Front matter

As atomic weapons from space laid waste to Earth's cities, Alan Rackham searched for the traitors. Was it possible he sought himself?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy October 1952 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

They tried to kill Alan Rackham about an hour after he had seen the accident. They bungled the job. They shot at him from ambush—with an ordinary automatic pistol—as he was walking up to his house; and Brave, who had a sixth sense for danger which never failed him, knocked Alan over at the very instant of the shot and sprawled across him, a great solid shield holding him down and protecting him despite his angry wrigglings. Brave's grenade pistol was in his hand before the two of them hit ground, and he sent four quick shots at the bushes, spaced so that the tiny hot fragments tore hell out of thirty yards of shrubbery. Nobody yelled or groaned. Brave waited a full minute, and then he rose cautiously, so that Alan could sit up and brush himself off and swear as he spat out dirt. They went into the house and Alan reported the assassination attempt to his immediate superior, Dr. Getty. After that they didn't try again to kill Alan for a long time.

The accident had been uncanny. It happened in the room where the shells of the silver-colored disks were fitted together and welded, before they were sent to the gargantuan baths that half-melted them again to rechill them into solid masses of metal which nothing short of a direct hit by a blockbuster would crack.

A welder, using one of the newly-developed torches that made the old ones seem like match-flares by comparison, dropped it accidentally. Its flame licked up and sprayed across the man's right hand. It melted the protective glove like ice cream on a stove; crisped away the skin and liquefied the flesh, charred the bones black and left the welder no more than half a palm and two fingers before he could jerk his hand out of the terrible blast of fire.

Alan and Brave were standing about twelve feet off, and there could be no mistake as to what they saw then.

The welder turned off his torch with his left hand; he held the remains of his right before his face, turned it and stared at it (the blood coursing in little sluggish streams down the forearm, the charcoal that had been bone sifting off into the air, the flesh a greasy yellow-red mass like candle drippings), and he shook his head slowly, an expression of annoyed mortification on his face. It was as though he had cut himself while shaving, no more. He was simply piqued, when he should have been shrieking with horror and unendurable pain.

Alan and Brave ran to him. "My God, man," said Alan, shaken, "let me get you to infirmary."

The welder stood up. "That's all right, Dr. Rackham. I can go myself. This don't hurt." And then a curious look spread over his face, as if he had just recollected a lesson taught him long ago. "It don't hurt much," he amended. "I guess it's cauterized so bad I can't feel it yet. Don't you worry, sir, I can make it."

He walked away, perfectly steady, carrying the almost destroyed hand in front of his chest; and Alan was so dumbfounded he let him go.

The welder never reached the infirmary. No man saw him again, alive or dead.

So an hour thereafter someone took a shot at Alan Rackham. Since Brave had witnessed the accident too, and because neither of them could account for the shooting except in connection with that strange accident, it seemed stupid and pointless for an attempt to be made on Alan's life alone; especially when a grenade pistol, one of those lean evil handguns developed in 1959, would with one shot have cut an eight-yard-wide swath in everything before it and eliminated both of them. But there it was. They shot at Alan with an automatic—the bullet nicked across his chest and spoiled a blue coat that was practically new—and then they disappeared.

Alan's house, which he shared with Brave, was a four-room brick atop a knoll on the outskirts of the colony. It was a perfect bachelor establishment; the precipitron kept it free of dust and Brave's innate neatness overcame Alan's careless disregard of surroundings to the extent that dirty socks and unpressed trousers were not often to be met with lying in corners or hanging over the backs of chairs. Brave was a good everyday cook and Alan occasionally took a couple of hours off to chef up a New Orleans style banquet for two. The living room was lined with books and the plastiglassed-in lounging quarters in the rear held racks of pipes and a well-stocked bar. They were very comfortable there. It was only a ten-minute walk from Alan's laboratory, and four minutes' ride from the center of the colony.

The colony was called Project Star. It was located on Long Island, protected much as Oak Ridge had been in the '40s and '50s, and Project Bellona in the early '60s; with electrified fences, and soldiers carrying the latest weapons, and a ring of grotesque machinery all around it, comprised of radar detectors and great ack-ack guns and a number of generators that threw up a kind of primitive, partly-effective force field. The force field would stop any aircraft or at least cause it enough trouble to slow it down for the ack-ack.

Of course the artificial satellite, Albertus (named in honor of Dr. Einstein), kept a watchful telescope on Project Star. But in that year of 1970 it seemed to most men that all the caution and secrecy was overly dramatic. After the collapse of Soviet Russia a decade before, from internal causes precipitated by the successful fixing of the American-controlled satellite Albertus in the heavens, and after the almost Carthaginian peace imposed on Argentina when its dictator A-bombed London, the world had quieted down considerably. America was top dog in the nations and her supervision of the science of other countries left little possibility of successful attack or even of effective sabotage within the many colonies which worked on advancements in weapons and other civilized phenomena, and on space flight.

Nearly everyone believed that the purpose of Project Star was to construct "flying saucers" (the inadequate name had stuck through the years) for use in reaching out to the other planets. Only the men who were working there, and a few others in government and in the military forces, knew that the disks were not intended for extra-terrestrial flight—there were rocket projects galore for that—but for journeys in the atmosphere or slightly above it, at speeds incredible even in 1970. The name Project Star had not been chosen to mislead anyone, but it had done so and nobody bothered to correct the impression. Secrecy had become an ingrained national habit in the past thirty-odd years.

Dr. Alan Rackham was one of the scientists who worked on the problem of fuel for the disks. He was not a member of the vastly important handful who headed the colony and came equipped with everything sacred and untouchable except halos, but he was considered of enough consequence to rate a house of his own and an assistant who was also an efficient bodyguard. This was Brave, whose proper name was John Kiwanawatiwa.

Brave sat down in his own chair, a sturdy specially-built job, while Alan called Dr. Getty on the visiphone to report the shooting. Brave never sprawled out or slouched as his superior did. He sat straight, a red-copper-colored man built to the scale of a Greek statue, about half again life size. His arms and legs were tough as cable steel, his chest a brawny barrel. He was a Navajo Indian, but his features were more nearly those of a Sioux: a great finely-formed crag of a nose, thin straight lips over white teeth, dark eyes that a hawk might envy their piercing power, a wolf-trap jaw. His speech was that of an M.S. of Carlisle and Oxford, except when he spoke with people he did not know or like; then it became a parody of the nineteenth-century storybook red man's gutteral discourse. At times, when he went with Alan to meetings of the hierarchy (a few of whom, including Dr. Getty, he cordially detested for their bland self-importance), he even wore a bedraggled chicken feather sticking upright in his black hair, stood behind Alan with folded arms and a fierce expression and confined his remarks to "Ugh" and "Waugh." This gave both Alan and himself a great deal of innocent pleasure.

For Alan Rackham was also a rebel against stuffiness and conceit. He was a perfectly normal-looking man, of slightly more than middle height, thirty-one years old, handsome enough if you liked lean bony features and unruly brown hair; his muscular development was so unobtrusive that no one ever guessed he had been a Marine and won himself a DSC in Argentina. He enjoyed his work at Project Star, for he had a scientist's inquiring mind; but he liked even more the huge Indian with whom he lived, the girl in the metallurgy section who wore his engagement ring, and the book of rather impudent philosophy on which he worked during his free evenings.

He also loved a long drink, a thoughtful pipe, an involved practical joke, and the moody Siamese cat, Unquote.

Now he turned from the visiphone, as the image of Dr. Getty faded out on its screen, and he frowned at Brave. "Son," he said, "why would anybody take a potshot at me?"

"What does Doc Pomposity say about it?" rumbled the Indian.

"Mainly blah, blah, blah."

"Naturally," nodded Brave. "You know, sagamore, I think it's that accident. There was something cockeyed about it.... I don't care how shocked the fellow was, or how quickly the flame seared up and anesthetized the wound; there should have been plenty of pain in that hand. And he didn't even yip when it happened. He only looked peeved."

"Getty says he never got to infirmary. No one has seen him at all."

"Cockeyed," said Brave again. "The whole thing's a muddle." He stared at Alan. "Boss, I have an instinct that warns me we're in for trouble."

"That's an instinct? When I get shot at, this gives you an instinct?"

"The noble red man has an instinct," said Brave imperturbably, "which sits in his belly and beats on a tomtom when trouble's coming. I don't mean ghastly wounds that don't make men cry out, or even lunatics laying for you thereafter—and there's a connection between the two, that's sure. But I mean big trouble. There's something in the air. I can't quite catch it, but it's been there for a long time. Weeks and months, sirdar."

"You've been reading the thesaurus again. You know more synonyms for 'master' than Roget. You mean this seriously, Brave? About trouble?" He had a respect for the Indian's intuition which was based half on his anthropological knowledge of the weird powers of certain older races, and half on pure human superstition; at times when Brave made his predictions, Alan felt as though a gypsy crone had passed by him and whispered some incantation in his ear.

"I mean it, Alan. And the damned instinct has never been wrong yet. It's beating in my guts right now like it did at Campana just before hell broke loose."

"Well, batten down the hatches, then," said Alan resignedly, while the hair on the back of his neck prickled and tried to stand up. "It's got itself off to a fine start, your trouble. My tailor will never be able to mend this jacket."

"Why don't you cook us some oysters Rockefeller and lobster thermidor and all that Frenchified goop you brew up?" suggested Brave. "If we're in for afflictions, we may as well meet 'em with pleasantly full stomachs."

"Right. While I'm at it, you write a report of the incident—of both of them—and sign my name. Getty'll never know the difference. He thinks you haven't mastered Basic English yet."

