid, fitting naturally into his hand so that the blunt tip of it
projected.

Naismith reached out, touched the circle. The view sprang
into being again. Prell had turned slightly, was massaging his
forearms with his hands; there was an anxious expression on
his face.

"One moment," said Naismith. He propelled himself through
the opening, turned, touched it with the silvery object again; it
blanked out. Instantly Naismith hurled himself at Prell.

The scientist turned, with a startled expression, as Naismith
hurtled up. Naismith seized the man by the front of his robe,
yanked Prell toward him. Terror sprang into the little man's
eyes.

"What was my mistake?" Naismith demanded. "Tell me!"
He tightened his grip.

"Beautiful," the little man gasped. His mouth opened and
closed like a fish's, making no sound, until Naismith impatiently
shook him. "You're nota Shefth . .. They have noesthetic
responses .. ." His face contorted with sudden malevolence. "I
know what you arehelp!" His lungs filled, he opened his
mouth to shout.

Naismith gripped his frail body with one arm, put the other
forearm against his chin, pressed. There was a gurgling sound
as the man's wind was cut off; then a dry, loud snap. The body
sagged.

As Naismith turned, one of the ubiquitous machines drifted
nearer. "For my information, sir," it said musically, "what has
happened to Master Prell?"

"Uglies attacked him," said Naismith at random, moving
away. "They appeared suddenly, killed Prell, then vanished."

"The automatic weapons did not fire," said the machine
politely.

"They were out of order," Naismith said. He glanced around;
none of the other floating robots seemed to have noticed any-
thing. Could he disable this one, if he had to? Was it necessary?

"For my information, sir," said the robot, "which were out
of order, the automatic weapons or the Uglies?"

"The weapons," Naismith told it, staring at the intricate
design on the front of the box.

"Thank you, sir."

"For my information," Naismith said suddenly, "tell me, are
you intelligent?"

"I am intelligent. I have a machine intelligence of plus
forty."

Naismith frowned. "That was not what I wanted to know.
Are youare you conscious?"

"I am not conscious, sir."

"Have you volition?"

"I have no volition, sir."

"Thank you."

"Thank you, sir." The machine dipped politely, turned,
drifted away.

On the other side of the doorway, the girl was waiting.
Naismith slipped through, closed the circle quickly behind him.

"What took you so long?" she demanded.

"I had trouble finding the doorway again," he said. Breath-
ing hard, he stared around at the crowded immensity behind
her. The room was globular, and so vast that he could not
estimate its extent. In a pale greenish haze, what seemed to be
thousands of floating bodies were ranked: some coming and
going, in a slow circling movement, others fixed. In a given
group, large or small, all the heads would be pointing one way
and the bodies spaced about equally, like fish in.a school. Some
were right-side up from his point of view, others upside down,
others at all angles. It gave him a vertiginous feeling.

"Well, come on," said the girl.

Naismith hesitated. Things were moving top fast; he needed
time to think. It was incredible that he had just committed a
murder . . . This was not like the other time, when he had
blanked out and discovered later that he had killed Wells. This
time, something in his own brain had said, Prell knows what I
am. For the moment, he had known exactly what he had to do
and why. Now it was fading. . . . In God's name, he thought
suddenly, what kind of a monster am I?

Chapter Fourteen

He was aware that the girl had taken his hand, was tugging
him off toward the center of the sphere. After a moment
Naismith cooperated, using his own director. They passed a
little shoal of brightly dressed people, then another. The room
was full of the tiny sarcophagus-shaped robots, too, Naismith
noticed. Then, with a shock, he realized that many of the
floating bodies were those of green-skinned Uglies.

They were carrying things, moving this way and that on
errands, their faces expressionless. Some of the brightly
dressed people were self-propelled, like himself and Liss-Yani;
but others were being moved from one place to another by

Uglies or by robots. All of them wore garments like Prell's that
seemed to hide stunted or atrophied legs.

Naismith and the girl rounded a huge, complex spray-shape
of glittering golden material, through the branches of which
tiny fish-shaped robots swam. On the further side, past a throng
of floating people, Naismith caught sight of another huge
object, this one as hideous as the other was beautiful.

It was the torso of a female Ugly, magnified to the size of a
ten-story building. Gigantic and grotesque, it loomed over the
glittering throng like a human body surrounded by mayflies.
Its arms were secured behind its back; its skin was pierced here
and there by long needles, from which drops of dark blood
were slowly oozing. Through the echoing talk and laughter,
Naismith suddenly heard a hoarse bawling sounda groan,
immensely amplified, that seemed to come from where the
Ugly's head should be. The talk died away for a moment, then
there was a scattering of laughter, and the hum of conversa-
tion began again.

Naismith felt sickened. "What's that?" he demanded.

"A solid," the girl answered indifferently. "That's one of the
rebel Uglies they captured. They made a big solid of her so
everyone can watch. Look over there."

Naismith turned his head, saw a girl of Liss-Yani's caste
entwined in a sexual embrace with a slender, muscular man.
There was a little ring of spectators around them, and some
languid applause.

"No, not them," the girl said impatiently. "Look farther up."

Naismith did so, and saw nothing of interest except still
another woman of the Entertainer classdressed, this one, in
long gossamer robesdrifting across the room with an en-
tourage of young men and women. Her face was noble and
sad; she looked straight ahead, without expression.

"That's Thera-Yani," said the girl in a muted voice. "Isn't
she wonderful!"

"I don't see it," Naismith said. "Why wonderful?"

"She was the best-loved Yani in the City until last month,
when the new mutations were released and the fashion changed.
Now there is nothing left for her. She took twenty-day poison,
and she is saying her farewells to the City."

Naismith snorted, unimpressed. Up ahead, a green-skinned
female servant was pushing a tremendously fat old woman
across the air by the small of her back. The Ugly, Naismith
noticed, was wearing a bright metal collar around her neck; he
now recalled seeing similar collars on other greenskins,

A fragment of speech drifted back: "But why must all the
Uglies die, Mistress? Haven't I always been good, haven't I
always"

"Oh, don't be tiresome, Menda. I explained to you before,

I can't do anything about it. It's something to do with science.
Don't let me hear ..."

