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MacDonald 102 Explorer Mitchell battles to conquer the challenge of the mountain SANATORIS SHORT-CUT Jack Vance 113 Mathematics is Magnus Ridolph’s weapon against a pirate of space Special Features THE ETHER VIBRATES The Editor 6 A department for readers, including announcements and letters FIRST TARGET IN SPACE R. L. Farnsworth 98 The president of the United States Rocket Society discusses the Moon SCIENCE FICTION FAN PUBLICATIONS A Review 138 Cover Painting by Earle Bergey — Illustrating “What Mad Universe” STABTIilNQ STORIES. Published every other month by Better Publications, Inc., N. L. Pines, President, at 4600 Diverse^ Are., Chicago 39, 111. Editorial and executive offices, 10 East 40th St., New Tork 16, N. Y. Entered as second-class matter November 22, 1946, at the post office at Chicago, Illinois, under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1948, by Better PublicatlMis, Inc. Snbscription (12 issues), $2.40; single copies, $.20; fweign uad Canadi^ postage extra. 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ASK FOR^/\ f V THIN ©ILteTTES.,./-—: \ , f I HOPE SO... \ YOU'RE MY IDEA OP - A-HANDSOMEMAN WHAT NiD UNIVERSE bj FREDRIC BROWN When the first moon rocket fell back to earth with a flash, Keith Winton found himself catapulted into a world that couldn't he! an astoBiisbiDg complete novel CHAPTER I The Moon Rocket The first attempt to send a rocket to the moon, in 1952, was a failure. Probably because of a structural defect in the operating mechanism, it fell back to Earth, causing a doz- en casualties. Although not containing any ex- plosives, the rocket — in order that its landing on the moon might be observed from earth — contained a Burton potentiometer set to operate throughout the journey through space to build The Planet of Dopelle up a tremendous electrical potential which, when released on contact with the moon, would cause a flash several thousand times brighter than lightning — and several thousand times more disruptive. Fortunately, it came down in a thinly populated area in the Catskill foothills, landing upon the estate of a wealthy publisher of a chain of magazines. The publisher and his wife, two guests and eight servants were killed by the electrical discharge, which completely demolished the house and felled trees for a quarter of a mile around. Only eleven bodies were found. It is presumed that one of the guests, an editor, was so near the center of the flash that his body was completely disintegrated. The next — and first successful — rocket was sent in 1953, almost a year later. * * * Keith WINTON was pretty well winded when the set of tennis was over but he tried not to show it. He hadn’t played in years and tennis — ^he was just realizing — is definitely a young man’s game. Not that he was old by any means — but at thirty-one you get winded unless you’ve kept in condition. Keith hadn’t. He’d had to extend himself to win that set. He extended himself a bit more, enough to leap across the net to join the girl on the other side. He was panting a little but he grinned at her. “Another set? Got time?” Betty Hadley shook her blond head. “’Fraid not, Keith. I’m going to be late now. I couldn’t have stayed this long except that Mr. Borden promised to have his chauffeur drive me to the airport at Greeneville and have me flown back to New York from there. Isn’t he a wonderful man to work for ?” “Uh-huh,” said Keith, not thinking about Mr. Borden at all. “You’ve got to get back?” "Got to,” she said emphatically. “It’s an alumnae dinner. My own alma mater and, not only that, but I’ve got to speak. To tell them how a love story magazine is edited.” “I could come along,” Keith suggested, “and tell them how a science-fiction book is edited. Or a horror book, for that matter — I had Bloodcurdling T ales before Borden put me on Surprising Stories. That job used to Is the Fabulous Globe give me nightmares. Maybe your fellow alumnae would like to hear about it, huh?” Betty Hadley laughed. “They probably would. But it’s strictly a hen party, Keith. And don’t look so downhearted. I’ll be see- ing you at the office tomorrow. This isn’t the end of the world, you know.” “Well, no,” Keith admitted. He was wrong in a way but he didn’t know that. He fell into stride beside Betty as she started up the walk from the tennis court to the big house that was the summer estate of L. A. Borden, publisher of the Borden chain of magazines. He sighed. “You ought to stay around to see the fireworks, though.” “Fireworks? Oh, you mean the moon rocket. Will there be anything to see, Keith?”, “They’re hoping so. Read much about it?” “Not a lot. I know the rocket is supposed to hit the moon like a flash of lightning or something. And they’re hoping it’ll be visible to the naked eye and everybody’s going to be watching for it. Sixteen minutes after nine, isn’t it?” “Right. I’m going to be watching for it anyway. If you get a chance — watch the moon dead center, between the horns of the crescent. It’s a new moon, in case you haven’t been looking, and it’ll hit in the dark area. Without a telescope it’ll be a faint small flash, like somebody striking a match a block away. You’ll have to be watching closely.” “They say it doesn’t contain explosives, Keith ? What is it that will make the flash?” “Electrical discharge — on a scale nobody’s ever tried before. There’s a new-fangled out- fit in it — guy by the name of Professor Bur- tcm worked it out — that uses the kickback of the acceleration and converts it into potential electrical energy — static electricity, of a kind. The rocket itself will be something on the order of a monster Leyden jar with a tre- mendous potential. “When it hits the surface of the moon and busts up the insulating layer outside — well, it’ll make the grand-daddy of all short cir- cuits. It’ll be like a flash of lightning, only probably three or four thousand times stronger than the biggest lightning bolt that ever hit earth.” “Sounds complicated, Keith. Wouldn’t Where Men in Jalopies Are Masters of Space! an explosive charge have been simpler?” “In a way, yes, but we’ll get a lot brighter flash frcxn this — weight for weight — than even from an atomic warhead. And what they’re interested in is a bright flash, not an explosion. Of course, it will tear up a little landscape — not as much as an A-bomb, though more than a block-buster — but that’s incidental. And they expect to learn a lot about the exact composition of the surface B£TTY HADLEY of the moon by training spectroscopes on the flash through every big telescope available. They—” They’d reached the door of the house and Betty Hadley interrupted by putting her hand on his arm. “Sorry to interrupt you, Keith, but I must hurry. Honestly, or I’ll miss the plane. ’Bye.” She put out her hand for him to take but Keith Winton put his hands on her shoulders instead and pulled her to him. He kissed her and, for a breathless second, her lips yielded under his. Then she broke away. But her eyes were shining — and just a bit misty. She said, “’Bye, Keith. See you in New York.” “Tomorrow night? It’s a date.” She nodded and ran on into the house. Keith stood there, a fatuous smile on his face, leaning against the doorpost. IN LOVE again, he thought. And this time it wasn’t quite like anything else that had ever happened to him. It was as sudden and violent as — well, as the flash on the moon was going to be at nine-sixteen to- night. He’d known Betty Hadley only three days, seen her only once before this marvelous weekend — that had been Thursday when she’d first come to Borden Publications, Inc. The magazine she edited. Perfect Love Stories, had just been bought by Borden from a lesser chain. Part of the purchase contract had been that he could hire the edi- tor who had done so well with it. • Perfect Love Stories had been a profitable magazine for three years now, due to Betty Pladley. The only reason the Whaley Pub- lishing Co. had offered it for sale was that they were changing to exclusive publication of slicks. Perfect Love was their only sur- viving pulp. So he’d met Betty Hadley on Thursday and, to Keith Winton, Thursday now seemed just about the most important day in his life to date. Friday he’d had to go to Philadel- phia to see one of his writers, a guy who could really write but who’d been paid in advance for a lead novel and didn’t seem to be doing anything about writing it. He’d tried to get the writer started on a plot, and thought he’d succeeded. Anyway, he’d missed seeing Joe Doppel- berg, his prize fan, who’d picked Friday to happen to be in New York and to call at the Borden offices. Maybe that was a gain, judging from Joe Doppelberg’s letters. And then, yesterday afternoon, he’d come out here at Borden’s invitation. And just another weekend on the boss’s estate (this was the third time Keith had been here) had turned into sheer magic when Betty Hadley turned out to be one of the other two guests from the office. Betty Hadley — tall and lithe and golden blonde, with soft sun-tanned skin, with a face and figure that belonged on the televi- sion screen rather than in an editorial office — how she ever got to be an editor — He sighed and went on into the house. In 13 STARTLING STORIES the big walnut-paneled living room, Borden and Walter Callahan, head accountant for Borden, were playing gin rummy. Borden looked up as he came in. “Hi, Keith. Want to take over after this game? It’s nearly finished. I’ve got some letters to write and Walter would probably as soon take your money as mine.” Keith shook his head. “Got to do some work myself, Mr. Borden. I’m smack against deadline on the Rocketalk Department; I brought my portable and the letter file along.” “Oh, come now. I didn’t bring you out here to work. Do it at the office tomorrow.” “Wish I could,” Keith said. “But it’s my own fault for getting behind and the stuff has to go to the printer tomorrow morning at ten sharp. They’re closing the forms at noon. It’s only a couple of hours work and I’d rather get it done now and be free this evening.” He went on through the living room and upstairs. In his room he took his typewriter out of its case and put it on the desk. From his brief-case he took the file-folder that held the incoming correspondence addressed to Rocketalk Department or, in the case erf the less inhibited letters, to The Rocketeer. On top of the stack was Joe Doppelberg’s letter. He’d put it there because it had said Joe Doppelberg was coming to call in person and he had wanted to have it handy. He worked paper into the typewriter and put down Rocketalk as a heading, then took a deep breath and dived in. Well, fellow space-pilots, tonight — the night I’m writing this, not the night you’re reading it — is the big night, the big night, and the ok Rocketeer was out there to see k. And see it he did, that flash of light on the dark of the moon that marked the landing of the first suc- cessful missile launched through space by man. He looked at it critically, then )ranked the paper out of the machine and put in fresh. It was too formal, too stilted. He lighted a cigarette and wrote it again and it came out better — or worse. IN THE pause while he read it over he heard a door open and close and high- heeled footsteps clicking down the stairs. That would be Betty, leaving. He got up to go to the door and then sat down again. No, it would be anticlimactic to say good-bye again, now, with the Bordens and CaHahan around. Much better to leave it on the note of that quick but breathless kiss and the promise of seeing him tomorrow evening. He sighed and picked up the top letter. It said: Dear Rocky-Tear ; I shouldn’t ought to write you atall, because your last ish stinks to high Arcturus, except for the Wheeler yarn. Who ever told that mug Gormley he could write? And his space-navigation? The big bohunk couldn’t peelot a rowboat across Mud Crick on a sunny day. And that Hooper cover— the gal was okay, more than okay, tho what gals aren’t on covers ? But that thing chasing her — is it supposed to be one of the Mercurian devils in the Wheeler story? Well, tell Hooper I can think of scarier BEIMs than them, cold sober, without even a slug of Venusian sappy-sap. Why don’t she just turn around and chase it? Keep Hooper on the inside — ^his black and white stuff is okay — and get somebody else for covers. How about Rockwell Kent or Dali? I’ll bet Dali could make a dilly of a BEM. Get it. Rocky ? Dali-dilly. Lookit, Rocky, get the Uranian bug- juke ready and iced because I’m going to beard the lyin’ in his den, come Friday. Not coming to Spaceport N’Yawk just to see you. Rocky, don’t flatter yourself on that. But because I got to see a Martian about a dog-star anyway. I’ll be in town, and I’m going to see if you’re as ugly as they say you are. One recent idea of yours. Rocky, is tops. That’s running half -col pix of your best and regularest correspondents with their letters. So I got a surprise for you. I’m sending mine. I was going to bring it, but this letter’ll get there before I do and I might miss an ish going to press in between. Ennahoo, Rocky, kill the fatted moon-calf, because I’ll be seeing you Friday. Joe Doppelberg. Keith Winton sighed again, and picked up his pencil. He marked out the paragraph about the trip to New York — that wouldn’t interest the other readers and he didn’t want to give too many of them the idea of dropping in ^ the office. He could waste too much time that w'ay. He penciled out a few of the cornier phrases in the other parts of the letter, then picked up the snapshot that had come with the letter and glanced at it again. WHAT MAD UNIVERSE 15 Joe Doppelberg didn’t look like his letter. He was a not bad, rather intelligent looking, kid (rf sixteen or seventeen with a nice grin. Sure, he’d run it with the letter. Should have sent it to the photoengraver before but there was still time. He marked the copy to be set with a half-column runaround for a cut, wrote “j4-col Doppelberg” on the back of the photograph. He put the second page of Joe’s letter into Keltfc pulled free of the Lundu and ran (CHAPTER III) the typewriter, thought a moment and typed at the bottom: “So okay, Doppelberg, we’ll get Rockwell Kent to do our next cover. You pay him. But as for having the glamour-gals chasing the BEMs, it can’t be done. Gals in stf are always chaste. Get it, Doppelberg? Chaste- chased. And that ain’t half as bad as your Dali-dilly, either.” He took the page out of the typewriter, sighed and pick^ up the next letter. He finished at six, which left him an hour before dinner. He took a quick shower and dressed and there was still half an hour left. He wandered downstairs and out the French doors that led to the garden. It was just turning dusk and the new moon was already visible in the clear sky. The see- ing would be good, he thought. And, darn it. STARTLING STORIES 16 that rocket-flash had better turn out to be visible to the naked eye or he’d have to write a new opening paragraph for the Rocketalk Department. Well, there’d be time for that after nine-sixteen. He sat down on a wicker bench beside the main path through the garden, and sniffed deeply of the fresh country air and the scent of flowers all about him. He thought about Betty Hadley, and just what he thought about her doesn’t need to be recorded here. But it kept him happy — perhaps happily miserable would be a better description — un- til his mind wandered to the writer in Phila- delphia and he wondered if the so-and-so was actually working on that story or was out getting plastered. Darn it, he really needed that novel for the October book. Borden had okayed the pay in advance but just the same it had been his, Keith’s idea and Borden was going to blame him if the story didn’t materialize. He thought about Betty Hadley again and then he thought about all the criticisms the Hooper covers had been getting and won- dered if he could find a cover artist who’d be really good on both beautiful heroines and horrible monsters. Hooper was a nice guy but he just didn’t have bad enough night- mares to please the customers. Like Joe Doppelberg, most of the fans seemed to want — The rocket, falling back to Earth, was traveling faster than sound and he neither saw nor heard it, although it struck only two yards away from him. There was a flash. CHAPTER II The Purple BEM There was no sense of transition, of movement, nothing of lapse of time. One instant, Keith Winton had l^en sitting upon a wicker bench ; in the same instant, it seemed, he was lying flat on his back staring up at the evening sky. There had been the flash and this — simul- taneously. Only it couldn’t have been merely that the wicker bench had collapsed under him — or even vanished from under him — because it had been under a tree and there was now no tree between him and the sky. He raised his head first and then sat up, for the moment too shaken — not physically but mentally — to stand up. Somehow he wanted his bearings first, before he quite trusted his knees. He was sitting on grass, smoothly mowed grass, in the middle of a yard. Behind him, when he looked around, was a house — a quite ordinary house, but it wasn’t Mr. Borden’s house. It had the look, somehow, of a vacant house. At least, there was no sign of life, no light at any window. He stared at the house wonderingly, then turned back to look the other way. A hun- dred feet away, at the edge of the lawn on which he sat, was a hedge and at the other side of the hedge were trees — two orderly rows of them, as though on each side of a road. They were tall poplars. He stood up a bit cautiously. There was a momentary touch of dizziness but, outside of that, he was all right. Whatever had hap- pened to him he wasn’t hurt. He stood still until the dizziness passed and then started walking toward the gate in the hedge. He looked at his wrist watch. It was five minutes of seven and that was impossible, he thought. Because it had been five minutes of seven, just about, when he’d been sitting on that bench in Mr. Borden’s garden. And wherever he was now he couldn’t have got here in nothing flat. He held the wrist watch to his ear, and it was still ticking. But that didn’t prove any- thing. Maybe it had stopped from — from whatever had happened and had started again when he had stood up and started walking. He looked up again at the sky. No, it had been dusk then and it was dusk now. Not much time could have elapsed, if any. And the crescent moon was in the same place — at least it was the same distance from the zenith. He couldn’t be sure here (wherever here was) about his bearings and directions. The gateway through the hedge led to an asphalt-paved three-lane highway. As he closed the gate he looked again at the house and saw something he hadn’t noticed before — a sign on one of the porch pillars that read For Sale. R. Blaisdell, Greeneville, N. y. Then he must still be near Greeneville, which was the nearest town to Borden’s estate. But that was obvious anyway — the real question was how he could be anywhere at all out of sight of where he’d been sitting WHAT MAD only minutes ago. It was only seven o’clock, even now. He shook his head to clear it. Amnesia? Had he walked here, wherever here was, without knowing it ? It didn’t seem possible, particularly in minutes or less. He looked uncertainly up and down the asphalt roadway, wondering which way to walk. There wasn’t another building in sight anywhere that he could see. But across the road were cultivated fields. If there was a farm there’d be a farmhouse. He decided to cross beyond the far row of poplars and see if he could see it from there. If not, he could just walk. Sooner or later he’d come to a place where he could ask questions and get his bearings. He was halfway across the road when he heard the sound of the approaching car, still out of sight beyond the next rise. He went on to the far edge of the road, turned and waited. It wasn’t coming fast from the sound of it and maybe — It came into sight, then, a Model T of ancient vintage that just barely seemed to make the top of the hill it had been climbing. Then, as it chugged and began to gather speed again coming toward him, Keith stepped out into the road and held up his hand. The Ford slowed down and stopped beside him. The man at the wheel leaned over and lowered the window on Keith’s side. “Want a lift, mister?” he asked. He looked, Keith thought, almost too much like a farmer to be one. He was even chewing a long yellow straw, just the color of his hair, and his faded blue overalls matched his faded blue eyes. Keith put a foot on the running board and leaned his head into the car through the open side window. He said, “I’m afraid I’m lost. Do you know where L. A. Borden’s place is?” The farmer rolled the straw to the oppo- site corner of his mouth. He thought deeply, frowning with the effort. “Nope,” he said, finally. “Never heard of him. Not on this road. Mebbe over on the pike. I don’t know all the farms there.” “It isn’t a farm,” Keith told him. “A country estate. He’s a publisher. Where does this road go?” “Greeneville ahead, ten miles, or so. Back t’other way it hits the Albany Highway at Carteret. Want a lift to Greeneville? Guess you can get your bearing there, find out UNIVERSE 17 where this Borden lives.” “Sure,” Keith said. “Thanks.” He got into the car. He was going to be late for dinner but at least he’d know where he was. In Greene- ville he could phone Borden and then hire a car to drive him out. He’d be there by nine at the latest. The old car chugged along the winding road. His benefactor didn’t seem to want to talk and Keith was glad of that. He wanted to think, instead, to try to figure out what possibly could have happened. Borden’s estate was a big one. If the driver of the ancient jaloppy knew everybody along the road he couldn’t possibly not have heard of Borden’s place if it were very close. Yet it couldn’t be more than twenty miles away, because it was ten miles from Greeneville — and so was the spot where he’d been picked up along the road. Even if those ten-mile distances were in opposite directions. And even that far was silly, since it had been a matter of minutes at the most. They were coming to the outskirts of a town now and he looked at his watch again. It was seven thirty-five. He looked out of the window of the car at the passing build- ings— they were on a business street now — until he saw a clock in a window and com- pared his watch with it. The watch was right. It hadn’t stopped and started again. The jaloppy swung into the curb and parked. “This is about the middle of town, mister,” the driver said. “Guess you can look up your party in the phone book and you’ll be all right.” “Sure — that’s my best bet. Thanks a lot.” Keith went into the drugstore on the cor- ner and to the phone booth at the back. There was a slender Greeneville phone book hang- ing by a chain from one side of the booth and he leafed through it to the B’s, and to — There wasn’t any Borden listed. Keith frowned. Borden’s phone was in the Greeneville exchange. He remembered having called the number a time or two from New York City. And it had been a Greene- ville number all right. Could it be an unlisted number ? That was possible, of course. Wait a minute — he ought to be able to remember it — it had been three numbers all alike — ones. That was it — GreeneAulle 111. He remembered wondering if Borden had used pull with the phone com- pany to get himself a listing like that. He pulled the door of the booth shut and STARTUNG STORIES 18 found a nickel out of the change in his pocket. But the phone was a type he hadn’t seen be- fore. There didn’t seem to be any slot for a coin to go in. Maybe they didn’t have coin phones in these little upstate towns, he de- cided, and he’d be supposed to pay the drug- gist for the call. He picked up the receiver and, when an operator’s voice asked, “Number, please?’’ he gave it. There was a minute’s pause and then the operator’s voice came back. “There’s no such number listed, sir.” For a second, Keith thought he must be going crazy. Then he shook his head. He asked, “You have a phone listed for L. A. Borden? I thought that was the number. Can’t find him listed in the phone book but I know he’s got a phone.” “One minute, sir . . . No, there is no such name on our listings.” “Thanks,” Keith said and put the receiver back. He still didn’t believe it. He stepped out of the booth and picked up the phone book again. He looked in it again and there still wasn’t any L. A. Borden listed. Suddenly he snapped the book shut and looked at the cover. It read, Greeneville, N . Y. A momentary suspicion that he was in the wrong Greeneville died and another fainter suspicion died before it was born when he read the smaller type — Spring, 1952. He still didn’t believe it somehow. He wanted to open that book and go through the B’s again. INSTEAD, he walked forward to the soda counter and sat down on one of the old- fashioned wire-legged stools. Behind the counter the druggist — a little gray-haired man with thick spectacles — was polishing glasses. He looked up. “Yes, sir?” “A Pepsi, please,” Keith said. He wanted to ask questions but he didn’t know what questions to ask. He watched while the druggist drew the Pepsi. “Beautiful night out,” the druggist said. Keith nodded. He’d have to remember to watch for the flash of that moon rocket, what- ever else happened. He looked at his watch. Almost eight — another hour and a quarter and he’d be outside, watching the dark of the moon. He drank the Pepsi almost at a gulp. It tasted cool and good but it made him realize he was getting hungry. Eight o’clock — why, dinner was over by now at the Bordens’ place! He looked around back of the soda fountain for any signs indicating that the druggist served sandwiches or other food. Apparently he didn’t. Keith took a quarter out of his pocket and put it on the marble top of the soda fountain. It rang metallically and the druggist dropped the glass he had been polishing. Be- hind the thick glasses the druggist’s eyes got wide and scared, and he stood there without moving his body but his head swiveled back and forth from one end of the store to the other. He didn’t seem to realize or notice that he’d dropped and broken a glass. The towel too fell from his fingers. Then his hand went forward, covered the coin and picked it up. Again he looked both ways as though making sure he and Keith were alone in the store. Then, shielding the coin deep in his cupped hands, he stared at it, moving it close to his eyes. He turned it over and studied the other side. Then his frightened eyes went back to Keith’s face. “Beautiful!” he said. “Hardly worn at all. And a nineteen twenty -eight.” His voice was so soft it was almost a whisper. “But — who sent you?” Keith closed his eyes and opened them again. “Either I’m crazy,” he thought, “or he is.” “Nobody,” he said. The little druggist smiled slowly. “You don’t want to tell. It must have been K. Well, never mind that, in case it wasn’t. I’ll take a chance. I’ll give you a thousand cred- its for it.” Keith didn’t say anything. “Two thousand, then. I know it’s worth more but that’s all I can give you. If my wife — ” “All right,” Keith said. The hand that held — and concealed — the coin dived into the druggist’s pocket like a prairie-dog popping into its hole. Unnoticed glass crunched under the druggist’s shoes as he walked down to the cash register at the end of the counter and punched a key. No Sale came up behind the glass. He came back, counting bills, and put a pile of them in front of Keith Winton. “Two thousand,” he said. “Almost breaks me but I guess it’s worth it. I’m a little crazy, I guess.” Keith picked up the bills and looked long and hard at the top one. There was a fa- The match fUme revealed a hideous scarred lace — and above it a dttb raised to strike (CHAPTER V) miliar picture of George Washington in the center of it. The figure in the comers was 100 and under the oval portrait of Washing- ton was spelled out One Hundred Credits. And that was silly, too, Keith thought. Washington’s picture belonged only on one dollar bills. Unless things were different here. Here? He looked again, read more printing. United States of America, he read. Feder- al Reserve Note. And it wasn’t a new bill. It looked worn and circulated and genuine. There were the familiar little silk threads. A serial number in blue ink. To the right of the portrait, Series of 1935, and a repro- duced signature, Fred M. Vinson, over fine type, Secretary of the Treasury. Slowly, Keith folded the little stack of bills and put them into his coat pocket. He looked up, and his eyes met those of the druggist, looking out at him through the thick spectacles, looking anxiously. The druggist’s voice was anxious, too. He said, “It’s — it’s all right, isn’t it? You’re not an agent? I mean, if you are you've got me now, for collecting and you might as well arrest me and get it over with. I took a chance and, if I lose, there’s no use keeping me in suspense, is there?’’ “No,” Keith said slowly. “It’s all right. Can I have another Pepsi, please?” This time some of the Pepsi slopped out as the druggist put it down on the marble. And, as glass again crunched under the drug- 19 STARTLING STGRIES 20 gist’s shoes, he smiled nervously and apolo- getically at Keith, got a broom from the cor- ner and began to sweep behind the counter. Keith sipped his second Pepsi and thought. If, that is, one could call the whirl of things inside his head thinking. It was- more like a ride on a pinwheel. He watched until the druggist had finished with the broom. “Look,” he said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions that may seem — uh — crazy to you. But I’ve got a reason for asking them. Will you answer them, no matter how they sound to you?” The druggist looked at him carefully. “What kind of questions, mister?” “Well — ^what is the exact date?” “June tenth, nineteen fifty-two.” “A. D.?” The druggist’s eyes got wider again, but he said, “Of course.” “And this is Greeneville, New York?” “Yes. You mean you don’t know—” “Let me ask,” Keith said. “Do you know a man named L. A. Borden who has a big estate near here? A magazine publisher?” “No. Of course I don’t know everybody around here.” “You’ve heard of the Borden chain of magazines that he runs?” “Oh sure. We sell them. New issues just came in today of some of them. Over on the stand there. The July issues.” “And the moon rocket? This is the night it lands?” “I don’t understand what you mean, ‘This is the night.’ It lands every night. It’s in by now. We’ll be getting customers any min- ute. Some of them drop in on their way to the hotel.” Again, for a moment, Keith closed his eyes. He thought, “I’m crazy or he is.” He opened his mouth to ask another ques- tion, closed it again. He was afraid. He wanted something familiar to reassure him and he thought he knew what it would be. He got up off the stool and walked over to the rack of magazines. He saw Perfect Love Stories first, and picked it up. The cover girl reminded him a little of the editor, Betty Hadley — only she wasn’t as beautiful as Bet- ty. How many magazines, he wondered, had ^itors more beautiful than their cover girls ? But Betty Hadley — He shoved Betty Hadley resolutely to the back of his mind and looked for Surprising Stories and saw it. He picked it up too. Yes, the July issue. Just the same as — Was it? The cover was the same scene but the art work wasn’t quite the same. It was better, more vivid. It was Hooper’s technique, all right, but as though Hooper had been taking lessons. The gal on the cov- er was more breathtakingly beautiful than he’d remembered her to be from the cover proofs and the monster — he shuddered. In general outline, it was the same mon- ster but there was a subtle difference, a hor- rible difference, that he couldn’t put his finger ,on — and felt he wouldn’t want to put his finger on. Not even wearing asbestos gloves. But the signature was there — when he was able to tear his eyes away from the monster. A tiny crooked characteristic H that was Hooper’s way of signing all his pics. And then, in the logo at the bottom right corner, he saw the price. It wasn’t 20c. . It was 2 cr. Two credits f What else? Very slowly and carefully he folded the two magazines, the two incredible magazines (for he saw now that Perfect Love Stories was also priced at 2 cr.) and put them into his pocket. He wanted to get off somewhere by him- self and study those two books, read and digest every word of them. But first, he’d have to pay for them and get out of here. Two credits? How much was two credits? The druggist had given him two thousand credits for a quarter, but that could hardly be a criterion. That quar- ter, for some reason he’d have to learn, was a rare and precious object to the man who had bought it from him. O, THE magazines were a better clue. If their value were an approximate criterion, then two credits was roughly equiv- alent to twenty cents. And if that were true the druggist had given him the equivalent of — let’s see — two hundred dollars for a quarter in hard money. He shouldn’t have done it — he should have been more careful — but the shock of seeing that almost-but-not-quite cover for the July book of his own doing made him a bit slap- happy for the moment. Change rattled in his pocket as he walked back to the soda coun- ter. His hand plunged into his pocket and found a half dollar. How would the druggist react to that? WHAT MAD UNIVERSE Casually, he tossed it down on the marble, “m take the two magazines,” he said. “Got change for a half?” The druggist reached out a hand for the coin and the hand trembled. Suddenly, Keith felt ashamed of himself. He shouldn’t have done that. And it would lead to conversation, inevitably, that would keep him from getting off by himself to read the magazines. He said gruffly, “Keep it. You can have them both — the quarter and the half — for what you gave me.” He turned and started out of the store. He started — that was all. He took one step and froze. Something was coming in the open doorway of the drug- store. Something that wasn’t human. Something that was over seven feet tall — so tall that it had to stoop slightly to get through the doorw'ay — and that was covered with bright purple fur except for its hands, feet and face. Its hands feet and face were purple, too. Its eyes were flat white disks, pupil-less. It didn’t have a nose, but it had teeth, plenty of teeth. And suddenly, from behind, a hand grabbed Keith’s arm and the druggist’s voice, suddenly fierce and shrill was shouting; “Nineteen forty-three! A fake! And the other must be a fake, too. He’s a spy! An Arcturian. Get him. Hunan. Kill him!” The purple thing in the doorway made a shrieking noise that was almost supersonic in pitch. It spread its purple arms and came toward him looking like something out of a nightmare that Gargantua might have. The druggist, yelling, “Kill him! Kill him, Lunan!” was climbing up Keith’s back but — in the face of what was coming at him from the front of the store — Keith hardly noticed that. ' He turned and ran the other way, to the back of the store, losing the druggist en- route. There had to be a door at the back of the store. If there weren’t he had a feeling he’d make one. CHAPTER III Shoot on Sight There was a door. Something clawed down his back as he went through it. 21 He pulled free, heard his coat rip. He slammed the door and heard a yelp of pain — not a human one — behind him. But he didn’t turn around. He ran. He didn’t turn until, half a block away, he heard the sound of a pistol report behind him and felt a sudden pain as though a red- hot poker were being drawn across his upper arm. He turned his head then, just for a second. The purple thing was coming after him. It was about halfway between the door he’d jvst left at the back of the store and Keith. But, despite its long legs, it seemed to run slowly and awkwardly. Apparently he could outdistance it easily. The purple thing carried no weapon. The shot that had seared Keith’s shoulder, he saw, had come from the little druggist who, a big old-fashioned revolver in his hand, was standing just outside the door. The pistol was aiming for another shot. He heard the shot as he dived into the areaway between two buildings — but the bullet must have gone past him harmlessly for he didn’t feel it. Then he was between the buildings and, for a moment, he thought he had run into a blind alley. There was only a blank brick wall at the end of the areaway. But there were doors to the buildings on either side and cme of them was standing ajar. He closed and locked it behind him. He stood there in the dimness, panting, and looked about him. He was in a hallway. Tow'ard the street, stairs led upward. In the other direction, there was another door. That would lead to the alley. Sudden hammering sounded on the door he had just entered — hammering and the babble of excited voices. Keith ran to the back door, opened it and was out into the alley. He ran between two buildings that would front on the next street. He slow'ed down his pace as he neared the sidewalk and emerged at a normal walk. He turned in the direction that would take him to the main street, half a block away, then hesitated. It was a fairly crowded, busy street. Was there safety or danger in crowds? He stood in the shadow of a tree a dozen paces short of the corner and watched. It looked like normal traffic on a normal small city main street — for a moment. Then, walking arm in arm, two of the purple-furred monsters went by. The people before and after them paid no attention to them. What- ever they were, they were— accepted. They were normal. They belonged here. STARTLING STORIES 22 Here? But where, what, wh«i was here? What mad universe that took for granted an alien race more horrible looking than the worst Bern that had ever leered from a sci- ence-fiction magazine cover? What mad universe in which he was given what seemed to be the equivalent of two hundred dollars for a quarter and attacked when he offered a half-dollar? Yet whose credit-currency bore a picture of George Washington and current dates and which had provided — they were still folded in his pocket — current and only subtly different is- sues of Surprising Stories and Perfect Love Stories? A world with asthmatic Model T Fords — and space-travel ? There must be space trav- el. Those purple things had never evolved on Earth — if this were Earth. The druggist had said, about the moon rocket, “It lands every night.” And then — what was it the druggist had shouted just before the Bern had attacked him? “An Arcturian spy?" But that was absurd. Arcturus was light-years away. The druggist had called the monster Lunan. A proper name— or an inhabitant of Luna? “. . . It lands every night. It's in by now. We’ll be getting customers any minute. Some of them drop in on their way to the hotel.” Suddenly Keith was aware that his shoul- der hurt him and that there was a wet, sticky feeling on his upper arm. He looked down and saw that the sleeve of his sport jacket was soaked with blood, looking black rather than red in the twilight and the shadow of the tree. And there was a deep gouge in the cloth where the bullet had creased it. He needed attention for that wound, to stop the bleeding. Why not walk out there, look for a policeman — were there policemen here? — and give himself up, tell the truth ? The truth? What was the truth? Tell them, “You’re all wrong. This is the United States, Earth, Greeneville, New York, and it’s June, nineteen hundred fifty-two, all right — but there isn’t any space travel except an experimental rocket that hasn’t landed yet and dollars are the currency and not credits — even if they’ve got Fred M. Vin- son’s signature and Washington’s picture — and there aren’t any purple Bems and a guy named L. A. Borden lives near here and will explain who I am.” Impossible, of course. From what he’d seen and heard there was oiriy (me person here who would believe any of that and that one person would promptly be locked up in a nuthouse if nothing worse. No, he didn’t want to do that. Not yet, anyway — not until he’d had time to orient himself a little better and find out what it was all about. Somewhere, blocks away, sirens wailed, coming closer. Police cars, if that siren- sound meant the same thing here that it did jn more familiar surroundings. Quickly he crossed the quiet side street, went through another alley and then, keep- ing in the shadows as much as possible, put another few blocks between himself and the main street. He shrank back into the shadow of another areaway as a squad car turned the corner with siren shrieking. It went past. He had to find sanctuary somewhere, even though there was risk in finding it. He couldn’t wander long this way without being seen — not with blood on his sleeve and the back of his coat, he remembered now, torn. There w’as a sign Rooms for Rent in the window of the next building. Did he dare take a chance? The feel of blood running dow'n past his elbow told him he’d have to. Keeping in the shadows as much as he could, he went to the door and looked in through the glass. Perhaps, if he kept his bad side aw'ay from the clerk . . . But there wasn’t any clerk at the desk in- side the door. There was a push-bell on the desk and a sign. Ring for Clerk. Perhaps . . . He opened the door as quietly as he could and closed it the same way. He tiptoed to the desk and studied the rack behind it. There w’ere a row of boxes, some with mail, a few with keys in them. He looked around carefully and then leaned across the desk and picked the key out of the nearest box. It was numbered 201. He looked around again. No one had seen him. He tiptoed to the stairs. They were carpeted and didn’t creak and 201 was right at the head of them. Inside the room he locked the door behind him and turned on the light. Now, if only the occupant of 201 didn’t come in within the next half hour, he had a chance. He stripped off his coat and shirt and studied the wound. It was going to be pain- ful but not dangerous. The gouge was half an inch deep but the bleeding was already slowing down. He made sure by looking in the dresser WHAT MAD UNIVERSE 2j drawer that the missing occupant of 201 had shirts — within half a size of his own — and then he ripped apart the shirt be had just taken off and used it to bandage the arm, winding it around and around so that the blood would soak through slowly if at all. Then he appropriated a dark shirt from the dresser — picking a dark one because his own had been white — and a necktie from the rack. One of three suits that hung in the closd; was dark blue, a perfect contrast to bis own light tan and he put it on. There was a straw hat too. At first he thought it too big for him but, with a little paper folded under the sweat-band, it served. He made a quick estimate and translation of the value of the things he’d taken, and left a five-hundred-credit note on the bureau. Fifty dollars should be ample. The suit, the main item, was neither new nor expensive. He made his own clothes into a bundle, wrapped with some newspaper that had b^n in the closet. Much as he wanted to study and read those newspapers, he knew that get- ting out of here and to a safer place came first. He opened the door and listened. There was still no sound from the little lobby downstairs. He went down the stairs as si- lently as he had come up them and was safdy outside again. Now, with a complete change of clothing, with no blood visible from his wounded arm, he needn’t fear the prowling cars. Only the druggist — or the Lunan — could identify him and he’d give the drug- store a wide berth. He got rid of his bundle in the first handy waste receptacle and then, walking as non- chalantly as he could, ventured onto the crowded main street of the town. OW, with his appearance reasonably changed, he dared look for sanctuary for the night — and a place where he could study at leisure the two magazines in his pocket. He had an idea those were going to be the most interesting magazines he’d ever read. He walked in the- direction opposite that of the drugstore where disaster had so nearly befallen him. He passed a man’s haberdash- ery, a sporting goods store, a theater at which was playing a picture he had seen in New York two months before. Everything seemed normal and ordinary. The people about him were normal and ordinary. For a moment, he wondered if — 24 STABTUNG STORIES _ Then he came to a newsstand with a rack ship. That was what came first of newspapers in front of it. The headline read : ... Borden Publications, Inc. . . . L. A. Bor- den, Editor and Publisher. Keith Winton, ARCS ATTACK MARS; DESTROY KAPi Managing Editor. Earth Colony Unprepared Dopelle Vows Vengeance He stepped closer to read the date. It was today’s issue of the Netv York Times, as familiar typographically as the palm of his hand. He picked the top copy off the rack and w'ent into the store with it. He handed the newsdealer a hundred credit note and got ninety-nine credits in change — all in bills like the ones he had except in smaller de- nominations. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and hurried out. A few doors farther on was a hotel. He checked in, signing— after a second’s hesita- tion while he picked up the pen — his right name and address. There wasn’t any bell- hop. The clerk handed him the key and told him where to find the room, at the end of the corridor on the second floor. Two minutes later, with the door closed and locked behind him, he took a deep breath of relief and sat down on the bed. For the first time since whatever had happened in the drugstore he felt safe. He took the newspaper and the magazines from his pocket, then got up again to hang his coat and hat on the hanger inside the door. As he did so, he noticed two knobs and a dial on the wall beside the doorway, above a six inch circular area of cloth — ob- viously a built-in radio with the cloth cover- ing a speaker outlet. He turned the knob that looked like a rheostat and it was. A faint hum responded immediately. He turned the tuning dial un- til a station came in clear and strong, then turned down the volume a little. It was good music— sounded like Benny Goodman, al- though he didn’t recognize the tune. He went back to the bed, took off his shoes to be comfortable and propped pillows up against the head of the bed. He picked up, first, his own book, Surprising Stories. He stared again, wdth growing wonder, at the cover — incredibly the same picture, incred- ibly different. He opened it quickly to the contents page and didn’t even glance at the table of con- tents until he read the statement of owner- He found he’d been holding his breath a little. He belonged here then (wherever here was) and he still had a job. And Mr. Borden too — but what had happened to Borden’s country estate, the estate that had literally fallen out from under him? Another thought struck him, and he grabbed up the love story book and almost tore it getting it open to the contents page. Yes — Betty Hadley was Managing Editor. It still read Whaley Publishing Co., of course. This issue was before Borden had bought the magazine. Whatever mad universe this was, he had a job here and Betty Hadley was here. He sighed a little with relief. Betty Had- ley— this couldn’t be too bad a place. The tune on the radio stopped suddenly, as though someone had shut off a record. A voice cut in : “Special news bulletin. Second warning to citizens of Greeneville and surrounding territory. The Arcturian spy reported half an hour ago has not yet been apprehended. All railway stations and spaceports are be- ing closely guarded and a house-to-house search is being instituted. All citizens are requested to be on the alert. “Go armed. Shoot on sight. Mistakes may be made but again we remind you that it is better that a hundred innocent people die than that the spy escape to cause the loss, perhaps, of a million Terrestrial lives. “We repeat the description ...” SCARCELY breathing, Keith Winton lis- tened to that description. About five feet nine . . . one-sixty pounds . . . tan suit, white sport shirt open at the collar . . . He let his breath out slowly. They hadn’t discovered his change of clothes then. And there was no mention of his being wounded. The druggist, then, didn’t know that one of the shots he’d fired had hit. The physical description was fairly dose but that couldn’t be too dangerous if they didn’t know the clothes he was wearing now or the fact that his upper arm would be bandaged. If only the man whose room he had burgled at the rooming house didn’t come home and find the dark suit missing, WHAT MAD and tie it in with the broadcasts — But — ye gods, what had he walked into? “SJwat on sight!” At least that ended but definitely his half- formed intention to go to the police with the truth as soon as he’d oriented himself a bit. Somehow, he was in deadly danger here and there wouldn’t be any chance to explain. Somehow he’d have to get back to New York, and — but what would New York be like ? As he knew it or otherwise ? It was getting hot and stuffy in the room. He went over to the window and opened it, then stood looking out at the street below. So ordinary a street, such ordinary people. And then three of the tall purple monsters, arm in arm, came out of the theater lobby across the way and nobody on the street paid any attention to them. He stepped back suddenly from the win- dow, for one of the purple things might, for all he knew, be the one that had seen him in the drugstore; they all looked alike to him but it might recognize him if it saw him at the window. He was trembling a little at a sudden thought. Was he crazy? If so, it was the craziest form of craziness he’d ever heard of and he’d studied abnormal psychology at college. And, if he were crazy, which was the delusion — this world he’d just discovered or his memories of a world without space travel and purple Bems ? Were all his memories wrong? Or — whatf There were footsteps along the corridor outside his door, footsteps of three or four people. There was a knock at his door. A voice said, “Police.” CHAPTER IV - Manhattan Madness MEITH took a deep breath and thought fast. The radio had just told him that a house-to-house search was being made, probably that’s all this was. As someone who’d just checked into the hotel he’d be investigated first, of course. Aside from his time of checking in, they could have no grounds for suspicion. Was there anything on him that would UNIVEESE 25 give him away if he were searched? His money — ^money that was in dollars and cents insterfo of credits. That was all. Quickly he took from his pocket the change he had left — a quarter, two dimes and some pennies. From his billfold he took the bills — three tens and some singles — that weren’t credit tails. He wrapped the change in the bills, making a small tight wad, and reached out throng the window, putting them on the corner of the window ledge out of sight Then he went and opened the door of the room. Three men, two of them in police uniform, stood there. The uniformed ones held drawn revolvers in their hands. It was the other, the man in a gray business suit, who spoke. He said, “Sorry, sir. We’re making a routine check-up. You’ve heard the broad- 'C3.sts “Of course,” Keith said. “Come in.” They came in, ready and alert. The muz- zles of the pistols were aimed at his chest and they didn’t waver a bit. The cold sus- picious eyes of the man in gray didn’t waver from his face either. But his voice was polite. “Your name?” “Keith Winton.” “Occupation?” “Editor. Manag^ing Editor, that is, of Surprising Stories.” Keith gestured casual- ly at the magazine lying on the bed. The muzzle of one of the revolvers dropped a little and a broad grin came across the face of the man behind it. “The heck!” said the uniformed man. “Then you run the Rocketalk Department, don’t you? You’re The Rocketeer?” Keith nodded. “Then maybe you remember my name? John Garrett I’ve written you some letters and you published two of them.” Quickly he transfered his pistol to his left hand and stuck out his right Keith shook it. “Sure,” he said. “You’re the guy who keeps trying to talk us into run- ning color on our inside illustrations, even if we have to raise the price a d — ” He caught himself quickly. “ — a credit.” The man’s grin got broader and his pistol dropped to his side. “Sure,” he said. “That’s me. I’ve been a fan of your magazine ever since — ” The man in gray cleared his throat. He said, “That’ll do. Sergeant. We’re on busi- ness, remember?” But his attitude was more relaxed as he STARTLING STORIES 26 smiled at Keith, and some of the stiffness had gone out of his face and voice. “Guess you’re all right, Mr. Winton. But, as routine, do you have identification?’’ Keith nodded and started to reach for the wallet in his hip pocket, but the man in gray said, “Wait. If you don’t mind — ” And, whether Keith minded or not, he stepped around behind Keith and ran his hands swiftly over all of Keith’s pockets, ending by removing the wallet himself, glanc- ing inside it and then handing it back. “Okay,” he said, “if—” He went to the closet, opened the door and looked inside. He opened the dresser draw- ers, looked under the bed, made a quick but reasonably thorough search. “You have no luggage?” Keith said, “Didn’t expect to stay here overnight. Came on business and it took me longer than I expected.” The man in gray finished his search. He said, “Sorry to have bothered you. Mr. Winton. By the way, I’m Captain Hoffman. If there’s anything I can do for you — you’re going back to New York tomorrow morn- ing ?’’ Keith had been thinking about that. Some- time tonight the man whose suit he was wearing was going to discover it was missing and possibly report it to the police. It might be better if he could run the gauntlet of the railroad station now, while things looked good. He said. “I’ve been thinking about that, Captain. Going back in the morning, I mean. It’ll get me in at the office so late ; I think I’m going to change my mind and go back tonight. I was tired when I decided to stay over here but I’m feeling better now. Will I have any trouble at the station?” “Possibly. They’re screening pretty close at all the outlets. I’ll write you a note if you like.” “Fine,” Keith told him. “I’ll appreciate it.” Half an hour later, he was on an un- crowded ti'ain to New York. He had a seat to himself and two hours of leisure to read the two magazines and the newspaper he had bought. The newspaper came first. ARCS ATTACK MARS; DESTROY KAPI That was the news, the big news. He read it carefully. Kapi, it seemed, was an Earth colony on Mars established in 1939, the fourth of the seven colonies established there. It was smaller than most of the others. There had been eight hundred and forty Terrestrial colonists. All had been killed as well as an estimated hundred and fifty Martian labor- ers. Then, Keith realized, there must be Mar- tians as distinguished from Terrestrial emi- grants. What were they like? There wasn’t any clue in the news article. Were they Bems — bug-eyed monsters like the purple beings from the Moon? He read on. A single ship of Arcturians had somehow got through the cordon of spaceguards, and had launched a single torpedo before the Dopelle fighters had de- tected it. They had attacked at once and. al- though the Arcturian vessel had switched to interstellar flight, they had pursued and destro}'ed it. Preparations were being made for a coun- ter-raid. The details were, of course, a mili- tar\' secret. There were a lot of names and things that meant nothing to him. Somehow it struck him strangely when he came across a familiar one — General Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, in charge of Venus Sector. Then there were words and references that puzzled him — the phrase “all-city mist- out” and frequent references to “the rene- gades” and “the Nighters.” He went through the paper from first page to last, hunting clues to the differences be- tween this world and the one he knew. There seemed to be so amazingly little difference on the domestic scene — so amazingly great a difference on the cosmic scale. The society news was there, the sport news — St. Louis was leading one major lea- gue and New York the other — and the ads were the same except that prices were given in credits instead of dollars. But basically the same merchandise was offered — no slightly-used space ships, no Little Wonder Atomic Kits for the kiddies. He studied the want-ads particularly. The housing situation seemed a bit better than he remembered it — occasionally a flat or house was offered for sale with the comment. “Emi- grating to Mars,” and one Pets for Sale ad offered a Venus coline and another a moon- pup. It was one o’clock when his train pulled into Grand Central. There were the usual WHAT MAD UNIVERSE 27 lights in the station, Keith noticed as he got off the train but there was something differ- ent otherwise in the atmosphere of the station — something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He realized, too, as he walked along with others down the long walk between the tracks to the main hall of the station, that the train had not been crowded. His car had been only a third filled. There weren’t any other trains unloading and all the redcaps seemed to have gone. Just ahead of Keith, a little man was struggling to carry three suitcases, one in each hand and one under his arm. He was having heavy going. “Give you a hand with one of those?” Keith asked. The little man said, “Sure — thanks,” with real gratitude in his voice as he relinquished one of the suitcases. A twinge in Keith’s left shoulder reminded him in time not to take the suitcase with his left hand. He moved around to the right side of the little fellow and said casually, “Not much traffic tonight, is there?” “That was the last train in, I guess. Shouldn’t really run ’em that late. What’s the use of getting in if you can’t go home? Oh, sure, you got a better start in the morn- ing, but — ” Keith said, “Sure,” and wondered what they were talking about. “Eighty-seven killed last night!” the little man said. “Sixty-some the night before. Just in New York and that’s just the ones killed outright. Heaven knows how many got dragged down alleys and beat up but not killed.” He sighed. “I remember when it was safe even on Broadway.” He stopped suddenly and put down the suitcases. “Got to rest a minute,” he said. “If you want to go on just leave that other one.” He flexed his hands, cramped from the handles of the suitcases. “No hurry,” Keith said. He was casting about in bis mind for ways in which he could ask questions without arousing suspicion. “Uh — -I haven’t heard a newscast for a while. Have you? Anything new?” “Arcturian spy in the country. That was on early in the evening. That’s worse news than Kapi.” He shuddered slightly. Keith nodded. “Haven’t heard a news- cast but I heard someone mention that. What’s it about ? I mean, how do they know there’s one loose, if they didn’t catch him?” “Catch him? Lord, mister, you don’t catch Arcturians ; you kill ’em. But this one got away. Upstate in Greeneville. Tried to sell somebody some banned coinage and one of the coins was one of the Arc counterfeits, one of the wrong-dated ones.” “Oh,” Keith said. It had been the coin, then. He’d felt pretty sure of it. Ple’d have to watch the rest of those coins he had. May- be it would be smarter to get rid of them as soon as he could, down the nearest sewer. It would be so easy to forget and hand one to someone when he bought something small, instead of one of the credit bills. Right now the coins, wrapped tightly in his dollar currency so they wouldn’t rattle, made a hard and suddenly uncomfortable lump in his right trouser pocket. Maybe, he thought, he should have left them on the win- dowsill of his hotel room in Greeneville in- stead of recovering them, as he had, by pre- tending to lean out the -window for a look around before he closed it and left the room with the Greeneville policemen. No, that might have been dangerous, too. If he’d left them and they’d been found — [Turn page’] SKOMO -secrze/i Millions turn to Bromo*Seltzer to relieve ordinar? headache three ways. It’s famous for giv-. iog fast, pleasant help. Cautiom Use only as directed. Get Bromo* Seltzer at your drugstore fountain or counter today, 1 A product of Bmersoa / Drug Co. since 1887, /] 25 STARTLING well, they’d seen his name in his wallet; there’d be a tie-in between Keith Winton and the Arcturian spy they were looking for. And then the New York police would be looking for Keith Winton. Yes, it was well that he’d recovered them temporarily. The little man flexed his hands again and picked up the two suitcases. “Guess I can make it the rest of the way,’’ he said. “If you’re ready — ” Keith picked up the other suitcase and they started along the tracks again toward the station lobby. “Hope there are cots left,” the little man said. Keith opened his mouth and shut it again. Any question he asked might give him away — if it were a question to which he should know the answer without asking. He said, “Probably won’t be,” in a humorously pes- simistic voice that could be taken as a joke if it was the wrong thing to say. They were nearing the lobby now and a redcap came toward them. The little man sighed with relief and put down the suitcases and Keith handed over t’ne one he’d been carrying. “Cots?” the redcap asked them. “A few left.” “Yes,” Keith’s companion said. “For me, anyway.” He turned to Keith. “You’re not — uh— ” “Thanks, no,” Keith said. “Think I’d bet- ter get home.” The little man shook his head slowly and sadly. “Too much of a chance for me to take. I’d rather be sure of seeing tomorrow. Well — good luck and thanks for the lift with that suitcase.” “Don’t mention it,” Keith said. They were walking through now into the main lobby of the station. Keith almost stumbled. There were army-type cots as far as he could see, in neat orderly rows in the dimly lighted lobby. On most of the cots people lay asleep. Could the housing situation be this des- perate? he wondered. No, it couldn’t be that, not for the number of for-rent ads in the newspaper in his pocket. But what then ? Why else were thousands of people sleeping uncomfortably and unprivately in Grand Central station? If only there were some way he could ask questions without drawing attention and suspicion. STORIES He threaded his way through the dimness, walking as quietly as he could so as not to awake the sleepers he passed, heading for the 42nd Street entrance. As he neared it he saw there were two policemen posted at each of the doors. But he couldn’t stop now. The ones he was approaching had seen him coming and were watching him. He tried to walk past them casually. He noticed now that the glass panels of the doors had been painted black on the outside. The bigger of the two policemen spoke as Keith reached for the door to open it. But his voice was courteous, respectful — even, Keith thought, a little awed. “Are you armed, sir?” he asked. “No.” “It’s pretty dangerous out there,” the policeman said. “We haven’t the authority to make you stay, but we advice it.” » ANGER ! Was it some danger of which he knew nothing that kept these thou- sands of people, the late arrivals on the last trains from here and there, inside the sta- tion? What had happened to New York? But it was too late for him to back down now. Besides, he thought grimly, he was in danger anywhere until he knew the score and the ropes a lot better than he did. He said as casually as he could, “Haven’t far to go. I’ll be all right.” “It’s your business,” said one of the cops. And the other grinned. “We hope it ain’t your funeral. Okay, mister.” He opened the door. Keith almost stepped back. It hadn’t been black paint on the outside of the panes. It had been — blackness. A kind of utter black darkness he’d never seen before. Not a glimmer of light showed anwhere. The dimmed lights inside the station didn’t seem to cut into that blackness at all. Looking down, he could see the paving of the walk for only a foot or two beyond the edge of the open doorway. And — was it his imagination, or was a little of that outside blackness drifting into the station itself, through the open door, as though it weren’t darkness at all but a pal- pable blackness, a mist, a pall? But he couldn’t admit — whatever was out there — that he hadn’t known about it. He had to go through that open doorway now, whatever it led to. He walked through and the door closed be- WHAT MAD hind him. It had been like walking into a closet. This was a blackout beyond black- outs. It must be — he remembered that phrase — “the mist-out,” one of the many things he’d wondered about while reading the newspaper. This must be it. He looked up, and there wasn’t a sign of moon or star — and it had been, in Greene- ville at least, a bright clear night. Yes, un- doubtedly this wasn’t darkness. It was a black mist. Reaching out to touch the building and trailing his hand along it as he walked, grop- ing with his free hand before him, he started walking west, toward the Vanderbilt Avenue corner. He kept his eyes open, straining against the black, but he might as well have closed them for all the good they did him. He knew now how a blind man felt. A cane, to tap ahead of him on the invisible sidewalk, would have been welcome. Why hadn’t he followed the little man’s lead and taken a cot in the station? His trailing hand encountered emptiness, the corner of the building. He paused a mo- ment, wondering if he should go on at all. He couldn’t go back into the station but why not just sit down here on the walk, his back to the building, and wait for morning — if morning did bring dissipation of the black mist ? Certainly getting to his bachelor apartment down in the Village was out of the question. Taxicabs couldn’t be running. He had a hunch no other form of transportation would be running either. Only fools like himself would even be trying to get anywhere in soup like this. But he decided against the sidewalk. There might be police patrols that would question him, wondering why he was outside the sanctuary of the station. Now with only his shuffling feet to guide him, he made his way to the curb and out in- to the street. If there was any traffic — but there couldn’t be. He found the curb on the far side by fall- ing over it, shuffled across the sidewalk and again was able to touch solidity with a guid- ing right hand as he groped along 42nd Street. Forty-second Street, only a few blocks from Broadway and Times Square, and he might as well have been in the deep- est, darkest forest of Africa. There wasn’t a sound, either. Except the soft shuffle of his own foot- steps and he realized that, for no conscious UNIVERSE 29 reason, he was walking on tiptoe to disturb that awful quiet as little as possible. He traversed the short block to Madison, crossed it, and began to grope his way toward Fifth Avenue. Where was he going? Well, why not Times Square? Unless he just sat down in the open, he had to be going somewhere and why not to the center of things? If there was anything going on in New York at all it would be there. And if Times Square were as bad as this he’d see if the subways were open. It might be light down in the subway stations — as in Grand Central — even if the trains weren’t running. Anywhere, out of this blackness. He’d been trying every door he’d passed. They were all locked. He thought of the Borden Publishing Co. office, only three blocks south — and he had the key to it. But no, the outer door of the building would be locked. All these other buildings he’d been passing were locked. He crossed Fifth Avenue. Across the street from him now would be the Public Library. For a moment he thought of going to it, and spending the night on the steps there. He’d try Times Square and the sub- way first. He tried another door — locked, as had been all tlie others — but in the brief instant when his footsteps paused as his hand tried the knob, a soft sound came to his ears. The sound of footsteps approaching him from the direction of Broadway. Footsteps that were even more soft and cautious than his own, stealthy footsteps. Something inside told him that, there was danger in them, deadly dan- ger. CHAPTER V The Nighters AS HE stood still the footsteps came closer. Whoever, whatever it was — there wasn’t any way of avoiding a meeting, unless he turned and worked his way back the way he had come. It was, it seemed to Keith suddenly, a one-dimensional world. There was only forward and backward in it as long as they each — he and the unknown — • groped their way along the building fronts. Like ants crawling along a string they must meet and pass unless one of them turned. STAETLING STORIES 30 But before he made up his mind to turn it was already too late — a groping hand had touched him and a whining voice was saying, “Don’t rob me, mister. I ain’t got no money,’’ and Keith sighed with relief. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll stand still. You go around me.” “Sure.” Hands touched him lightly, and a strongly alcoholic breath almost made him gasp as the man groped past him. There was a chuckle in the blackness. Just an old space dog on a spree,” the voice said. “And rolled already. Look, mister. I’ll give you a tip. The Nighters are out. A gang of twenty or thirty of ’em, over Times Square way. You better not keep on the way you’re goin’.” The man was past him now. His hand still touched Keith’s arm to maintain contact. “They’re the ones who robbed you?” Keith asked. “Them? Mister, I’m ain’t I? Would I be if the Nighters had got me ? I ask you.” “That’s right,” Keith said. “Maybe I’d better not go that way after all. Uh — are the subways open?” “The subwaysf Man, you really want trouble, don’t you?” “Where is a safe place to go?” Keith asked. “Safe? A long time since I heard that word. What’s it mean?” A drunken laugh. “Mister, I was on the Mars-Jupe run in the days of the plat rush, when they said the last rites over us before they closed the air- locks. I’d as soon be back there as messing around this mist-out and playing tag with Nighters.” “How’d you know I wasn’t a Nighter?” “You kidding? How could one guy be a Nighter, when they go in armlock gangs and you can hear ’em tapping. We’re fools to be out in this, mister. You and me, both of us. If I wasn’t drunk — say, got a match?” “Sure,” Keith said. “Here’s a box of them. Can you — ?” “I got the shakes, mister. Would you light one for me ? And then, when I get a fag go- ing, sure. I’ll tell you a safe place we can hide out in for the rest of the night.” Keith scraped a match along the side of the box and struck it. The sudden flame made gray dimness out of the black mist for a radius of about a yard. It revealed a hideous, leering, scarred face — and above it a club raised to strike. The club started to come down the instant the match flared. There wasn’t time to duck that blow. Keith stayed alive in that instant by reacting quickly, instantaneously. He stepped in un- der the blow, thrusting the flaming match into that ugly face. The man’s forearm, not the club, struck Keith’s head a glancing blow. The club dropped and struck the sidewalk. Then they were struggling, wrestling in the dark, with strong hands trying for Keith’s throat, foul breath in his face and fouler words in his ears. He managed to avoid those strangling hands. He stepped back and struck. His fist connected solidly in the dark. He heard his assailant fall — not knocked out, for he was still cursing. Lender cover of that sound. Keith took three light, quick steps backward, away from the wall, out into the open blackness, and stood there quietly, not making a sound. He heard his attacker scramble to his feet, breathing hard. For half a minute, perhaps, that breathing was the only sound in the world. Then there was another sound, a new one. It was a distant, soft tapping, like the tapping of a blind man’s cane, but faster and manifold — as though a company of blind men were coming tapping through the dark, fast. The sound came from the direction he had been going — from the direction of Broad- way and Times Square. He heard a subdued mutter, “Nighters!” and the quick shuffle of footsteps as his for- mer assailant started off. His voice, no longer cursing or even belligerent, came back: "Nmi, pal. Nighters!” And the shuffle and scuffle of his footsteps died away as the tapping got louder and nearer. It was getting nearer incredibly fast. IK^THAT were Nighters? Human be- W w ings? He tried to piece together the few things he’d heard about them. What had the man with the scarred face said about them ? “When they go in armlock gangs and you can hear ’em tapping.” A gang of murderous (“Them? Mister, I’m alive, ain’t I ? Would ! be if the Nighters had got me? I ask you?”) desperadoes or- ganized to prey in the superblackness of the mist-out? Armlock? A row of them with locked arms, perhaps, from one side of the street to the other, so their prey couldn’t escape ? The tappings was close now, only yards away. Coming faster than men can walk in WHAT MAD UNIVERSE 31 the dark, almost at a run. They had a sys- tem, somehow, that gave them speed. Keith turned and ran, diagonally toward the line of the building fronts until his hand, outthrust, made scraping contact, and then along the buildings. Despite the risk of fall- ing over some obstacle he couldn’t see, -he ran. The danger behind seemed greater. The fear that had been in the voice of the man with the scarred face was contagious. That man — and he was no coward, however foul he was — had knoivn what Nighters were, and he’d been afraid, plenty afraid. Keith ran thirty or forty paces, then stopped to listen again. He’d gained. The tapping was farther off, maybe twenty yards away instead of five or ten. He could out- distance them then, as long as he dared to run. He went forward again, this time at a rapid walk for a counted twenty steps, and stopped again to listen. Yes, he’d held his distance even at that pace. He started again, a little faster. He wanted to gain, not to stay even. Another twenty steps, again a pause to listen. Tapping — from the opposite direction, ahead of him. Quite a way ahead — he must be halfway down the block now. And that other sound could come from near the far corner — but definitely it was the same kind of sound as behind him, only more distant. Two lines of them, coming from opposite directions, and he was in between. He stopped, his heart beating wildly now. He knew now what fear was. He could taste it in his throat. The Nighters — whatever Nighters were — had him in the middle. He stood there, hesitating, until the tap- pings behind him were so close he had to start running again — running toward the more distant danger to escape the closer one. Again, this time, he ran, blindly except for a hand trailing along the building fronts. He ran about fifty paces before he stopped again to listen. There was the tapping from both directions now— and about equally dis- tant either way. No use to run farther! He crouched back into a doorway, caught. They’d have him within a minute now. Un- less— He groped for the handle of the door he leaned against, and tried to turn it. It was locked, of course. His frantic hands ran over the front of the door, felt the glass panel. In desperation he swfing his fist at the bottom corner of the glass and it shattered. He should have cut his fist badly, but be didn’t. As though luck had decided to give him a break at last, a small area of glass fell neatly inward. He had a glimpse of light in- side as a thick curtain drawn down over the pane swung inward. He reached through the opening, turned the knob from the in- side, and stumbled through the door. The light inside almost blinded him as he slammed the door shut behind him. A voice said, “Stop or I’ll shoot.” Keith stopped, partly raising his hands. He blinked and could see again. He was in the lobby of a small hotel. Across the desk, a dozen feet from him, leaned a white-faced, very frightened looking clerk, holding a re- peating shotgun whose muzzle looked as big as a cannon and was aimed straight at Keith’s chest. He said, “Don’t come a step closer. Get back out. I don’t want to shoot you, but — ” Without lowering his half-raised arms, Keith said, “I can’t. Nighters. They’re — ” The clerk’s face got whiter. They could both hear the sounds of tapping. The clerk’s voice was just above a whis- per, and it trembled. “Back up against that door. Hold the curtain fast against the break, so no light shows.” EITH took a step backward and leaned against the door. He and the clerk were both very silent. Would they see — or, groping, feel — that hole he had made in the glass? Was a knife or a bullet or something going to come through that hole and into his back. His skin crawled. But nothing came through the hole. For a minute there was tapping, muffled voices. Human voices ? Keith thought so. Then the sounds outside died away. Neither of them spoke for almost three minutes. Then the clerk said, “Now get out. They’ve gone.” Keith kept his voice pitched as low as he could and still make it audible to the clerk. He said, “They’re still nearby; they’ll get me if I go out again. I’m not a robber. I’m not armed. And I’ve got money. I’d like to pay for that window I broke — and I’d like to rent a room if you’ve got one. If you haven’t a room. I’ll even pay to sit in your lobby all night.” The clerk studied him uncertainly, with- out lowering the gun. Then he asked, “What 32 STARTLING STORIES were you doing — out there?” “I came in from Greeneville — last train into Grand Central. I’d had word my broth- er was seriously sick and I took a chance on getting home — a dozen blocks. Hadn’t real- ized quite how bad it was out there.” The clerk studied him closely. Finally he said, “Keep your hands up.” He lowered the shotgun down to the counter, but kept his hand on it and his finger inside the trig- ger guard while, with his free hand he took a pistol out of a drawer behind the desk. “Turn around — your back toward me. I’ll be sure you’re not armed.” Keith turned and stood still while he heard the clerk come around the end of the coun- ter. He stood even stiller while the business end of the pistol pressed into the small of his back and the clerk’s hand ran over his pock- ets. “Okay,” the clerk said. “I guess you’re all right ; I'll take a chance. I ’would hate to send a dog out into — that.” Keith sighed with relief, and turned. “How much for the window, and a room?” “A hundred creds will cover both. That rack of magazines and pocket books — give me a hand to put it in front of the door. It’s high enough — it’ll block off the break in the glass.” He took one end of the rack and Keith the other. The rack blocked off the door per- fectly. Keith’s eye was caught by the titles of some of those pocket books — one in par- ticular. He noticed the price too — cr. Apparently the rule of one credit to ten cents held pretty well. And a hundred credits — ten dollars — for the pane of glass and a room for the night was reasonable enough. Not that he would have quarreled at a thousand credits, rather than go out again into the horror that was Forty-second Street. He followed the clerk back to the desk and signed a registration card. He took a hun- dred-credit note and a fifty from his wallet. He said, “I’m going to pick out two or three of those pocket books to read. You keep the change.” “Sure, thanks. Here’s your key. Three- o-seven — third floor front. You’ll have to walk up and find it yourself. I’ve got to stay here on guard.” Keith nodded and pocketed the key. He walked quickly back to the book rack and picked a book called Is the Mist-out Worth It? That one, for sure. His eye ran over the other titles. Some of them were familiar, others were not. H. G. Wells’ Outline of History — ^he grabbed that one quickly. He could get a lot he needed to know out of that book. What for third choice? There was lots of fiction but he didn’t want that. He wanted redder, more concentrated meat. Dopelle, the Man, The Story of Dopelle, Dopelle, Hero of Spacewar. There were half a dozen books on Dopelle — and where had he heard that name before ? Oh, sure — in the newspapers, the general in charge of Terrestrial space fleets. Well, if there were that many books about him out of only a few dozen titles, then maybe it would be well to skim through one of them. He picked The Story of Dopelle — it didn’t even surprise him to notice that it was by Paul Gallico. The walk up to the third floor told him how tired he was. His wounded shoulder was beginning to ache. So, for that matter, did the knuckles of his right hand. The glass had not cut them by a miracle but they were bruised and sore. He found the room by the dim light in the hall, went in and turned on the light. It was a pleasant, comfortable room, with a nice soft bed that he looked at longingly. But he didn’t dare get into it until he’d found out a few things he might learn from the books he’d bought in the lobby. He undressed enough to be comfortable and sat down to read. First, Is the Mist-out Worth It? That one he was going to skim fast but he wanted to find out what the mist- out was. ’'stickily its history was fairly well summarized in the opening chapter. The mist-out, he learned, had been per- fected by a German professor in 1934, shortly after the destruction — by Arcturian action — of Chicago and Rome. The destruc- tion of Chicago — in which eight million people had died — had happened early in 1933. Immediately, every large city in the world had enforced a strict blackout but, later in that same year, another Arcturian vessel slipped the cordon and Rome — perfectly blacked-out — had been destroyed. Fortu- nately, however, that particular Arcturian ship had been captured with a few members of the crew still alive. Through the use of something or someone called Mekky — the author assumed that all of his readers knew all about iMekky, and failed to explain — it had been learned from WHAT MAD UNIVERSE the surviving Arcturians that they had detec- tors which picked up hitherto unknown rays — other than light rays — emitted by electrical incandescence. They could thus locate a city through the lights burning within closed buildings, for the buildings were as transparent to the so- called ej>silon rays as they were to radio waves. For a while it seemed that the only safety for Earth’s cities lay in going back to candles or gaslight for illumination at night. (Elec- tric lights could be used for interior daylight lighting, for sunlight damped out the epsilon rays before they left the atmosphere.) But Dopelle had retired to his laboratory and worked on the problem. From his find- ings of the nature of epsilon rays a German professor had worked out the epsilon gas which constituted the mist-outs which were now required by the Greater Earth Council for all cities larger than a hundred thousand population. It was a substance of strange properties indeed. Odorless, harmless to life, it was impervious to light and to epsilon rays. Inexpensively made from coal tar, one plant could turn out enough in a few hours each evening to mix with the air and blanket a city completely. Sunlight disintegrated it at dawn in the space of a few minutes. Other Arc ships had been through the cordon since then but no major city of Earth had been damaged. Undoubtedly the mist-out had saved many millions of lives. There was no sure way of knowing how many Earth cities would have been destroyed without it. But it had taken lives too. Law enforce- ment agencies in many major cities had found themselves almost completely helpless to combat growing crime waves. Under cover of the mist-out, the streets of big cities had become no-man’s-lands. In New York, for example, five thousand policemen had died. The situation was aggravated by the strong tendency of combat veterans who had fought in space to turn to crime, a psychosis to which possibly a third of them succumbed. Finally, in many of the larger cities, attempts to maintain order at night had been abandoned. Respectable citizens were simply warned to keep off the streets at night. Even the police stayed under cover from dusk to dawn and vicious gangs held sway. Some gangs, such as the Nighters of New York, the 33 Bloodies of London and the Lennies (Keith wondered if the name came from Lenin’s) in Moscow, had adopted specialized tech- niques and seemed fairly well organized. Hundreds died nightly. The situation would have been worse except for the fact that the hoodlums killed and robbed one another more often than honest citizens, who stayed home. The mist-out was, therefore, a big price to pay for immunity to space attack. Possibly a million people had died in the mist-out — but probably twenty to fifty million lives had been saved. The author pointed out the de- struction by Arcturian ships of fifteen towns and small cities — too small to have mist-outs, too small to be not expendable — and reasoned, that except for the mist-outs, those fifteen flaming hells would have been cities of from a million, to ten million people. Keith shivered a little as he put down Is the Mist-out Worth It? If he’d bought that book in Greeneville he’d have known better than to have left Grand Central Station. He’d have taken a cot there or slept on the floor. Night life on Broadway wasn’t what it had been where he’d come from. He walked to the window and stood look- ing— well, not out, exactly, but at the blank blackness that was the pane. The curtain wasn’t pulled down, but that didn’t matter on any but a first floor window. Six feet away, outside, one wouldn’t be able to see the lighted window at all. It was an uncanny kind of blackness. And what was going on down below there on Forty- second Street, only a block and a half from the center of the universe? Criminals taking over Forty-second Street! Spaceship runs to Mars, war with Arcturus. What mad universe was he in ? CHAPTER VI The Sewing Machines Rampant WELL, wherever, whatever it was, he was here and he was stuck with it and he was going to be in continuous danger until he learned the ropes well enough so that he wouldn’t risk making a break every time he did or said anything. Breaks weren’t safe in a spot where you could get yourself shot on sight as a spy 34 STARTLING STORIES on no provocation at all, where you could get yourself killed by being foolish enough to try to walk from Grand Central Station to Times Square after dark. Resolutely, he picked up the pocket edition of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History. He was too tired to sit up any longer. He’d lie on the bed to read and, if he went to sleep — well, he’d finish reading in the morning and find out as much about things as he could before going out to face them. He picked up the Wells book and started to read, skimming lightly through the early chapters. There was no difference in them. They even had the same pictures. He’d hap- pened to reread the book recently and was familiar with it. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Roman Empire, Charlemagne, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Columbus and America, ■the American Revolution, Civil War, the Industrial Revolution . . . Into Space. That was the chapter heading, nine-tenths of the way through. He quit skimming and leafing over pages and started to read. Nineteen hundred and three. An Ameri- can scientist at Harvard had discovered the spacewarp drive. Accidentally! Working on, of all things, his wife’s sewing machine, which had been broken and discarded. He was trying to change it around so the treadle would run a tiny home-made generator to give him a high-frequency low-voltage cur- rent that he wanted to use in some class ex- periments in physics. He’d finished his connections — fortunately he remembered afterwards just what they’d been and where he’d made his mistake — and he’d worked the treadle a few times when his foot stamped unexpectedly on the floor and he nearly fell forward out of his chair. The sewing machine, treadle and generator and all, just wasn’t there any more. The professor. Wells humorously pointed out, had been sober at the time but he quick- 1}' remedied that. After he sobered up he borrowed his wife’s new sewing machine, and lost that. He didn’t know where they were going. He rigged up a third one and this time ae got witnesses, including the president and the dean of the university. He didn’t tell them -u'hat they were going to witness. He just told them to watch the sewing machine. They did and then the sewing machine wasn’t there to watch. They didn’t know what they had, but they knew thay had something new. They relieved Professor Yarley (that was his name) of his teaching duties and gave him a grant to finance his experiments. He lost a few more sewing machines and then quit using sewing machines and began to get the thing down to the essential minima. He found he could use a clockwork motor — connected that particular way — to the gen- erator. The treadle wasn’t necessary. He didn’t have to use a bobbin but the shuttle was necessary and had to be of ferrous metal. And an electric motor running the generator canceled something out ; it wouldn’t work. Foot-power through a treadle, hand power, clockwork or his son’s toy steam engine. He got it down to a comparatively simple layout of stuff mounted on a box — boxes were cheaper than sewing machines — he’d wind a spring, release the lever and — well — it went somewhere. Then one day there was a news story that . something at first thought to be a meteor had struck the side of a tall building in Chicago. Upon subsequent examination it proved to be what was I'ft of a wooden box and some oddly assorted clockwork and electrical ap- paratus. Yarley took the next train to Chicago and identified his handiwork. He knew then that the thing moved through space and he had something to work on. Nobody had timed the striking of the object against the Chicago building to an exact second but, as nearly as he could get it timed, Yarley de- cided that the object had traveled from Harvard to Chicago in just about nothing flat. The university gave him some assistants then and he began experimenting in earnest, sending out the things in considerable num- bers, with identifying serial numbers on them and with an accurate record kept of variations in number of wflndings, the exact amount of power applied, the direction in wdiich it had been facing and all such data. Also, he publicized what he was doing and got people watching for them all over the w'orld. Two were reported. By comparison with his records he learned some important things. First, that the machine traveled in the exact direction of the axle of the genera- tor part — second, that there was a relation- ship between the number of windings and the distance it traveled. Now he could really go to work. By 1904 WHAT MAD UNIVERSE he had determined that the distance the ma- chine traveled was proportionate to the cube of the number of turns or fractional turns on the generator and that the duration of the trip was actually and exactly nothing flat. By cutting the generators down to toy size he could send a machine for a com- paratively short measured distance — a few miles — and make it land in a particular field outside of town. IT MIGHT have revolutionized trans- portation in general, except that the machines were always damaged seriously, internally and externally, when they landed. Generally there was barely enough of them left for identification, not always that much. And it wasn’t going to make much of a weapon ; explosives sent never arrived. They must have exploded enroute, somewhere in the warp. In three years of experimentation, they got it worked out to a nice formula and even began to understand the principles back of it as well as to be able to predict the re- sults. They determined that the reason the things were destroyed was their sudden materialization, at the end of the journey, in air. Air is pretty solid stuff. You can’t displace a quantity of it in nothing flat without damaging whatever does the displacing — not only damaging it as an object, but damaging its very molecular structure. Obviously, the only practical place to which an object could be sent was into space, open space. And, since the distance in- creased as the cube of the windings, it wouldn’t take a very large machine to reach the moon, or even the planets. Even interstellar travel would not take a really monstrous one, especially as the thing could be done in several hops, each taking no longer in time than it took the pilot to press a button. Furthermore, since time was a zero factor, no trajectories need be calculated. Simply aim directly at a visible planet or the moon, adjust the distance factor, and there you were, materializing in space a safe distance from the planet and ready to descend and land. How to land took them a few years to work out — the science of aerodynamics hadn’t been solved yet and, anyway, there wasn’t supposed to be any air on the Moon, the first and most obvious objective. But in 35 1910 the first man landed on the Moon and returned safely. The habitable planets were all reached within the next year. The next chapter was The Interplanetary War but Keith Winton couldn’t read it. It was three-thirty in the morning. He’d had a long day and things had happened to him. He simply couldn’t hold his eyes open. He reached out and turned out the light and was asleep almost before his head dropped back on the pillow. It was nearly noon when he awakened. He lay there for a moment before opening his eyes, thinking of the crazy dream he’d had about a world with space-travel and Bems and war with Arcturus. And mist-outs and — He rolled over a little and his shoulder hurt so that he opened his eyes and saw an unfamiliar ceiling over his head. It was a shock, and it made him fully awake and he sat up in bed quickly. He looked at his wrist watch. Eleven forty-five ! Rats, he was late for the office. Or was he? He was horribly mixed up, unoriented. He got out of bed, and walked over to the window. Yes, he was cwi Forty-second Street, on the third floor, and there, across the street, was the Public Library. The street was filled with normal traffic and the sidewalks were crowded as ever, with ordinary-looking people wearing ordinary clothes. It was the New York he knew. He stood there, puzzling, trying to fit his being here in New York into the scheme of things. The last thing he remembered that really made sense was his sitting in a chair in Mr. Borden’s garden. After that — Could he have come back to New York other than in the way he seemed to remember it — and have supplied, somehow, a night- mare for his memories of the trip? If so he was overdue to see a psychiatrist. Was he crazy? He must be. Yet had hap- pened to him yesterday. He put his hand to his shoulder gently and it was plenty sore under the bandage. Well, he’d get out of here, go home and — well, he couldn’t plan any further than that just yet. He’d go home first. He turned around and walked to the chair where he had put his shirt and trousers. Something on the floor beside the bed caught his qye. It was a copy of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History. His hands trembled a little as he picked it up and opened it to the contents page. 36 STARTLING STORIES That would be the quickest. The third last chapter was Into Space, the second last The Interplanetary War and the last chapter Struggle Against Arcturus. The book dropped out of his hand. He reached to pick it up and saw another one slid slightly under the bed. It was called, Is the Mist-out Worth It? He sat down in the chair and didn’t do anything for a few minutes except to think, to adjust his mind to the fact that whatever had happened had really happened. The mist-out last night with its jungle savagery, the — He reached back for his trouser pocket and got his wallet. There were credit bills in it and not dollars. A little over a thousand credits, which would be a little over a hun- dred dollars. LOWLY he dressed and walked back over to the window. It was still Forty- second Street and still ordinary but it didn’t fool him now. He remembered what it had been like at one o’clock last night and shud- dered a little. He caught a flash of purple in the crowd below and across the street and looked closer. It was a purple Bern, all right, walking into the library — and nobody was paying any more attention to it than they would have paid to a bank clerk or an insurance sales- man. He sighed deeply, put the H. G. Wells pocket book and the Paul Gallico one on Dopelle into his coat pockets and decided to leave the one about the mist-out. He knew all he really had to know about the mist-out — stay indoors out of it. He went downstairs and out through the lobby. A different clerk was on duty at the desk and didn’ even glance at him. Now that he was fully awake he was hungry. Eating was the first order of busi- ness. He hadn’t eaten since noon yesterday. A quiet little restaurant a few doors west looked inviting. Keith went in and sat at a little table along one side. He studied the menu. There was a choice of a dozen entrees, and nine of them were familiar. The other three were the most expensive items — Mar- tian zot a la Marseille, roast brail with kapi sauce and gallina de luna. That last, if Keith remembered his Spanish, would be moon chicken. Some day. he decided, he was going to eat moon chicken, Martian zot and roast brail but right now he was too hungry to experiment. He ordered goulash. Goulash didn’t require concentration and, while he ate, he skimmed through the final two chapters of Wells. Wells was bitter about the so-called interplanetary war. He saw it purely as a war of conquest with Earth the aggressor. The inhabitants of the Moon and of Venus had proved friendly and exploitable — and had been exploited. The intelligence of the lunans (yes, they were the purple Bems) was about that of an African savage of Earth but they were much more docile. They made excellent laborers and still better mechanics, once they had been introduced to the mysteries of machinery. The Venusians, although almost as intel- ligent as Earthmen, were creatures of a quite different order. Interested solely in philos- ophy, the arts and abstract mathematics, .they had welcomed *the Earthmen, avid for exchange of cultures and ideas. They had no practical civilization, no cities (or even houses), no possessions, machines or weapons. Few in number, they were nomads who — aside from the life of the mind — lived as primitively as animals. They offered no barrier and every assistance — aside from work — to man’s colonization and exploitation of Venus. Earth had established four colonies there, aggregating a little short of a million people. But Mars had been different. The Martians had the silly idea that they didn’t want to be colonized. They had, it turned out, a civilization at least equal to ours, except that they had not yet developed space travel (which, after all, had been an accidental discovery on Earth — if it hadn’t been for the Professor’s sewing machine the space warp principle might not have been discovered, mathematically, for a millenium). The Martians had greeted the first arrivals from Earth gravely and courteously (the Martians did everything gravely ; they had no sense of humor) and suggested they re- turn home and*stay there. They’d shot the second arrivals and the third. And, although they’d captured the space ships in which these parties had arrived, they’d not bothered to use or copy the machines. They had no desire to leave Mars, ever. In fact. Wells pointed out, no Martian had ever left Mars alive even during the interplanetary war. WHAT MAD UNIVERSE A few, captured alive and put on Earth- bound ships for demonstration and study here, had willed themselves to death as soon as the ships had left the thin atmosphere of Mars. The same was true of Martian plants and animals. They could not or would not live anywhere else. No single specimen of Martian flora or fauna graced botanical gardens or zoos of Earth. The so-called interplanetary wars, there- fore, were fought entirely on the surface of Mars, and had been a bitter struggle in which the Martian population had been several times decimated. They had, however, capitulated short of annihilation and per- mitted colonization of Mars by Elarthmen. Only Earth and its moon, Venus and Mars had turned out to be inhabited by intelligent beings in the Solar System. Saturn sup- ported plant life of a strange sort and a few of the moons of Jupiter bore plant life and wild animals. Man met his match — an aggressive, colonizing race of intelligent beings — only when he went beyond the Solar System. The Arcturians had had the space drive for cen- turies. It was only by chance — for the uni- verse is wide indeed — that they had not yet visited the Sun’s planets. Having learned of us through an encounter near Proxima Cen- tauri, they set about to remedy that omission. The current war against Arcturus was, on Earth’s part, a defensive war — although it involved such offensive tactics as we could muster. And thus far it had been a stale- mate. Defensive tactics on both sides being more than adequate against known offenses. By fortunate early capture of a few Arc ships Earth had quickly overcome the tech- nical handicap of a few centuries under which it had started the war. Currently, thanks to the leadership of Dopelie, Earth had, in some ways, a slight advantage — although it was still a war of attrition. Dopelie ! That name again. Keith put down the H. G. Wells book, and started to take The Story of Dopelie out of his pocket when he realized that he had long since finished eating and w'as attracting curious glances just sitting there. He paid for his meal and went out. The steps of the library across the street looked inviting. He could sit there and read some more. But there was his job to be considered. Did he work for the Borden Publishing Co. — here and now — or didn’t he ? If he did. 37 having missed a Monday morning might not be unforgivable. Missing a whole day might be. And it was well after one o’clock already. He walked east and then south, to the office building in which — on the tenth floor — Borden Publications was located. He took the elevator up. CHAPTER VII Mekky That beautiful outer door was very familiar, one of those modem ones that look like nothing more than a sheet of glass with a futuristic chrome handle on it ; you couldn’t even see the hinges. The lettering Borden Publications, Inc. was just below eye height, small and chaste, in chrome letters suspended right inside the thick glass. Keith took the handle very carefully so he wouldn’t fingerprint that beautiful sheet of nothingness, opened the door and went in. There were the same mahogany railing, the same pictures — hunting prints — on the walls and the same plump little Marion Blake with the same pouting red lips and upsw'ept brunette hairdo, sitting at the same stenog- rapher-receptionist desk back of the railing. It gave him a funny little thrill to see her there — not because Marion herself could give him any thrill but because she was familiar. She was someone he knew and she was the first person he’d seen since — gosh, w^as it only since seven o’clock yesterday evening? It seemed like ages ! He’d seen familiar things and familiar places but not a familiar face. True, the address in the copy of Surprising Stories (at 2 cr.) had told him that Borden Publi- cations was still here, but it wouldn’t really have surprised him to find a purple Bern at Marion’s reception desk. For just a second, the familiar sight of her there, and the office being so completely usual, so completely as he remembered it, made him doubt his memory of the past eighteen hours. It couldn’t be, it simple couldn’t — Then Marion had turned and was looking up at him and there wasn’t a trace of recog- nition in her face. “Yes.P’ she asked, a bit impatiently. 