"Ugh," said Brave. "Noble red man will inscribe li'l pictures on birchbark for medicine man, while medicine man raises cain in frozen food locker. Don't get that sauce too thin this time, patriarch. I can't bear watery sauce on my lobsters."

CHAPTER II

Next morning, while Alan was still dressing and yawning, and Brave was clattering skillets in the kitchen, humming the allegro con passionato movement from "Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah," the door chimes bonged softly. Brave went to the spywindow, surveyed the caller, and shifted his grenade pistol to a handier position before opening the door. A stranger stood on the threshold.

"Ichabod Crane," said Brave to himself, and aloud, "Yes?"

"Ah," said the stranger, "you would be the tough egg with the unpronounceable name. Greetings, chieftain."

"How," said Brave with a straight face. "You want-um audience with great sachem?"

"That I do, Lo."

"Oh, gad," groaned the Indian, "if I hear that weary old jest once more I'll burst into tears and die. Come in, comedian. Dr. Rackham's dressing."

"Thanks. Forgive me for the godawful gag, friend. I haven't eaten breakfast yet and an empty stomach plays the devil with my sense of humor." He rattled over to a chair and sat down. At least, thought Brave, closing the door, you expected him to rattle. He was the longest and thinnest bag of bones ever seen on Long Island. Fully six feet eight, he was lean from the top of his narrow skull, which was covered by an inch-long mat of straight stiff blond hair, to the soles of his number twelve feet. If he had any fat in him at all it must have been a very lonesome blob of fat indeed, well camouflaged and utterly alone in a wilderness of stringy muscle, meager sinew, and shaving-slender bones. His green eyes, perpetually half-lidded on either side of a nose like the prow of a Chinese junk, were humorous and sharp and as bright as polished emeralds.

Brave said to himself, Here is a shrewd customer, who isn't one-tenth the fool he appears to be.

"You don't have an appointment with Dr. Rackham."

"No, I don't. A plump little meathead called Getty over at the central offices said he'd be here, and I popped over on the chance. I want to inveigle him onto a TV program of mine."

"Dr. Rackham is a busy man."

"So is President Blose of the U.S. of A., but he came on the program, Lo. Pardon me," said the man, "there I go again. It's second nature. I don't mean to offend, but I was a disk jockey once. Look, friend, my name is Jim McEldownie. I'm Worlds of Portent McEldownie."

"I'm Lashings of Victuals Kiwanawatiwa, and my eggs are scorching," said Brave, going out to the kitchen. "The books are counted, so are the pipes, and the first editions are booby-trapped. Don't get ideas."

"Injun, I could grow to love you," said McEldownie. "Listen, seriously, don't you ever watch TV?"

"I do not."

"That explains it. Existing in the dark like this, you wouldn't have heard of me. I run this klatch, see, called Worlds of Portent, onto which I entice various important and pseudo-important characters, and there I cajole and browbeat and query till they tell me all sorts of fascinating lies, and the public laps it up like a bunch of silly cats."

Unquote, the Siamese, rose out of her hygienic playbox and gave him a frozen glare. He recoiled. "My God," he said, "I seem to be offending everyone this morning. Forgive me, puss."

Unquote snarled and collapsed in a boneless pile of beautiful fur. Alan stuck his head into the room and said, "Where do you classify me?"

"Huh? Oh, hallo, Doc. You're important. Anybody from Project Star is important. Whether the same can be said for those officials of our mighty government who have gasped and babbled and turned blue on Portent, I'm not one to declare. How about it, Doc? Will you appear?"

"Talking about what? Fuel? That's all I really know."

"If you can talk for thirteen minutes about it, without violating any regulations or giving away secrets, I want you. Fuel is hot stuff with the space-minded John Q."

"What do you think, Brave? Should we do it?"

Brave said, "Too much time and no fun, that's how it sounds to me."

"Oh, I don't know. I've never been on the air."

"Please," said McEldownie, shuddering like a leafless willow in a high wind. "The phrase is 'on the space.' Air belongs to that outmoded, decadent, but apparently deathless medium called radio. There, I've said it. Have you got any mouth-washing soap?"

"A positive Hilton Boil," said Brave in the kitchen. "A real yokked-up comic. Wait till I've fed him and we'll hurl him out."

"All right," said Alan, "I'll do it. I'm a ham at heart. When do you want me?"

"Tomorrow night at eight vacant?"

"As vacant as—" he was going to say "Dr. Getty's head," but caught himself in time. The TV man's flippancy was contagious. "Quite vacant. Give Brave the directions and we'll be there."

Brave said, "Breakfast is on. There are three plates and food for two. I hope you eat lightly, Mr. Portent."

"McEldownie, but call me Jim. I eat like a bird."

The bird, thought Alan half an hour later, must be a starving turkey buzzard; he sighed and stood up. "We're due at work, Jim. See you at eight tomorrow, then?"

"Seven-fifteen. I have to brief you. Cheers, gentlemen. Apologize to the cat for me. I insulted it a while back and it's been burning holes in my neck ever since." He took himself off, still with the illusion of rattling bonily. Alan and Brave washed up and strolled down to their laboratory.

Nothing happened that day or the next, save for a thorough search for the missing welder, which turned up no trace of him. At seven-fifteen the two friends walked into the TV studio in Manhattan.

"Hi," said McEldownie, waving a long hand. "Sit down and let's gurgle about fuel." They did so. At one point the lean man said, "An idea. What if Brave were to stand behind you all through the program? It'd look impressive as hell. Sinister Indian guards scientist even on national hookup. 'No precaution too elaborate for our men,' says head of Project Star. How about it?"

Alan looked at Brave. He would not expose his friend to stupid ridicule. Brave winked. "Okay," said Alan. "But no gags."

"Abso-bloody-lutely. Play it for gravity. Show people that there is danger connected with the business. And I think there is," he added solemnly.

Alan stared. "Why do you say that?"

"I don't mean the TV, I mean your work out on Long Island. You can't tell me that nobody in the world wishes our country any ill, chum. We have enemies just as we always have had. Why else the ack-ack and force screens?"

Alan did not answer. He thought of Brave's prediction of trouble, and he was more impressed with this lanky comedian than he had been before that moment.

Thirty seconds before the program time he sat down at the round table opposite McEldownie, and Brave took up a forbidding posture behind his chair.

His host began to speak, and suddenly Alan realized why the tall blond irrepressible fellow had been trusted with a program of such gravity as Worlds of Portent. As the cameras rolled and the brilliant lights came on, the jester's motley dropped away from him and was replaced by a cloak of earnest sobriety. His fantastic appearance heightened the seriousness; it was as shocking and thought-producing as if a scarecrow had begun to talk Schopenhauer.

He knew precisely how much to say; when to sit back and let Alan do a monologue, and when to interrupt with a pertinent question. He was a genius at his work.

And then, perhaps four or five minutes after the telecast had begun, Alan became aware of two things, each quite extraordinary. First, Brave had disappeared. Alan glanced back over his shoulder and found the Indian had vanished. The lights were so bright that his vision did not extend to the walls of the studio, so he presumed that his friend was still there somewhere; but he had left the range of the cameras. And secondly, something was happening to Alan's mind.

He tried to analyze the trouble, but he could not do it. He could only touch a few salient points of it; the fact that although he was talking very learnedly, and with (so far as he could tell) lucidity and vigor, he was not controlling his tongue in the least. It was almost like being drunk; there seemed to be a small entity perched on the root of his tongue who was pulling the strings of speech. But whereas the drunken entity was malicious and got him into all sorts of rows and riots, this particular sprite was doing what seemed a fine job for him. He knew quite well that he himself was not forming or directing the words he spoke. It was unpleasant, to say the least.

And there was something else. His mind, freed of necessity to concentrate on the program, was somewhere off in space, listening intently ... listening to a voice from without and within, a voice that inhabited the cold wastes of time and infinity as well as the bone-bounded sphere of his brain.

Listen to me, Alan Rackham, said the voice. Wordlessly, yet with words, from the farthest stretches of the galaxies and still existing in the core of his own intellect, cold as hoarfrost, hot as berserker's rage, gentle and persuasive as a doting mother, the voice said to him, Listen to me.

He would not listen. It was good and evil both together, and if he listened he would die. Yet it was said he would live. He would live forever; if time can be measured in terms of endlessness, he would not die. But he knew he would die. He struggled. The cameras picked up no hint of the travail. His face was intense and good-humored and his words were intelligent; and all the while he fought with the voice and would not listen. He fought it for an hour, and for a month, and till the end of the world came and beyond, and it spoke to him, fire and ice in the same words, but without words, and then he began to listen to it.

At this point six minutes of the telecast had gone by.

You are listening now, said the voice. You are listening, are you not?

I'm listening, God curse you.

I am taking you, Alan Rackham, as a bear takes a lamb, as a man takes a woman, as a hand takes a glove and the glove takes the hand.

I understand, curse you. Take me.

I am older than your whole race, and wiser than its cumulative wisdom, and I come from the stars.

Of course, you come from the stars. You are myself, and I understand you, friend.

Yes, I am yourself, wiser and stronger and older and beyond you in every way, and I am you. You are my servant, my slave, and myself.

Certainly, master. Why do you tell me things I have always known?

You are not obeying when you follow me, for you follow yourself, you who are now me.

You are God, are you not? said Alan in his mind. The Buddhists are right.

No. Not God. I am the atom and I am the intergalactic void, you and me and everything right and wrong. Have you learned your lesson?

It is a lesson I knew in the womb.

Now you are mine, said the voice, approving without an iota's loss of the flame and frost of hatred and love blended flawlessly.