Now they were approaching the center of the enormous
room, where the largest and most tightly packed mass of people
floated. The shrill hum of conversation grew louder. Naismith's
nerves prickled; the closeness of all these people was subtly
unpleasant.

Up ahead, a raucous female voice was screaming, like an
articulate parrot's: the words were not distinguishable. Naismith
and the girl moved nearer, threading their way patiently
through the press, sometimes horizontally, sometimes in the
vertical plane.

At last Naismith could make out the screaming woman. She
hung in the middle of a little group of gaudily dressed people.
She was hugely, obscenely fat in her puffed and ornamented
garment of white and scarlet. When she swung around, Nai-
smith could see her body quake like a jelly inside the fabric.
Her face was sallow and lined, the eyes bright with madness.
"... come in here and tell me, who do you think you are, be
silent and listen, I tell you I will not have any disrespect, why
don't you observe the rules, don't talk to me, I tell you,
listen . . ."

"Highborn, if you please," said a fat man in brown, with
ruffles around his worried baby-pink face.

"... never in three hundred years have I been treated like
this, be quiet, Truglen, I wasn't speaking to you, how can I
bear these constant interruptions, Regg! Regg! where is the
creature, Regg!"

"Yes, Highborn," said a green-skinned man, floating up beside
her.

"Give me a pickup, can't you see the state I'm in?"

"Highborn," said another man, almost as fat as the first,
"try to be calm. You may want to wait a little before you have
another of those, recall that you've already had ten this
period . .."

"Don't tell me how many I've had, how dare you!" She
choked apoplectically, took something the greenskin was hold-
ing out, swallowed it and glared, speechless for a moment. The
servant handed her a tube leading to a flask of reddish fluid,
and she sucked at it, her old face hollowing deeply and her mad
eyes bulging.

Liss-Yani spoke to a robot, which glided forward and said
politely, "Highborn, here is the Shefth you sent for."

Her head swiveled; she glared, spat out the drinking tube.
"And high time, too! Why can't I get any obedience any more,
why do you all make things so difficult for me, do you
want to kill me, is that it? Come forward, you, what's your
name?"

Unwillingly, Naismith floated toward her. "Naismith," he
told her.

"That's not a name, are you making a joke of me? What is
his name, I say, what is this Shefth's name?"

"He does not know his name, Highborn," said the robot.
"He is to be referred to as 'that man.'"

"Be quiet!" screamed the fat woman. "You, are you a
Shefth?"

"As you see, Highborn," said Naismith. A globe of watchers,
most of them hugely fat, was beginning to form around them.

"Impertinence! When have I ever had to bear such insults!
Do you know how to kill a Zug, answer me directly, and mind
your manners!"

"I don't know," said Naismith.

"He is the only Shefth we have, Highborn," said the baby-
pink fat man, bending near.

"Well, I don't like him! Go back and get another one at once,
do you hear me, take this one away, I won't have him, I won't!"

"Highborn, there is not enough time" said the fat man.

"Time, tune, don't we manufacture time, how can you be
so cruel and thoughtless, don't contradict me, I say, go and
get another!"

Two or three of the men around the fat woman exchanged
glances.

"Well, what's wrong with you all, are you deaf or paralysed,
why can't I get a simple order obeyed in Mind's name, oh, why
are you all..."

A chime sounded nearby; heads turned. "One moment," said
the pink man anxiously. "Highborn, the message."

The woman fell silent, gaping and blinking. There was a
movement in the globe of people as the pink man drifted back.
Now Naismith could see a yellow box-shaped machine with a
lighted face, suspended in a transparent globe. The chime
came again. The pink man tilted himself nearer, staring at the
face of the machine. Naismith could see words forming in
threads of white light, one, then a gap, two more, another
gap ...

" 'Danger . . . Zug alive . . . send Shefth.'" The pink man
paused, then straightened. He sighed. "That's all. Almost the
same as last time."

"Well, it's clear enough, isn't it?" the woman screamed.
"Danger, send Shefthto kill the Zug, that's clear, isn't it,
what more do you want?"

"But the words left out, Highborn," the pink man said
despairingly.

"Never mind, you're only trying to confuse me! They want
a Shefth to kill the Zugwe want a Shefth, up there in the
future, that's clear, isn't it? Well, then, what's the matter?"

There was motion in the globe of watchers; a hawk-nosed
man, leaner than the rest, came plunging through and stopped
before the fat woman. Behind him was a gnome in brown and
red stripes, one of the scientists. "Highborn, this man says
Prell has been killed in the workrooms!"

"Prell? Killed? Who killed him? Who is Prell?"

"The time-laboratory director, Highborn! His spine was
broken, not more than five minutes ago."

"There is the man who did it!" blurted the gnome suddenly,
pointing his finger at Naismith. Heads turned; there was
agitated motion in the group.

"He did it? Then kill him, quickly, quickly, you idiots, before
he does it to somebody else! What are you waiting for, kill
him!" The woman grew yellow-faced and shrunken; her little
eyes glistened with fear.

"One moment," said the hawk-faced man. "Autosthat
man." Three of the dark, red-lensed machines drifted toward
Naismith, taking up positions around him.

"Kill him!" squalled the woman.

"That can be done in a moment, after we ask one or two
questions," said Hawknose. He turned to Naismith. "Don't
make any sudden motion, or the guns will fire. Did you kill
Prell?"

"No," said Naismith. He caught sight of Liss-Yani hovering
in the background.

"Who did, then?"

"Uglies," said Naismith. "They came into view, killed him,
disappeared again." Sweating, he tried to relax.

"You saw this?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you speak of it?"

"No one gave me an opportunity."

The man's lips quirked in a half-smile. "Where is that
robot?" he asked, turning.

The box drifted up to him; Naismith recognized the red
and green arabesques. "Yes, sir?"

"Is this the man who told you Uglies had killed Prell?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you see it happen?"

"No, sir."

"Did the automatics fire, or did the alarm sound?"

"No, sir. That man said they were out of order, sir."

"Were they?"

"No, sir."

The hawk-faced man turned to Naismith again. "That seems
conclusive. Have you anything else to say?"

"Kill him!" screamed the woman again. "Kill him! Kill
him!"

"What about the Zug, Highborn?" ventured the pink man.