38 STARTLING STORIES Keith cleared his throat. Was slw kid- ding? Didn’t she know him or was she just acting funny? He cleared his throat again. “Is Mr. Keith Winton in? I’d like to speak to him, please.” That could pass as a gag to counter hers ; if she grinned now, he could grin back. She said, “Mr. Winton has left for the day, sir.” “Uh— Mr. Borden. He in?” “No, sir.” “Is Be — Miss Hadley in?” “No, sir. Nearly everybody left at one. That’s the regular closing this month.” “The regu — oh,” he stopped himself in time before he could pull a boner by being incredulous about something he undoubtedly should know. “I forgot,” he finished lamely. Why, he wondered, would one o’clock in the afternoon be the regular closing (she must mean the regular closing time) and why this month in particular? “I’ll be in tomorrow then,” he said. “Uh — what would be the best time to catch Mr. Winton?” “About seven.” "Se — " He caught himself starting to repjeat incredulously again. Did she mean seven in the morning or in the evening? No, it couldn’t be seven in the evening. It’d be almost time for the mist-out then. Suddenly he guessed the answer and won- dered why he hadn’t thought of it sooner. The mist-out, of course — in a New York in which the streets were sudden death after dark, a New York without night life at all, the hours of work would have to be different in order to give employes any personal lives of their own at all. It would change things completely when you had to be home before dark — probably well before, in order to assure safety. The working day would be from six or seven in the morning — an hour or so after early sun- rise dissolved the mist — until one o’clock in the afternoon. And that would give people afternoons which would be the equivalent of evenings. Of course — it would have to be that way. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself. Then Broadway wasn’t dead, and there would still be shows and night clubs and dance halls and taverns — but their time to howl would be afternoons. And everybody would be safely home in bed by, say, seven or eight and sleep until about four o’clock so they’d be ^ and dressed by dawn — and, of course, that’s what meant by eople, his suitcase banged legs, he drew sharp looks and sharp STARTLING STORIES 42 words — but he kept going, not quite keeping up with the pace of the car out in the street but not losing much ground either. And the voice came inside his head again. "Keith Winton,” it said. "Stop. Don’t fol- low. You’ll he sorry.” Keith started to yell his answer. “Why? Who are — ” and realized that, even over the cheering, people were hearing him and turn- ing to stare. "Don’t attract attention,” the voice said. "Yes, I can read your thoughts. Yes, I am Mekky. Do as you have planned and see me later — three months from now.” “Why?” Keith thought. “Why so long?” "A crisis in the war,” said the voice. "The human race is at stake. The Arcturians can win. I have no time for you now.” “What shall I do?” "As you have planned,” the voice said. "And be careful. You are in danger every minute.” Keith tried desperately to frame a question that would give him the answer he sought. “But what happened? Where am — ” "Later,” said the voice. "Later I will try to solve your problem. I perceive if through your mind but I do not know the answer yet.” “Am I crazy?” "No. And do not make one fatal mistake. This is real — it is not a figment of your imagination. Your danger here is real and if you are killed here you are very dead. I have no time now. Stop following.” Abruptly in Keith’s mind, before he could again hear the sounds of cheering and the other noises, there was a sudden sensation of silence. Whatever had been in his mind had withdrawn. He knew that without know'ing how he knew. He knew there wasn’t any use framing another question there. There wouldn’t be any answer. Obedient to the last order he stopped walk- ing. He stopped so suddenly that someone bumped into him from behind and snarled at him. He caught his balance and stood staring down the street, over the heads of the crowd, at the sphere that was floating away from him, out of this life. What was it? What kept it up there? Was it alive? How could it have read his mind? And it seemed to know who he w^as, what his problem was — but not the answer. He didn’t want to let it go. Wait three months? Impossible when he could get the answer now ! But he couldn’t keep up with that car through the crowd while he was burdened with the suitcase and the armful of magazines. He looked about him wildly and saw that he was in front of a cigar store. He darted in and put the suitcase and magazines down on a soft drink cooler near the entrance. He said, “Back in just a sec- ond. Thanks for watching these,” and ran out again before the man could protest. UTSIDE again he could go faster. He held his ground half a block behind the car and the motorcycles and even gained a little. They turned south on Third Avenue, west — just around the corner — on Thirty- seventh Street. And there was a big crowd gathered there. The motorcycles and the car stopped at the edge of the crowd. The sphere that had floated above the car didn.’t stop. It floated on and up, over the heads of the people. Up, up, to the open window. It was Betty Hadley. Keith Winton got to the edge of the 'crowd and stopped. No use pushing his way farther — he could see better here than closer in against the building. The cheering was tremendous. Besides “Mekky,” he heard “Dopelle” and “Betty” in with the cheers. The sphere floated up until it was level with the open window, beside Betty Hadley’s shoulder. It paused there, hovering. It spoke. This time, Keith knew instinc- tively, it was not speaking to him alone, as it had back there when it had first passed him. He knew somehow that the words he was hearing inside his head were echoing in the heads of all who stood there. The cheering didn’t even stop. It didn’t have to, Keith realized. The words that formed inside his head, in that mechanical voice, were different in nature from the sounds that came through his ears. He could hear both at once and one didn’t interfere with the other. "Friends,” said the voice, "I leave you now to bear a message from my master Dopelle to Miss Hadley. A private message, of course. I thank you for the courtesy you have shown. And, from my master, these zvords to all of you — ‘The situation is still critical, and we must all do our best. But be of good cheer. There is hope for victory. We must zvin — we shall win.’ ” "Mekky!” the crowd roared. “Dopelle!” WHAT MAD “Betty!” '‘Victory!” “Down With Arcturus!” ‘’M&kky, Mekky, MEKKY!” Betty Hadley, Keith saw, was smiling, her cheeks and throat flushed with embar- rassment. Now she bowed once and with- drew her head and shoulders inside the win- dow. The sphere floated in after her. The crowd began to disperse. Keith groaned. He tried to hurl a thought at the sphere but he knew it was too late. It wouldn’t pay any attention to him if it heard him, if it received the thought. Well, it had warned him. If it had been inside his mind it must have known that he loved Betty and it had warned him not to follow. It would have saved him the despair and bitterness that he was feeling now. It hadn’t meant much — not too much, that is — when Marion Blake had told him that Betty was engaged. As long as she wasn’t actually married there was hope for him, he’d thought. He’d hoped he could make her for- get this dope Dopelle. But — what a chance! Far more than anything he’d read about that magnificent hero, the exhibition he’d just seen had made him realize what a romantic celebrity Dopelle must be! “My master Dopelle,” the sphere had called him. And all 'New York was cheering him when he wasn’t even there. What a chance he, Keith Winton, had to take away the fiancee of a guy like that! He walked back moodily to the cigar store where he’d left his suitcase and magazines and apologized to the clerk for the manner of his leaving them. The streets were beginning to empty when he came out of the cigar store. He realized it must be getting near dusk and that he must find a place to stay. He hunted until he found an inexpensive UNIVERSE 43 little hotel where — for a hundred and twenty credits in advance — ^he took a room for a week. In his. room he picked up one of the pulp magazines. Now for the plan — and the voice that had been Mekky, the sphere, had tol4 him to go ahead with his plan. For awhile, a long while, he couldn’t really concentrate. Betty Hadley’s face with its aura of blonde hair, its smooth creamy skin and kissable red lips, kept getting in the way. Why hadn’t he had sense enough to obey the sphere’s orders not to follow it — and get himself in a mood like this, just when he had to be able to think hardest. Thinking of the hopelessness of his ever getting Betty made what he was doing seem futile and useless. But after awhile, in spite of himself, he began to get interested in the magazines. And he began to see that his plan was really possible. Yes, he thought he could make a living for himself writing — for some of these maga- zines, at any rate. Five years earlier, before he’d started working for Borden, Keith had done quite a bit of free-lancing. He’d sold a number of stories and he’d written several that hadn’t sold. In fact, his batting average had been about fifty-fifty and — for a writer who wasn’t too prolific, and who had difficulty plotting — that hadn’t been too good. Besides, his stories hadn’t come easily. He’d had to sweat them out painfully. So, when a steady job at a fairly good wage had been offered him, he’d quit writing. But now, with five years of editing under his belt, he thought he could do better at it than he had before. He could see [Turn page] TRY ITI Scratch your head! If you find signs of dryness, loose ugly dandruff, you need Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic. Grooms hair relieves dryness . . ; . . ; removes loose dandruff! A lITTlE Wildroot Cream-Oijl does a lot for yout Jiair. Keepsyour hair well groomed all day long. Leaves no trace of that greasy, plastered down look. Makes hair look and feel good. CREAM-OIL CHARLIE SAYS: "IT CONTAINS LANOLIN!” TUHI IN . i i **Th« Advenfuro* of Som Spado" Sunday ovenings« CBS Network* 44 STABTUmi ST(HtlES now what a lot of his mistakes had been — laziness among them. And the laziness, at least, was curable. Besides, this time he had plots to start with — the plots of all of the unsold stories he could remember. He thought he could do better with them now than he had five years ago, a lot better. He went through magazine after magazine, skimming all the stories, reading some of them. It got dark and the black blankness of the mist-out pressed against the pane of his window but he kept reading. One thing became increasingly obvious to him — he couldn’t and didn’t dare try to place stories in a setting with which he was as unfamiliar as he was with the world about him. He’d make mistakes, little mistakes, that would give him away, things that would show his unfamiliarity with the little details of life here. Fortunately that left him two fields. From his reading of Wells’ Outline of History he knew that the differences here all dated from those vanishing sew'ing machines of 1903. On any story — adventure, love or what have you — written as a costume piece and placed before 1903, he was on sure ground. Luck- ily. too, he’d been a history major at college and was pretty familiar with the subject — particularly American history. He noticed with satisfaction that the love and adventure magazines both carried a fair percentage of costume pieces — more than the love and adventure magazines of where he’d come from. Possibly because there was a wider difference here between life of a hun- dred or two hundred years ago and life of today, the settings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seemed more romantic and interesting. Even the love pulps — he was both sur- prised and satisfied to learn — carried histori- cal stories, love tales put in Civil War, Revo- lutionary War and pioneer settings. The other field he could tackle was, of course, pure fantasy. He’d bought only one fantasy magazine but he'd seen that there were others on the stands. And in pure fan- tasy— or semi-science-fiction adventures in far and non-existent galaxies — he couldn’t go w'rong. Nor in stories of the distant fu- ture. As long as he avoided the present, the recent past and the near future, he’d be all right. He finished his study of the magazines by ten o’clock and, from then until midnight. he sat at the little desk in hts ro<»n, pencil m hand and paper before him, jotting down notes of all the stories he could remember having written and not sold. He was able to remember twenty stories. Of the twenty, six had been historical cos- tum pieces and those were in — ^particularly the shorter ones that he could re-write com- paratively quickly. Another six he picked out as being fairly easy to translate into his- torical or fantastic settings. A dozen stories, then, to start on, as soon as he could get hold of a typewriter — if he could sell one or two of them quickly, he’d be all right. If not — well, there were still the coins in his pocket. A quarter had brought him two thousand credits in Greeneville. But he’d got himself into a jam. He wasn’t going to take that risk again unless he had to — ^and then not without studying up on the subject and learning what the pitfalls were. By midnight he was sleepy. But he hadn’t finished all he wanted to do yet. He picked up The Story of Dopelle by Paul Gallico and started to read. Now to find exit what the competition really was — CHAPTER IX The Dope on Dopelle The competition, he learned within the next hour, was not only terrific. It was impossible. Dopelle (he didn’t seem to have a first name at all) was simply unbelievable. He was Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Einstein and Edison and Philo Vance and Galahad all rolled into one. And he was only twenty-seven years old. The sketch of the first seventeen years of his life was brief. He’d been brilliant in school, skipped a lot of grades and had been graduated by Harvard (magna cum laude) at the age of seventeen, president of his class and the most popular man of his class despite his comparative youth. Prodigies aren’t usually popular, but Do- pelle had been an exception. He hadn’t been a grind. His high standing in his classes was due to his ability to remember perfectly everything he read or heard, obviating the necessity for hard study. WHAT MAD Despite his heavy schedule of classes (he’d taken about everything Harvard had to of- fer) he’d had time to captain an undefeated and untied football team. He had worked his way through school (and become finan- cially independent in the process) by writ- ing, in his spare time, six adventure novels which had become best sellers at once and still rated as top classics in their field. The wealth these books brought him en- abled him to own his own private space- cruiser and his own laboratory where — dur- ing his last two years of college — ^he had al- ready made several important improvements in the technique of space travel and space warfare. That was Dopelle at the age of seventeen, just an ordinary young fellow. His career had started then. He’d gone from Harvard to a Space Offi- cers’ Training School, emerged a lieutenant and had jumped grades rapidly for a year or so. At twenty-one he was in charge of counter-espionage, and was the only man who had successfully been to the Arcturian system and lived among the Arcs. Most Earthly knowledge of the Arcturians had been obtained by him on that trip. He was an incredibly good space-pilot and fighter. Time and again his squadron had turned back Arcturian attacks with Dopelle spearheading as well as directing the fighting. The brass had begged him not to fight per- sonally'because his scientific knowledge was invaluable — but he fought anyway (by this time he was apparently above authority) and seemed to bear a charmed life. His bright red space-ship, the Vengeance, was never hit. At twenty-three he was general of all the Solar forces but command seemed to be the least important of his activities. Except dur- ing times of crises he delegated authority and spent his time having exciting adventures in espionage and counter-espionage or in work- ing in his secret laboratory on the Moon. The list of his scientific accomplishments in that laboratory was almost unbelievable. The greatest of them, perhaps, was the creation of a mechanical brain, Mekky. In- to Mekky Dopelle had put powers of thought not possessed by human beings. Mekky wasn’t human but he (actually it, of course, Gallico pointed out, but nevertheless always referred to as he) was super-human. Mekky could read minds — including Arc- turian minds — and could perform thought- transference. Also he could scJve (as an UNIVERSE 45 electronic calculating machine can solve) any problem, however difficult, given all the fac- tors. Into Mekky also was built the ability to transfer himself instantaneously through space without the necessity of having a space- ship to ride in. This made him invaluable as an emissary, enabling Dopelle, wherever he was, to keep in touch with his space fleets and with the governments of Eiarth. Briefly and touchingly near the end of the book Gallico told of the romance between Dopelle and Betty Hadley. They were, it seemed, engaged, but had decided to wait until the end of the war to marry. Meanwhile Miss Hadley continued to keep her job as editor of the world’s most popular love story magazine, the job she had held when she and Dopelle had met while he was in New York incognito on an espionage job. They had fallen in love immediately and deeply. Now the whole world loved them and eagerly awaited the end of the war and the day of their marriage. Keith Winton frowned as he put down the book. Could anything possibly be more hope- less than his loving Retty Hadley ? Somehow, it was the very hopelessness of things that gave him hope, a shred of hope. The cards just couldn’t possibly be stacked that badly against him. There might be a catch somewhere. It was after one o’clock when he undressed for bed but he phoned the desk of the hotel and left a call for six. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day. It had to be if he were to keep on eating after a week. And he went to sleep and dreamed — the poor goof — of Betty. Of Betty dressed (more or less) in one of the costumes worn by girls on the cover pictures of science-fic- tion magazines, being chased by a purple Bern. Only he, Keith, was the purple Bern and he was thwarted when he almost caught Betty by a tall dashing romantic young man who had muscles of steel and who must be Dopelle, although he looked uncommonly like Errol Flynn. Dopelle picked up the purple Bern that was Keith and said, “Back to Arcturus, spy!” and threw him out into space and he was spinning head over purple heels out among the planets and then among the stars. He was going so fast that there was a ringing sensation in his ears. The sormd got louder STARTUNG STORIES 46 and louder until he quit being a purple Bern and realized that the ringing was the tele- phone. He answered it and a voice said, “Six o’clock, sir.” He didn’t dare lie down again or he’d go to sleep, so he sat on the bed awhile, think- ing, remembering the dream. What did Dopelle look like? Like Errol Flynn, as he had dreamed? Why not? If he ever saw Dopelle would it be any more improbable than anything else that Dopelle should look like Errol Flynn, or even be Errol Flynn? Wasn’t this, maybe, a fantastic movie or a story or a book he’d tangled himself in? Why not? Dopelle, he thought, was al- most too perfect, almost too fantastic a char- acter to be true. Good Lord, he sounded like something out of a — no, not out of a pulp magazine. As editor, Keith would have re- jected any story which had so improbable a character. Like something out of a comic book, maybe. But wait — ^hadn’t the mechanical brain, Mekky, in brief contact with hhn, anticipated that very thought? “ do not make one fatal mistake. This is real. It is not a figment of your imagina- tion. Your danger here is real — ” Mekky — fantastic as Mekky himself was — was right. This universe and the spot it had put him in were real enough— -as real as his hunger for breakfast right now. He dressed and went out. At six-thirty in the morning the streets of New York were as busy as — in that other universe he’d been in — they would have been at ten or eleven o’clock. The short day necessitated by the mist-out demanded an early start. He bought a Times and read it while he ate breakfast. The big news story was, of course, the visit of Mekky to New York, and the reception that had been given him. There was a picture splashed over a quarter of the front page of the sphere poised in midair outside the open window and Betty Hadley leaning out of the window, bowing to the crowd below. A boxed item of ten-point boldface type gave the words Mekky had spoken to the crowd, just as Keith had heard them there, inside his head. “Friends, I leave you now to bear a message from my master Dopelle to—” Yes, word for word. And apparently that had been the only public statement from the mechanical brain. An hour later k had re- turned to “somewhere in space” as the news story put it. He skimmed the rest of the paper. There was no news of the war — no mention of the crisis Mekky had said (privately to Keith) was impending in the war. If things were going badly, apparently it was being kept from the public. If Mekky had told him a military secret it must have been because Mekky realized that he was in no spot to spread it farther, even if he wished to. An item on an inside page about a man being fined two thousand credits and costs for possession of a coin interested him. He read it carefully but didn’t find any answer to the problem of why possession of coins was illegal. He made a mental note to look it up as soon as he had time. Not today — he had too much to do today. First thing was to rent a typewriter. By taking a chance on using the name Keith Winton, for which he still had identification in his wallet, he got one without having to leave a deposit and took it to his room in the hotel. He put in the hardest day’s work he’d ever done in his life. At the end of it — he was dead tired by seven o’clock and had to quit - then— he’d finished seven thousand words. A four thousand word story and a three thousand worder. True, they were both rewrites of stories he’d written before, long ago, but he’d done a better job on them this time. One was a straight action story in a Civil War setting, the other a light romance set against the background of early pioneer days in Kansas. He fell into bed, too sleepy to phone down to the desk and leave a call for in the morn- ing. But he awoke early, just after five o’clock. Back in his room after coffee and doughnuts, he read over the two stories and was more than satisfied with them. They were good. What had been wrong with them before hadn’t been the plots — it had been the writing and the treatment and five years as an editor had taught him something after all. He could make a living writing — he w'as sure of that now. Oh, he couldn’t bat out two stories a day except while he was re- writing his old stuff from memory but he wouldn’t have to. Once he’d rewritten the dozen or so stories he’d picked out he’d have WHAT MAD UNIVERSE 47 a backlog. Two shorts or a novelet a week would be plenty once he’d used up his avail- able old plots and had to think up new ones, j One more, he decided, and he’d start out ito peddle them — And start, of course, with i Borden Publications. They were good for :quick checks if they Kked the stories, j For his third rewrite job, he picked a sci- lence-fiction, remembering that Marion Blake I had told him they were in the market for stuff for a new book in that field. He had one that wouldn’t require any revamping at all — a time-travel story about a man who goes back to prehistoric times. It was told from the point of view of the cave man who encounters the time-traveler and none of it was in a modern setting — so he couldn’t go wrong. He started batting the typewriter again and had it finished by nine o’clock. Half an hour later he was smiling down at Marion Blake across the reception desk. She smiled back. “Yes, Mr. Winston?’’ “Brought in three stories,” he said proud- ly. “One I want to leave with Miss Hadley for her book and — who’s running this new science-fiction book you told me was start- ing?” “Keith Winton. Temporarily an5nvay. After it’s really on the stands th^ may put someone else cm it.” “Good, I’ll want to see him too, then. And — I had a copy but I forgot to notice — who’s running War Adventure Stories?” “Keith Winton edits that, too. That and Surprising Stories are his regular books. I think he’s free now. I’ll see if he can talk to you. Miss Hadley’s busy but maybe she’ll be free by the time you’ve talked to Mr. Win- ton, Mr. Winston. Uh — your names are a lot alike, aren’t they?” “Almost a coincidence — same initial, too.” He laughed. “Maybe he’ll want me to use a different by-line if he buys the stories. He may figure some of his readers will think Karl Winston is a nom de plume of Keith Winton.” Marion Blake had pushed a plug into the switchboard and was talking into the mouth- piece. She pulled the plug. “He’ll see you now,” she said. “I — uh — told him you were a friend of mine.” “Thanks a lot.” After he’d started for Keith Winton’s of- fice he realized that he wasn’t supposed to know the way until he was shown, but it was too late then, so he kept on going. A moment later, Keith Winton sat down opposite Keith Winton, reached across the desk to shake hands and said, “I’m Karl Winston, Mr. Winton. Have a couple of stories to leave with you. Could have mailed them, of course but I thought I’d like to meet you while I was in New York.” Keith was studying Winton as he spoke. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, about Keith’s age, an inch or so taller but a few pounds lighter. His hair was darker and a little curlier. Facially, there wasn’t any particular resem- blance. “You don’t live in New York?” “Yes and no,” Keith said. “I mean, I haven’t been, but I may be from now on. Been working on a paper in Boston — and doing a lot of free-lance feature writing on the side.” He’d thought out his story and didn’t have to hesitate. “Got a leave of ab- sence for a while and — if I can make a go of things free-lancing here — I probably won’t go back. “I brought in two shorts I’d like you to consider — one for War Adventure and one for the new science-fiction book Miss Blake tells me you’re starting. I’d appreciate a de- cision as quickly as I can get it — because I w'ant to write some more I have planned along these lines and don’t want to start until I know your reaction to these.” Keith Winton smiled. “I’ll keep them out of the slushpile.” He glanced at the upper right corners of the two manuscripts Keith had put on the desk. “Three and four thousand. Those are lengths we need and both books you men- tioned are wide open.” “Fine,” Keith said. He decided to crowd his luck a little. “I happen to have an ap- pointment in the building here on Friday, the day after tomorrow. Since I’ll be so close, would that be too soon for me to drop in to see if you’ve made a decision?” Keith Winton frowned a little. “Can’t promise for sure that soon but I’ll try. If you’ll be in the building anyway drop in.” "Thanks a lot.” Keith didn’t crowd his luck any farther than that. He stood up. “I’ll be in Friday then about this time. Good- bye, Mr. Winton.” He went back to Marion Blake’s desk. “Yes,” she said, “Miss Hadley is free now. You may go in her office.” This time Keith remembered to wait until she pointed out the proper door to him. STAETLING STORIES ia Me felt as though he were walking through thick molasses on the way to the door. He thought, “I shouldn’t do this. It’s crazy. I should have my head examined. I should leave the story for her — or take it to some other love story magazine editor.” He took a deep breath and opened the door. And then he knew he should have stayed away. His heart did a double somersault when he saw her sitting there at her desk, looking up at him with a slight impersonal smile. She was twice as beautiful as he re- membered. But of course that was silly — Wait — wa^ it silly? This was, somehow, another universe. It had a completely differ- ent Keith Winton in it. Why shouldn’t it have a completely differ- ent Betty Hadley ? Only she wasn’t different really. She was just more beautiful. He couldn’t tell exactly where the difference lay. It was as subtle as was the difference between the girls on the magazine covers back there and the ones on the covers here. They were the same girls in the same costumes but they had more — well, you name it. It was like that with Betty — she was the same girl but subtly more beautiful and more desirable. He was twice as much in love with her. Her smile faded and she said, “Yes?” Keith realized that he must have been star- ing. He said, “My name is Kei — uh — Karl Winston, Miss Hadley. I — uh — ” She saw he was floundering and helped him out. “Miss Blake tells me you are a friend of hers and a writer. Won’t you sit down, Mr. Winston?” “Thanks,” he said, taking the chair oppo- site her desk. “Yes, I brought in a story which ...” And he went on talking, or rather his tongue did, now that he’d got it back, telling her substantially the same story he’d told Keith Winton. But his mind wasn’t on what he was say- ing at all. And then, somehow, he was making his getaway without falling over his own feet and the interview was over and he was out of the door. And he knew he’d never again torture himself by coming that close to her again. Not that it wouldn’t be worth the torture if there was a chance in a billion but there wasn’t — there couldn’t be. He was so miserable that he almost walked blindly past the receptionist’s desk without speaking but Marion Blake called out, “Oh, Mr. Winston.” He turned and managed to make himself smile. He said, “Thanks a lot. Miss Blake, for telling them — ” “Oh, don’t mention that. That’s all right. But I have a message for you from Mr. Winton.” “Huh? But I just talked to — ” “Yes, I know; he just left to keep an im- portant appointment. But he said he wanted to ask you something and he’ll be back by twelve-thirty and could you telephone him then?” “Why, sure. I’ll be glad to. And again, thanks a lot.” He started for the door, wondering what Keith Winton wanted to talk to him about so soon. He’d been in Betty Hadley’s office less than fifteen minutes. Winton couldn’t ppssibly have read even one of the two stories. But — well, why wonder ? He’d know when he phoned at half past twelve. As he walked toward the elevators in the hallway outside Borden Publications, Inc., the door of one of the elevators slid open. Mr. and Mrs. L. A. Borden emerged and the door slid shut behind them. Caught unaware, Keith nodded and spoke to them. Each of them nodded slightly and Mr. Borden murmured something inaudible, as one does when spoken to by someone whom one can’t recall. They went past him and into the offices he’d just left. Keith frowned as he waited for a down elevator. Of course they didn’t know him and he shouldn’t have spoken. It was a very slight slip but he’d have to be on the alert to avoid even slight ones. He’d made one back in Betty’s office, too, when he’d started to introduce himself as Keith Winton instead of Karl Winston. And, now he thought of it Betty had given him a very peculiar look when he’d made that slip. Almost as though — but that was silly. He put the thought out of his mind. It came to him again, as he walked into the elevator, that the similarities of this uni- verse might be more dangerous to him than its differences, might make him give himself away more easily. He worried about it a little. He’d have worried about it more if he’d known that he already had. WHAT MAD UNIVERSE CHAPTER X Slade of the W. B. I. Keith WINTON didn’t feel like going back to his hotel and grinding out an- other story just yet. This afternoon and eve- ning, maybe. He had a good start with three stories but three stories, even fairly short ones and rewritten, are plenty for two days. He knew those stories were good and he wanted to keep up the quality and not go stale. The rest of today, then, he’d take off and wander around a bit. Tomorrow, another story or two, so he’d have something to take in on Friday when he kept his appointments at Borden. It was funny, he thought, to be on the opposite side of the fence there — to be taking stories in instead of having writers and agents bring them. Maybe he should get himself an agent — no, let that wait until he had a sale or two he could report and a foot inside the door. He strolled over to Broadway and down to Times Square. He stood looking at the Times Building, wondering what was strange about it — then realized that the strips of cur- rent news headlines in electric lights weren’t flashing around as they should have been. Why not? Oh sure — because daytime New York used a minimum of electric lighting. Those what- ever-they-were rays emitted by electric lights and detectable by the Arcturian space-ships were blanked out at night by the mist-out but by day they weren’t. That was why, then, most places he’d been in had seemed so dimly lighted compared to the offices and stores and restaurants he’d known. Come to think of it, there hadn’t been any artificial light at all in most of them. He’d have to watch little things like that, to keep from giving himself away. He’d had the electric light on in his hotel room most of the time he’d been working. Luckily, he hadn’t been called on it. Hereafter