This is a pleasure beyond pleasure, sensation far above sensation. This is maelstrom descent and flying into the sun. This is the keenness of sexual transport to the nth power. I live for you.

Now you have it. Never forget it.

Never! swore Alan.

Now forget it.

I have forgotten it.

Now what do you have to do for me?

Whatever it is you wish.

Truly you are mine. Now you have forgotten me.

I have forgotten.

Who am I?

Who are you? asked Alan, perplexed.

Truly you have forgotten. What have you to say?

"So the problem of most importance confronting us then was, how can we carry enough of this fuel to get us to the moon and back? It took us seven years to solve that one, but as everyone knows, we did. Then Van Horne discovered the hitherto unknown properties of—" he was talking blithely, almost by rote, for this was history-book stuff; and there had never been any sprite guiding his tongue at all, nor any voiceless voice in the bitterness of the eternal chasm between the stars and there was no memory anywhere in his consciousness of such things, nor any lingering discomfortable feeling that he had known a thing now forgotten....

CHAPTER III

They were driving out Queens Boulevard toward the colony, and Alan said, "Why did you leave, Brave? Where'd you go?"

The great Indian spun the wheel for a curve. "Just back to the wall."

"Why?"

"Lights were too bright for my eyes."

Alan stared at him. "You could out-gaze the sun, you pokerfaced liar, and you know it. Why did you leave?"

Brave glanced over at him. "Caliph, I hate to go on sounding like a spae-wife, or the Witch of Endor. But never in all my life have I had such a succession of ominous bodings. You'll think I'm turning raven in my old age—"

"No, damn it, Brave, I know you can smell danger a mile or a month away. Go ahead."

"Quoth the raven, then. I didn't feel happy about standing there. Before we started, it seemed like a good quiet joke. But when we were there and the lights came on, and the cameras started, I suddenly had to step back out of sight. I had to, Alan. A couple of my ghostly ancestors took me by the scruff and hauled me right away from there."

"That would have made a nice tableau on TV."

Brave chuckled deep in his chest. "Running Lizard and Pony Sees-the-Sky saving John Kiwanawatiwa from the white man's magic ... I laugh, viceroy, but I swear it felt like that. The old desert-spawned blood—the blood that doesn't tame down—boiled up under those lights and cameras. It pulled the civilized flesh and bones away from them. It whispered that things were wrong, wrong for an Indian and wrong for his friend." He stepped on the gas viciously and the MG spurted forward onto the Union Turnpike like a turpentined hound. "Alan, I almost yanked you up and walked off with you under my arm. I didn't like you sitting there in the bath of electrical magic."

"Why didn't you do it?" asked Alan curiously.

"Oh, hell, boss man. It's one thing to have these primeval urges, and another to forget all your technical training and scientific knowledge so completely that you'll follow the impulse. Do you bust a window every time you'd like to?"

"Hmm." Alan was ill at ease. It seemed to him for a moment that there was something to Brave's instinct, and that he should have been snatched from those lights. Then he said, "I think it's merely that someone had a shot at me the other day, and you've fretted over that till you're seeing assassins behind every chair."

"Maybe. Maybe." Brave rocketed the little car along the dark highway, across the miles to home, and all the while the tomtoms beat in his blood and he knew that he should be afraid, that he should be coldly and sanely afraid of some black hazard soon to come.

Don Mariner walked into their laboratory the following afternoon. He was one of the top engineers on Project Star, a youngish-middle-aged man running to flab and ever-thinning hair. Ordinarily good-humored, today he had a long face and a crease between his eyes. Without a word he spread a sheaf of blueprints and photostats out on a lab table. Alan and Brave bent over them. Don's stubby finger traced the outline of a flying disk, then stabbed at the fuel storage tanks and several other sections of the interior.

"Look at this, you two. I've had it under my nose for three months and it never struck me till today. Just look at it. See anything wrong?"

After a moment Alan said, "The fuel tanks are too big."

"My God! You ought to be the engineer instead of me. I ought to hire out for a potato peeler. Three months it took me to see it."

"What's the point of it?" asked Brave. "If the disks are going to use hornethylene, they won't need a tenth—not a hundredth that much storage space, even if they want to circle the earth a dozen times without landing."

"Here's another thing," said Don Mariner. "This closet for space suits. Why? The stratosphere is the highest they're supposed to go, and there's no need for space suits there. You want a space suit to crawl around the outside of Albertus, but not to wear in a disk. If there's trouble outside the shell you will simply land. Now look at these instruments." He showed them another chart. "Are these instruments for earth travel?"

"I don't know. Are they?"

"They are not. And also they're not the instruments Carey designed for the disks last year. They're a new set entirely, and some of 'em I don't understand myself, but I'll tell you this: they're not for earth travel. They're what you'd want in a space rocket." He looked up, his gray eyes bleak. "I faced Carey with 'em, and he swears they're his old design; and Carey doesn't lie in the ordinary course of events. But they're not, and I know it."

"What's the point?" asked Alan. The question was almost rhetorical; he knew the answer.

"The point is, these disks we're building are supposed to be purely and simply a faster means of traveling around Terra than any we have now. But the man in the street, that faceless brainless little cipher, believes they're for conquering the stars. And by Judas, he's right! We're building interplanetary disks—and we're not supposed to know it!"

The three men stared at one another.

"Who's keeping it from us?"

"And why?"

"There are plenty of rocket projects—so what if someone wants to try a space disk instead? Why would he tell all his scientists and technicians a pack of lies? There's no need for secrecy, for God's sake!"

"But—my gosh," protested Alan, "no one man could keep a thing like this from all the rest of us. There must be ten or twenty who know. And details like these, the fuel tanks and instruments, they can't be hidden from anybody!"

"So where does it lead us?"

"Up a narrow, dank, and ill-smelling blind alley," said Brave.

"Not so bl—"

There was a detonation outside the lab; a harsh, clangorous thunderclap of a sound, like the bursting of a bomb full of wash tubs and anchor chains. The three men were dashing for the door before the reverberations had died away.

A disk had crashed on the airfield. Brave and Alan and Don piled into a jeep and raced down toward it.

"I didn't know they had any ready for use," Alan shouted.

"Oh, yes. They haven't advertised it much, though. And this must be the first test flight. I didn't know it was coming off today."

"You'd think we'd all have been invited to the takeoff. Big impressive show, faithful workers get afternoon off, and all that."

"Hell," said Don, "if they're keeping the purpose of the things from us, for no good reason that I can see, they might want to keep the test flight secret too."

"How can they keep it secret? It obviously had to take off in plain sight, and they couldn't shoo everyone indoors. No, I guess they just didn't give a damn about us. Underlings, unimportant servants, that's us," said Alan bitterly, with a flash prevision of the terrible idea that would soon be obsessing him.

They pulled up beside the wreckage of the disk. There was no danger of explosion, due to the peculiar properties of hornethylene. The giant platter, with its raised top like a hot-dish cover and its bubble of clear crystal beneath, lay crumpled and bent, one-third of its whole edge accordioned in upon itself. Even as they came up the crystal bubble inched open; not smoothly, as it should have done, but like a damp-swollen door creaks away from its frame under heavy pressure. The pilot thrust his legs out and dropped to the ground. Alan and a dozen others ran to him.

"Hi," said he. "Guess I pulped this job up right."

"Good Lord, man, are you okay?"

"Not a nick. I just had time to see the ground coming up at me and bingo, I was sitting there with my eyes popping. Anybody got a drink?" He was cut to the pattern of all airmen since the days of monoplanes: tall, narrow of hip and wide of shoulder, lean always-tanned face, a wry grin on the mouth and horizon-hunger in the eyes.

Somebody gave him a flask. "Were you alone?" asked Alan.

"Sure. They can't risk two guys in these things yet. We don't know what they'll do. This one'll take some going over with a microscope and tweezers; it's full of bugs. Someone jockey me to the main offices?"

The crowd dispersed slowly; but Brave, putting an urgent hand on Alan's arm—it enfolded his biceps and the fingertips met the thumb, for Brave's hands were as outsize as the rest of him—held him there. "Wait a minute, risaldar. I want to check something."

"Another instinct, Brave?"

"Plain horse sense. And I want to check it before the big boys clamp a top secret sign on this wreck."

He reached up and gripped the edge of the crystal bubble. It resisted him. He set his muscles and tugged with all his incredible strength. The crushed metal hinges complained and shrieked and parted, and the great bulbous sheet of plastiquartz fell to the ground, narrowly missing him as he dodged back.

"I'll boost you up, and you can give me a hand."

Inside the disk, they crouched and went through the tunnel into the control room. This comprised the entire central portion of the disk; suspended within the shell, like a small kernel in a large nut, it was held comparatively steady as the outer husk rocked and rolled and flipped in its characteristic skipped-rock flight. Alan did not understand the principle of this near-motionless suspension of the control room within an erratically weaving hull, although Don Mariner had tried to explain it to him in patient two-syllable words. It involved a knowledge of the newest developments in gyroscopics, which the young fuel expert did not comprehend. Brave had a fairly good idea of the basic laws involved, but wisely had never tried to beat it into his friend's head. Alan on fuel, on chemistry, on philosophy, was superb; Alan on dynamics or any other branch of mechanics was deplorable.

They looked around the room. Nearly all the equipment was still in its place, for the clamps that held it during the astonishing speeds the disk could maintain in flight had held it still in the shattering instant of the crash. But the entire control board, the panels of instruments and the wide mirrors that gave the pilot a view of the earth and air from every angle, had all been shoved back and broken when the saucer had struck its nose edge into the ground.