"The Zug, I don't care about the Zug ..."

"But who will kill it, if we kill the Shefth?"

"Get another one," she muttered. "Don't bother me with
these details, I've told you a million times, I don't want to be
bothered, can't you understand that, I only want to be left
alone"

"One moment," said Hawknose. He gestured toward the
nearest of the machines. Blackness flapped suddenly toward
Naismith.

For a heart-freezing instant, he thought the gun had fired;
then he realized he had been enclosed by another of the dark
globes. Through it he could hear their voices, but could not
make out the words.

Time dragged unendurably. Then, suddenly, the little group
broke up; the dark globe vanished.

"Well, that's settled," said Hawknose agreeably. "You're to
have a reprieve, Shefth. We're going to let you kill a Zug
here, on this side of the Barrier. If you do, well and good. If
not" He shrugged, turned to the gnome beside him.

"Give him some equipment and get the gate ready," he
said. "A few of you go along and watchyou, you and you.
Anyone else want to go? All right, four vehicles, then. See to
it."

As he turned away, there was a babble of voices around
Naismith. The gnome had darted away and disappeared; other
bright forms were clustering nearer. Naismith caught sight of
Liss-Yani, and of a smooth-limbed, athletic man who might
have been her brother. Two gorgeous fat men in candy stripes
of violet and pink drifted up, chattering excitedly to each
other.

With a look of sullen hostility, the gnome reappeared carry-
ing a small bundle of equipment. "This way."

As the group followed him, he edged closer to Naismith and
muttered, "You animal, you're going to be clawed up and
eaten alive inside half an hour. I'll be watching, and I'll laugh!"

Naismith felt chilled. The holiday mood of the people around
him, their laughter and bright faces, suggested that they were
about to enjoy some amusing spectacle. Clawed up and eaten
alive . . . Would that amuse them? A cold fury came to drive
back his fear. Somehow, somehow, he would cheat them of
that pleasure.

Darting ahead, the gnome checked at one of the mirror
disks. He touched it briefly. The disk cleared: they were look-
ing into a tiny, blue-walled room, on the far wall of which
glimmered another silvery disk.

"Go ahead, get in," said the gnome impatiently.

Naismith entered the chamber slowly, glancing around him.

The gnome handed him a clutter of harness and equipment.
"Put these on."

Naismith examined the objects. There was a pistol-like
weapon in a holster, a helmet with a curious forward-jutting
spike, and a complex webwork of plastic straps with metal
insets.

"Here, let me show you," said the man who resembled Liss-
Yani, coming forward. "Rab-Yani is my name. You may call
me Rab." He took the harness from Naismith's hands, deftly
looped it around his torso, arms and legs.

"What's this forto protect me from the Zug?" Naismith
demanded.

Rab-Yani gave him an odd look. "It gives some momentary
protection," he said. "Nothing short of a force-field will protect
you against a Zug, however. What this does principally is to
seal off wounds and prevent shock. In that way, you can go on
fighting for another few seconds before you lose consciousness."

Naismith watched grimly as the Entertainer passed the
holster strap around his chest. The projecting gun-butt looked
familiar; he grasped it, drew it half out of the holster.

Yes, it was the samethe massive, powerful grip and barrel.

"That's your flamer," said Rab-Yani. "It projects a spear of
intense flame which cut through even a Zug's hide, if you are
close enough. It is good for three shots before it becomes too
hot to hold."

Naismith thought this over in silence. Behind him, the
excited voices continued; then the sound faded, and suddenly
a ghostly blue bubble floated past him; in it were the two fat
men, staring back at him with onion eyes. The bubble passed
through the wall ahead and disappeared.

"Now the helmet," said Rab-Yani, fitting it onto Naismith's
head. "This contact goes here, on your cheekbone. Clench your
jaw."

Naismith did so, and at once a faintly shimmering disk
appeared, hanging in front of his face from the spike of the
helmet.

"That's for illusions," Rab-Yani said. "The Zug may appear
in some confusing shape, but look through that, and you will
be able to see its real aspect."

Naismith relaxed his jaw; the disk winked out.

"Well, we're ready," the Entertainer said. Two more ghostly
bubbles floated past. In one of them crouched the gnome, who
gave Naismith a malevolent glance before he disappeared.

Turning, Naismith saw Rab join Liss-Yani: he floated close
to her, she touched the controls of the machine she held, and a
blue shadow-sphere formed around them.

The bubble floated nearer: Rab-Yani gestured toward the

gateway in the wall ahead, and Naismith saw that it was now
open, revealing blue-violet depths.

Feeling very much alone, he took a deep breath and floated
through.

The gigantic, deserted corridors of the Old City had a dream-
like familiarity to Naismith: again and again he recognized
places he had encountered before, in his dreams and in the
machine memory the aliens had given him: but they were all
changed, empty, shadowed. Here was a great concourse, on
whose elaborate, fluted central stem Naismith remembered see-
ing a colorful crowd perched, fluttering, coming and going like
a flock of tropical birds: now it was an echoing vault.

Later, they drifted along the tops of hundreds of ranked
cylindrical shells, each twenty feet wide, in whose purple depths
vague, indecipherable shapes could be glimpsed. "The Shefthi
growth cells," Rab commented, drifting close to his bubble.
"You came out of one of those ... do you remember?"

Naismith shook his head. Part of his mind was aware of the
blue bubbles, with their chattering occupants, drifting insub-
stantially around, behind, above him. Another part was listen-
ing to what Rab-Yani said. The rest was fiercely alert for
danger.

"What about youdid you come out of one of those, too?"
he asked abstractedly.

Floating beside Rab in the bubble, Liss-Yani laughed. "No
then he would have been a Shefth! The gravity in those cells
is set at one and seven tenths Earth normal. He would have
too many muscles!" She put her arm around Rab with casual
affection.

The gnome's bubble darted suddenly forward, disappeared
through the solid wall.

"And you abandoned all this, just to get away from the
Zugs?" Naismith asked. "Why?"

"When they mutated, they became very strong and very
intelligent. The Old City is full of tunnels and passages, too
many ever to flush them all out. That's why you Shefthi were
created. We never needed a warrior caste beforenot for
thousands of years."

"If they're so intelligent, why not deal with them?"