he’d move the desk and typewriter over closer to the window and leave the light off. He walked past a news stand slowly, and read the headlines: FLEET BLASTS ARC OUTPOST 49 That ought to give him a kick, Keith thought, but it didn’t. He couldn’t hate Arc- turians — he didn’t even know what they looked like. This was real, yes, but it couldn’t seem real to him yet. It still seemed like a dream he might wake up from. Dream? No, more like a nightmare. It was a world in which the only woman he’d ever really loved, head over heels, was engaged to somebody else. He stood staring moodily at a window of hand-painted neckties. Something touched his shoulder and he turned around. He jumped back, almost striking the glass of the window. It was one of the big purple haiiy Lunans, a Bern, no less. It said, “Pardon me, do you have a match?” Keith wanted to laugh, but his hand trem- bled a little as he handed over a package of matches and then took it back when the Lunan had lighted a cigarette. It said, “Thank you, sir,” and walked on. Keith watched his back and the way he walked. Despite his bulging muscles he walked like a man wading through waist- high water. Heavy gravity, of course, Keith thought — on the Moon he’d be strong enough to throw Gargantua around. And he was slumped down, pulled together by that grav- ity. Not an inch over eight feet tall. On the Moon he’d probably be eight and a half. But wasn’t there supposed to be no air on the Moon ? How could Lunans breathe ? And they must breathe, because he’d lighted a cigarette. Anything that doesn’t breathe couldn’t smoke. Suddenly, and for the first time, some- thing occurred to Keith. He could go to the moon! Mars! Venus! Why not? In a uni- verse with space-travel why not take advan- tage of it? A little chill of excitement went down his spine. Somehow he hadn’t, in the few days he’d been here, thought of space- travel in connection with himself. Now the idea hit him like a ton of bricks. It would take money, of course. He’d have to write plenty — but why couldn’t he? And there was another chance, once he had learned the ropes well enough to take a chance. Those coins he still had. If a nine- teen twenty-eight quarter had brought him two hundred dollars, maybe one of the other coins he had would turn out to be a rare one, and bring him big money on whatever black market the secret coin collectors used. But for now, that was too dangerous. Big Victory for Solar Forces 50 STARTUNG STORIES He strolled up Broadway as far as Forty- sixth, and then saw by a clock in a window that it was almost twelve-thirty. He went into a drugstore and phoned Keith Winton at Borden Publications. Winton’s voice said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Win- ston, Thought of something else I wanted to talk to you about, something you might do for us but it’s a bit complicated to discuss over the phone. Are you free this after- noon?” “Yes,” Keith said. “Wonder if you could drop up to my place. We can discuss it over a drink, may- be.” “Fine,” Keith said. “Where and when?” “Four o’clock all right? And I’m in Apart- ment six at three-one-eight Gresham, down in the Village. You’d probably better take a cab unless you know the district down there.” Keith grinned, but kept his voice serious. “I think I can find it all right,” he said. He ought to be able to. He’d lived there for four years. Me put back the receiver and went out to Broadway again, this time walking south. He stopped in front of the window of a travel agency. Vacation Trips, the sign said. All-Expense Tours to Mars and Venus. One Month, 5,000 Cr." Only five hundred bucks, he thought. Dirt cheap, as soon as he could earn five hun- dred bucks. And maybe it would take his mind off Betty. He went back to his hotel, walking fast. He jerked paper and carbon into the type- writer and started working on the fourth story. He worked until the last minute, then hurried out and caught a subway train south. The building was familiar and so was the name Keith Winton on the mailbox of Apart- ment 6 in the downstairs hallway. He pressed the buzzer and waited, with his hand on the latch, until it clicked. Keith Winton— the other Keith Winton — was standing in the doorway of the apart- ment as Keith walked back along the hall. “Come in, Winston,” he said. He stepped back and opened the door wider. Keith walked in — and stopped suddenly. A big man with iron-gray hair and cold iron-gray eyes was standing there in front of the book- case. There was a deadly looking forty-five automatic in his hand and it was pointed at the third button of Keith’s vest. Keith stood very still, and raised his hands slowly. He heard the door close behind him. The big man said, “Better frisk him, Mr. Winton. From behind. Don’t step in front of him. And be careful.” Keith felt hands running lightly over him, touching all his pockets. “May I ask what the idea of this is?” Keith managed to keep his voice steady. “No gun,” Winton said. He stepped around where Keith could see him again. He stood there looking at Keith with puz- zled eyes. He said, “I owe you an explana- tion, sure. And then you owe me one. Okay, Karl Winston — if that’s really y'our name — meet Mr. Gerald Slade of the W. B. I.” “Glad to know you, Mr. Slade,” Keith said. What, he was wondering, was the W. B. I.? World Bureau of Investigation? It seemed like a good guess. He looked back at his host. “Is that all the explanation you owe me?” Winton glanced at Slade and then back at Keith. He said, “I thought it best to have Mr. Slade here. You brought me two stories this morning at the Borden office. Where did you get them?” “Get them? I wrote them.” “You mean you rewrote them. They were stories I wrote five or six years ago. You did a nice rewrite job on them — I’ll say that for you. They were better than the orig- inals.” Keith opened his mouth, and closed it again. The roof of it felt dry and he thought he’d make a croaking noise if he tried to say anything. It was so obvious, now that he thought of it. Why shouldn’t the Keith Winton of this universe have written the same stories since he had the same job, lived in the same flat — everything the same except physical re- semblance? Why hadn’t he thought of the possibility ? He moistened his lips with his tongue. He had to say something. He said, “Lots of stories have similar plots. There have been lots of cases where — ” “These aren’t just cases of similar plots. Too many of the minor details are identical. In one story, the names of the two main characters are the same as in my original of that story. Coincidence won’t wash, Win- ston. Coincidence could account for similar basic plots, but not for identical bits of busi- ness. WHAT MAD UNIVERSE "Those stories were plagiarized. I’ve got copies in my files to prove it.” He stared at Keith, frowning. He went on, “I suspected something before I finished reading the first page of one story. When I’d read all of both stories I was sure of it. But I’ll admit I’m puzzled. Why would a plagiarist have the colossal gall to try to sell stolen stories to the very man who wrote them ? However or whenever you stole them, you must have known I’d recognize them. And — is Winston your real name?” “Certainly.” “That’s funny, too. A man calling him- self Karl Winston offering stories written by a man named Keith Winton. What I can’t understand, if it’s a fake name, why you didn’t pick one that wasn’t so close.” Keith wondered about that himself. The man with the automatic asked, "Got any identification w'ith you?” Keith shook his head slowly. He had to stall, somehow, until he could fig- ure an out — if there was one. He said, “Not with me. I can prove my identity, of course. I’m staying ^ the Watsonia Hotel. If you phone there — ” “If I phone there,” Slade said, “I’ll be told a man named Karl Winston is regis- tered there. Sure, I phoned there already. That’s the address on the manuscripts.” He cleared his throat. “That doesn’t prove any- thing except that you’ve been using the name Karl Winston for the two days you’ve been there.” He clicked the safety catch on the big auto- matic. His eyes hardened. He said, “I don’t like to shoot a man in cold blood, but — ” Keith involuntarily took a step backwards. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Since when is plagiarism — even if I were guilty of it — something to shoot a man for?” “We’re not worried about plagiarism,” Slade said grimly. “But we’re under orders to shoot on sight anybody suspected of being an Arc spy. And there’s one loose, last seen in Greeneville upstate. We got a kind of punk description but you could fit it. So — ” “Wait a minute,” Keith said desperately. “There’s a simple explanation of this some- where. There’s got to be. And, if I were a spy, wouldn’t pulling a dumb stunt like stealing an editor’s stories and trying to sell them back to him be the last thing I’d do?” Winton said, “He’s got something there, Slade. That’s what puzzled me most about 51 the whole thing. And I don’t like the idea of shooting him down unless we’re sure. Let me ask him one or two more questions.” He turned to Keith. “Look, Winston, you can see this is no time to stall. It won’t get you an>i;hing but bullets. Now, if you’re an Arc, heaven only knows why you’d have brought me those stories. Maybe I was sup- posed to react differently — do something else besides call a W. B. I. man. But if you’re not an Arc, then there must be some ex- planation. Can you give it?” Keith licked his lips again. For a mo- ment, a desperate moment, he couldn’t re- member any of the places he’d submitted those stories to when he’d first written them. Then he remembered. He said, “There’s only one possibility I can think of. Did you ever submit those stories to the Gebhart chain of pulps in Chi- cago? “Yes — one of them anyway. Both, I guess. I’ve got a record of it.” “About five years ago?” Keith pressed. “About that.” Keith took a deep breath. He said, “Five years ago I was a reader for Gebhart. I must have read your stories when they came in. I must have liked them and passed them, even if the editors over me didn’t buy them. My subconscious mind must have remem- bered them.” He frowned. “Ij that’s true I’d better quit writing — fiction, anyway. When I wrote those stories recently I thought they were original. If it was my subconscious memory of stories I’d read five years ago — ” He saw with relief that Slade’s grip on the pistol wasn’t quite so tight. Slade said, “Or you could have taken notes on those stories, intending to swipe them sometime later. ” Keith shook his head. “If it had been deliberate plagiarism, wouldn’t I have changed at least the names of the charac- ters? And — ” He started to say “the titles,” but realized in time that he wouldn’t be sup- posed to know whether the titles were the same or not. He turned to Winton and asked, “Did I use the same titles?” “On one of them. On the other you had a better one.” Winton leaned back against the table behind him and looked at Slade. He said, “That sounds reasonable to me, Slade. I’m inclined to believe him. And, as he says, if he were deliberately plagiarizing, he’d have changed them more than he did. STARTLING STORIES 52 They were well written — ^the actual writing is better than mine was, I’ll admit.” He took a deep breath. “It could be true and you almost shot the guy.” “I still should,” Slade said. “You know as well as I do we aren’t supposed to take chances with possible Arcs. In any case, I’m not taking this gun otf him till we check forty ways for Sunday. For a start, you can put through a long distance call to this Chicago publisher and — ^wait, they’d be closed now, even if it’s an hour earlier there.” Winton said, “Just a minute, Slade. I’ve got an idea. When I frisked him, I was look- ing for a gun and he hasn’t got one. But I did feel a billfold.” Slade’s eyes got even harder as he stared at Keith. “And no identification in it?” There was, Keith thought bitterly, plenty of identification — but not as Karl Winston. All too clearly now he saw all the mistakes he had made. And it was too late now to try to correct any of them. Maybe he had only seconds to live. The W. B. I. man didn’t wait for him to answer. Obviously he wasn’t going to be- lieve him anyway. He said to Winton, with- out taking his eyes off Keith, “Get the wal- let. And see if he’s got anything else in his pockets. That’s the last chance we’ll give him.” The other Keith Winton circled to ap- proach him from the back. Keith took a deep breath. This was going to be it. Be- sides the identification in that wallet he still had the incriminating coins, wrapped — so they wouldn’t clink together — in money that was in dollars instead of credits. He hadn’t dared leave the stuff in his hotel room. Well, it didn’t matter. The wallet alone would be enough. This was it. Either he was going to die here and now or else — Heroes in the stories he had bought back in a sane universe where he’d been a Borden editor instead of an Arc- turian spy always managed to jump a gun. Was there a chance in a thousand that it could really be done? NEXT ISSUE DORMANT by A. E. VAN VOGT AND OTHER STORIES CHAPTER XI The Blacker Dark The . man who was searching him was behind him now. Keith stood very still with the muzzle of the pistol aiming right at him. His mind was going like a millrace but it wasn’t thinking of anything that would save him from being shot within the next minute or two. As soon as the other Keith Winton opened that wallet and read the iden- tification in it. . . . All Keith’s attention was on tlie automa- tic. A gun like that, he knew, shot steel- jacketed bullets that would go right through a man. If Slade fired now he’d probably kill both of them, both Keith Wintons. And then what? Would he wake up back on Borden’s farm in Greeneville in a sen- sible world? No, not according to what Mekky, the mechanical brain, had said — “This is real. . . . Your danger here is real. If you are killed here ...” And, wildly improbable as Mekky himself was, he knew somehow that Mekky was dead right. Somehow there were two universes and two Keith Wintons but this one was just as real as the one he’d grown up in. The other Keith Winton was just as real as he was. And would the fact that one shot might kill them both delay the W. B. I. man’s finger a second on the trigger? It might or it might not. A hand was reaching into his hip pocket. It came out, holding the billfold. Keith found he was holding his breath. A hand went into his side trouser pocket — apparent- ly his host was going to finish the search before opening the billfold. Keith quit thinking and moved. His hand closed on Winton’s wrist, and he pivoted .and swung Winton around in front of him, between himself and Slade. His trouser pocket ripped. Over Winton’s shoul- der he saw the W. B. I. man moving to the side to get a clear shot. He moved, keeping Winton between them. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a fist coming for his face and he jerked aside, let- ting it pass over his shoulder and then stepped in low, butting his head against Win- ton’s chest. Then, with both hands and with all the weight of his body and the momen- WHAT MAD UNIVEESE turn of his forward rush, he shoved Winton backward against Slade, following close. Slade stumbled backward into the book- case and glass crashed. The automatic went off, making a noise like a blockbuster in the confined space of the room. Keith dung to Winton’s lapels with both hands while his foot kicked up alongside Winton at the automatic. The toe of his shoe hit Slade’s wrist and the automatic went out of Slade’s hand. It clunked against the car- peted floor and Keith gave a final shove against Winton’s chest and then dived for the gun. He got it. He backed off, holding it to cover both of them. He was breathing hard and — now that the immediate action was over — his hand was trembling. There was a knock on the door, and a sudden hush inside the apartment. Then a voice called, “Are you alf right, Mr. Win- ton?” and Keith recognized the voice — that of Mrs. Flanders, who had the adjoining apartment. He made his voice sound as much like that of the other Winton as he could. He called, “Everything’s okay, Mrs. Flan- ders. Gun went off while I was cleaning it. The recoil knocked me over.” He stood still, waiting, knowing she’d be wondering why he didn’t open the door. But all his attention had to be on the two men in front of him and he didn’t take his eyes off them a second. He saw the puzzlement in Winton’s eyes. Winton was wondering how he knew Mrs. Flanders’ name and had recognized her voice. After a few seconds he heard Mrs. Flan- ders’ voice again. “All right, Mr. Winton. I just wondered.” And her steps going back along the hall to her own apartment. She was still wondering, of course, why he hadn’t opened the door — and there’d been a lot more noise than his falling over from a recoil could have made. But she wouldn’t call coj^r right away. She’d keep on wondering awhile first. But some other tenant might not. He had to do something quickly about Winton and the W. B. I. man. He couldn’t just shoot them but he couldn’t just walk out and leave them to start a chase after him. He needed at least a few minutes’ grace to start his getaway. Getaway to where? he wondered, then shoved that thought out of his mind. Right now he couldn’t figure more than min- utes ahead. “Turn around,” he ordered, making his 53 voice sound grim and deadly. He stepped in close to them, keeping the muzzle of the gun in the W. B. I. man’s back — he was more afraid of Slade trying something than Win- ton— and felt Slade’s hip pockets. Yes, there was a pair of handcuffs there. He took them, stepped back. He said, “All right, step over by that post in the archway. You, Winton, reach through it. Then cuff yourselves together. Wait a second; first toss me your keys, Slade.” He BACKED to the door when they had followed his orders. He started to tell them not to yell, then realized they would anyway and didn’t bother. He slid the gun into his pocket and went through the door. He heard their voices behind him as he went down the hall to the stairs and doors were popping open. He walked fast but wouldn’t let himself run. Nobody, he thought, would actually try to stop him, al- though somebody would be phoning the po- lice by now. Nobody did stop him. He made the street and kept up his fast walk. He was a block away when he heard sirens. He slowed down instead of hurrying faster but he turned oflf Gresham Street at the next corner. Within ten minutes squad cars would be cruising the neighborhood with his descrip- tion. But by that time he could be on Fifth Avenue, walking north from Washington Square and they wouldn’t be able to pick him out of the crowd. Or better yet — A taxi went by, empty, and he started to hail it, then swore at himself as he realized he had forgotten to get his billfold back, in Winton’s apartment. On top of every- thing else now, he was broke. He couldn’t even take the subway. A dozen blocks away, he felt safe from the squad cars that were undoubtedly look- ing for him. He was walking north on Fifth Avenue then and the sidewalks were fairly crowded. He stepped up his pace a little when he noticed that most of the others were walk- ing faster. Above all, he didn’t dare to be inconspicuous. And there seemed to be hurry in the air. The realization of the reason for it struck him almost like a blow. It was becoming twilight. It was going to get dark pretty soon. Dark? That wasn’t the word for it. The 54 STABTUNG STORIES blacker dark, the mist-out. All these people were hurrying because they were scurrying home to get under cover for the night The doors would be locked and barred and the streets left to crime and banditry and scav- enging. For the first time since he’d made his get- away from the apartment he stopped, won- dering where he was going. Not back to his hotel, of course. They’d be waiting for him there. He’d given his right address on those manuscripts he’d turned in to Win- ton. And that meant he’d lost everything — the clothes, the suitcase, the toilet articles. Again and more bitterly he thought of his stupidity in not getting his billfold back after Win- ton had taken it. There hadn’t been a lot in it but enough that he could have taken a room for the night, enough to have lived on for at least a few days until there was a chance for him to figure a new plan for living in this mad world. Writing was out but maybe there was another way. Broke, flat broke, what chance did he have? Somehow he’d give himself away at every turn. Of course there were the few coins from a sensible universe and he was glad now he hadn’t dared to leave them in his hotel room. But they represented danger as well as possible capital. He shrugged. What difference could a little thing like that make now? If the police got him he was dead anyway, coins or no coins. Slowly he started walking again, still northward. He knew where he was going now. Thirty-seventh Street, just off Third Avenue. The fifth floor. It was dusk when he got there and the few people left on the streets were hurrying, almost running. It was deeper dusk be- cause the street lights had not gone on as they should have by this time in the evening. And the street lights weren’t going to go on. A janitor was just reaching to lock the outer door as Keith opened it. The man’s hand went quickly to his back pocket, but he didn’t pull the gun. He asked, suspiciously, “Who you want to see?’’ “Miss Hadley,’’ Keith said. “Just stay- ing a minute.” “Okay.” ■ He walked back to the self-service eleva- tor but the janitor’s voice came back after him. “You’ll haveta walk. Juice is off al- ready, mister. And hurry down if you want me to take a chance on opening the door to let you out.” Keith nodded and took the stairs instead. He went up them rapidly and had to stop on die fifth floor landing to get his breath back. Then he rang the bell of the front apartment. After a moment Betty’s voice called out, “Who is it?” “ICarl Winston, Miss Hadley. It’s im- portant.” The door opened on the chain, and Bet- ty’s face looked at him through the three- inch opening. Her eyes were a litde fright- ened. He said, “Awfully sorry to bother you so late. Miss Hadley, but I’ve got to get in touch with Mekky. Is there any way it can be done?” The chain slid out of the groove and the door opened. She said, “Come in, K-Keith Winton.” Scarcely daring to breathe, Keith stej^ed into the room. She’d called him by name, by his right name. He stood with his back against the door, scarcely believing, staring at her. The room was dim, the shades already pulled down. The light came from a candle in a candlestick on the table behind Betty. Her face was shadowed but the dim light behind her made a golden aura of her soft blonde hair. She asked, “You’re in trouble? They found you out?” He nodded. “You haven’t mentioned Mekky to any- one else? No one would think of your com- ing here?” “No.” She turned and Keith saw for the first time that a colored maid was standing in the far doorway. Betty said, “It’s all right. Della. You may go to your room.” “But, Miss—” “It’s all right, Della,” The door closed quietly behind the maid and Betty turned back to Keith. He took a step toward her. He asked, “Do you — remember — uh — I don’t under- stand. Which Betty Hadley are you? How could you have known — ” It sounded inarticulate and confused even to him. She said, “Sit down, Mr. Winston. I’m going to call you that, to avoid confusing you with the other Keith Winton. What happened? Was it Keith Winton w^ho found you out?” WHAT MAD UNIVERSE 55 “Yes.” Keith laughed a little bitterly. "The two stories I gave him were his own stories. I didn’t even try to explain — and I’d have been shot first if I’d tried. And by the way, tear up that story I left with you. It’s both an original and a plagiarism. But that’s not important, now. What about Mekky ?” She shook her head slowly. “You can’t reach Mekky. He’s back with the fleet. The Arcs are — ” She stopped short. “Going to attack, I suppose,” Keith said. “Mekky told me there was a crisis in the war.” He laughed a little. “But I can’t get excited about the war — I can’t believe in it enough. What I want to know is what Mek- ky told you about me?” Betty Hadley looked at him thoughtfully. “Not much,” she told him. “He didn’t know much himself. He hadn’t time to go imder the surface of your mind. But he learned that you were from — somewhere else. He didn't know where. He knew that where you came from you were called Keith Win- ton, although you don’t look like the Keith Winton I know. “He knew you were in a jam here be- cause— well, because you don’t know enough about things not to make mistakes. He knew you were not an Arc spy but that you’d get shot for one unless you were awfully care- ful.” Keith leaned forward. "What is Mekky? A robot, a thinking machine?” “That — and a little more than that. Do- pelle made him that but — I don’t know. Even he doesn’t understand — he has emo- tions too. Even a sense of humor.” The way she said the name Dopelle, Keith thought — the way she emphasized the pro- noun— almost capitalized it. She’s more than in love with him, Keith thought — she wor- ships him. He closed his eyes a second and when he opened them he didn’t look at her. He hardly heard w'hat she was saying, until he realized she was asking a question. “What can I do? Mekky told me he saw in your mind that you might come to me for help. He said it would be all right if I didn’t take any risk myself.” “I wouldn’t let you do that,” Keith said. “And no one followed me here or could even suspect I’d come here. But I don’t know how you can help unless you can get in touch with Mekky. My masquerade here has blown up higher than a kite. And I haven’t got any answers for the questions the cq>s would ask — even if they stopped to ask questions. Mekky, I hope, could give me the answers — and vouch for them.” She nodded. “But there’s no way you could get in touch with Mekky unless you could get to the fleet.” “Where’s the fleet?” SHE hesitated, frowning, before she de- cided to speak. “Near Saturn. But you couldn’t get there. You’ll have to wait it out somehow. Have you money?” “No, but I don’t — wait, there’s something you can tell me. I might be able to look it up at the library or somewhere, but I can find out from you quicker. What’s the score on coinage — metal coins.” “Metal coins? There haven’t been any since nineteen thirty-five. They were called in then.” “Why?” “The Arcs were counterfeiting them — and paper money, too. They had a network of spies here then. One of the things they did was try to disrupt Earth’s economic sys- tems by flooding the world with counterfeit money. It couldn’t be told from real money even by experts. “A bad inflation started and everything would have gone smash. So the war coun- cil of the nations got some scientists to- gether and they figured out a kind of paper currency that couldn’t be counterfeited. I don’t know what the secret is. Nobody does, except a few scientists. “Something they use in the paper gives ofiE a faint yellowish glow in the dark or in deep shadow. Anybody can s|X)t counterfeit money because no counterfeiter — nor the Arcs — has been able to duplicate paper that gives off that glow.” Keith asked, “Was that when the change was made from dollars and cents to credits ?” “Yes — in all countries. Each country backs its own coinage but it’s all in credits and all kept at par so it’s interchangeable.” Keith said, “So after the old money had been called in for exchange, it was illegal to possess any. But there are coin collectors who do?” “Yes. It’s illegal and there’s a pretty stiff fine. But there are coin collectors, plenty of them. It’s not considered a real moral crime.” “Like drinking during Prohibition?” Betty looked bewildered. “Like what?” 56 STABTUNG STORIES “Skip it.” Keith took the little wad of money out of his pocket, the coins wrapped in the bills. He opened them out and studied them. He said, “I’ve got five coins here and two bills that are dated before nineteen thirty-five. About what would they be worth?” He handed them to Betty, who glanced at them. She said, “I don’^t know just what prices are paid. I’d guess about ten thou- sand credits — a thousand dollars by the old scale. What are those other coins and bills?” “Dated after nineteen thirty-five. So they’re impossible. I nearly got myself killed giving one to a druggist in Greene- ville.” “But how could they be dated after — ” Keith sighed. “I don’t know either. But I’ll drop them down the sewer as soon as I leave here. The others are dangerous enough. Look — about Arcturian spies. Are Arcturians human beings ? Can’t they tell an Arcturian from an Earthman?” “They’re horribly different.” The girl shuddered. “Monsters, More like insects in appearance, bigger of course, and as intel- ligent as we are. But back in the early days of the war they captured a lot of people alive, on some of their first raids. They can — take over people, put one of their minds into a human body and use it for a spy. “There aren’t so many now. Most of them have been killed. Sooner or later they give themselves away because their minds are alien. And since those early days they haven’t been able to capture many humans alive.” “But even so,” Keith said, “why shoot on suspicion? Why aren’t they arrested and, if their minds are actually alien, a psy- chiatrist should be able to prove or disprove that they’re Arcturians. Don’t a lot of in- nocent people get killed?” “Yes, maybe a hundred for every real spy. But — well, they’re so dangerous, especially now that the war is in the current stage, that it’s better, really better, that a thousand peo- ple die than that an Arc spy should stay at large. “If they got a few of our secrets to add to their own science it could change the tide of the war. And that would mean the end of the whole human race, the death of billions. So it’s not considered a crime to kill a human being by mistake if there’s cause to think he's an Arc. Don’t you see?” “Not completely. If you could capture them and be sure first wouldn’t that be just as good?” “It’s too dangerous. Too many of them have escaped on the way to jail or even after they were locked up. They have special powers, physical and mental.” EITH grinned wryly. “So one of them could maybe take the gun away from the W. B. I. man who was holding it on him. Well, if they had any doubts before in my case, they haven’t now.” He stood up. For a long moment he stared at Betty Hadley, then turned his head and looked at the window. It was black, blank. The mist-out was on. He said, “Thank you. Good-bye.” She stood, too. Her eyes went to the windo\y, as his had. “But where are you going to go? You might take a chance for a block or two if you’re careful, but — ” “I’m armed.” “But you haven’t any place to go. You can’t stay here, of course; there’s just Della and I. But there’s a vacant apartment on the floor below. I can fix it with the janitor so—” "Nor Keith’s answer was so explosive that he felt foolish after he had said it. “But tomorrow I can talk to the W. B. I. I can explain that Mekky vouched for you to me. It won’t be safe until Mekky is back a few months from now, for you to be run- ning loose — but on my word for it they might hold you in protective custody until he does come back.” Possibly there was a shade of uncertainty on Keith’s face, for she kept talking, pressing the point. She said, “They will believe me enough to give you the benefit of the doubt. Because I’m Dopelle’s fiancee — ” She couldn’t have known it, but it had been the wrong thing to say. Keith shook his head slowly. He said, “No. I’m going out. You — you’re really in love with this Dopelle?” She said only, “Yes,” but the way she said it was enough. “Good-bye then. Miss Hadley,” Keith said. She held out her hand to him but he pretended not to see it. He didn’t trust himself to touch it. He went out quickly. WHAT MAD UNIVERSE CHAPTER XII The Moon N HIS way down the stairs he began to realize how foolish he had been and to be glad that he had been foolish. He was mad — not at anybody but at everything. He was tired, very tired, of being pushed around. He’d been as cautious and care- ful as he knew how and it had kept getting him into worse and worse trouble. Now he was going to quit being cautious. It would probably get him killed, and quick- ly, but — well, what did he have to lose? In the downstairs hallway the man with the gun was still there. He said, “Y’ain’t going out, are you, mister?” Keith grinned at him. “Yes. Got to see a man about a sphere.” “You mean Mekky? Gonna see Dopelle?” There was awe in the man’s voice. He went to the door, gun ready in his hand. He said, “Well, if you’re a friend of his — and I shoulda guessed it if you were seeing Miss Hadley — maybe you know what you’re do- ing. I hope so.” Keith said, “We both hope so.” He slid through the doorway and heard the door slammed and bolted behind him. He stood there in the utter blackness of the mist-out, and listened. There wasn’t a sound from any direction. He felt his way to the curb and took off his shoes, tying the laces together and hanging them around his neck. Without them on, nobody would be able to hear and stalk him. He shifted the forty-five automatic to his coat pocket and kept his hand on it. It was easy, if awkward, to follow the curb line by walking with one foot on the curbing and the other down in the street. The feel of a sewer grating under his foot re- minded him of the coins and bills he had to get rid of, the ones dated after nineteen thirty-five. He’d put them back in a dif- ferent pocket. He shoved them through the grating of the . sewer. With that out of the way, he went on, listening. Funny, he thought ; he wasn’t afraid. May- be because now, tonight, he was the hunter and not the hunted. He was three blocks south of where he 57 had turned onto Fifth Avenue before he heard a quarry. Not footsteps — whoever it was either was standing still against the front of a building or else he had, like Keith, taken off his shoes to walk silently. The sound Keith heard was a slight, barely audi- ble snifHe. He stood very still, scarcely breathing, until he heard it again, and then he knew the man was moving, going south. The second sound had come from that direction. Keith hurried his steps, almost running, in the direction he’d already been going until he was sure he was well ahead of his victim. Then he cut diagonally across the sidewalk and groped