Brave walked over to the pilot's seat and stood silently surveying the mess. At last he said, "Alan."

"Yes?"

"Look here."

Alan looked, and started as though he had been stabbed with a hypodermic needle. "God ..." he said.

The control board had buckled back against the pilot's chair; something beyond it, some ponderously heavy piece of machinery in the space between central room and shell, had knifed through wall and board as sharp and deadly as the blade of a guillotine. The metal had sliced the center of the pilot's seat to within six inches of the back.

No man could have sat there at the moment of the crash, as the pilot averred he had done.

He would never have lived. He would have been cut in two....

CHAPTER IV

That night Alan and Brave rode across Project Star to the women's building, where Alan's fiancee, Win Gilmore had a small apartment. Win—short for Winifred, and God help the man who called her that—opened the door before the sound of the diacoustic bell had died away.

The first thing that struck you about Win was color: she looked as though she had been put together by a Bergdorf Goodman display artist with a genius for analogous chromas. Her hair was washed in a pale aquamarine and dusted over with luminous flecks of mauve; it was drawn back to the crown and clasped there by an abstract spiral of silver, from which it fell in darkening waves down her naked back. Her nylon jersey lounging outfit, cut with almost severe simplicity, was graduated from pink to a deep violet hue. Her finger and toe nails were lacquered with phosphorescent sapphire, and the lashes of her blue eyes were dyed with mascara of the same glowing shade.

Her skin was a soft golden color, thanks to half an hour a day under the sun lamps of the colony's gymnasium.

"How, oh squaw of rainbow brilliance," said Brave, holding up a hand in grave salute. "I leave this warrior in your keeping, whilst I shuffle down to the recroom and squander a few bucks on the pinball machines."

"How, oh mountain that walks. Will you have a slug of Scotch first?"

"The noble red man, pampering his internal workin's, drinks only rum this week. No thanks, Win. The gambling fever's got me. See you."

Alan closed the door behind him and took Win into his arms. He kissed her, gently at first, then hard, their lips parted, warm on each other as their bodies warmed, his hands strong and taut on her back; he smoothed his fingers down the hollow of her spine, ran them up into her soft hair. She said against his mouth, "You demolish that toilsomely-wrought thatch, boy, and I'll demolish you." He laughed and pushed her away and lit a cigarette, stray flecks of mauve from her hair glittering on his fingers.

She went to the low cocktail table and picked up an already filled glass. He took it from her. "Here's atomic dust in yer eye, Winniefred," he toasted, and drank long and thirstily.

"Whoa, Nellie. Haven't you drunk anything today?"

"Only the dregs of woe," he said lightly, and then his lean face changed and his eyes looked into a remote place which they did not like. At once she touched his arm.

"Sit down, Alan." He did so automatically, and she perched tailor-fashion on the edge of the couch beside him. "What's the matter?"

"I wish I knew."

"Just the blues? You been skipping meals? That always makes you ethereal and moody. I'd as soon have Unquote with a toothache around the place as you after you've missed your lunch."

"No, not the blues. Big trouble, sweetheart, that's been exploding right and left with no rhyme to it. I've thought so much about it in the last few hours that I doubt if I can even talk about it now."

Then, of course, he told her everything: beginning with the welder's accident and eerie lack of pain, then the shot from the bushes, Brave's indefinite fears climaxing at the telecast, Don Mariner's discovery of the undreamt-of potentials of the disks, the crack-up ending the almost-furtive test flight, and the pilot who lived when he should have been butchered, Alan brought it all out; and as he listened to his own words a dreadful idea was born and grew and expanded throughout his intellect until suddenly he knew that here was his answer, that no other could be rationally accepted. He sat silently for minutes, while Win watched him, and gradually the color swept out of his face and he began to shiver.

She put the glass into his hand. He drained off the last of the drink, and she clicked open a deep drawer of the cocktail table and gave him another, freshly mixed at a touch of her finger on the emerald stud of the drawer.

"What is it, Alan? You've seen something in it, some connection between these events. What is it?"

He took a shuddering breath through open lips and said, "Yes, I know. I know what we have to fight."

"Fight? You mean there are enemies? You can deduce that from—"

"My God, yes, there are enemies." He turned, to fix her with a glare like a lunatic's. "Listen, Win. We all have the desire to go out to the other planets, and to the stars beyond our system. We've built a score of rocket projects all over the continent because of that desire. It's no secret, everyone has it. Right?"

"Sure, darling. Even I want to see—well, Mars, anyway."

"But here are these disks, too good, too damned good by far, possibly capable of doing just that; and the government and most of us have thought they were only for earth travel. Why? Who would want to build ships for interplanetary, or even for all I know interstellar-space flight, and keep it hidden from the rest of mankind?"

"Russia?" she suggested humbly.

"Oh, nuts. You might as well say Switzerland. No, it's here at home, on Project Star, and it's a handful or more than a handful of our own top men.

"Now the other angle: there are men here who apparently can't be hurt by ordinary means, who don't feel pain, who can resist the force of such a weapon as a thousand-pound cutlass-edged juggernaut, and who only stare quietly when their hands are melted off like butter in a flame."

"Yes?"

"Put the two together, Win. Remember that after I'd seen one evidence of this lack of pain, I was ambushed. Someone thought I ought to die before I spread the word around. Who?"

"Well, who?"

He drank again and lit a cigarette. The lighter shook in his hand. "There's only one answer I can see," he said. "Correct me if I'm crazy, baby. There are mutants among us. We've been anticipating them in fiction for decades. Now they're here, and they want to reach the stars before we do, they want to pass unnoticed until they're ready to—to take over, or whatever their purpose is."

"Mutants, Alan?"

"The natural progression from Homo Sapiens. Homo superior. The supermen."

She slid a pointer across its bar two notches and pressed the emerald button and the table delivered a dry Martini, which she sipped as she regarded him steadily. At last she said, "Is that the sole possibility, sweetheart? Isn't it a pretty wild explanation to accept on the evidence of a couple of queer accidents?"

"I don't think so," he said gruffly. "No, blast it, I don't think it's too wild. It's perfectly possible, and it fits the facts."

"Your Homo superior must be about as fallible as poor old sapiens then, because he's let his secrets out with a vengeance. I'd think that anyone smarter than we are would at least simulate pain after his hand was burnt off."

"That was a slip-up, yes. But he didn't know anyone was watching."

"Homo superior must have a low opinion of our intelligence, or he wouldn't have let those blueprints get into our hands."

"The progression of the disks' manufacture has come to the point where he couldn't help it, I suppose. And maybe by now it doesn't matter. Don's had those fuel tank charts for three months, because it was necessary that he work on aspects of construction so close to the tanks that it was impossible to falsify them. But he only saw the instrument panel plans this morning. As I said, maybe it doesn't matter now. If the disks are near enough ready to be taking test flights, maybe the mutants are going to step out in the open."

"Then why would they shoot at you?"

"Hell, I don't know. Perhaps they'll publish the purpose of the disks without mentioning their own roles, as secret designers and builders and as creatures that can't be hurt. They could say 'security reasons' and get away with a lot."

"It's an explanation, all right," said Win. "I don't swallow it, boy, but it does fit the facts. So do all sorts of other weird theories."

"Such as?"

"Ah, you don't want my ideas. They're as mad as your own." She leaned over the arm of the couch and touched several glowing spots on its outer surface; at once the illumination of the room cooled and faded. The forest green walls, complimentary to her own coloring and to the clothing she wore, appeared to recede and become the dark depths of a woodland on a moonless night; the furniture seemed to change into moss-grown stumps and great misshapen rocks. Overhead, the ceiling turned dusky blue under the play of hidden tint-beams, and miniature galaxies twinkled and gleamed across its surface, their varying incandescence giving the illusion of tridimensional infinity.

Alan set down his glass and looked over at her. She was a shape of nocturnal secrecy, sinuous darkness against which her nails and eye-lashes burned with phosphorescent sapphire. Her use of the luminous lacquer was an artful bit of technique. It made her into a fantastic mystery which cried out to be solved. Although Alan had seen the trick before, he could never resist it. It was unbelievable that the sober girl in a shapeless smock who sweated in the metallurgy lab was also this Cleopatra, this shadowy temptress; Troy's exquisite Helen, yearning for love, her strong enchantments designed to make her both conqueror and conquest.

Forgetting the half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, forgetting the supermen and everything else but his physical craving, he threw himself down on the wide couch beside her. His hands touched the live softness of the halter and slid to her back. The sweet strong muscles glided under his fingers as she lifted her arms to take his face between her hands. Then his hands went down from flesh to fabric and he felt her long body pressing tight against him, close as his own skin.

He opened his eyes and saw the glowing purple of her lashes and in the thick gloom the dimmed luster of her teeth between the parted lips. He kissed her and closed his eyes again. He touched her throat, where the blood throbbed close to the surface in a fast steady rhythm; he found other pulses and held his fingertips on them until his own caught their beat and merged with it and the separate throbbings were one.

It was dark, then very dark, the dark of a sunless sea lapping all about them, and slowly it grew lighter and he was sitting up to run his fingers through his unmanageable hair and remember that some time ago he had been holding a cigarette.

"Hey," he said, "what happened to my Rocketeer?"

Win stretched out a lazy arm and brought the lights up once more. "Sure you didn't put it out?"

"I swear I didn't. My God, here it is," he said, picking it off the couch where it had been smashed and its tobacco scattered. "What did I stub that out on?"

"Probably the couch. It doesn't matter, it's resistant."