Rab gave him a surprised look. "The Zugs are predatory
upon man," he said slowly. "They eat our flesh, and plant their
eggs in our bodies. There are men at this moment, hidden
away down here, paralysed, while Zug larvae grow inside them.
Yes, we could deal with the Zugs, but only on their terms.
Do you think you would like that, Shefth?"

Naismith said stubbornly, "But why try to kill them with
weapons like this?" He touched the gun at his chest. "You

could be safe inside one of those bubbles, shooting them down
with force-rods. They wouldn't have a chance."

Rab exchanged glances with the girl beside him, then looked
around. The other bubbles had spread out; neither was within
earshot.

"Listen to me, Shefth," he said in a low voice. "Are you really
as ignorant of the Zugs as you pretend?"

"I don't remember anything about them," Naismith said
flatly.

"Then you are probably doomed, because Pendell has gone
ahead to find one, and it will not be hard. You must realize this:
these creatures are the fiercest man-killers in the history of the
universe: but they are not mindless animals. If we hunt them
with superior weapons, they stay in hiding. That is why
you have no armor that will protect you for more than an
instant, and no gun more powerful than that one. If you were
trained, there would be one chance in two of success; as it is,
you will have only a few seconds to kill the Zug before it kills
you. It is incredibly fast and agile. It"

He broke off suddenly as the gnome's bubble reappeared
ahead. The expression on the little man's face was one of
malicious triumph.

"Quickly," said Liss-Yani in an urgent voice.

"You must hold your fire until it is almost upon you," Rab
finished tensely. "It will dodge your first flame and come at
you from a different direction. Your only chance is to antici-
pate that direction, and"

A scattered chorus of shouts broke out from the bubbles
behind them. Tense, hand on his gun, Naismith stared around.

What he saw was nothing more frightening than a small bald
man in white robes, who had just entered the corridor from a
narrow opening ahead. His pale blue eyes stared across at
Naismith without expression; then he turned and was gone.

"Now the Zug will certainly come," Rab muttered. "That
was a scout."

"A man?" Naismith asked incredulously. "There are human
beings serving them?"

"I told you," Rab began, then stopped abruptly. From the
opening ahead, something else had emerged into view.

Naismith's hand slapped his chest instinctively, came up with
the cool metal of the gun, even as his mind registered the
incongruity of what he was seeing. The thing that was now
hurtling toward him with incredible speed, winged, glittering,
was no Zugit was an angel.

Naismith had an impression of blazing eyes, a manlike face
of inhuman beauty, powerful arms outstretched.

In that frozen moment, he was aware of the passengers in the
bubbles, all facing around, bright-eyed, intent, like spectators

at a boxing match. He saw the gnome's bubble begin to move.
Then his jaws clenched, and the view-disk sprang into being
in front of his face. The angel disappeared; in its place was
a many-legged monster, red-eyed, clawed and hideous.

"Zug!" shouted the voices around him. Then the beast was
upon him.

Naismith fired. A spear of flame shot out of the pistol, blue-
bright, twenty feet long. The monster wheeled in mid-air,
seemed to vanish.

Naismith whirled desperately, knowing as he brought his
gun around that he had no chance. He saw the gnome hanging
close behind him in his blue bubble, almost close enough to
touch.

There was no time for conscious thought: he simply knew.
The gun fired in his hand: the lance of flame shot out, straight
through the gnome's insubstantial body.

A wailing chorus went up. The gnome, unharmed, whirled
to look behind him. Then he began to howl with fury.

Drifting in the air, its huge body still writhing, armored tail
lashing, the Zug lay with its massive head cut half from its
body, and a trail of violet-red blood streaming from the wound.

The spectators in their bubbles began to close in, shouting
with excitement. Rab and Liss-Yani were hugging each other.

Naismith felt himself begin to tremble. It was over; he was
still alive.

"How did you do it?" How did you ever do it?" shouted one
of the candy-striped fat men, edging nearer, cheeks shining
with pleasure.

"Pendell was too close," Naismith said with an effort. "He
came up behind me, knowing the Zug would use him for
cover." He took a deep breath, and smiled at the gnome.
"Thank you," he said.

Pendell flinched as if he had been struck; his face writhed.
As laughter burst out around him, he turned and darted away.

The view-disk in front of Naismith's helmet had winked out
again. Curious, he turned to look at the Zug: and where the
monster had been a moment before, an angel lay slain.

The pale head, half severed, was noble and beautiful; the
eyes stared blindly. The great limbs tensed spasmodically; the
sharp tail curled up and then was still.

Chapter Fifteen

Naismith was dreaming. Part of his mind knew that his body
was afloat, curled up in mid-air in the green-walled cubicle;
another part was drifting through dream images, memories,
distorted and menacingthe pale Zug, more horrible than in
life, with fangs and gleaming eyes, looming toward him, while
he hung paralysed, unable to reach for the gun . . .

Naismith groaned, trying to awaken. The image faded. Now
he was wandering through the deserted corridors of the Old
City, somehow confused and blurred together with the cor-
ridors of the spaceship. The greenish faces of Lall and Churan
floated into view; they were dead, their dull eyes turned up.

And a part of his mind, separate from the other two, was
watching in fascinated horror as a door trembled, about to
open.

The crack widened. In the darkness, something stirred, came
into view ...

Naismith awoke, with his own hoarse cry echoing in his
ears.

His clothing was sweat-sodden; his head ached, and he was
trembling all over. A shout echoed in the distance, outside the
cubicle. For a moment he wondered if he were still dreaming:
then the sound came again. It was a shout of alarm, or fear.
Other voices answered it; then came a rolling, rumbling
avalanche of soundan explosion!

Naismith gathered himself and shot to the doorway, looked
put. A man of the Entertainer caste, armed and helmeted, face
intent, went by down the corridor.

"What is happening?" Naismith called after him, but the man
was gone.

On the way to the social room, he passed two groups of
hurrying automatic guns, their red lenses aglow; the second
was accompanied by a robot, which did not respond to his
questions. Somewhere, very distant, sounded the rumble of
another explosion.