with his hands ahead of him until he came to the building fronts. Then he drew the automatic from his pocket and stood, waiting. Something bumped into the muzzle of the pistol, and Keith’s left hand darted out and caught the front of a coat to keep the man from pulling away. “Don’t move,” he said sharply, and then, “Turn around, very slowly. ” There’d been no answer but a sharp intake of breath. The man turned. Keith’s left hand groped, crossed over, and pulled a revolver out of a right hip picket. He put it into his own pocket. . He said, “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot. We’re going to talk. Who are you?” A tight voice said, “What do you care who I am ? All I got on me is about thirty credits and that rod. You got the rod. Take the dough too and let me go.” “I don’t want your thirty credits. I want some information. If I get it straight I might even give your rod back. Do you know your way around here?” “What do you mean?” Keith said, “I don’t know the ropes here. I’m from St. Lou. I got to find me a fence.” There was a pause, and the voice was a little less tight now. “Jewelry — or w’hat?” it asked. “Coins. A few bills, too, pre-thirty-five dollars. Who handles the stuff here?” “What’s in it for me?” Keith said, “Your life for one thing. Your gun back. And — if you don’t try to cross me — maybe a hundred credits. Two hundred, if I get a fair price.” “Peanuts. Make it five hundred.” Keith chuckled. “You’re in a swell posi- tion to bargain. I’ll make it two hundred and thirty. You already got the thirty ; consider 38 STAKTUNG STOBIES I took it away from you and gave it back.” Surprisingly, the man laughed too. He said, “You win, mister. I’ll take yx>u to see Ross. He won’t cheat you any worse than anybody else would. Come on.” “One thing first,” Keith said. “Strike a match, I want a look at you. I want to know you again, if you make a break.” “Okay,” the voice said. It was relaxed now, almost friendly. A match scraped and flared. Keith’s captive, he saw, was a small, slen- der man of about forty, not too badly dressed but in need of a shave and with slightly bleary eyes. He grinned, a bit lopsidedly. “You’ll know me,” he said, “so you might as well have a handle. It’s Joe.” “Okay, Joe. How far is this Ross guy?” “Couple blocks. He’ll be in a game.” The match died. “Look, how much worth of stuff you got?” “Somebody told me ten thousand credits.” “Then you might get five. Ross is square. But listen — gun or no gun, you’ll do better to cut me in. There’ll be other guys there. We could take you easy.” “Okay, Joe, maybe you’ve got something there. I’ll cut you in for a fifth— a thousand if we get five thousand. Fair enough?” “Yeah, fair enough.” Keith hesitated only a second. He’d need a friend, and there vvas something in Joe’s voice and there had been something in Joe’s face that made him think he could take a chance. His whole plan — if you could call it that — was a desperate gamble. Impulsively, he took Joe’s revolver out of his pocket, groped for Joe’s hand, and gave the gun back to him. But there wasn’t any surprise in Joe’s voice when he said, “Thanks. Two blocks south. I’ll go first.” They single-filed along the building fronts, locked arms while they crossed two streets. Then Joe said, “Stick close, now. We go back the areaway between the second and third buildings from the corner. Keep your hand on my shoulder.” Back in the areaway, Joe found a door and knocked — three times and then twice. It opened and light blinded them momentarily. A man at the door lowered a sawed-off shot- gun and said “Hi, Joe,” and they went in. Four men were sitting around a poker table. Joe said to the man who was putting down the^ shotgun, “Friend of mine from St. Lou, Harry. Got some business with Ross.” He nodded at one of the men at the table, a swarthy, stocky man with cold eyes behind thick lenses. “He’s got coinage, Ross.” Keith merely nodded and, without speak- ing, put the coins and bills on the table in front of the stocky man. Ross examined each one carefully, and then looked up. “Four grand,” he said. “Five,” Keith said. “They’re worth ten.” Ross shook his head. Keith felt a touch on his arm. Behind him, Joe said, “I should have told you. Ross is one-price. If he of- fers you four grand, he won’t give you four thousand and one. You take it or leave it.” “And if I leave it?” Keith asked over his shoulder. “1 know a couple more guys. But I’m not sure we can find ’em tonight. And I doubt if they’d do better than Ross.” Keith nodded. “Okay,” he said, “four grand, if it’s cash and you’ve got it with ft yotL “I got it with me.” Ross pulled out a bulging wallet and counted out two thousand- credit notes and twenty hundreds. He folded Keith’s coins carefully inside the bills again and put them in his vest pocket. “Sit in a while on the game?” “Thanks, no,” Keith said. Counting the money, he glanced at Joe, who almost im- perceptibly shook his head to indicate he didn’t want to take his cut here. The man who’d let them in picked up the shotgun again before he opened the door to let them out. Outside, in the blackness again, they moved out of earshot of the door and then Joe said, “A fifth of four thousand’s eight hundred. Want me to light a match so you can count it?” “Okay — unless you know somewhere we can have a drink and talk a few minutes. We might do some more business.” “An idea,” Joe said. “A little farther south in this same block. I could use a snort of moonjuice.” Again Joe led the way and again he led back into an areaway and knocked measured knocks on a door. Again light blinded them momentarily, and then they were in the back room of a tavern. There were a few others there ahead of them, not many. It was still, Keith reflected, comparatively early in the evening. They took a table and Joe ordered rnotm- WHAT MAD juice. Keith nodded that he’d take the same. While the aproned bartender was bringing them from the front Keith counted out eight hundred-credit notes and passed them across to Joe. Joe nodded and shoved his hat back on his head. “You’re a right guy,” he said. “Hope we can do more business. But you’re a fool.” “For what? Giving you back your rod, back there?” “Yeah. Well — maybe you weren’t. If you hadn’t done that. I’d probably have taken you. If I’d given the signal back there at the game you wouldn’t have lasted — ” E BROKE off as the bartender came back with two shot glasses of trans- parent fluid. “On me,” Joe said, and put down one of the bills Keith had just given him. He raised his glass, “Death to the Arcs.” Keith touched glasses, but took a cautious sip of his first. He’d wondered whether “moonjuice” was a nickname for some drink he already knew, or whether it was as exotic as it sounded. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever dreamed of, let alone tasted. It was thick, almost syrupy, but it wasn’t sweet. And, para- doxically, it was cool and hot at the same time. It left a cool taste in his mouth at the same time it burned a passage down his gullet. He saw that Joe had only sipped his, so he didn’t down it. “The real stuff,” Joe said. “Got much of it out west?” “Some. Not much.” “How are things out there?” “Fair,” Keith said. He wished that he could talk more, but there was always the risk of saying something wrong. He’d have to appear taciturn. “Where are you staying here?” Joe asked, after another sip. “Nowhere yet. Just blew in. Should have holed in before the mist-out, but I — had something to do.” “I can take you to a place. Whenever you’re ready. The evening’s a pup.” Keith nodded. They finished their drinks and Keith ordered a second round. What- ever moonjuice was he liked rL It seemed to clear his head rather than otherwise. He wished he could ask questions about it but of course he couldn’t. This was the last one. UNIVERSE 59 though, he decided. The stuff might be tongue-loosening and he couldn’t risk that. After a sip from the second glass of it, he leaned forward across the table. “Joe,” he asked, “where can I find an ex-space pilot who’d like to make a thousand credits on the side?” Joe’s eyes narrowed a little. “You kid- ding?” That meant it had been a bad question but Keith couldn’t see why. Anyway, he might as well go ahead now. There were only half a dozen people in the place; he might be able to shoot his way out, even if he gave himself away. “Why should I be kidding?” he de- manded. To his relief, Joe grinned. He jerked a thumb at his lapel. Following the gesture, Keith noticed an emblem there, about the size of and rather similar to the ruptured duck he himself had worn for a while. “Oh,” he said and moved his hand away from the pocket with the automatic in it; he hadn’t made a major boner after all. “Didn’t notice it, Joe. How long you been out?” “Five years. Based out of Kapi, Mars. Glad I wasn’t there a few days ago.” He shook his head slowly. “Guess there isn’t much left of Kapi.” “We’ll get back at them for that,” Keith said. “Maybe.” Keith said, “You sound pessimistic.” Joe lighted a cigarette, slowly. He said, “There’s a showdown coming. A big one. Oh, I don’t know anything except what I read between the lines but when you’ve been out there you get the feel of things. There’s a full scale attack coming — I don’t know which, us or them. But one way or the other it isn’t going to last forever.” Keith nodded gravely. He Vemembered he’d better stick to the point and talk as lit- tle as necessary. He couldn’t discuss the war very intelligently, so he’d better skip it. He asked, “Been to the Moon recently?” “Year ago.” Joe’s lips twisted. “Hadn’t started mist-outing then, yet. Thought I could make an honest living like a chump. Piloted a rich guy there in his own boat. What a brawl that was.” “Bad?” “Six of ’em in the party, and drunk as lords. A six-year-old kid could peelot one of those Ehrling jobs, but none of ’em was STARTUNG STORIES GO sober enough to do it. I was driving a cab, picked ’em up one afternoon on Times Square and drove ’em over to Jersey to his private port and he offered me a thousand to take ’em there. “I hadn’t been off Earth in two years and I just abandoned my cab and took ’em. We went to Habcrul and stayed a week.” He shook his head sadly. “My grand lasted less than a day, but they kept me with them.” Keith asked, “Those Ehrlings much dif- ferent from the hot jobs?” Joe laughed. “Same difference as between a kiddy car and a midget racer. All visual. Direct sight on your objective, push the button. Spread your wings and coast in. Complicated as drinking moon juice. Have another?” “Thanks, no. Let’s talk business. Want to make a thousand, Joe ? I want to get to the moon.” Joe shrugged. “Why pay a thousand, pal? Every hour on the hour from LaGuardia. Ninety credits round trip.” Keith leaned forward. “Can’t Joe. I’m hot — dodgers out from St. Lou and they’ll be watching all the ports. Besides, some St. Lou friends of mine might be expecting me there. I’d just as soon walk in their back door.” “That way,” said Joe, reflectively. “But — pal, for a thousand credits do you expect me to steal a private boat and take you there?” “No. I want you to help me steal a boat and show me how to run it. You don’t have to go along. How long would it take you to show me the controls?” “Half an hour. But swiping a boat, pal — that isn’t peanuts if we’re caught. It’s ten years on Venus.” His eyelids dropped a little and he stroked the back of one hand with the palm of the other. “I been to Venus once. I don’t want to go back.” Keith made a rapid calculation. He said, “Three thousand credits, Joe.” Joe sighed. “It’s a deal. When you want to go?” “Tonight,” Keith said. Maybe it was the moon juice, maybe it was his years of having read science-fiction, maybe it was just that he was human, but there was a sudden wild elation in him. The Moon ! And the other word that rounded out the magic of it. He said it again. “Tonight!” CHAPTER XIII The Song of the Spheres OE sighed again. “That’s bad,” he said. “But if it’s got to be tonight, then it’s got to be tonight. It’ll be tougher get- ting out of town from under the mist-out than it will be to swipe the boat. That means I got to swipe a car too.” “You can though?” “Oh sure. But we’ll have to crawl in it, not much faster than walking. The mist-out doesn’t taper off till three or four miles into Jersey either. Take us a good three hours to get that far.” “Sounds like pretty good time to me,” • Keith said. “Aren’t many guys could do it,” Joe said modestly. “You were lucky you picked me. I’ll show you a trick not many know — how to navigate a car by dead reckoning and a compass. What time is it?” “A little after nine.” “We can get a car in half an hour or less. We’ll be out of the mist-out by one then and the port we’ll go to is about thirty miles into Jersey but we’ll be in the open then. I’ll have you there by two o’clock.” - “The private port of this rich guy you mentioned ?” “Yeah. He’s got two. One’s a little two- place job — that’ll be best for you if it’s in. If it isn’t you’ll have to take the big one, the one we made that trip I told you about in. Guess they’ll both be there, come to think of it. Read in the paper he’s under fire from a congressional committee, so he’ll stick to Earth for a while. He makes rajiks.” “Oh,” said Keith. “One more moonjuice and we’ll go.” “If it’s on me,” Keith said. He sipped it slowly, lingeringly. He was getting a little scared again in spite of the moonjuice. Thus far he’d been lucky — but he was still in Manhattan and Saturn was a long way off. Saturn and the space fleet and Mekky. Then again they were in the almost im- penetrable blackness of the mist-out. Again they went single-file, with Keith keeping his hand on the shoulder of the man walking ahead of him and Joe guiding them along the buildings with an outstretched arm. WHAT MAD UNIVERSE At the first corner he stopped. “Wait here. I can get a car better by myself. I know where. Stick right here till you hear me coming.” And he was off again into the blackness, walking so silently that Keith couldn’t hear a sound except, once, the faint sniffle that had enabled him to catch Joe in the first place. That slight cold of Joe’s had been a break, for Joe was turning out to be a God- send. He couldn’t keep much track of time, standing there, for he didn’t want to light matches to see his watch. But it seemed like less than a half hour before he heard a car coming, inching along the curb, the occa- sional scrape of rubber against the curb- stone. Keith waited until it stopped and then felt his way toward where the sound had last come from. He felt the side of a sedan, said Joe’s name and got an answering, “Yeah.” He got in. Joe said, “Here’s the trick. You got to use the flashlight.” He pressed one into Keith’s hand. “Turn it on and keep it aimed at the floorboards of the car. Now take this chalk and draw a line parallel with the wheelbase of the car, front to back, as straight as you can.” The flashlight, held within a foot of the floor, let Keith do that all right. “Good,” Joe said. “Now here’s the compass. Put it down by the line. Now wait till I turn the car south when we get a block over, to Sixth Avenue. I can go that far , by the seat of my pants.” The car inched forward and Keith turned off the flashlight. A few minutes later Joe stopped the car. “Get out and catch a house number,” he said. “We ought to be close to Sixth.” Keith got out and fell over the curb. He got up and groped his way to the line of building fronts. A minute later he was back in the car. “Just overshot it,” he said. “Back up the width of one building and then head south.” Joe did, then drove ahead a little till they were out of the intersection. “Now the flashlight again,” he said. “From here on we can make ten miles an hour. Look, that’s the line of direction of the car, see? Here’s the compass. Now Sixth Avenue runs about southeast by south — all the straight streets do. Turns just a trifle more east at Minetta Place and then 61 goes straight again till we get to Spring Street. “There we take that right into the tunnel. Now you keep the flashlight on that line and the compass and keep me going straight. Pll watch the speedometer and check distances. We can go ten miles an hour.” “What if we -hit something?” “Won’t kill us at ten an hour. If we ruin the car we’ll have to swipe another. We’ll waver from one side of the street to the other, but if you keep close watch on that compass, we shouldn’t scrape curbing often- er than every few blocks — and whenever we do, we realign ourselves. Ready? Here we go.” Joe was a skillful pilot, it turned out, and knew the streets and directions beautifully. They scraped rubber against the curb only twice before they reached Spring Street and only twice, on the Sixth Avenue leg of the trip, did he have Keith get out and check house numbers. ®NCE, in the Holland Tunnel Keith heard another car go by them, head- ing in from Jersey but they were lucky and didn’t even scrape fenders. Joe knew the Jersey side too and kept them on straight streets where they could navigate with the compass. After a mile or so he turned the headlights on and Keith could see that they penetrated ten or twelve feet into the blackness. Joe said, “Okay, pal. It tapers off from here. You can lay off the compass now.” The headlights shot their beams farther and farther and before long it was an ordi- nary night they were driving through — an ordinary night with stars and a moon. Keith looked at the Moon and took a deep breath. He thought, “This is a dream. I’m not really going there.” At one-fifteen by Keith’s watch, Joe pulled the car to the side of the road. He said, “We’re here, pal.” He turned off the head- lights and took the flashlight from Keith. “Across these fields. It’s pretty isolated back there. We won’t even have to be careful. Hope they don’t swipe the car on me before I get back to it.” They started across the fields. The moon- light was so bright that they didn’t need the flashlight. Keith said, “How’ll you get back into town in the car alone? Can you man- age the car and the compass both?” “I won’t go back to New York tonight. STARTLING STORIES 62 I’ll drive the car into Trenton or somewhere and spend the night there. They might be watching for that car in the morning if it’s reported early. So I’ll go in by train and let them find it in Jersey. It’s just past these trees.” He used the flashlight, going through the grove, and on the far side of it were a big landing field and a big all-glass building like a monster greenhouse. Through the glass, Keith could see the two space-ships Joe had told him about. They looked more like air- planes than space-ships. The big one was about the size of a transport plane and the little one not much bigger than a Piper Cub. Joe said, “Wait here. I’ll walk once around and be sure the coast’s clear.” When he came back, he nodded. Keith held the flashlight while Joe opened the door with a picklock. “Good thing the little job will do. It’s foolproof. I can show you how to run it in ten or twenty minutes. Know anything at all about space navigation?” “Not a thing.” “Well, then it’s good you won’t want the Ehrling. It’d take me a while to teach you that one.” Keith was walking around the smaller space-ship. Now, at closer range, he could see it was less like an airplane than he had thought. The wings were shorter and stub- bier. What had looked like canvas felt more like asbestos. And there wasn’t any propel- ler. “Here’s the airlock,” Joe said. “Just turn this handle. If you open it in space for any reason — and you’d better put on a space-suit first. There’s two inside the ship. You got to open this valve first and let the air out of the ship first. Then, after you’re back in, you start the airmaker and it builds up. I’ll show you that. Get on in.” Keith sat at the pilot’s seat and Joe, be- side him, explained the controls. They were simple, Keith thought, much simpler than those on a light plane. “Here’s the sighter,” Joe was saying. “Just aim that where you want to go. And these dials set the distance. Big one’s in hundred-thou-mile units, next one in thou- sand, and on down to the little vernier in feet. That’s for hangaring of course. Now for the Moon — you landing on this side or the far side?” “This side.” “Then just sight on where you want to go, set this dial — the repulsor — for ten miles. When you’re ready, push this button and you dematerialize here and materialize ten miles above the moon. That’s safe for the Moon. Better allow twenty miles for Earth, thirty for Venus, about fifteen for Mars. “Minute you materialize there, you start falling. Put the nose in a steep glide and let yourself fall and the wings begin to take hold as you get down into the atmosphere. Glide in and land her like a glider. That’s all.^ “If you’re going to miss your place or make a bad landing — well, you’ll have your finger on the button and you push it and you flash back ten miles high again and start over. That’s all there is to it, pal. Got it?” “I guess so,” Keith said. It sounded sim- ple enough. Anyway he saw a clip on the inside of the airlock door with a book en- titled Manual of Instructions under it so he could pick up anything he’d missed or for- gotten to ask. He took out his billfold and counted out the three thousand credits he’d promised Joe. It left him less than two hundred but he probably wasn’t going to need any any- way. “Okay, pal,” Joe said. “Thanks — and luck. Look me up sometime when you’re back. The place we had the moon juice.” After joe had gone, he reached for the manual of instructions and studied it closely for nearly an hour. It was even simpler than he’d realized. You aimed at your objective and guessed or roughly estimated the distance — and if you were wrong it didn’t matter because, if you were short, you merely needed to press the button again and, if you were over, it didn’t matter if you had the repulsor set for ten miles short of the object, because it would stop you there. Gliding in didn’t seem any tougher than making a dead-stick landing in a light plane, with the added advantage that you could flash back up in nothing flat and start over again if it looked as though your landing weren’t going to be good. He looked up through the glass panel in the top of the space-ship, through the glass roof of the hangar, through the atmosphere of Earth and the nothingness of space — at the stars and the Moon. Should he go to the Moon first? There was no important reason for it. His almost hopeless destination — Mekky and the fleet WHAT MAD near -Saturn — wasn’t g^oing to^ be any more accessible from there than from here. But he knew he stood a good chance of never getting to Mekky alive and he knew too that, if he did get there, he was going to try to get back to his own world. Before he died or before he went back, one or the other, he wanted just once to set foot on the Moon. He’d skip the planets — but, just once, he wanted to stand on ground that wasn’t that of Earth. It wouldn’t cost him much time, and there wouldn’t — or shouldn’t — be much risk. The paragraph on the moon in the manual of in- struction had told him that the settlements, the fertile lands, were on the far side, where there was water and where the air was thick- er. On the near side were only barren rock and a few mines. He took a deep breath and strapped him- self into the seat. He set the dials for two hundred and forty thousand miles and the repulsor dial for ten miles, checked his aim for dead center and pushed the button. Nothing happened, nothing at all. He must have forgotten to turn a switch somewhere. He realized that he’d closed his eyes when he’d pushed the button and opened them again to look over the instrument panel. Nothing was wrong. Or was it? There was something differ- ent, a sensation of lightness, of falling, of going down in a very fast elevator. He looked upward through the top panel and the Moon wasn’t there any more but the stars were and they looked brighter and closer and more numerous than he’d ever seen them. But where was the Moon? He looked down through the glass panel in the floor and saw it rushing up at him, only miles away. He caught his breath as he set the dials again, ready to flash him back to a point above the atmosphere, then took the stick and put his feet on the pedal controls. The wings seemed to be catching air now and the craft was at the right slant to go into a glide. But it had been too sudden, too unex- pected— he wasn’t ready. He pressed the button and again nothing happened — appar- ently— except that suddenly the Moon was a little farther away again. This time he waited it out, going into a glide. He kept his finger on the button un- til he cleared the edge of a crater and saw he was heading for a flat level plain on UNIVERSE 63 which even a dub couldn’t miss making a good landing. He made one, and rolled to a stop. Slowly he unstrapped himself. He hesitated just a moment with his hand on the latch of the airlock, wondering if there really was air outside. But there had to be. He’d glided down. He opened the door and stepped out. Yes, there was air, thin and quite cold, like the air atop a high mountain of Earth. He looked around, shivering, and was disap- pointed. He might have been standing on rocky, barren land on Earth, with moun- tains in the distance. It didn’t look any dif- ferent. It felt, different, though. He felt unbe- lievably light. How high were you able to jump on the Moon? He took an experi- mental little hop that wouldn’t have taken him over six inches high on Earth and went several feet into the air. He came down more slowly and lightly than he’d expected. But doing it gave him a queasy feeling at the pit of his stomach and he didn’t try it again. He looked up, wondering what was wrong in that direction. It looked like an ordinary Earth sky, except that the sun was bright- er. But wasn’t that wrong? Weren’t you supposed to be able to see stars in daytime from the Moon? Shouldn’t the sky, except for the bright ball of the sun, be dark? But that was because scientists thought there wasn’t any air on the Moon. Were they wrong on that — back there in his own universe, too? Or was that ju.st another difference between this universe and his — that the Moon of this universe had air and his didn’t? He turned around slowly, then caught his breath at sight of what he’d forgotten to look for. The Earth, a monster yellowish ball, hung there in the sky, looking as the moon looks when seen from Earth in day- time but larger. And he could see the out- line of continents on it. It looked like a big globe of Earth hanging there. He stared at it wonderingly for a long minute, until the sharp feel of cold air in his throat and lungs reminded him that he’d freeze if he stood out here much longer. It must be close to zero and he was dressed for summer in New York. Regretfully he took his eyes off the mag- nificent sphere in the sky, then got back into the space-ship and closed the airlock. The 64 STARTLING STORIES air inside was thin and cold now, too — but now that the airlock door was closed the airmaker unit and the heater would bring it back to normal automatically. He strapped himself back into the pilot’s seat, thinking, “Well, I’ve been on the Moon.’’ It hadn’t thrilled him as much as he’d thought and he believed he knew why. It was because— here, in this universe — it didn’t seem completely real, however real this universe was. It was too easy. Much too easy. Yes, he knew now, definitely, that what he wanted was to get back, back to the world he was born in and on which he belonged. Maybe he was too old to readjust himself to something like this. Maybe if it had hap- pened when he’d been seventeen instead of thirty-one and if he’d been heart-free instead of head-over-heels in love, this universe would have been just what the doctor or- dered. But it wasn’t now. He wanted back and there was only one mind — a mechanical one — that might be able to help him do that. He set the pointer at Earth and the dial at only a hundred and twenty thousand miles, halfway between Earth and Moon. Out there in space, he could take his time about locating Saturn. He pushed the button. CHAPTER XIV Monster from Arcturus He was used to nothing happening when he pressed that button. It didn’t surprise him at all tliat suddenly the Earth was twice as big as it had been before. But it did surprise him that he himself felt so strange. It surprised him until he realized that he was almost completely weightless here. What pull there was pulled him away from the straps in the seat, toward Earth over- head. Then the ship itself must have over- come its inertia and started falling in that direction and he felt completely weightless. Well, it would take him a long time to fall a hundred and twenty thousand miles. More time than he thought he’d need. He began, first through one panel and then another, to scan the sky. It shouldn’t be too hard to find Saturn. Out here in space, with no atmosphere to blunt vision, the stars were monstrous compared to the way they looked from Earth. Even on Earth rare people, with gifted eyesight, were said at times to be able to distinguish the rings of Saturn. From here, in space, normal eyesight ought to do it easily. And he wouldn’t have to search the entire sky, even though he didn’t know Saturn’s present position. He knew enough of elemen- tary astronomy to recognize the plane of the ecliptic and Saturn would be in that plane. He’d have to look along a line, not throughout the whole sky. Of course, if Sat- urn were on the other side of the Sun, he’d have to try from there. But from here the Sun was a fiery ball in a black sky and oc- . cubed only a small fraction of the line of the ecliptic. It took him a minute to get his bearings becau.se there were so many more stars here than he was used to seeing. They didn’t twinkle, they glowed like luminous diamonds on a piece of black velvet. But he found the Dipper and then the belt of Orion and, after that, it was easy to locate the constellations of the zodiac. He followed it around, carefully, study- ing each celestial object near the imaginary line. He got a little thrill out of seeing a reddish disk that must be Mars, a reddish disk with faint crackly lines on it. He followed the line through about thirty degrees and there it was. The rings weren’t quite edge-on but they were unmistakable. And there was only one object in the whole sky that had rings. He put the pointer on it and reached for the manual of instructions, in which there was a table of orbital distances. Yes, there it was — Saturn, 886,779,000. It was in the same general direction from the sun as Earth was and that made it easy to figure. Knock off the 93,000.000-odd miles of Earth’s distance from the sun, and Saturn was 793-odd million miles away from him. And, if he overguessed, it wouldn’t matter as long as he had his repulsor set. He set the dials at 800,000,000 miles, and the re- pulsor to stop him a thousand miles away from Saturn, checked the pointer again and pressed the button. The beauty of the ringed planet — and its tremendous size from only a thousand miles away — made him catch his breath. He hadn’t WHAT MAD UNIVERSE realized how close a thousand miles was to a planet nearly 74,000 miles in diameter, about nine times the diameter of the Earth. It was a full minute before he could look away from it and start searching the sky for the Earth fleet, the war fleet. He didn’t find it — it found him. A voice startled him by saying, “Do not move.” It was a physical, actual voice, not one inside his head as Mekky’s voice had been. This wasn’t Mekky. The voice said, “What are you doing here? Pleasure craft are forbid- den outside the orbit of Mars.” He located it this time while the voice was speaking. It came out of a tiny speaker set into the instrument panel. He hadn’t no- ticed it before. Alongside it was what looked like a pick-up mike. Keith said, “I want to see Mekky. It’s important.” While he spoke he looked out through the vision panels and saw them — half a dozen oblong objects that globed him in at close range, occulting big chunks of the sky. He couldn’t guess how big they were without knowing their distance nor their dis- tance without knowing their size. The voice said sternly, “Under no cir- cumstances are civilians or occupants of civil- ian craft allowed to approach the fleet. You will be escorted back to Earth and turned over to the authorities for punishment. Do not attempt to touch your controls. Your ship is pinned. Have you a space-suit on?” “No,” said Keith. “But this is important. Does Mekky know I’m here? I must see him.” “Mekky knows you are here. He ordered us to englobe and capture you. Put on a space-suit so you can let the air out of your ship and open the lock. One of us will enter and take over operation of your ship.” “All right,” Keith said, desperately, “but does Mekky — ” The voice was different this time. It spoke both ways at once, strangely, in- side his head and through the speaker on the instrument panel. It was Mek%’s voice. It said, “Keith Winton, I told you not to come here.” Keith answered aloud. If the voice had come through the radio too, then Mekky was dealing the others in on the conversa- tion and he might as well. He said, “I had to come now or never, Mekky. The plans went wrong. I was being hunted down as a spy and you’re the only 65 one who knows I’m not. I wouldn’t have lived a day longer on Earth.” “What is that to me? What is one lie beside the defense of a solar system?” “That’s why,” said Keith, trying to sound confident. “You know, from having studied my surface thoughts, that I’m from another universe. You’ve got a lot of things here in the way of science that we can’t touch there. Space-travel and — and you, yourself. But how do you know we haven’t got some things you’ve missed ? “You’re in a jam here. You’re afraid of the next Arc attack. How do you know, without searching deeply into my mind, that you won’t find something there that may be worth a lot more than the little time you’d have to give me?” A calm but youthful voice said, “Maybe he’s got something there, Mekky. Why not bring him over to the fleet? What have we got to lose?” It was a youthful yet deep voice — there were authority and confidence in it. Keith had never heard it before but he knew somehow that it must be Dopelle’s voice — Dopelle, with whom Betty Hadley, his Betty Hadley, was so hopelessly in love. The great Dopelle who held this universe — except for the Arcturians — in the palm of his hand. The mighty