He looked carefully but could find no place where a cigarette's fire might have been crushed. He shrugged. "So long as I didn't burn you, baby."

"You didn't." She had the automatic table mix them two cocktails. "There's Brave back from the recroom," she said.

"Ears like a fennec," he said admiringly. "I didn't hear anything."

"Watch it, brother. I know what a fennec's ears look like." She went to open the door for the big Indian. "How'd you do, Brave?"

"Gambled away a dollar and seventy-five cents in a reckless passion. Are you ready to go home, sheikh?"

"Yes, I am. I have a theory I want to talk about."

"You argue him out of it, Brave," said Win. "He's been working too hard. He thinks supermen are after him."

Brave looked at Alan and his fine face grew hard and set. "Supermen ..." he said. "Mutants. Alan, is that it?"

"I think that's it."

"It fits the picture, all right."

"It explains every instance we've observed."

"I believe you're on the right track," nodded Brave. "When did you find it?"

"While I was telling Win about it. Let's go home and thrash it out, son. She's a disturbing influence."

Brave eyed Win up and down with a leer that on anyone else would have been particularly lewd and lascivious. From the faithful Brave it was merely what he meant it to be—a piece of mild buffoonery. "You understate the case, my liege. Yon woman has a plump and supple look; she wriggles too much, such minxes are dangerous. Let's drag tail."

"Okay, boys. Go knock your steel-plated skulls together. But remember that I think you're barking up an impossible tree at an invisible possum what ain't thar." She swung the door open for them and stood aside, one arm upraised with the hand on the jamb.

Alan kissed her a light farewell, and Brave patted her on the head and said, "Ketch-um sleep, squaw, you look bushed." Then, as Alan turned away, his glance was caught by a mark on Win's arm. It was a round blemish, an angry-looking red welt to the edges of which still clung infinitesimal flakes of gray ash smudged into the skin. He turned away and walked down the corridor with Brave at his side, and he thought ferociously of every possibility he could imagine, but his mind always came back to the same answer.

It was a burn, just such a small wound as would result, say, from a cigarette being pressed out against the arm by an oblivious lover.

And it should have been shockingly painful.

But Win had not felt it at all....

CHAPTER V

Alan awoke after an hour of nightmare-ridden sleep. He opened his eyes and got quietly out of bed and put on his tweed suit and a pair of loafers, and walked out of the house without disturbing the slumber of Brave.

He went down to the main road and walked along it in the moonlight toward a distant group of buildings. Presently a soldier stepped into his path.

"Halt and identify yourself."

"I am Dr. Alan Rackham of Fuel Research. My security number is A10C14B44."

The soldier looked at him a moment and then his eyes glittered. "Pass, friend," he said, and standing aside he watched Alan go on toward the buildings. There was a cynical smile on the soldier's mouth.

Alan came to a squat flatroofed structure like a concrete shed. He knocked on the door. It opened and he went in. One weak bulb burned in a lamp. There was a tall man standing there in the shadows. He shook hands with Alan.

"Welcome, companion. Just sit down here."

Alan seated himself on a stool. The other passed along two walls and in succession a number of vivid lights flared out, bathing Alan in their burning radiance. He did not blink, but looked steadily and fixedly ahead.

Greetings, said the voice.

Greetings, master.

Are you happy to return to me?

I have never been away from you.

That is true. Now I have things to tell you. You will not remember them consciously tomorrow, but you will obey the commands and refuse to do those things which I tell you are wrong. Understood?

Understood.

Now first, slave, said the voice coldly, anger piled on icy anger in the dripping wordless thoughts: you have decided that there are aliens among you. A race of supermen, mutated from your own weak breed.

Yes.

That is untrue. Forget it.

It is forgotten.

Such an idea is foolishness.

It is stupid, said Alan, believing.

There are no aliens. There are neither supermen nor mutants. There is no thinking race on earth but the genus Homo. The accidents are unrelated; the welder a victim of shock, the pilot merely lucky.

I see.

The disks are under the supervision of the government, who wished to keep their purpose secret until now.

Security reasons, said Alan in blind agreement.

There is only you and there is only me, I who am you, you who are me. And this is our private knowledge and not to be spoken of.

I would die rather than tell of it.

Now you are mine again.

Never anything else, master.

Forget me.

Forgotten.

Go home.

Of course.

Alan rose and passed out of the range of the lights, and the tall man nodded with approval and began to switch off his terrible lamps.

Alan woke in the grayness of dawn, cramped and half-chilled from sleeping in a chair. He stretched and groaned, and got up to brew some coffee. Brave woke at the clinking of china and came padding out to the kitchen.

"Up so early, commodore? You look as if you hadn't slept."

"I slept, all right, but it didn't do much good. My head's splitting."

Brave took over the coffee pot. "Any more ideas on the mutant theory?"

"Oh, hell. I guess I was wrong."

Brave turned and looked at him. "Why do you say that?"

"Well, look. The welder might have been suffering from shock. The pilot was—just lucky. And the business of the disks can be explained by obtuse government security regulations. And where does that leave our precious superman notion? Out in the cold and wet."

Brave shook his great head. "Huh-uh, son. More to it than that. Too many coincidences spoil the broth; too many queer things happening isn't right. I think you were on the trail of truth last night."

"I was talking through my ear," said Alan irritably.

Brave stared at him. A furrow appeared above the great hawk nose. He bent and pushed Alan's head back and looked into his friend's eyes. Alan tried to jerk his head away and Brave held it steady in the grip of one tough fist. He lifted Alan's lids one after the other and growled deep in his chest.

"What the devil, Brave!"

The Indian stood erect. "By the Great Spirit," he said. "Hypnotized!"

"What in hell's name are you talking about?"

"You've been hypnotized. Your pupils are swollen as big as grapes."

"You're crazy."

Brave regarded him equably. "Sure, tetrarch. Sure I'm crazy. Did you go out last night?"

"You were with me. What's wrong with you? We went to Win's."

"I mean later, when I was asleep."

"Certainly not. I did get up and go into the living room, though, and I fell asleep in a chair."

"Ah," said Brave. He considered a moment. "Watch the java, will you?"

Alan nodded. The Indian went out of the kitchen. Alan heard him moving things about in their little laboratory beside the plastiglassed lounging quarters. In five minutes he returned.

"Alan, you trust me, don't you?"

"My God, do you have to be reassured on that? Ever since we marched through Argentina together. Since Campana and Buenos Aires and that hell of Pergamino. I'd trust you if you told me to jump into Lower Bay."

"Okay. Now do me a favor." He gulped down a cup of scalding coffee. "Drink up and come with me."

Alan drank obediently, and stood and followed Brave into the lab. In a cleared space stood a pair of machines, looking somewhat like giant cameras, the lens of one covered by a multicolored disk, that of the other unshaded; there were plastic charts bolted to the sides, and dials and several types of indicator, and among all these the distinctive green and gold seal of the Institute of Psychotherapeutic and Hypnotherapeutic Research.

Alan balked. "Hold on, Brave! You aren't going—"

"You said you trust me. Do it now if never again. Sit down."

"No!" he shouted. He was not quite sure of his reasons, but he knew he must not be hypnotized.

Brave moved to shut him off from the door. "You'll sit there if I have to knock you out, boss."

Alan saw he was not joking. He said, "Where did you get the machines, Brave?"

"Had 'em around for years. I've always been intrigued by hypnosis, you know that. In fact you knew I had the machines. Will you sit down?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Damn it, you're sparring for time. If you think—"

Alan swung on him without warning, a lashing buffet that could have broken a lesser man's neck; Brave took it square on the side of his jaw and staggered back, shaking his head. Then he caught Alan's coat as the smaller man leaped for the door. He swept him around by the coat like a yo-yo on a string, and judging his blow as carefully and dispassionately as an old champion measures an upstart contender, he rammed his big fist into Alan's belly just below the ribs. It jolted Alan back and doubled him over and made him blind with agony. He could not breathe. There was no air left in his lungs and he could not suck any into them. He was going to die. He wanted to die. He was dying.

Brave dropped him, unresisting, into the chair and tied him down with a few turns of a light rope. "Son," he said, "I know that wasn't you that socked me, it was whatever creeping louse got to you last night. I'll apologize later for smacking you ... if you want me to." He went to his machines and began to turn dials and adjust gauges, and move pointers on the graduated scales. He tipped Alan's head up and clamped it firmly in the vise-like apparatus which rose from the chair's back. Alan was groggy, his breath now hissing in and out between clenched teeth. Brave went on talking.

"I could have knocked you out, and it wouldn't have hurt nearly as much; but I wanted you awake. That pain may help, too. Rob Pope was saying something the other day about intense pain being an aid in nullifying the effects of hypnosis, when allied, that is, with counter-hypnosis. We'll see. Take it easy, pup."

Your technical training could be a deterrent factor, thought Brave; you may be able to oppose the mechanical-visual patterns successfully. I hope not. It doesn't seem to me that there's a lot of time left to us, and I want you back on my side.

He focused the lens of one machine on Alan's half-open eyes and pressed a button. Light began to flicker across the agonized face, its color changing from second to second. Brave cut in the other beam and white light that shifted its form even as the first shifted color lanced through the blue and red and yellow. Alan shut his eyes, but immediately opened them again.

"You can't resist it," said Brave quietly. "You don't want to resist it. You like the pretty lights." The voice was an important stimulus too. "Your mind is conditioned to taking orders, isn't it, son? Somebody's been giving you evil commands. You don't like that. You'd rather listen to me." The weird patterns of the light beams held Alan's dull gaze. He was already adrift in a flashing vacuum. Brave's voice came to him slurred and without sense. Gradually he began to hear the words.