The huge globular hall was filled with motion: People were
rushing in all directions, interfering with each other, often
colliding. Robots and automatic guns were everywhere. There
were a few greenskinned servants, all with the metal collars
around their necks, all with wild, stunned expressions. He

passed one male greenskin who was arguing or pleading with
a stout man in white. The man, who was carrying a viewscreen
on which a tiny picture was visible, shifted a few yards away
from the servant, not looking at him; the servant followed, still
talking, and so they moved jerkily across the hall. Naismith
drifted after them and listened.

"... to kill me like this," the greenskin was saying in a hoarse,
indistinct voice. "Tell them not to do it, please tell them"

"Leave me alone," muttered the man, gazing into his view-
screen. He moved away again. Again the servant followed.

"Don't let them kill me, that's all I ask," he said thickly. "I'll
do anything, I'll be good, I'll never be slow when you call
againjust please tell them"

Without speaking or looking up, the man moved away. The
servant fell silent and gazed after him. His heavy face turned
blank; then he shuddered, his face darkened, his muddy eyes
bulged. With an inarticulate sound, he launched himself
through the air, arms outstretched.

He never reached the man in white. In mid-air, his head
suddenly dropped, his body went limp. He floated, turning
slowly, past the man in white, who did not even glance up.

From the back of the metal collar around the dead green-
skin's neck, a thin trickle of blood crept into sight.

Naismith turned, went on his way. Here and there in the
huge space, he saw other drifting, greenskinned bodies. One or
two were being towed away by sarcophagus robots; the rest
were being ignored.

He noticed, too, that the man in white was not the only one
with a viewscreen. Almost every member of the ruling caste
had one; and where the people clustered thickly, he discovered,
they were watching larger screens that hung in the air.

Naismith moved on. Movement flowed around him, voices
called in excitement; once he saw an Entertainer with a bloody
face being carried past by a robot. But it was all dreamlike,
distant.

What was wrong with him? He felt a tension in himself that
was slowly, steadily increasing, and it seemed to him that it had
been building continuously all this while, ever since that first
day in the multiple classroom in Los Angeles. Every step, from
the death of Ramsdell, his imprisonment, then Wells' murder
. . . traveling forward with the two aliens, the buried space-
ship, all the way to the City . . . that tension had been
remorselessly growing inside him. He felt as if his body were
being physically distended by it, till he must burst if he could
not find relief. His forehead was sweating; there was a tremor
in his arms. Something inside him . . . that buried mystery, the
thing that had taken over in the psychiatrist's office, and again
in Prell's laboratory . . . the black secret of his being. .. .

He felt as if the door were about to open, and as if its
opening would destroy him.

"Shefth, what's the matter with you?"

He looked up. It was a fat little man in brown and green
stripes, gazing at him with anxious eyes. The shrill voice went
on, "Don't you know the Highborn has been asking for you?
Where have you been? Come along, hurry!"

Naismith followed toward the center of the hall, where the
largest cluster was located. As they made their way slowly
through the close-packed, moving bodies, the little man panted
back at him, "Hurry, hurryshe wants you there before it
happens!"

"Before what happens?" Naismith asked dully. The pressure
inside him was so great that he could scarcely breathe. His
head ached, his hands were cold.

"The Barrier!" the little man shrilled. "They are going to
put up the Barrier any minute! Hurry!"

Squeezing his way through the inner ring, Naismith came
into view of the fat woman and her entourage, gathered
around a row of big circular screens. One showed a view of the
time-laboratory workrooms, with a gnome in the foreground
Pendell, or another just like him. The fat woman was scream-
ing hysterically, "Isn't it ready yet? How soon, then, how soon?"

"A few minutes, Highborn."

"Why can't you be more specific? A few minutes, a few
minuteshow many?"

"By my estimate, not more than five," said the gnome. His
face was strained; he was giving part of his attention to the
aristarch, part to a control box he held in his hands.

"But I want to know exactly" the fat woman shrilled. Her
eyes were mad in her yellow face. "Go forward in time and
find out, as I asked you to before!"

The hawk-faced man drifted up and said, "That would pinch
out the loop, Highborn. It is contrary to the basic laws of time."

"Pinch out the loop, pinch out the loop, that's all I hear!"
the old woman screamed. "I'm tired of it, tired of it! How
many minutes now?"

"Perhaps three," said the gnome, tight-lipped.

"Highborn, the trap worked!" said a grime-streaked Enter-
tainer, darting up, his face jubilant. "The Uglies were destroyed
we have their time vehicle!"

"Good!" said the fat woman, looking momentarily pleased.
"How many does that leave?"

The men beside her turned toward one of the floating
screens, in which nothing showed but a scattering of greenish
points of light. As Naismith watched, a few winked out, here
and there.

The nearest man touched the edge of the screen, peered at

the numbers that appeared at the bottom. "Seven hundred
fifty-three, Highborn," he said.

"Good! And how many Zugs?"

The group's attention turned to another, similar screen, in
which the dots of light glowed sullen red. "The same as before,
Highborn," said a man. "Five hundred eighty-seven."

The old woman snorted with indignation. "Still so many?"
she said. "Why, I say why?"

"The Barrier will kill them, Highborn," Hawknose reminded
her gently.

"Then how long is it till the Barrier?" she demanded.

"Less than one minute," said the gnome. Drops of sweat
stood on his brow.

In his mounting distress, it seemed to Naismith that the
whole great gathering had turned sordid and ugly, the colors
dulled; even the air he breathed smelled overperfumed and
fetid. This was a sorry climax to the drama of the human race,
he thoughtthis pampered oligarchy of piggish little men and
women, selfish, ignorant and stupidless worthy to survive
than the Entertainers who amused them, or even the neuras-
thenic technicians who kept their city functioning. And now
there would be no threat to their dominion, for ever and ever
. . . That, somehow, was the most intolerable idea of all.

"Ready!" the gnome snapped. His eyes gleamed with excite-
ment as he glanced around. Behind him in the darkness, Nai-
smith could see the other technicians floating beside their
machines, all with faces upturned toward Pendell.

"Now!" said the gnome harshly, and his fingers touched the
control box.

Naismith felt an instant's violent and inexplicable alarm.
Something seemed to compress his lungs; a band of pain
clamped around his forehead.

Shouts of excitement echoed in his ears. All across the vast
space, men and women in gaudy costumes were swirling about
each other in rapid motion.