"Somebody hypnotized you last night, didn't they, son?"

"Yes. I think they did."

"Who did it?"

"I don't know. A tall man."

"Do you know his name?"

"I couldn't see his face very well."

"What did he tell you?"

There was a long silence. Then Alan, his face contorted, said, "He didn't tell me anything. He only put on the lights. They were vivid as sin. Then there was a voice."

"What did the voice say? You can tell Brave, son. Good old Brave. You trust Brave."

He thought. "I can't tell you," he said. "Not even you. It was a voice. It was the voice. My voice. I love it."

"Isn't there anything you can repeat?"

"Yes. It said I had to forget the superman theory. It explained the accidents; and the disks. It's all natural. It isn't mutants."

Brave started to sweat. He pried at Alan's mind, learning almost everything about the night before. But he did not find out that Alan had first heard the voice at the telecast, nor did he learn that the voice and Alan were one, master and slave, but one. The earlier hypnosis had been too clever. It had struck at the roots of Alan's soul, becoming religion and truth to him, and he would not deny it or betray it.

At last realizing that he had heard all he was going to hear, the Indian gave Alan certain counter-commands. He repeated them until Alan squirmed and whimpered under the repetition. Finally Brave was satisfied. By using the powerful mechanical-visual stimuli, it was usually easy enough to plant ideas in a subject, and only infinitely stronger agents could destroy such ideas. Brave hoped that the enemy did not have stronger agents; but he knew that in the last analysis it was a timid and unsure hope indeed.

"About all I can do now," he growled low, "is stick with you as if I was a cocklebur in your hair. Till they kill me, or we beat 'em."

He turned off his machines and brought Alan to full consciousness. He untied him and led him into the lounging quarters, pushing him down onto a yielding sofa. "Take it easy for a while. That was quite an ordeal. I guess you have a belly-ache." He poured two long Scotches. "Now tell me what you remember."

Alan thought. "Everything," he said with surprise. "At least I suppose it's everything." He repeated the substance of what they had both said in the lab. "Right?"

"That's it. I told you to remember it all. I wanted to level with you, chief. We've got a fight on our hands and I can't have you going around in a daze. You've got to realize what happened to you last night, so you can buck another attempt like it. By the way, you couldn't tell me why you went down to that building."

"I don't know. I haven't any memory of going, or of what happened there; I simply recall telling you about it. I have a memory of a memory, I suppose you could say."

"Strong medicine those dog soldiers are using, by God," said Brave. "The more I learn about them, the surer I am that they're superior mutants."

"I think so too," said Alan. Brave grinned. His therapy had overcome the former hypnotist's commands. Alan went on. "The big question was, why have they suddenly appeared among us, why now? I think we have that answered. It isn't sudden; it may have been happening for generations. Slip-ups may have occurred as far back as history goes. One mistake might go unremarked; two might make a man wonder: then he'd investigate, and be either eliminated (they shot at me, you remember!) or hypnotized and taken under the control of the mutants."

"Bright lad! Your own experience bears that out."

"So the newest big question would be: how do we fight them? Perhaps we're the first to recognize them and retain our own wills. We can't let that circumstance go to waste, Brave. We've got to strike at them for our race's sake." He scowled. "But that leads to this: do we strike at them?"

"What do you mean, Alan?"

"I mean ... well, Brave, would we be in the right to take law into our own hands and start a murder campaign, say, against them? Suppose we were fighting good, instead of evil?"

Brave looked blank.

"How do we know they're wrong?" Alan continued. "How do we know they're against us? Perhaps they are the true race of the future, and every man of intelligence should be on their side. No, this isn't an hypnotically planted theory: it's something I brooded on last night before I went to sleep. Where do our loyalties stand? If Homo superior is intelligent and self-centered, callous toward us, then obviously we fight him fang and claw. But if he is intelligent and benevolent, as you'd expect from a higher type of being, then we should ally ourselves with him."

"He shot at you. Is that benevolence?"

"I know. We might be wrong. It may have been a simple maniac who did it. Again, I think the coincidence would be too great; well, perhaps Homo superior had a good reason for it. We can't judge too deeply on insufficient evidence."

Brave said, "I see what you mean, Alan, and in abstract theory I agree with it. If the mutants are a good breed, a real improvement on our own kind, then we owe them the allegiance of intelligent underlings. But concrete evidence says they're not good. They shoot at you; they employ the most malefic and vicious kind of hypnotism on you, where a simple conditioning to the fact of their goodness would have brought you around to their side just as easily—and with twice the value. They aren't good. They are villainous." He grimaced. "I can see you hate the idea. Why? What's on your mind that I don't know about?"

Alan turned a haunted face to him. "Brave," he said, "Brave, Win's one of them."

The Indian said, "No. You're wrong. Not Win."

"That's what I repeated a couple of hundred times last night. Not Win, not Win. But I mashed out a cigarette on her arm—accidentally, of course—and she didn't feel it. It left a hell of a burn. But she never felt it. She can't feel pain. She's mutant."

Brave laid his hands on his thighs and shook his head and could say nothing. Alan went on. "Has she been playing with me, then? Or can they get physical pleasure from us? Or was it her job to watch me for signs of awareness?"

"Not that. You've been engaged too long for that."

"Well, what is the reason? Is it possible that she could actually be in love with me? Me, a member of a lower species! I've asked myself, could I fall in love with an orangutan? A fairly bright, good-looking orangutan? The answer always comes out no."

"Hardly a fair comparison."

Alan glanced over at the mirror that formed the west wall of the otherwise plastiglassed-in room. He saw himself haggard, gray in the face, with bloodshot pouched eyes, and clad in tweeds that had obviously been slept in. "Hardly fair to the ape," he said, grinning a little.

"I can't believe Win is one of them," said Brave stubbornly.

"And I can't find any other explanation. If I make sure she is, and if we find they're evil, as we think, then I know what's the first thing I'll do." He looked his friend in the eyes. "I'll kill her, Brave. I'll cut her damned lying throat!"

Then he stood up. "Enough of that. There are bigger things at stake than Win right now. I think we may take it as a truism that you and I can't hinder the superman's plans worth a whoop. Nor could we get to more than one or two people in authority before we were found out and stopped. Lord, the very ones we'd naturally go to are probably mutants themselves! So there's just one thing to be done. Enlist the fellows we know are all right. There's Don Mariner, for a start. He's plump and balding and looks ineffective but he's as smart a lad as we have on the Project. Then there's Rob Pope; he was in the hospital last month when he cut himself badly on a hot sheet of plastiquartz. He's in the plastic chemistry section, but he knows a lot about hypnotism and such-like, so he'd be an asset."

"Can we trust him just because he cut himself? He might have faked the pain."

"Brave, we've got to trust somebody! All we can do is grasp at little indications of true humanity. Let's see. Who else is there?"

"Bill Thihling, the rocketjet man. He was at Oxford with me. Rhodes scholar, prince of a guy, and abnormally sensitive—I've seen him throw up when a dog was run over. He's no callous mutant."

"Good deal. That's five of us. Any more?"

They thought hard. Mentioning names, discarding them as unsure risks, they ran through all their acquaintances. No more potential allies could they find till Alan said, "Jim McEldownie!"

"What do we know about Jim?"

"That he's uglier than the Duchess in Alice. Look at the mutants we've recognized: the welder, a well-set-up Tarzan type; the pilot, a clean-cut handsome dog; and Win, a raving belle. Does Jim fit in with them? My sainted grandmother, no! And if we convince him of our belief, he might put us on TV to broadcast it to the country. Worlds of Portent has a huge following, and people believe what they see and hear on it. Then afterward, if they get us, we won't have wasted what may be the first and last opportunity men have had to publicize the presence of the enemy among us."

Brave went to the visiphone. There was an atmosphere of tense disquiet in the room now, as though things were about to burst out in violence and passion at any second. The Indian talked with Don Mariner and Pope and Thihling, who all agreed to come over within the hour; then he called McEldownie. Shortly the lanky announcer was looking quizzically at him from the screen. "How, Lo." He shuddered. "How low can you reach for a gag? What's up?"

"Mac, can you get here right away?"

"Unholy cats—apologies to Unquote—why the rush?"

"Just say we need a good man in a hurry."

The other cocked an eyebrow. "I detect the aroma of butter, salve, and the old oil. Okay, I'll take an air taxi. Heat up any spare steak you have lying around. I haven't eaten breakfast."

"Naturally," said Brave, and turned off the visiphone. "There," he said to Alan, "now all we have to do is convince them."

It took two hours to convert the four men to their views. Don Mariner, because of his own findings, was with them from the first exposition; Pope was intrigued but skeptical; Thihling was frankly incredulous; and McEldownie was scornful and astonished by turns. At last the fierce earnestness of Brave and Alan had its effect, and all of them were on their feet, pacing up and down, shouting at one another, smacking their fists into their palms and proposing unworkable plans at random.

Alan argued with Jim about the telecast. Finally the lean man said, "All right. I'm wacked. We're all wacked. They'll take away my job, my license, and my reputation. They'll toss us all in the hatch. Maybe we'll be lucky and get a room together. We can sit in a ring and make faces at each other for the next fifty years." He shrugged. "Nevertheless, we'll do it. We'll do it tonight. If things are coming to a head, we've got to step high and swift. I'd scheduled the Secretary of State tonight, but he'll have to wait. I'll go down and make arrangements. Won't say anything to the sponsors, naturally, or the staff. They trust me ... they've done it for the last time, I imagine. Well, I've had five good years on TV. Let's finish it in a real crackerjack blaze of the well-known glory, gents. Here we go round the loony bin."

"You, boy," said Alan fervently, "are okay."

"I'm a living doll," said McEldownie moodily, and left.

Bill Thihling, the rocketjet man, a compact sturdy pocketsized fellow about Brave's age—thirty-six or -seven—said, "Now let's have some action. Let's do something."

"First thing we do is swallow some antigues," said Brave, going into the kitchen for the bottle. Antigues were anti-fatigue tablets, on which a man could keep fresh and intelligent for seventy-two hours without sleep. "I have an idea that sleep will be a myth and a vagrant memory for us before too long."

"And then," said Don Mariner, "we catch one of the supermen and beat some truth out of him."

Alan laughed hollowly, reminding himself of a character out of MacBeth. "Beat it out of him? Torture a being that doesn't feel pain?"

"Kill him, then," urged Rob Pope. "It's simple bloodthirst, but we've got to make a beginning. Perhaps it'll make his cousins fret a little. Bring 'em into the open."

"We don't even know they can be killed. A thousand-pound 'sword' couldn't faze the pilot of that disk. What could we do?"

"We can try! It's no good our arguing back and forth; we haven't any real data. The only thing to do is kidnap one of them, see what makes him tick, and then do our planning."

"I'm for that," said Don. "Which one shall we take?"

"The welder's vanished, and we can't very well torture, or try to torture, Win Gilmore. Too rough on Alan. Let's have in the pilot of the wrecked disk."

"He wouldn't come here if we called him: too suspicious a request," said Alan. "Kidnapping's the thing."

"Pope and I can handle that," said Thihling. "Anyone know his name?"

"Erin Grady," said Don Mariner. "Judas, isn't that a handle!"

Rob Pope, a big rangy man built in the style of a woodsrunner out of early America, said, "Ho for Erin Grady, then. And if he tries any of his damn superman's hypnosis, I'll fling it in his own teeth. I know a trick or two in that line myself."

The two of them left the house. Brave began to mix three stiff highballs, and Don Mariner took out a harmonica and played Bach, with only a few sour notes per bar. Alan picked up the cat Unquote and fondled her. But his thoughts were grim. All he could see was a beautiful girl who he longed to hold in his arms. A beautiful girl with a cigarette burn on her arm. A girl who felt no pain. Win....

CHAPTER VI

They brought in Erin Grady, dressed in brown civilian clothes and wearing an expression of curiosity on his lean well-proportioned face and in eyes that were accustomed to peering into measureless deeps of the sky. "How'd you get him?" asked Brave.

"Lied like a trooper," said Pope, and the pilot turned half-angry, half-amused blue eyes on him.

Brave gestured to a straight-backed chair. "Please sit there, Mr. Grady." The pilot did so without question. "Forgive this wire," Brave went on, looping the heavy coils around the man's chest and arms, "but we don't think rope would hold you."

Then the pilot spoke. "Kept telling myself for years that scientists are all cracked," he said philosophically. "Guess this proves it."

"Bill," said the Indian to Thihling, "go out and patrol the house. Let us know if anybody approaches—anybody at all."

The rocketjet man left them. Brave put Grady's hands flat on the arms of the chair and lashed them down at wrist and knuckles. Then he stood back, Alan and Don and Rob a little behind him, and he said gravely, "Erin Grady, you smashed up a disk yesterday. But you weren't hurt."

"I was lucky."

"You sat in the regular pilot's chair as it hit?"

"Sure, I—" then his eyes narrowed and he shut his mouth.

"Too late," said Brave grimly. "You gave yourself away. You aren't so clever as you're supposed to be."

"Whaddaya mean?"

"For a superman, you're too slow on the trigger. We got into that disk before they clamped a security ring around it. We saw what happened to the chair. No human could have missed being sliced down the brisket by that juggernaut that came through the control board."

"You clever, clever little bastards," said Grady venomously. "You'll be dealt with." For the first time he seemed angered at the wire that held him. He threw his weight against it, but it held firm. He glared at each of them, and Rob Pope said, "He's trying hypnotism; watch yourselves."

Mariner chuckled. "He can't affect me, I'm too fat. The thought waves get lost."

Brave did not even feel the tentative vibrations of the pilot's mind, but he glanced at Alan and saw that his friend was sweating. "You okay, guru?" he asked anxiously.

"He's talking to me." Alan's face cleared. "But I'm not going under. I believe your treatment did the trick, Brave."

The pilot relaxed and deliberately spat on the rug. Brave reached out an arm like a tree trunk and slapped the tanned cheek, so the head rocked sideways. "We aren't going to be gentle with you, pal," said Don. "Face that. We aren't playing for marbles."

Grady did not speak. Brave took eight strips of light wood, narrow and about two inches long, from his pocket. Kneeling, he fitted them neatly under the pilot's well-manicured and rather long nails. The man flipped them out with a convulsive motion of the fingers; Brave impassively brought his enormous fist down like a hammer on the back of the fellow's right hand. Grady shrieked.

"Do that again and I'll break the other one," said Brave.

"You red-skinned bastard!" howled Grady, "you did bust it up."

"I meant to. I wanted to see if you'd be quick enough this time to simulate pain."

Had Alan not known better, he would have sworn the pilot was actually suffering. "What are you talking about? Why in blue hell shouldn't I feel pain?"

"Because you're a mutant, and we know you can't. Why can't you, I wonder," muttered Brave in a conversational tone, fitting the splinters under the nails again. "Pain is a necessity of life as we know it. It warns you of danger. A man could be sliced off up to the waist without noticing it, except for pain. Why would the next higher animal to man in the scale of evolution have lost the sensation of pain? It doesn't make sense."

"That's the first thing you've said that I agree with or understand. It doesn't make sense. You're all nuts."

"Come off it," said Alan. "You have given yourself away too often. Don't go back to the old innocent routine."

Rob Pope said, "Suppose they can regenerate lost appendages? It isn't as mad as it sounds. Suppose that welder slipped away and grew himself a new hand? In the case of such a beast, what good would pain be to him? It'd be no more than a nuisance. The lack of pain then becomes an intelligent development—but only then."

"What devils they must be," said Don, staring at Grady. "Right out of the swamps of Hell."

Brave said to the pilot, "Now I'm going to ask you a question. If you give me a fair answer I'll take out one of these sticks. If you don't, I'll drive it into you—under the nail it hurts about as bad as anything can—and light it. It's an old trick and it works wonders as a tongue-loosener. Here's the question: are you a mutant of our race, a superman?"

Grady looked at him for a moment and then he laughed. He was still laughing when Brave hit the stiff wood with a hammer and sank it beneath the nail. Then he screamed.

"You do that real well. It sounds as if that hurt you. Keep it up if you like; it won't bother me. I'm an Indian, Mr. Grady. I'm as sensitive and humane as the next guy until I'm up against somebody who fights unfairly, who's mean and cruel and treacherous; then I turn cold and I say to myself, how shall I fight this brute? and if torture is the best answer, I use it without any qualms. That's sense, it seems to me. Well, I hate your uncanny guts, Mr. Grady, and all your crew: and there isn't any way to fight you that I can see, so I'll torture you. And even if I'm nine-tenths certain that you aren't feeling it, still it eases me a little to hear you whoop and yell. And there's that tenth of my brain that says maybe you are feeling it. I hope you are. I really hope you are."

He lit the wood: it was synthetic, a very light, hard compound of fibers that burnt with a quick flame, as hot as the heart of a coal. It reached the nail and curled it back in two shavings of black char: and Grady almost shattered his throat with his roaring.

"Brave," said Alan, "stop it! He does feel it!"

"You raving maniacs, certainly I feel it!" Grady cried. "Where'd you get the idea I couldn't? You're all mad!"

Don Mariner said calmly, "I'll tell you why he doesn't feel it. Just look at his face." They all did so, uncomprehending. "He isn't sweating," said Don triumphantly, "and he hasn't even turned pale!"

Grady turned his head toward the engineer. "Oh, you fat little blob of stupidity," he said icily. "You stand there with your idiot companions and your bright little idea that's about as wrong as wrong can get. Of course I'm not sweating. I haven't any sweat glands. I haven't any pores. And naturally I can't turn pale. This is my natural color. I'm no damned human chameleon. But I can feel pain, in spite of your driveling theories. What do you want to know?" He spat again. "I won't sit here and take this agony for anyone. What the blazes can you do to us if you do know? You can't touch us. Go on, ask away."

"Are you mutants?" asked Brave.

"No."

"Are you human?"

"Not as you understand it."

"Where did you come from?"

The pilot sneered. "From the ninth planet of a sun unknown to you," he said.

Brave glanced back at Alan. "Think he's lying?"

"I swear I don't know."

"I'm not lying," said Grady. "Want to know how I got out of that disk alive? I heard the damn machinery shifting in front of me—oh yes, my ears are sharper and my sight's better, and I can move a lot faster than you can—so I spread myself out thin against the back of the seat. Lucky for me the monster stopped an inch short of my guts. Want to see how I did it? Will that convince you?"

Then he did an incredible, a terrible thing to see: he seemed to turn almost fluid, and though none of his features changed, they withdrew to the sides; his whole body thinned out and flattened along the chair back, and he became a caricature of a man run over by a steam roller. Then he laughed at them.

Above Rob's gasp and Alan's cry came the shriek of Don Mariner. Then he had swept Brave aside and fired a grenade pistol almost in the face of the pilot; and Grady died without a sound.

"No recriminations," said Alan. "You can't see a thing like that and hold your hand. If I'd been armed I'd have done it myself."