"How many Uglies left?" the old woman cried. "How many,
I say how many?"

"None, Highborn!" a man called triumphantly. In the screen,
every green light had winked out.

Glancing across the hall, Naismith saw many drifting green-
skinned corpses, but not one living servant.

"And how many Zugs?" called the old woman.

A hush fell. In the second screen, one ruddy light was still
burning.

"One," said the nearest man reluctantly. "One Zug left alive,
Highborn."

"Fool!" she screamed at Pendell. "Fool, fool! How could
you be so careless? Why didn't your Barrier kill them all?"

"I don't know, Highborn," the gnome said. His face
twitched; he blinked, rubbed his thin arms with his hands. "In
theory it is impossible, but"

"But there it is!" she shouted. "Well, what are you going to
do? How can we be safe if there's a Zug still alive? Where is
that Shefth? I say where is he?"

Several hands thrust Naismith forward. "Here, Highborn."

"Well?" she demanded, whirling, her mad eyes staring into
his. "Well? Are you going to kill it? What are you waiting
for?"

Naismith tried to speak, and failed. His body was on fire
with pain; he could barely see.

"What's the matter with him?" the old woman squalled. "I
say what's the matter?"

Hands probed his body. Dimly he heard the hawk-nosed
man's voice: "Are you ill?"

Naismith managed to nod.

"Look at him, just look!" the old woman shouted. "What
good is he now? Put a death collar on him and be done with
it!"

"But the Zug, Highborn!" called an anxious voice. "Who
will kill the Zug?"

"Put the collar on him, I say!" the woman's hysterical voice
railed on. "I can't stand the sight of him. Put the collar on
himkill him, kill him!"

Naismith felt a moment of intolerable tension, then a sud-
den release. He was afloat in darkness, safe, protected.

The woman's shout seemed to echo from a distance. "Well,
why don't you put the collar on?"

A pause. Another voice answered: "Highborn, this man is
dead."

Chapter Sixteen

In the darkness, the being who knew himself as Naismith
awakened. Memory returned. He knew where he was, and
what he was.

He was alive, though the rapidly cooling body in which he
lay was not. He could remember, now, with utter clarity, all
the things it had been necessary for "Naismith" to forget.

He remembered killing Wells. Earlier, he remembered stand-

ing beside the wreckage of a bomber, and coolly selecting the
dog tags of one of its crewmen, the one who most resembled
him in age and height: dog tags that read "NAISMITH,
GORDON."

He remembered stripping the body, carrying it on his
shoulders to a ravine, throwing it in and covering it with
boulders....

Earlier still, he remembered his first grublike awareness
warmth, protection, motion. He had put out pseudoganglions,
first cautiously, then with gathering sureness and skill. He had
linked his own nervous system with that of his host, a Shefthi
warrior returning belatedly from a Zug hunt.

Then he could see, feel, hear, with his host's human senses.

He was inside the Shefth: he was the Shefth. . . .

With grim satisfaction, he realized that the game was over,
the long-maturing plan had been successful. His knowledge of
his own kind came only from human sources, but logic alone
made it certain that he represented his species' counterblow to
the humans' Barrier. Encysted in a human body, his mind
radiations mingled with those of a human brain, he alone of
all his kind could pass through that Barrier. He was the one
surviving Zug: he himself was the monster he had been sent to
kill.

Now, as his strength returned, he was aware of motion. The
host-body was being towed off out of the way, probably by a
robot. He waited, tensely, until the motion was arrested and
the sounds of voices diminished. It was evident that he had
been taken out of the great hall, into some smaller chamber.

He waited again, to make sure, but there was no further
movement.

Ever since the host-body died, he had been injecting desic-
cants into it to harden it and make it brittle along the center
line of the torso. Now he stretched himself, applied pressure:
and the body split. Light came into his prison.

For the first time, he saw with his own eyes; and he was
dazzled. The world was so much more brilliant and beautiful
than human senses could convey!

Now he saw that he was floating in a small, bare cubicle,
among the corpses of dozens of greenskins.

Carefully he drew himself out of the hollow he had made in
the body of his host. He felt his limbs and wings stretching in
the air, hardening.

A fresh babble of voices came from outside the cubicle. He
gripped the empty host-body and drew it quickly to the back of
the room, hiding it behind the other floating bodies. A moment
later, there was a commotion: a body crashed heavily into the
room, followed by another. The first was babbling in a thin,
terrified voice, "No, no, no ..."

He risked a glance. A robot, as he watched, was affixing a
death collar to the scrawny neck of a technician. Its task done,
the robot turned and floated away. It was carrying a cluster of
the metal collars, which jangled faintly as it moved.

The technician, left behind, tugged vainly at his collar. Tears
glittered in the little man's eyes. With a choked sound, after a
moment, he turned and followed the robot.

The being who called himself Naismith waited grimly. Now
that the Shefthi and the greenskins were gone, the City's rulers
were evidently making sure of the techniciansperhaps of the
Entertainers as well. However that might be, Naismith waited
because he had to. -

During these first few minutes, he was vulnerable and weak,
easy prey for any determined man with a weapon.

At intervals, cautiously, he tested his wings. The curved ribs
were hardening, the membranes drying. He flexed his grasping
members, watching the armored segments slide in their casings.
Strength and alertness began to flow into his body. Soon

His thoughts broke off abruptly as another robot entered the
chamber. Naismith felt a tug, and saw the greenskinned bodies
around him bob and wheel, as they followed the robot out into
the corridor.

Naismith went along, caught in the same web of force. Out-
side, he saw that his small group of bodies was being joined to
a much larger one. All the greenskinned corpses, evidently,
were being brought together for disposal. Naismith could have
broken free of fee weak attraction that held him, but he ran
less chance of detection in staying where he was. Besides, if
his idea of bis whereabouts was correct, the procession was
headed where he wanted to go.

Other groups of bodies were added as they went, but always
at the head of the procession, and it was not until they crossed
a large spherical hall that anyone noticed Naismith.

"Looka Zug, isn't it?" an effete voice remarked. "How
frightening, even dead as it is!"