Brave was running his hands over the exposed flesh of the dead pilot. "This is weird stuff," he said. "It isn't human—well, that's obvious. It feels vaguely like gutta-percha. It's swelling up slowly. No, by glory, it's going back into shape again. It's becoming humanoid again." He looked up. "Notice how that word springs to the mind? Humanoid. He wasn't human, he told the truth about that. He wasn't even superhuman. He was alien."

Don Mariner, still shaking, said, "I'm sorry I shot him. I just went out of my head at that stunt he pulled. Never been so scared in my life. I sure fouled up our chances of learning how and whom to fight."

"'What can you do to us if you do know? You can't touch us.'" That was Rob Pope musing aloud. "What did he mean by that? That they're so powerful it doesn't matter now if we know about them?"

"You could put any interpretation on it," said Alan.

"Before we theorize any more," said Bill Thihling from the door, "you'd better know there's an air taxi headed this way. It's a Manhattan job and I thought it might be McEldownie again, but you never know. So what do we do with the corpse you birds so casually created?"

Brave said promptly, "The garbage disposal unit. It'll take care of him in thirty seconds—and very appropriate too." He hoisted the body of the pilot out of the chair, after cutting the wires. As he carried it off to the kitchen and the hidden well that was the disposal unit, Alan opened a camouflaged wall cupboard and took out the all-vac. Switching it on, he ran its round nozzle over the gouts and stains of blood on the rug, the walls, and the chair. It sucked them into itself like an anteater inhaling a hill of ants, leaving no trace of discoloration. Whipping it back into its nook, and tossing the long pieces of wire in after it, he slammed the door and turned round.

"That's that. We're clean. If it's Mac, we tell him the truth; otherwise Grady was never here. Right?"

Bill opened the door. McEldownie was just coming up the walk.

"Cheers, gang. The eminent statesman is put off. We're set for tonight. What crimes have you been committing?"

"Oh, kidnapping and murder," said Alan. The announcer dropped to the couch.

"You're jesting, I trust?"

"In a gnat's eye," said Mariner. "You're just thirty seconds too late to see the corpse." He told Jim briefly what they had done. The bony man did not say anything for a few moments, and then, "Jee-blinking-rusalem! You caught one and pumped him and slew him out o' hand, all in the time it took me to fly to the studio and back. What a bunch of thugs. The Black Hand could have taken lessons from you." He leaned forward as Brave came in. "Well, you seem to have got precious little out of him before young Donald here got peeved, but let's coordinate it and see what we have."

"One, he could do miraculous things with his physical structure," said the Indian. "It's the first wholly sure thing we've learned since we saw the welder burn off his hand without flinching."

"Two," put in Alan, "he said his kind aren't mutants, but aliens from another system. It may be true. Lord knows. We have only his word."

"Three, he claimed to feel pain, and if he was faking, he was a class A actor," said Rob Pope. "I'll tell you why: I was pretty sensitive to his brain waves, even when he wasn't broadcasting at us. Once I thought I caught a plea for help to someone unnamed. And every time Brave hurt him, I felt that he was actually suffering."

"I felt it too," agreed Alan.

Brave, getting out bottles of Scotch and rye, said, "In the minute I had to examine his skin and flesh, I found he wasn't lying about his being without pores. The skin was perfectly smooth. It felt rather like a kind of rubber, though not so much so as to seem inhuman to a casual touch. And his body assumed the human shape after death, so it would appear to be the natural form of the beasts." He passed one bottle to Rob and the other to Mac. The six allies drank deeply. Through two bottles they discussed the enemy; coming at last to a sort of half-conclusion, that there were extraterrestrials who could change their shapes within limits, and there were others, either from the same strange world or existing as a mutation of Earthmen, who were impervious to pain. The aliens, Alan and his crew decided, were susceptible to it. The near-tangible thought waves from the tormented pilot had been too agonized to deny.

It was then a little past four in the afternoon.

"A bit more than three hours before we need to leave for the station," said Thihling, "if we take one of the colony's air taxis. What say we relax and loaf and forget for part of those three hours?"

Alan got up and went sprawling at full length on the deep-napped rug. "I'm for that. Let's loosen up. Loll around. My God, I'm as strung up as Captain Kidd."

"I thought you fell down on purpose," said Rob. "But if you're capable of turning phrases like that, I guess you're just too drunk to stand."

Unquote found Alan and sat down with an air of modest ownership in the small of his back. Brave got out more bottles. "We ought to be drinking to things," he said. "There should be witty toasts and pledges to fair maidens. Bumpers should be drained to the memory of gay college days and friends long gone."

He passed the rye to McEldownie, who said, "We ought to be sucking this booze out of old ivy-covered pewter mugs, then, instead of giving each other our loathsome diseases. More collegiate, y'know."

The Indian took a healthy gulp of bourbon. He sighed appreciatively and flipped the bottle through the air and Bill caught it and had it uncorked and upended in the same motion, dexterous as a conjurer. "Ah," he said, choking and spluttering, "smooth!" He passed it to Alan, who nearly upset Unquote in reaching for it; the cat dug her claws into the rough fabric of his coat, glared at the back of his neck, and spoke sharply and at some length concerning the irreverence of certain men.

"Puss, simmer down," said Jim. "Your master drinketh."

"Now there's a bad word in its context," said Alan gravely. "You know nothing about cats, Mac, m'boy. Nobody was ever a cat's master. If Napoleon kept a cat, it bullied him."

"Napoleon, my illiterate friend, had an intense fear of cats. So obviously he didn't own one."

"If Tamerlane had a cat, it bullied him. If Genghis Khan—"

"You've made your point. Send the alky on its way," said Don.

"Brave, pass around the old ivy-covered pewter mugs," Alan said grandly, rolling over and precipitating a furious Unquote to the rug. "While you're at it, get some old ivy-covered crackers and cheese."

"I could stomach an old ivy-covered potato chip," murmured Rob Pope.

"Let's have a little masculine nostalgia," said Bill. "Let's remember Oxford, Brave."

Four strictly-American-college men hooted him down.

Brave brought glasses and a tray of snacks, and, thoughtfully, a dish of milk for Unquote. "Here comes old ivy-covered Brave now," said Rob. The big Indian emptied a fifth of rye into the glasses. Jim picked up the empty bottle, regarded it like Hamlet with the skull of Yorick, and said, "Blessed blue ruin, how I love thee. Omar had nothing on McEldownie."

"McEldownie the Tentmaker," said Alan. "It has a fine classic ring to it."

"I pawned my fine classic ring last week. I was hungry."

"God," said Bill. "Classic of '58, I presume?"

They finished the rye and after serious consultation opened a bottle of Scotch. McEldownie began to talk with a broad Highland accent and it seemed very funny to everyone. Unquote stalked away to her playbox in disgust. Brave sat bolt upright, looking like a statue of copper-colored granite. They all got drunk.

The announcer stood up and juggled three glasses, then four, and the others applauded, for he was good at it. "For all your awkward look, Mac," said Alan, "you're a slilful—skilful old bird."

"When I juggled before the crowned heads of Europe, they went mad over me. I often wished I could juggle in front of whole people," he added wistfully. "Never did. Just heads."

"Oh, brother," said a woman's voice. They all turned round and looked toward the door. Win Gilmore stood there, shaking her beautiful blued coiffure. "This place looks like a shebeen. And you're all fried to the eyeballs. Ought to be ashamed of yourselves." She dropped her lavender cloak: she was wearing an amethyst-colored halter and a pleated nylon skirt of syenite blue, which clung to her legs as she walked toward them. Alan could see the play of muscles in her thighs where the soft skirt touched them. Some of the liquor sank away from his brain and he remembered that this woman was not human. He gritted his teeth and turned his head away to look at Brave. The Indian was also sobered. He said, "Well, hello," uncertainly.

"It makes me mad," said Win, pouring herself a shot of rum. "All this attractive male virility going to waste. No women to appreciate it. There ought to be wenches flung picturesquely here and there."

"You paint a sordid picture, madame," said Rob. "We've been chastely reliving old school days, knotting old school ties, and reciting the Boy Scout oath to each other. It's uplifting. It's—"

"Sophomoric?"

"Who is this dazzling fluff?" McEldownie asked.

"Win Gilmore."

The tall man opened his green eyes wide. "Oho? The super-jade!"

Win regarded him without affection. "Who the hell are you, and what the hell do you mean by that crack?"

"Your secret is known, harridan," said Jim. He stared into her wide eyes. "Alan says you can't feel pain. That makes you one of the enemy in our book. If it weren't for your perfection of form, I myself would take pleasure in booting you in the left nostril." He let his gaze wander over her well-stocked amethyst halter. "Alan," he said critically, "far be it from ol' Mac to question your judgment, but I doubt this lassie's inhumanity. I really feel we've made another error. If she isn't human, then I'm a rhinoceros."

"You look more like a starving stork," Win cried furiously. "Alan, who is this wretch?"

"Peace, gal, I'm standing up for you, no matter what it sounds like. Doc, you can't convince me that a gal with a balcony that'd grace the Palace Theatre isn't human. I think you're wrong."

"Of course she's good looking. She's a step above us in the evolutionary scale, isn't she?" snarled Alan. "Or else she's from some goddam planet out in the other galaxies." Win looked at him blankly.

"I think you've jumped to a conclusion when you should have crawled to it." McEldownie took a step forward and caught Win's eyes with his own. "I believe you can feel pain," he said.

"Good Lord, of course I can feel—ouch!" She gave a little scream. The announcer had pinched her sharply on the naked flesh just below her halter. Because she had been looking into his eyes, she could not have seen the casual motion of his hand.