"Yes, and imagine that we aren't even seeing its true form,"
another voice replied. The sound faded as the procession moved
on. "If we had a viewer to look at it with" A pause. "But,
Willot, what is a dead Zug doing here, in the New City?"

Naismith waited no longer. With a surge of his wings, he
was out of the cluster of bodies, darting straight across the hall
toward the nearest doorway.

Shouts echoed behind him as he gathered speed. Ahead, a
little group of gorgeously dressed fat men blundered squarely
into his path. He burst through them like a rocket, sending
them flying with bruised limbs and broken bones.

Then he was at the doorway, thinking his destination. He
dove through, into the workrooms of the technicians.

Here everything was confusionmachines unattended and
adrift, unidentifiable instruments floating in clusters. A few
technicians were visible, most of them wearing the death
collars. Of the few who were still without them, one was being
pursued, shrieking, by a robot.

The dim memories of his last sleep were now clear. Nai-
smith remembered stealing out of the cubicle, going to the
workrooms, capturing and subduing one of the technicians. He
had put a mind helmet on the little man, had forced out of him
the one secret he wanted to know.

Now he headed directly for one small doorway, half-hidden
behind floating machines. He opened it with a thought, dived
in.

There was a gnome before him in the narrow, blind tube. He
had the rear panel already open, and was fingering the controls.
He turned a snarling face as Naismith entered; then his eyes
widened, his face paled.

Naismith killed him with one blow, pushed his body aside,
and turned his attention to the control board.

Here, carefully concealed and guarded, was the central
control system for all the automatic devices that made life
possible in the Cityair generators, synthesizers, automatic
weapons, robots.

Naismith examined the control disks carefully. Some had
the death symbol on them, meaning their settings could not be
altered without killing the operatoran underling would have
to be sacrificed for each such adjustment. These were the
controls for the force-fields which made up the walls of the
New City; the precaution was understandable.

Others, of a slightly different color, also bore the death
symbol, but in these cases it was a bluff, and Naismith touched
them without hesitation. He turned off all the automatic
weapons in the City, neutralized the robots, and opened the
gateways between the Old and New Cities. Then, working more
slowly, he opened the panel and altered the thought signals
required to approach the control board. Now only he could
make any further changes in its settings.

He was hungry, so he made a light snack from the food he
found in the corridor. Then, at his leisure, he went back the
way he had come and began the tour of the City.

Everywhere, the Lenlu Din gawked at him with pasty faces,
all silent, all shaking. Those nearest the doorways fled in a
panic when they saw him enter: the rest did not even try to
escape, but only hung where they were, passive, staring.

He paused to examine his reflection in the silvery disk of a
mirror. It was strange, and yet perfectly natural, to look at
himself and see this pale, unearthly figure, with its blazing eyes
in the inhuman mask of the face. He flexed his great arms, and

the smaller grasping members; then the tail, watching the
sharp sting emerge.

He moved on, giving new orders to the robots as he went.
In the social room he came upon a little group of fat men
frantically at work upon an instrument he recognized.

They scattered as he approached, and he read the message
they had been trying to send into the past: "DANGER
ONE ZUG ALIVE. DO NOT SEND SHEFTH." The
machine was glowing, the message incomplete. He turned it
off, and went on his way.

He was here, nothing they could do could alter that. That
had been obvious from the beginning: but let them try.

The vast concourses and galleries of the New City absorbed
his attention; he was beginning to catalogue the treasures of
his new domain, a task that would occupy many months. Yet
the silent throngs, the glittering color, the miles of records and
information capsules, did not please him as they should. After
a long time he realized what the trouble was. It was the phan-
tom personality of the man, Naismith. It was oppressive, as if
he were wearing an invisible overcoat. Irritably he tried to
shrug it off, but it stayed.

Now that he was aware of it, the feeling was more annoying
than ever. He stopped and floated still, appalled. Every thought,
every feeling that Naismith had had during the months their
minds were linked together was recorded in his brain. It was
not merely that he remembered Naismith: he war Naismith.
He was a member of the race of conquerors; and he was also
a man.

He made a violent mental effort to throw off that phantom
mind, but the thing clung to him stubbornly, like the ghost of
an amputated limb. It was no use telling himself that Naismith
was dead. Naismith's ghost was in his mindno, not even a
ghost; his living personality.

He whirled in sudden anger, and the fat little people scat-
tered around him. Were these the rulers of Earth's ultimate
City, the inheritors of four hundred thousand years of human
evolution? These puffed little parasites, selfish, neurotic and
cruel?

Their race produced some great men, Naismith's voice said
soberly in his mind.

There are none among these! he answered. Nor will they
ever produce any, if they live a million years.

Not under your rule.

And if I had left them to themselves, what thenwould
they have done any better?

No, there is no hope for them, nor perhaps even for the
technicians. But there is hope for the Entertainers.

Pride stiffened his body. They are my property.

They are human beings.

In doubt and confusion, he turned to the nearest robot, a
sarcophagus-shape with geometric figures inscribed in red on a
gold and silver ground. "Tell me briefly, what is a human
being?"

The robot whirred, hummed. "A human being," it said, 'is
a potentiality."

After a moment, he gestured. The robot bowed and drifted
away.

The Entertainers deserve their chance, Naismith's voice said.

No.

He turned as another robot floated up: he recognized it as
one he had sent into the Old City on an errand.

"Lord, I found no Masters alive, but I have taken eggs from
their bodies as you ordered. They are under the care of the
technicians in the biological laboratories."

He made a sign of dismissal and the robot went away. He
went on with his tour of inspection. Everywhere, the eyes of
the little fat people stared at him in dull misery.

Woe to the vanquished, said a voice in his brain: was it -his
own, or Naismith's?

With a sense of panic, he discovered that he could not tell
the difference. The two were one.

He was all triumph and mastery; yet he was all commisera-
tion, all regret.

Give them their lives, and their chance, said the voice.

Where?

Where but on Earth?

    Naismith hung frozen for a moment, remembering the sea
of grass, under the cloud-dotted sky.

A little man in white drifted up. "Master, are there any
orders?"

"Yes. Find me the Entertainers Liss and Rab." As the human
bobbed his head and darted off, Naismith beckoned the nearest
robot. "Bring me a vehicle."

Still, when the robot had gone, he hung in the air, oblivious
to the color and movement around him, astonished by the
purpose that was in his mind. Could a Zug feel this passion of
mercy, and remain a Zug?

The robot came first with the control box, then the Enter-
tainers, looking frightened and desperate.

Naismith took the control box. "Come near, and don't be
afraid," he said to the Entertainers. "We are going to Earth."

"To Earth? I don't understand," said Liss-Yani.

"Are you going to exile us there?" Rab burst out. He turned
to the girl. "Let him do it," he said fiercely. "It's better than
staying here to be food for him."

Liss-Yani's face paled. After a moment, she stepped nearer,

and Rab followed. Naismith touched the controls. The blue-
tinted bubble of force sprang up around them; the hall drifted
away. They passed through one partition, then another ... then
a third, and they were in space, under the cold majesty of the
stars.

They stood on the grassy plain just at dawn, when the
greenish-blue sky to eastward was lit with yellow fires along
the horizon, and the sun bulged up red as a blood-orange above
the mountains.

Naismith switched off the bubble. The two entertainers
looked at him without expression, then turned and began to
walk away through the wet grass. After a moment they linked
hands.

"Wait," Naismith called after them. They turned. "How far
does the influence of this machine extend?"

"About half a mile," the girl said dully.

"Then if I take it farther away than thator, better, if I
remove it in timeyou will die?"

"You know we will."

"Then watch." Naismith touched the controls, forming the
bubble. He depressed and rotated the time control gently.

The two silent figures vanished; the plain writhed, darkened,
glowed with sunlight, darkened again. Touching it more gently,
Naismith turned the control the other way. The same sequence
unrolled in reverse, like a film strip run backward.

The two figures appeared once more, then a thirdNaismith
himself, wings busy as he hovered in air, his grasping members
holding the machine.

Invisible in the bubble, he watched himself leave. He saw
the two Entertainers stiffen, saw them clutch each other. After
a moment he saw them separate, open their eyes, look around
in wonder.

Still he waited, until they dared to walk a few steps into the
grass, calling to each other, breathing deep. Dawn was diffus-
ing half the sky; across the plain, birdsong echoed.

Naismith lowered the bubble, brought it into phase and
turned it off. The two humans did not even see him.

"LissRab!" he called.

They turned, with incredulous faces. "It didn't kill us!" said
Liss-Yani. "Is this real?"

"It is real," he told her.

"But then" she whispered, and fell silent.

"They said that you Zugs made the illusion," said Rab.

"They also told you we were hideous monsters," Naismith
replied drily. "Which is easierto make an illusion you can see
with your own eyes, or to make one that can only be seen
through a 'viewer'?"

They stared at him. "This is your true form?" Liss-Yani
ventured.

"It is my only form."

"And all this is real?"

Naismith did not reply. They were a pretty pair, he was
thinking, especially the female; it would be interesting to breed
them and see He checked himself. Was that the Zug's thought,
or the man's?

It was neither, he realized, but a blend ... and how curious
to think that this detached pleasure, half cool, half warm, was
possible only to the mythological creature he had become....

"But why would they do this?" Rab asked.

"Tell me, when you left the City on their errands, did you
ever think of staying on Earth?"

"Yes, often," said Liss, her eyes glinting.

"Why didn't you do so?"

"If we had stayed in the past, that would have changed
history, changed the Cityso it was impossibleit would have
pinched out the loop."

"And why didn't you settle here, in your own present?"

The two looked at each other. "Because they made us think
it was a wasteland," Rab said.

Naismith inclined his head. "We will go back to the City
now," he said. "You will tell the other Entertainers, gather
them all together. I will give you vehicles, tools, records,
everything you need."

They came toward him slowly. "But why are you doing
this?" Liss asked.

"You would not understand," said Naismith.

... In truth, he hardly understood himself. But as he moved
through the glittering throng in the great hall, listening to the
music and the voices, seeing the respectful looks on the faces
of the Lenlu Din when they glanced his way, it seemed to
Naismith that somehow, through accident and willfulness, he
had woven himself precisely and symmetrically into the grand
design.

Always, he thought, the universe tended to strike a balance
between two excesses: long life and short, intelligence and
mindlessness, mercy and cruelty. The tapestry unrolled, and
there was never an end to it.

"Lord," said a robot, drifting up, "the last of the Lenlu Din
are being processed now in the gold chamber. In one hour they
will all have been treated, as you ordered."

Naismith dismissed it, and watched it float among the idle
pleasure-seekers. He was pleasantly hungry; in half an hour it
would be time to eat. After all, this way was best. In the old

days, a Zug would have leaped upon his victim and devoured
it on the spot. Now ...

A few hundred yards away, from the midst of a large group,
he heard the screeching of the old woman, the Highborn,
hysterical and angry as ever. Other voices were soothing her.
All was normal, all was for the best in this best of worlds.

Naismith drifted over; the gaily dressed little people parted
respectfully to let him through. Even the mad old woman
interrupted her screeching to bob her head.

"Highborn," said Naismith, "have you forgotten that you
are about to retire for extended meditation?"

"I am? Am I?" she said uncertainly. "When am I going?"

"Almost immediately," Naismith told her gently, and beck-
oned to a passing robot. "Show the Highborn to her chambers."

"But won't that be unpleasant?" she asked, letting herself be
led away.

"You will not mind it at all," Naismith promised her, and
floated off in another direction.

Three fat little men, arms linked, drifted across his path with
respectful glances. To them, he was no monster, but a revered
counsellor and guide. The absence of the Entertainers did not
strike them as odd: Drugged and hypnotized, they had forgotten
there had ever been such a caste, or any other state of things.

They were cattle.

Was this mercy? Then a Zug could be merciful. Was it
cruelty? Then there was cruelty in a man....

The game, Naismith realized now, was not over. The pattern
was still unfolding, in this small and unimportant corner of the
universe of stars.

Here, in the closed world of the City, he tasted triumph
dominion was his. Yet it was good to know that down there on
Earth, the human species was still free, still evolving in its
pattern.

It was pleasant to think that in a thousand years, or ten
thousand, Zug and Man might meet again, and this time blend
their powers into something greater. It would take that long,
or longer; Naismith and his kind could afford to wait.

For God is not born in a day.