Dopelle. “Damn him,” Keith thought. Mekky’s voice again said, “All right. Bring him to the fleet. To the flagship.” There was dull knocking on the outside of the airlock. Keith unstrapped himself quick- ly from the pilot’s seat. He said, “Just a minute. Getting a space-suit on.” It was thick and awkward to handle but there wasn’t anything difficult about putting it on. The helmet clicked automatically into place against the neck-ring. He opened the valve in the airlock that would let the air inside the ship outside. He heard it hiss. When it quit hissing in a few seconds he opened the airlock. A man wearing a space-suit bigger and more cumbersome than his came in. Without speaking he sat down in the pilot’s seat and began to work the vernier controls. He stood up again and motioned to the airlock. Keith nodded and opened it ; they were up against, almost touching, the side of a big ship. From so close, he couldn’t tell how big it was. An airlock stood open and Keith stepped across into the closed compartment to which it led. Of course, he realized, a ship this size ® 66 STARTLING STORIES couldn’t exhaust all its air merely to let someone in at the airlocks. There’d be an intermediate chamber. The outer door swung shut. Air hissed. The inner door swung open. A tall, very handsome young man with black hair and flashing black eyes stood there, just inside the inner door. He stepped forward quickly and helped Keith take off the helmet. He said, “Fm Dopelle, and you’re this Winton or Win- ston Mekky told me about. Hurry up and get that suit off.” His voice was courageous, but worried. "We’re in a jam. I hope you’ve got something we can use. Otherwise — ” Slipping out of the space-suit, Keith looked around him. The ship was big all right-^the room he was in must be the main chamber. It was a hundred feet long by thirty or thirty- five wide. There were a lot of men in it, mostly working down at the far end of the room in w’hat looked like a completely equipped experimental laboratory. His eyes w'ent back to Dopelle. There, just above Dopelle’s head, hung Mekky, the basketball-sized sphere that was a mechanical brain. Inside his head came Mekky’s voice. ‘"It could be, Keith Winton. Something about a potentiomotor. A man named Burton. Whatever it is, it’s not known here. Do you know the details, the wiring diagram? “Don’t bother answering, just think. Yes, you’ve seen diagram and formula. You don’t know them consciously but they’re there in your subconscious. I think I can get to them under light hypnosis. You are willing?” “Yes, of course,” Keith said. “What’s the score?” “The score is this,” said Dopelle, answer- ing for Mekky. “The Arcs are going to at- tack soon. We don’t know exactly when but it may be within, hours. And they’ve got something new. We don’t know how to buck it yet. It’s a single ship, not a fleet — but their whole effort for years has gone into it. That’s good, in one way. If we can destroy it the way will be clear for us to take the fleet to Arcturus and end the war. But — ” “But what?” Keith asked. “Is it too big for you to handle?” POPELLE waved a hand impatiently. “Size doesn’t matter, although it’s really a monster — ten thousand feet, ten times the biggest thing we’ve ever tried to build. But it’s coated with a new metal, im- pervious to anything we know. We can A-bomb if all day and not scratch the finish.” Keith nodded. “We had that stuff, too — in our science-fiction magazines.” He got the space-suit off as he finished speaking. “I used to edit one.” Dopelle’s face lighted up. It was a nice face. Keith decided that— Betty Hadley re- gardless— he liked Dopelle. “I used to read them,” Dopelle said, “when I was younger. Of course now — ” But something in the expression on Do- pelle’s face registered. He’d seen a face like it before, back — no, he hadn’t seen the face, either. Just a photograph of it. A photo- graph of a younger and far less handsome edition. Dopelle was — “Joe Doppelberg !” Keith said. His mouth fell open. “What?” Dopelle’s eyes were puzzled now. “What do you mean?” “I know you now,” Keith said. “I’ve got a clue to this set-up. You’re Joe Doppelberg, a science-fiction fan of — of back there where I came from. Only you’re older than he— and a thousand times handsomer and more intelligent than he and — you’ve got every- thing he wanted. “You’re what he would have dreamed him- self to be. He — you — used to write me long letters, full of corny humor, to my Rocketalk Department, and you called me Rocky and you didn’t like our Bems, and — ” He broke off and his mouth dropped open again. Dopelle said, “Mekky, he’s crazy. You won’t get anything out of him. He’s stark crazy.” “No,” Mekky’s voice said. “He isn’t crazy. He’s wrong of course but he isn’t crazy. I can follow his thought processes and see why he thinks that. I can straighten him out on it. I see the whole thing now — except the formula and diagram we need. “Come, Keith Winton, you must go under light hypnosis so I can get from your deep subconscious what I need. Then I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” “How' to get back?” “Possibly. I’m not sure of that. But you will be doing a tremendous service. You may be the instrument of saving Earth from Arcturus — and Earth here is just as real as the one you know. You’re iK»f living in the dream of one of your science-fiction fans. I assure you of that. “And that you may know what you’re WHAT MAD UNIVERSE saving Earth from would you care to see an Arcturian ?” “Would I — why sure. Why not?” “Follow.” The sphere that was Mekky floated across the room, and Keith followed. The voice was saying inside his head, “This is one we cap- tured in a scouting ship. The first we cap- tured alive since the early days of the war. It was from its mind — if you can call it a mind — that I learned of the monster ship that is to come, and of the new armament it will have. After you see it — ” A door swung open, revealing a steel- barred door just inside it and a cell beyond the steel bars. A light flashed on within the cell. “That," said the voice of Mekky, “is an Arcturian. ” Keith stepped closer to look through the bars and then he stepped back even more quickly. He felt as though he were going to be sick at his stomach. He closed his eyes and swayed dizzily. Horror and nausea al- most blanked him out. The steel door swung shut. “That,” said Mekky, “is an Arcturian in its own body. Maybe now you understand why Arcturian spies are shot on suspicion.” Keith cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “That is what will destroy the human race and populate the Solar System, unless we can destroy the monster ship. And time is short. Come, Keith Winton.” CHAPTER XV Flashback Keith winton felt a little dazed. He felt as though he’d been drunk and were just sobering up, as though he’d been under ether and were just coming out. Yet it wasn’t quite like that either. Though he felt physically lethargic his mind was clear, crystalline in fact. It was just that too much strong meat was being fed to it all at once. It was having difficulty absorbing more. He sat on a little steel-railed balcony, looking out over the big room of Dopelle’s space-ship, watching Dopelle and a varying number of other workmen swiftly and effi- ciently making something that looked like a very large and quite modified edition of 67 something he’d seen a picture of in a science magazine back on Earth, his own Earth. It was a Burton potentiomotor. The sphere that was Mekky floated above the operation, fifty feet away from Keith, but it was talking to Keith, in Keith’s mind. Distance didn’t make any difference, it seemed, to Mekky. And Keith had a hunch that Mekky was carrying on more than one of those telepathic conversations at the same time, that Mekky was directing Dopelle and the workmen even while he talked to Keith. “You find it difficult to grasp, of course,” Mekky’s voice was saying, “infinity is, in fact, impossible fully to grasp. Yet there are infinite universes.” “But where?” Keith’s mind asked. “In parallel dimensions or what?” “Dimension is merely an attribute of a uni- verse,” Mekky said, “having validity only within that particular universe. From other- where a universe — spatially infinite in itself — is but a point. “There are an infinite number of points on the head of a pin. There are as many points on the head of a pin as in an infinite universe or an infinity of infinite universes. And in- finity to the infinite power is still only in- finity. “There are, then, an infinite number of co-existent universes — including the one you came from and this one. But do you con- ceive what infinity means, Keith Winton?” “Well — yes and no.” “It means that, out of infinity, all con- ceivable universes exist. There is, for in- stance, a universe in which this exact scene is being repeated except that you — or the equivalent of you — are wearing brown shoes instead of black ones. “There are an infinite number of permu- tations of that variation, such as one in which you have a slight scratch on your left fore- finger and one in which you have a dull headache and — ” “But they are all me?" “No, none of them is you. I should not have used that pronoun. They are separate individual entities — just as the Keith Win- ton of this universe is a separate entity from you. In this particular variation, there is a wide physical difference — no resemblance, in fact. “But you and your prototype here had roughly the same history. And, as you found out to your sorrow, you wrote the same stories once. And there are similarities be- STARTLING STORIES 68 tween my master Dopelle here and a science- fiction fan named Doppelberg in your uni- verse but they are not the same person.” Keith thought slowly, “If there are in- finite universes, then all possible combina- tions must exist. Then, somewhere, every- thing must he true. I mean, it would be im- possible to write a fiction story, because no matter how wild it sounds that very thing must be happening somewhere. Is that true?” “Of course it’s true. There is a universe in which Huckleberry Finn is a real person, doing the exact things Mark Twain described him as doing. There are, in fact, an infinite number of universes in which a Huckleberry Finn is doing every possible variation of what Mark Twain might have described him as doing. No matter what variation, major or minor, Mark Twain might have made in the writing of that book it would have been true.” Keith Winton’s mind staggered a little. He said, “There are an infinite number of uni- verses in which we — or our equivalents — are making Burton outfits to defeat attacking Arcturians ? And in some of them we’ll suc- ceed and in others we’ll fail?” “Of course. And there are an infinite number of universes in which we don’t exist at all. In which the human race does not exist. There are an infinite number of uni- verses in which flowers are the predominant form of life. Infinite universes in which — in which the states of existence are such that we have no words to describe them. All pos- sible combinations must exist in infinity. “There are an infinite number of uni- verses in which you’re going to die in the next half hour, piloting a rocket against the monster ship from Arcturus.” “What?” “Of course. You’re going to ask to. It may get you back to your own universe. You want to get there. I can see it in your mind. Don’t assk me if you will succeed in this par- ticular universe. I cannot read the future.” ^ GAIN Keith shook his head. There jLm were still a miliion questions though he could figure the answers to some of them himself. But he asked another one first. “Explain again, please, what happened. How I got here.” “The moon rocket from your Earth must have fallen back and exploded — the Burton effect, that is. It isn’t exactly an explosion — when it struck Earth on L. A. Borden’s estate a few yards from you. There are peculiar properties to such an electrical flash. Burton didn’t know what he had. Anyone caught in it directly is not killed. He’s knocked into another universe.” “How can you know that if the Burton effect is new here?” “Partly by deduction from what happened to you, partly by analysis — deeper than was given it on your Earth — of the Burton for- mula. You’re here. Q. E. D. And, from your mind, I can see why out of an infinity of universes you landed in this particular one.” “Why?” “Because you were thinking about this particular universe at the instant the rocket struck. You were thinking about your sci- ence-fiction fan, Joe Doppelberg, and you were wondering what kind of a universe he would dream about, what kind he would like. And this is it. “Analyze the differences and you’ll see they fit, all of them. You didn’t think this universe up, Keith Winton. It existed. It’s real. Any universe you might have been thinking of would have existed, ready for you to be blown into by the Burton flash.” “I — understand,” Keith Winton said. It answered a lot of things. Yes, this was the kind of universe Joe Doppelberg would have thought of and dreamed of — with a romanticized hero named Dopelle practically running it, saving it. It even answered a lot of little details. Joe Doppelberg had been at the Borden office. He’d seen Betty Hadley and probably been smitten by her. And so here Betty was in love with Dopelle. Joe knew of Keith Winton, had corresponded with him and had a mental picture of him, so there was a Keith Winton here. “But Joe hadn’t ever seen Keith Winton — he’d been out of New York the day of Joe’s call — so the physical picture wasn’t accurate. Joe had seen Borden, so Borden was here — but Joe didn’t know of Borden’s Greeneville estate and there hadn’t happened to be a Greeneville estate here. “It all fitted — even to the improvement of the Bems on the covers of Surprising Stories — bug-eyed monsters with the subtle horror that Doppelberg demanded in them. A crazy Earth with everyday automobiles — and space-ships, too. Black adventure at night on Manhattan Island — and intergalac- WHAT laAD tic -warfare. A Moon with air on it — and a super-marvelous mechanical brain as Dopelle had created it. Dopelle the super man, the only man who’d been to Arcturus and come back alive. Dopelle who was almost single- handed saving the solar system. Universe a la Doppelberg! It fitted — ev- erything fitted. It had to be. The men in the big room down below the balcony were now putting the finishing touches on the thing they were making — a thing of complicated coils that still somewhat resembled the pictures he’d seen once of a Burton potentiomotor. Apparently Mekky had finished his telepathed instructions to them. Mekky floated up to the balcony now and hovered near Keith’s shoulder. In Keith’s mind, he said, “They’re installing it on a life-boat, a rocket-propelled craft. Someone must take the life-raft out and run it around a while until a tremendous charge is built up in the Burton apparatus. Then it will hover near the fleet until the monster ship from Arcturus materializes here to destroy us. They have the same space-drive we have. “Then the life-raft must crash the mon- ster. The Arc ship is inertialess. Any other ship we have can crash it without hurting it. Nothing in our armaments can touch it. It will blaze a path of death and destruction through the planets after it has destroyed our fleet. Unless the Burton apparatus — which is new to them as to us — can destroy it.’’ “Can it, though?” “You’ll know when you crash the life-raft into it. Yes, you will be given the privilege. Every man in the fleet would volunteer. Do- pelle himself would love to do it but I talked him into letting you. I knew from your mind that you’d want to take the chance. It will — I believe — get you back to your own uni- verse. “The life-raft isn’t a raft, of course. That’s just a nickname for it. It’s a small rocket- propelled ship. You’ve never seen one. I shall implant knowledge of its operation in your mind before you enter it. And you know what to do before the crash.” “What?” “Concentrate on your own world. On a specific part of it; possibly on the very spot where you were a week ago when the moon rocket hit you. But not on that time, of course — upon that place in that universe, as of now. UNIVERSE 69 “You don’t want to get back there just in time to be blown away again by the moon rocket’s landing. From there you can go to New York — the New York you know. And to Betty Hadley — your Betty Hadley.” Keith reddened a little. There was a disadvantage to having one’s mind read that thoroughly even by a mechanical brain. The men were wheeling off the thing they had made. “Will it take them long to install it in the rocket?” he asked. “Only minutes. Relax now and close your eyes, Keith Winton. I’ll implant in your mind the knowledge of how to control a rocket-propelled craft.” Keith Winton closed his eyes and re- laxed . . . The life-raft hovered, ten thousand miles out from Saturn. A thousand miles from the Earth fleet Keith could see the fleet in his visiplate, hundreds of ships of all sizes, the might of the Solar System, yet helpless against the thing to come. And he, alone in this tiny cigar-shaped rocket only thirty feet long by six in cir- cumference, could do what the whole fleet couldn’t — he hoped. Well, Mekky thought it would work and Mekky would know if any- body or anything would know. No use worrying about it. It would work or it wouldn’t and, if it didn’t, he wouldn’t live to worry. He tested the controls, sending the rocket in a tight little circle only a mile across, coming back and to a dead stop at the point at which he’d started. A difficult maneuver but easy for him now. “The Ole Rocketeer,” he thought. “If my fans of the Rocketalk Department could only see me now.” He grinned. Inside his head, Mekky’s voice said, “It’s coming. I feel ether -vibrations.” He lodked hard at the visiplate. There was a black dot just off the center of it. He touched the controls, got the dot on dead center and slammed on all the rockets, full power. The black dot grew, slowly at first, then filled the screen. He was going to hit it in a second now. Quickly, desperately, he re- membered to concentrate on Eartii, his Earth, on the spot near Greeneville, New York. On Betty Hadley. On currency in sensible dollars and cents and night life on STARTLING STORIES 70 Broadway without the mist-out, on every- thing he’d known. A series of pictures flashed through his mind, as is supposed to be the case with a drowning man. “But — Lord,” he thought, “Why didn’t I think of it sooner? It doesn’t have to be exactly like that. I can make a few improvements, I can pick a universe almost exactly like mine but with a few dif- ferences that would make it better, such as — The rocket hit the monster ship, dead center. There was a blinding flash. Again there was no sense of a time lapse. Keith Winton was again lying flat on the ground and it w'as early evening. There were stars in the sky and a moon. It was a half-moon, he noticed, not the orescent moon of last Saturday evening. He looked down and around him. He was in the middle of a big charred and black- ened area. Not far away were the founda- tions of what had been a house, and he recognized the size and shape of it. He recognized the blackened stump of a tree beside him. Things looked as though the explosion and fire had occurred almost a week ago. “Good,” he thought. “Back at the right time and place.” He stood up and stretched, feeling a bit stiff from his confinement in the little rocket- ship. He walked out to the road, still feeling a bit uneasy. JVhy had he let his mind wan- der a trifle just at the last minute. He could have made a mistake doing that. What if — ? A truck was coming along and he hailed it, getting a lift into Greeneville. The driver was taciturn. They didn’t talk at all on the way in, Keith thanked him as he got off at the main square of town. He ran quickly to the newsstand to look at the headline of the current newspaper displayed there. “Giants Beat Bums,” it read. Keith sighed with re- lief. He realized he’d been sweating until he’d seen that headline. He wiped perspiration off his forehead and went into the newsstand. “Got a copy of Surprising Stories?” he asked. “Right here, sir.” He glanced at the cover, at the familiar cover, saw that it said 20c, and not 2cr. Again he sighed with relief— until he readied for change in his pocket and remembered there wasn’t any there. And there’d be only credit bills — a few of them — in his wallet. No use pulling that out. Embarrassed, he handed the magazine back. “Sorry,” he said. “Just realized I came away without any money.” “Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Winton,” the proprietor said. “Pay me any time. And — uh — if you came away without your money could I lend you some? Would ten dollars help?” “It surely would,” Keith said. “Thanks a lot Uh — make it nine-eighty, so I’ll owe you an even ten with the magazine.” “Sure. Gee, I’m glad to see you, Mr. Winton. We thought you were killed when the rocket hit. All the papers said so.” “Of course,” Keith thought. “That’s how he knows me. My picture would have been in the papers as one of Borden’s visitors who was killed.” “Glad to say the newspapers got it wrong,” he told the man. “Thanks a lot.” IW E POCKETED the nine dollars and H eighty cents, and went out again. It was getting to be dusk, just as it had been before on last Saturday night. Well, now to- — ^now to what? He couldn’t phone Bor- den. Borden was dead — or ma3d)e blown into another universe. Keith hoped it was the latter. Had the Bordens and the others who’d been on the estate, been near enough the center of the flash to have had that happen to them ? He hoped so. An unpleasant memory ritade him walk past the corner drugstore where — it seemed like years ago— he'd seen his first purple Bern. He went into the drugstore on the next comer and walked back to the phone booth. Often someone worked late in the Borden offices in New York. Maybe some- body would be working there now. If not, all the call would cost him wmuld be a rejK>rt charge. He got a handful of change from the druggist and went back to the phone booth. How did one dial a lor^ distance operator on a Greeneville phone? He picked up the Greeneville directory to find out and idly leafed it open to the B’s first. The last time he’d handled one of these things there hadn’t been any L. A. Borden listed. This time, of course — just to reassure him- self, he ran his finger down the column. There wasn’t any L. A. Borden. For Just a minute, he leaned against the WHAT MAD UNIVERSE back of the phone booth and closed his eyes. Then he looked again. Had some embryonic thoughts gone through his mind at the last minute and brought him back to a universe not quite the same as the one he left? Quickly he yanked the copy of Surprising Stories out of his pocket and opened it to the title page. He ran his finger to the point in the fine print where — Ray Wheeler, Manag- ing Editor, it read. Not Keith Winton but Ray Wheeler. Who the devil was Ray Wheeler ? Quickly his eyes swung to the name of the publisher — and it didn’t read Borden Publi- cations, Inc., at all. It read Winton Publi- cations, Inc. It took him a full five seconds to figure out where he’d heard the name of Winton before. Then he grabbed for the phone book again and looked under the W’s. There was a Keith Winton listed, Cedarburg Road, and a familiar phone num- ber, Greeneville 111. No wonder the newsdealer had known him, then. And he had changed things some- what and somehow with those last minute thoughts in the rocket ship. This was al- most the same universe but not quite. In it Keith Winton owned one of the biggest chains of publications in the country and had owned a Greeneville estate! But what else — if anything? He put a coin in the phone and said quick- 71 ly, “Long distance, please,” before he re- membered it was a dial phone. His hands fumbled the directory before he could find out how to get a long distance operator. Then he got one, and said, “New York, please. Have the New York operator see if there is a Betty Hadley listed and get her for me if there is. Quickly, please.” A few minutes later — “Your party, sir.” And then Betty’s cool voice saying. Hello.” “Betty, this is Keith Winton. I — ” "Keith! We thought you — the papers said — what happened?” “Guess I must have been in the explosion, Betty, but at the edge of it and just got knocked out. I must have had amnesia from the shock and been wandering around. I just came to myself. I’m in Greeneville?” “Oh, Keith, that’s wonderful I It’s — I just can’t say it ! You’re coming right to New York?” “As soon as a plane will get me there. Want to meet me at La Guardia field?” “Do I want to? Oh, darling And a moment later, Keith Winton — with a dazed and somewhat silly look on his face — put the receiver on the hook and hurried out of the drugstore. A taxi to the airport and then — This, he thought, was a universe he’d really settle for. Next Issue’s Novel: AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT, by Arthur C. Clarke RAT RACE Ey DOROTHY and JOHN DE CODRCY The Rat-men's empire spread ever outward until it engulfed the world in a paralysis of total terror OIS MACDONALD opened the door of the laboratory. Her hus- band, Bruce, and Dr. Granas were studying something intently. “It’s six o’clock, Bruce,” she called from the doorway. Bruce looked up from the table. “Al- ready?” he asked, surprised. Dr. Granas stretched. “That’s the way it is, Bruce. Time seems to slip through a man’s fingers when he’s doing something.” Bruce walked across the room. “Well, we might as well hear what he has to say and get it over with.” He snapped on the tele- visor and walked back to the sink. The two men washed their hands and dried them, occasionally glancing at the screen. The orchestra that had been playing van- ished to be replaced by the solemn face of an announcer. “Ladies and Gentlemen. This is Malcolm Field, speaking to you from the United Nations Government Building in Geneva. Through the cooperation of the European Broadcasting Alliance, we bring you a special address by United States Dele- gate, Avery B. Clark.” 74 STARTLING STORIES The scene shifted and the usually tragic face of Delegate Clark appeared looking more dejected than usual. He cleared his throat. “My fellow citizens. There are few of you, if any, who do not know of the mo- mentous events of these last four days. You have heard, as did I, the surrender ultimatum of the Cafis. Yesterday, we experienced the type of warfare which we can expect if we are to resist. “For one hour, it was as if our civilization did not exist and we were returned to the Stone Age. The official emissary of the Cafis explained the principle of this weapon and has shown how it is applied, yet none of our scientists, either professional or ama- teur, has been able to find a way to combat this weapon. The Cafis have informed us that tliis only one of many such weapons and each is equally potent. “This is not war as we of earth have known war, but it is war none the less. The Cafis are an alien race and therefore a peculiar one. If they had wished, they could have attacked us without warning and by now, we would all be dead. “My fellow delegates and I have felt the grave responsibility resting upon u.^ and we have considered the facts carefully. If I were deciding for myself alone, I would say, fight ! Fight to the end ! I would have noth- ing of greater value to risk than my life and my honor. But, I have had to decide for you, for your wives, for your fathers and mothers, for your husbands and for your children. “Therefore, I have made the only decision possible. It is the unanimous decision of the United Nations Government that we accept the ultimatum, ‘surrender without condition.’ The surrender will take effect at seven o’clock tonight. Eastern Standard Time. From then on, we will be subjects of the Galactic Empire of Cafis, and we will be expected to govern ourselves accordingly.” ELEGATE CLARK paused, his lower lip trembling. “Good-by and God be iwith you,” he finished hastily. Bruce turned the televisor off. He looked jrt Granas and then at his wife. “Hello, fellow slaves,” he said, grinning. “It’s not funny, Bruce!” Lois snapped and buried her face in her hands. Bruce went to her side and put his arms around her. “I wonder what we do now?” Dr. Granas asked of no one in particular. “I’m afraid I don’t know. Unde Bob,” Bruce answered. “I haven’t had much ex- perience at this sort of thing. ” “Is — isn’t there something we can do?” Lois burst forth, desperately. “Maybe — maybe if there was more electricity — ” Dr. Granas shook his head. “If you were a scientist, Lois, you’d understand. This thing can’t be beaten. You’ve seen con- densers and you know how simple they are. The weapon of the Cafis is almost the same as a condenser. They created two electro- static fields of unimaginable intensity which encompassed the earth outside the atmos- phere. This in turn, converted the earth into a non-unified stress field and isn’t en- tirely understood.” “But — but how does it work?” Lois asked. “Surely there is some way to combat it !” Dr. Granas smiled. “Well, any electrical activity, no matter how slight, acting in this field, instantly sets up a counter potential of almost equal pressure. It would take billions of horsepower to operate even the devices in the house. 'The earth simply hasn’t got the available power to overcome this po- tential, and even if it did, we would be de- feating ourselves in using it since the C^s draw their power directly from the sun. “Why, there would be such a tremendous amount of heat released here on Earth that it would destroy all life within a matter of hours. Even if we surmounted that obstacle, the Cafis would be draining so much power from the sun that in a few weeks, it would become unstable and might even explode into a super-nova. “We would then literally be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. There might be another way but we simply haven’t the technology and knowledge to find it or use it. In a hundred years we might, but not now.” Lois nodded dejectedly. They just .sat disconsolately in the laboratory. There was nothing to say ; nothing to do but wait. Finally, Dr. Granas glanced at the clock. “'Thirty-eight more minutes of freedom,” he sighed. “Thirty-eight more precious minutes and I have nothing to do.” Bruce roused himself. “Do you remember that bottle of Napoleon brandy you gave us two years ago?” Dr. Granas nodded. “Well, it seems to me,” Bruce continued, “that it’s still in the refrigerator.” Lois looked up. “It’s still there, darling. Shall I get it?” “I think it would be a good idea,” Bruce RAT RACE 75 said. “Take it into the living room, dear, and I’ll get the goblets.” In the living room, Bruce carefully divided what was left of the brandy into three goblets. He cet the bottle down and silently handed glasses to Lois and her Uncle Bob. They stood facing each other, Bruce slightly swirl- ing the brandy in his glass. Dr. Granas again glanced at the clock. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, oratori- cally, “since this is my last twenty-seven minutes of freedom. I offer a toast. To the United Nations, to the United States, and to — tomorrow morning. May I wake up and find this is all a dream.” Lois bit her lip as the glasses tinkled. They fell silent again after the toast, each count- ing the minutes and having in them, thoughts too private to share. Soon, Granas walked over to the televisor. He turned. “Shall I turn it on?” he asked, hesitantly. “Let’s wait until seven,” Lois suggested. “We’re free to do as we please until then.” “Maybe it would be better,” Granas agreed. “I imagine the ‘rats’ will have us listening every day to propaganda broadcasts from now on.” “You’re going to have to watch out for that word in the future. Uncle Bob,” Bruce said. “They may be rodents but they’re also our bosses.” Lois shuddered. “They do look like rats,” she interposed. “I think they’re horrible!” RUCE replied, “You know, I think we’re being illogical. They don’t really look Kkd rats. They don’t have any fur. If it weren’t for their teeth and that bottlelike shape, they could easily pass themselves off as men. We humans have some sort of a natural aversion for rodents, particularly rats, but after all, just because they’re rodents instead of primates doesn’t mean they are vicious. I think they've treated us quite well, so far.” “We still don’t know what they’re going to do,” Dr. Granas said, caustically. “I wonder how such a terrible life form happened to become a dominant animal?” Lois asked. “Oh, it’s logical enough,” Dr. Granas answered. “It’s really only an accident that a primate like man became dominant here. On the whole, rodentia are intelligent, and they are certainly prolific. By all rights they shtMild have developed here. Even as it is, we have a great deal of trouble saving civili- zation from rats. They have lived with us everywhere and have practically defied our every attempt to get rid of them.” “Oh let’s not talk about them any more,” Lois exclaimed. “They make my skin crawl ! ” “All right,” Dr Granas answered. “May- be we should be watching the televisor. The Cafis will probably have plenty to say.” “I guess I’ll go to bed,” Lois said. “I don’t think I could stand seeing those awful rat faces again.” Bruce kissed her. “I’ll be up soon, dear, and don’t worry. Everything will be all right. ” Lois smiled and nodded her head, but Bruce could see that she wasn’t convinced. Dr. Granas waited until Lois was gone and then snapped on the televisor. A well- known commentator was reviewing the events of the preceding four days, augmented by recorded scenes. “. . . more than industrial paralysis. In homes and offices, these scenes were typical.” The scene shifted to show a young woman snapping on switches and plugging in ap- pliances all over her house. Nothing worked. The scene changed to an office where a young man smilingly demonstrated an in- operative adding machine. The young man picked up a flashlight and snapped on the switch. Nothing happened. The commentator’s voice broke in. “These scenes are in no way exaggerated as you all know. Although we have not yet received the final reports, preliminary surveys show that all types of electrical equipment, no mat- ter where situated, were blanked out during the one hour test yesterday.” “The Cafis emissary, Atis Tobe, declared that if the weapon had been stepped to a higher degree, it would have also prevented the travel of light and heat. Incidentally, we were able to make these recordings by using mechanical motion picture devices and so the stoppage had no effect.” He paused. “That’s about all the time we have left. There will be further bulletins every hour unless the Cafis begin censorship of news. And now we take you to the New York News Bureau.” “Now what?” Dr. Cranas asked. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Marvin Hill. Our New York News Bur- eau has become more or less the center o£ attention during the last twenty minutes. The STARTLING STORIES 76 Cafis Gan, Atis Tobe, has landed in New York and has requested a hookup for a na- tionwide broadcast. Reports are coming in indicating that similar broadcasts will take place in Europe and Asia. Official emis- saries of the Cafis have established headquar- ters in London, Paris, Moscow, Madrid, Rome and Istanbul. “We have a tentative report from Shang- hai but it has not yet been verified. It ap- pears that simultaneous broadcasts which will cover the whole world will begin in a very few minutes. Indications are that New York will be the new seat of government at least temporarily. We are preparing — That’s the signal, ladies and gentlemen. We take you to the Municipal Building.’’ “I wish they wouldn’t be so cheerful,” Bruce muttered. “You’d think this was the Fourth of July or something!” NEW face appeared on the screen. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen of the United States,” the face intoned. “This is Kimball Trent, V/e are bringing you a special address by the Viceroy of the Cafis Empire, Atis Tobe,” He paused, significant- ly, “Viceroy Tobe.” The face and shoulders of the Viceroy came into view. “So that’s the number one rat,” Dr. Granas mumbled. Bruce thought Atis Tobe was staring directly at Dr. Gran- as. At least, it looked as though he were. A man’s voice was heard in the background. “You’re on the air. Your Excellency.” “Thank you,” the Viceroy said with a slight lisp. With beady eyes he stared from the screen and twitched his nose a little. The whiskers on the side of his nose were trimmed close and even, looking very much like an out-of-place mustache. His ears were small and except for the bulging forehead, he looked very much like a hairless rat. Even his voice was high pitched and some- what squeaky. “I bring greetings to the most recently acquired of the Cafis Empire. Although you have surrendered and are technically a sub- ject race, may I assure you that your status is that of citizens in our great Empire.” “Soft soap!” Bruce growled. “As fellow citizens,” the Cafis Gan con- tinued, “I fee! we should understand one an- other. I am sure that a few of you are har- boring some misconceptions regarding us. Possibly I do also regarding you. We have studied your planet for only four days and most of our energy and resources have been devoted to the study of your languages. It has been difficult but we have mastered them sufficiently to adequately express our de- sires. By induction, we have been able to formulate a reasonably accurate picture of the average inhabitant of this planet. “That you are creatures of logic is obvi- ous, since you have surrendered rather than tried to resist the inevitable. That you are civilized is plain, not only from your tech- nology but from your attitude toward us, an alien race. Because of these things, I am safe in assuring you that you will soon be granted full citizenship in the Cafis Empire with all its rights and privileges.” Dr. Granas snorted. “He hasn’t gathered what our attitude really is ! His hide must be a foot thick!” They listened to a glowing dissertation on the benefits of citizenship in the Cafis Em- pire. The inducements were purely intellec- tual and carried not even a residue of emo- tional appeal. “Cold blooded little beggars!” the doctor growled. “There are a few prerequisites to obtain- ing citizenship, however,” the Viceroy went on, “but since these conditions are logically necessary, I confidently expect your full co- operation. ” At this point, the Cafis Gan attempted a grin. Seldom had Bruce seen a more revolt- ing spectacle. The Viceroy decided he had grinned enough and continued his speech. “In order to coordinate technology, it is necessary that all scientists and technicians be registered. If then, you are engaged in one or more of the following professions, full or part time, you will go to the nearest center of local government and there leave your name, address and other such data as you will be asked by those in charge of the regis- tration, Registration will begin tomorrow morning at eight o’clock and will continue until the registration is complete.” The Viceroy began reading off the names of various sciences, arts and crafts with monotonous intonations. When he reached ‘Biologist’, Bruce stirred and mumbled some- thing inaudibly. Shortly after that came ‘Chemist’. “I see I’m in this too,” Dr. Granas sighed. They listened while the Cafis Gan finished his list. Then he favored his audience with another smile. He laid down several more RAT edicts which were not too restrictive and suggested that it was desirable that each per- son conduct himself in his most normal man- ner. “Business as usual during altercations !” Dr, Granas gritted. The Viceroy stopped speaking and turned his head. He made a motion to someone, and his face vanished to be replaced by that of a local announcer. Dr. Granas reached over and switched off the televiser. “Well, Bruce, I wonder how many times a minute they would like to have us breathe!” Bruce didn’t move. He just stared at the blank screen. “What do you think we should do now?” Dr. Granas asked. Still Bruce didn’t stir. “What’s the matter, boy? Are you hyp- notized or something?” “Huh? Oh. What did you say, Uncle Bob?” “I said, are you hypnotized?” “Ah — oh no. It was just that profile.” “Well,” Granas smiled, “I can’t say that it’s any more repugnant than a full face view.” “No, I mean — ” Bruce paused. “Oh, I don’t know.” He sighed. “Let it go.” “I’ve been thinking, Bruce. If we get downtown early tomorrow, we may not have to wait long to register.” “Yeah, I suppose so,” Bruce answered, “but if you feel up to it. I’d like to do a little work tonight. The only thing we have tO do is connect up the amplifying circuits.” “It’s all right with me,” Dr. Granas re- plied. “We can start testing tomorrow then.” “That reminds me,” Bruce interrupted. “In order to energize the colloid, we’ll have to feed a variable current into the input amplifier.” “Yes,” Dr. Granas nodded. “The more variable, the better.” “Well, how about this idea,” Bruce sug- gested. “Let’s hook a microphone up to the input and stand it in front of the loudspeaker of the lab’s televisor. That would really give us variation. W’e can keep it turned on low enough so it won't bother anyone.” “Sometimes, Bruce, you get the darnedest ideas,” Dr. Granas chuckled. “I guess you’re just naturally lazy. There’s nothing like let- ting the broadcasting company energize the colloid for us I” “Do you think it’ll work?” Bruce asked. RACE 77 “I don’t see why not. There’s nothing wrong with it.” The two men went into the laboratory and set to work on the final connections. Forty-five minutes later, Bruce laid down his soldering iron. “Pretty much Goldburg- ish but the output is O.K.” “You all done?” Granas asked. “Yup, she’s all hooked up. Do you want me to help you?” “No, I’m done too. The circulation pump looks kind of crude but I’ll give it the ‘Gran- as’ personal guarantee.” Bruce walked over to a cabinet and took out a small microphone. As he walked back, he unwound the cord and plugged it into the calculator’s input amplifying circuit. They finally got the microphone properly propped up in front of the televisor. As Granas tuned in a program, Bruce stuck two test leads into the innards of the tube circuit. “A little more volume. Uncle Bob. There, that’s about right.” Dr. Granas straightened and grinned. “Well, shall we go to bed and let the ‘Mac- Donald automatic energizing system’ do the work for us?” Bruce stuck his ear next to the loud- speaker attached to the calculator’s output. “What do you expect to hear, Bruce?” “Oh, nothing. I just couldn’t resist it. By tomorrow we should have a pretty good echo coming through.” “I hope you’re right, my boy,” Dr. Granas replied. “If we don’t, we will have wasted a lot of time and money.” “Under the present circumstances,” Bruce said, slipping off his lab coat, “I don’t see that it makes much difference how much money we lose.” “No use being bitter,” Granas retorted. “It isn’t going to do the Cafis any harm or you any good.” “I guess you’re right,” Bruce sighed. The two men left the laboratory. Dr. Granas paused at the stairway. “You go ahead, Bruce. I forgot to shut the lights off.” “O.K. Good night.” “Pleasant dreams, fellow Roman!” Bruce went upstairs. Lois was asleep so he undressed quietly and eased himself into bed. MJREAKFAST was a dismal ritual. Dr. Granas nrade two or three ineffectual attempts to relieve the oppression. Lois was obviously depressed, but Bruce seemed de- STARTLING STORIES 78 tached, preoccupied, and his face wore the same expression of philosophic calm it had the night before. “What have I done ? Why won’t you talk to me?” Dr. Granas asked. "I’m sorry, Uncle Bob,” Lois sighed. “I don’t mean to be rude.” “Oh, it isn’t that,” Granas smiled. “I know you aren’t trying to be rude, but it worries me when you don’t talk.” “Is a woman always supposed to be talk- ing?” Lois asked, smiling. “Of course not,” Granas answered, “but I know you too well. You’re letting this thing get you, and you can’t hide it.” “I’m sorry I'm — just — oh — I guess I’m not used to being a slave!” “I know it’s unpleasant,” Granas admit- ted, “but there’s nothing we can do about it, and as people have always done, we’ll just have to grin and bear it. Come on, Bruce! Stop brooding!” The older man laid a friendly hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “Huh?” “I said, cheer up!” Bruce sighed. “Oh I’m not depressed. I’ve just been thinking.” “Well, you can do your thinking when we get back. It’s almost time to leave. W e want to get downtown before a line forms so we can get home earlier.” “Would you like some more coffee before you go?” Lois asked. “I don’t think so, dear,” Bruce answered. “Uncle Bob is right.” “Bruce, you’re getting to be a cynic, just like your father,” Granas said. “Maybe I am but I’ve got better reasons than he had.” Dr. Granas arose. “Let’s get going. We can talk on the way to town.” Lois followed the two men into the hall. She took her coat out of the closet while Bruce was tying his tie. “You aren’t going too, are you?” Bruce asked. “I most certainly am!” she replied. “Oh there isn’t any necessity for that, darling. This is only a registration. We’re only going downtown and we’ll be right back.” “I don’t trust them, any of them!” she stated. “If you go, I go too!” Bruce opened his mouth to object, then, finding no logical reason, let it go. “All right, dear. Maybe we’ll take in a show or something afterward.” “Not today, we won’t!” Granas inter- posed. “It has taken us two years to build our calculator and today we’re going to test it!” “I’m not so sure I want to test it,” Bruce replied, opening the door. “After all, our work is supposed to be dedicated to human- ity. Now we’ll be giving it to the rats.” “I doubt if we’ll be giving much away, Bruce, but in any case, this might be valu- able later on. Our calculator might find a method of counteracting that electro-stasis field of the rats.” “I don’t see how!” Bruce commented as he slammed the car door. RANAS answered. “I don’t mean ours. I mean a later development. Suppose in ten years from now, an electro-colloidal calculator built on our principal, were given all the data on that stasis field, for example, a formula with an inoperative generator stated as part of the equation. Wouldn’t the brain carry the formula to its logical con- clusion? After all, an adding machine doesn’t have to understand the term, two plus two. “That’s all just wishful thinking,” Bruce replied. “A problem as complex as that would at least call for comprehension or awareness.” “It’s only your mind that tells you that,” Dr. Granas insisted. “In a sense, our col- loid calculator does have awareness. There is always a continuous flow of impulses be- tween all the cells, through the main induc- tors. You might say quite accurately that it thinks.” “Well, here we are,” Bruce interrupted. “I’ll let you two out and park the car.” “We’ll wait in front of the building!” Lois called. “All right!” Ten minutes later, Bruce walked swiftly up to the entrance of the building. “I don’t see a line waiting,” Bruce smiled. “Have the rats lost their popularity so soon?” “I wish you’d be serious, Bruce,” Lois cautioned. “I don’t think this is the least bit funny ! ” “Maybe not, maybe not,” Bruce replied as they walked into the building. A policeman gave them directions and they soon found their way to the registration office. Dr. Granas picked out one of the in- terviewing desks at which no one was wait- ing. An oldish man was being interviewed RAT RACE 79 by a uniformed Cafis. “Shall I go first?” Granas asked, “or do you want to?” “It doesn’t matter to me,” Bruce shrugged. “Go ahead.” The oldish man arose and left the desk. Dr. Granas sat down in the chair and Bruce stood behind 'him. The Cafis glanced up from the desk and looked at Bruce. “If you will have a chair over there, young man, I will be with you as soon as I have finished with this gentle- man’s interview-.” “We work together,” Dr. Granas re- marked. “He might be able to give you in- formation that I can’t.” “I see,” the Cafis said. “If you will draw up a chair, then, w’e will proceed.” The rodent busied himself wnth some blanks then stared at Dr. Granas. “ State your name, age and place of residence please.” “Doctor Robert Granas, fifty-four, thirty- four-o-three Hudson Terrace.” “Your profession.” “Bio-chemist.” “By whom are you employed?” “We are doing independent research.” “State the nature of it briefly, please.” “We are preparing a biological calculator utilizing a colloid substance which responds to electrical stimulae in known patterns. We—” “Doctor, you are attempting to mislead us. You are making an artificial brain.” “Only 1^ a very broad definition could you call it a brain, sir,” Granas answered. “Let me describe the device to you. Doc- tor,” the Cafis said. “This device is fun- damentally a tank, divided into tiny insu- lated compartments. Each compartment has a small opening between itself and all of its immediate neighbors. You have horizontal rods 'or wires and vertical rods or wires pass- ing through the tank but not directly con- nected to the cells. “It seems, by induction, these pick up the tiny impulses. You have an energizing solu- tion slowly filtering through the colloid mass which forms the third pole of your primary electrical system. Connected to this are ap- propriate amplifiers, integrators and/or vari- ous other devices which utilize the output of the brain.” Dr. Granas listed to this recital c^en mouthed. “But — but — how could you know ! How could you possibly know ! !” “From my position, Doctor Granas, it is quite simple but I am sorry that I can not tell you. I must, however, ask you to stop all work on this device. Our technicians will call at your laboratory this afternoon. You are not to do any further work until you re- ceive their permission,” Without waiting for a reply, he turned to Bruce. “Your name, age and place of residence, please.” “Bruce MacDonald, thirty -one, same ad- dress. I’m a biologist and I plan to leave here at once, return to our laboratory and w'ork unceasingly until our device, as you call it, is finished ! I wouldn’t advise you or any of your friends to try and stop me.” “Mr. MacDonald. You are being irra- tional.” “And I plan to go right on being irra- tional ! Any attempt at interference and I shall resort to violence. In case you don’t realize what I mean, I will break bones and destroy lives if necessary !” MJRUCE jerked the appalled Granas to his EP feet and catching Lois by the arm, marched them out of the building. Lois was pale and Dr. Granas trembled a little. Bruce, however, took no notice of anything. Grim- ly, he led them up the street. No attempt was made to stop them. A fe\^ minutes later, they climbed into the car and drove home- ward in silence. As Bruce was unlocking the door, Lois whispered. “Bruce, why did you do it? Now they’ll kill us all.” “I’ve Ireen thinking about that,” Bruce said, quietly. “I wondered if I’d made the biggest mistake of my life and possibly my last one — but I don’t think so. The more I think about it, the more I’m sure I han- dled the situation in the only way possible.” “By losing your temper, I suppose!” “And our lives in the balance!” Granas added. “No, you two! They aren’t going to do a thing to us!” Bruce answered. “I think — ” “And you’d better think fast too!” Granas interrupted, “because there’s a car stopping out in front.” Lois dashed to the window'. “Oh Bruce, they’ve come!” she sobbed. “What’ll we do!” The trio fell silent as two of the aliens emerged from the car, said something to the human driver, and walked measuredly toward the door. Bruce opened it for them- and they stej^d in wdthout comment. Gran- as’ ^es widened as he recognized the face STARTLING STORIES 80 and dress of the Capis Gan. The Viceroy turned and faced Bruce. "I am the Cafis Gan. My name is Atis Tobe. You are, I believe, Bruce MacDonald.” “I am,” Bruce admitted, trying not to smile. “Something amuses you, Mr. MacDon- ald?” the observing Cafis asked. “Yes,” Bruce answered. “I’m more or less amused to see that I guessed correctly.” The Cafis Gan regarded him with an un- winking stare. “You have declined to follow our request to cease work.” “I have.” “You realize that you are being irrational then?” “Your Excellency,” Bruce began with a grin, “from your point of view, I am com- pletely irrational but my behavior from the human standpoint is not only normal but you will encounter it in eighty percent of your subjects.” “That is impossible,” Atis Tobe answered.- “You are a civilized race. Such a thing will not be tolerated.” “You have only studied us for four days, Your Excellency,” Bruce pointed out. “True, but there are many indications of civilization. Your own device, for example.” “You have a point there,” Bruce admit- ted, “but I have another device to show you.” He reached into his pocket and took out an automatic. Dr. Granas clenched his hands and Lois gasped. “Bruce, please!” she whispered, fervently. “If I were to pull this bit of metal called the trigger, you would die instantly,” Bruce said to the Cafis Gan. “Assuming that is the truth, Mr. Mac- Donald, what does it prove?” The Cafis was annoyed. “It proves. Your Excellency, that with us, destruction of life is a common thing.” Atis Tobe bent over and studied the re- volver. “Did you make this?” “No,” Bruce answered. “Nearly every human possesses a gun and sometimes uses it. These are made in huge quantities, each one adapted to a specific purpose. This one is expressly designed for use on humans. It would work equally well on you also.” The Cafis Gan continued to stare at the gun. “What is the principle?” “It’s a simple heat engine,” Bruce replied. “Chemical reaction generates a high gas pressure which forces a metal pellet through this tube. The velocity of the bit of metal or bullet will cause it to penetrate a body, rup- turing its internal organs where it strikes.” Atis Tobe had apparently been practising his smile for this one was not nearly so grue- some. “Your explanation, Mr. MacDonald, is most ingenious. For a moment, I almost believed you.” Bruce lined the gun up at point blank range and squeezed the trigger. The report was deafening in the small room. A metal insigne ripped off the shoulder of the uniform of the Cafis Gan. The Viceroy felt of the torn fabric and turned to look at the wall behind. It was almost imperceptible but Bruce detected a faint quiver in the rodent’s talonlike hand. “Almost you have convinced me,” the Cafis said slowly. “Lois,” Bruce said. “Will you get that package from the butcher shop? It’s in the refrigerator behind the milk.” “What?” Lois asked, confused. “Get me our latest purchase from the butcher shop,” Bruce repeated, distinctly. Lois hurried to the kitchen and returned a moment later with a package wrapp>ed in white paper. She extended it timidly to Bruce. He ripped it open with the muzzle of his automatic and removed a two inch thick, round steak from the wrapper. Slowly, Bruce extended the dripping steak to the Viceroy. The rodent man recoiled a little. “A speci- man, Mr. MacDonald?” he asked. “No,” Bruce replied, trying to leer. "Food!" Atis Tobe winced and covered his eyes. In a moment he recovered his composure and turned to stare at Dr. Granas. “Is all this the truth?” Granas nodded his head. “I’m afraid it is. Your Excellency.” “How horrible! How depraved !” There was silence in the room as Bruce placed the steak back in its wrapper and handed it to Lois. “I believe we have made a terrible mis- take,” the Cafis Gan Sciid, weakly. “It is in- credible that such barbarism can exist among thinking creatures ! ” His body twitched. He turned and walked to the door. In stupefied silence, the trio watched the two Cafis leave. The rodents paused at the car and stared at the human driver. Almost fearfully, they stepped in and drove off. RAT RACE Lois turned from the window. “What are they going to do now?” she asked, wring- ing her hands. “I imagine their full time occupation from now on will be leaving the earth and trying to forget it as soon as possible,” Bruce an- swered, smiling. Dr. Granas shook his head. “I don’t un- derstand this at all,” he said. “What’s going on?” “It’s quite simple. Uncle Bob,” Bruce re- plied. “The Cafis thought we were civilized. In fact, I don’t think they’ve ever come across an uncivilized race before.” “What do you mean, uncivilized !” Granas bristled. “Civilization is a pretty relative term,” Bruce answered. “To us, we are civilized. To the Cafis, however, we are monsters. You see, the Cafis don’t kill. Their understand- ing of the term ‘war’ is a sort of a contest, certainly not bloodshed.” “But they’re a conquering race!” Granas objected. “How can they do it without blood- shed?” “I’m not entirely sure,” Bruce replied, thoughtfully. “I’m only guessing but so far, my guesses have been pretty good. My the- ory is that the rest of their empire is much like themselves. You yourself remarked that it was only an accident that the rodents didn’t become the predominant race here on earth.” “That’s true,” Dr. Granas admitted. “I think we can assume, that up until now, the Cafis have only had to deal with races similar to themselves. When they came here, they carried on their vrarfare just as they always have done. I bet the rest of their empire considers them pretty ruthless con- querors.” “I don’t see what )ma’re getting at!” Granas exploded. 81 “I got the clue last night. Uncle Bob,” Bruce continued, “when Atis Tobe turned his head. I thought about it for a long time and finally decided that I was right. I guessed that they were non-carnivores and were therefore unaccustomed to violence and bloodshed. It was so unheard of to them, that they didn’t for one minute expect to find a carnivorous civilization. “Look at how they conquered the earth. Not by killing I Their weapons are of a dif- ferent type. They paralyze a civilization and give you a chance to nullify the weapon and if you can’t do it, they win. If you can com- bat their weapon, then they think up a new one and on it goes until someone’s resources are exhausted.” , “Well — well — ^how did you know they were so peaceful?” Lois stammered. “Rats here on earth are vicious — and horrible!” RUCE laughed. “Darling, that’s what comes from jumping to conclusions. The Cafis are rodents to be sure, but as rodents go, rats are certainly not the most intelligent ! ” “Well these rats are certainly intelligent!” Granas interrupted. “Not rats. Uncle Bob,” Bruce replied, grinning. “Beavers !” “Not exactly,” a loud voice boomed. The trio stood frozen, staring at each other. “W-h-a-t?” Granas said, weakly. “I said, not exactly.” The voice rumbled through the open door of the laboratory. There was a momentary mad scramble as they all tried to go through the laboratory door at one time. Their eyes took in the empty roc«n at a glance then rested on the loudspeaker of the calculator. They waited, hardly breathing. “Rabbits!” the calculator said. COMING m THE NEXT ISSUE THE ISOTOPE MEN A Hcdl of Fame Classic by FESTUS PRAGNEUL Only a quartet of Eartbmen stood between the Mercurian invaders and planetary conquest! A Hall of Fame novelet TETHAUEDHA CHAPTER I Jungle Crack-up A MOON of mottled silver swam in the star-flecked sky, pouring its flood of pale light over the sea of blue- green vegetation that swelled up and up in a mighty, slow wave to break in the foaming crest of the Andes. The shadow of my plane raced far below, dipping into the troughs, breasting the sum- mits of that vast, unbroken sea of emerald Copyright 1931, by Go, Stretching on and on beyond reach of vision. Night had caught me unawares, and it is no simple matter to lay down supplies in a little clearing, marked only by a flickering camp- fire, lost somewhere among the jungles of Brazil. Or was it Brazil ? Here three great states mingled in an upland of forest and mountain and grassy valley — Peru, Bolivia, Brazil. bach PublicatUms, Inc. Here ancient races had made their home, raised their massive temples in the little valleys, wrested a fortune from the moun- tains, given their lives to the jungles — a people more ancient by far than those others beyond the ranges whom the Incas con- quered. Here none had come before to study, yet now, somewhere in the gloom beneath me, was a little oval valley hung mid-way By SCHLYLEB NILLEB between crag and forest, and there would be the tents and fires of scientists, men of my own world. But there came no glimmer of flame in the darkness, no flicker of white tents in the moonlight. Alone the outflung cross of the plane swam the unbroken sea of green, dark and boding against its wan beauty. It takes little error of judgment to miss a tiny clear- 83 s? Startling stories ing in the dark. So, as the western ranges crept out of their alignment, I swooped and soared, and was roaring back, higher now, over the silent moon-lit forests. I had seen one gap in the jungle — a harsh, black scar seared by some great fire from the bowels of the planet, ugly and grim in the soft beauty of the night. Again it slipped beneath, and as the shadow of the plane vanished against its blackness, it seemed to me that there came a scurry of furtive motion, an instant’s flicker of shadow against its deeper gloom. I half checked the course of the plane, to wheel and search it closer, then of a sudden the air about me blazed with a dull crimson fire that burned into my body with a numb- ing fury of unleashed energy, the drone of the engines gasped and died and we were spinning headlong toward the silver sea be- neath ! As it had come, the tingjing paralysis passed and I flattened out the dive of the crippled plane, cut the ignition and dived over the side. As in a dream I felt the jerk of the parachute, saw the deserted plane, like a huge, wounded bat of the jungles, swoop again in a long flat dive that broke and pan- caked into the upper reaches of the forest. Then the heavy pendulum of my body alone beat out the dull seconds as I swung and twisted beneath the silken hemisphere of the ’chute. And then the leafy boughs, no longer silver but like hungry, clutching talons of Wack horror, swept up and seized me. The rain-forest is like a mighty roof stretched over the valleys of tropical America. Interlacing branches blot out the sun from a world of damp and rotting dark, where great mottled serpents writhe among tangled branches and greater vines strangle the life out of giants of the forest in the end- less battle for light. , And there are little, venomous things of the dark ways — savage two-inch ants with fire in their bite, tiny snakelets whose parti- colored beauty masks grim death — creatures of the upper reaches and of the glorious world above the tree-tops. With the sunrise, a blaze of life and flam- ing color breaks over the roof of the jungle — flame of orchid and of macaw, and of the great, gaudy butterflies of this upper world. Beneath, there comes but a brightening of the green gloom to a wan half-light in which dim horrors seem to lurk and creep and watch, and giant lianas twist and climb up and ever up to the living light. The sun was an hour gone when I fell but it was not until its second coming when I managed to writhe and slip through the tan- gle as if I too were of the jungle, moving toward the spot where my memory placed that blasted clearing, and the light. And with the deepening of the gloom in the upper branches I came upon it, quite by accident, from above. It was a little valley, perhaps a mile long and two thirds as wide, lying in an oval of gittering jet against the side of the moun- tains. Here the Andes were beginning their swift climb up from the jungles to the snows and beneath me fifty-foot cliffs of sheer black dropped to the valley floor. I have spoken of it as blasted, seared into the living heart of the jungle. It was all of that, and more ! There was a gentleness in its rocky slopes that spoke of centuries of hungry plant-life, prying and tearing at jag- ged ledges, crumbling giant boulders, dying and laying down a soft, rich blanket of humus over the harsh, under-rock, forming a little garden-spot of life and light in the dark heart of the forest. Then came fire — an awful, scourging blast of fierce heat that even Man’s Hell cannot equal ! It blasted that little valley, seared its verdant beauty horribly, crumbling blossoms and long grasses into dead white ash, strip- ping the rich soil of past ages from its sleep- ing rocks, fusing those rocks into a harsh glittering slag. The sheer cliffs, once draped with a delicate tracery of flowered tendrils, had cloven away under the terrible heat, split off in huge slabs of the living rock that had toppled into the holocaust beneath and died with the valley. The few thin shrubs that screened me at their summit showed blackened, blistered leaves and twigs, though here the heat had been least. As no other spot on Eartlr that little upland valley was terribly dead, yet at its center something moved ! Eagerly I peered through the gathering dusk. Full and golden, the moon was rising over the forest, throwing new shadows across the valley floor, brightening new corners, re- vealing new motion. It wakened a lustrous opalescence in the two great spheres that nestled like mighty twin pearls against the dark rock, to create beings of the rock and of the shadow, gliding wraithlike among the shattered boulders! TETRAHEDRA OF SPACE 85 Painfully I crept through the dense growth of the brink, nearer to those great spheres and their dreadful cargo. Now I could see them clearly, rank on rank of them in order- ly file, some hundred of them, strewn in great concentric rings about the softly glowing spheres — great, glittering tetrahedra — tetra- hedra of terror \ They were tetrahedra, and they were alive. They stirred restlessly in their great circles, uneasy in the dim light. Here and there little groups formed, and sometimes they clicked together in still other monstrous geometric shapes, yet always they moved with an un- canny stillness, darting with utter sureness among the scattered rocks. And now from the nearer of the twin spheres came another of their kind, yet twice their size, the pearly walls opening and clos- ing as by thought-magic for his passing ! He swept forward a little, into the full light of the moon, and the rings followed him, cen- tered about him, until the spheres lay beyond the outermost and the giant tetrahedron faced alone the hosts of his lesser fellows ! Then came their speech — of all things the most mind-wracking! I felt it deep within my brain before I sensed it externally, a dull heavy rhythm of insistent throbbing, beating at my temples and throwing up a dull red haze before my staring eyes! You have heard those deepest notes of a great organ, when the windows tremble, even the walls, the building itself, vibrate in re- sonance, beat and beat and beat to its rhythm until you feel it throbbing against your skull. UCH was the speech of the tetrahedra, only deeper still beneath the threshold of sound — so deep that each tiny nerve of the skin sensed its monotonous pressure and shouted it to a reeling brain — so deep that it seemed like a great surf of more-than-sound thundering dismally against desolate, rocky shores ! I think now that it was a sort of chant, the concerted cry of all the scores of tetrahedra, dinning savagely, angrily at their giant leader in a dismal plaint of discontent and unease! I think they were restless, aware of unful- filled promises and purposes, anxious to make sure their misison or to be gone. For soon I sensed a deeper, stronger voice beating against the din, drowning it out, thundering command and reproof, shouting down the mob until its lesser drumming sank to a mutter and ceased. But the voice of the SOME stories are forgot- ten almost as soon as they are printed. Others stand the test of time. Because “Tetrahedra of Space,” by P. Schuyler Mil- ler, has stood this test, it has been nominated for SCIENTIFICTION’S HALL OF FAME and is reprinted here. In each issue we will honor one of the most out- standing fantasy classics of all time as selected by our readers. We hope in this way to bring a new permanence to the science fiction gems of yesterday and to per- form a real service to the science fiction devotees of today and tomorrow. Nominate your own favorites! Send a letter or postcard to The Editor, STARTLING STORIES, 10 East 40th St., New York 16, N. Y. All suggestions are more than welcome! giant tetrahedron rang on, inflected now as our own voices, rising and falling in angry speech and command, pouring out burning sarcasm, perhaps, cowing them with its greater insistence ! Like all good leaders, his followers were as children to him, and the hard, harsh beat of sound swept off into a soothing, cajoling murmur of whispering ripples, yet none the less dominant and definite in its message. And it sank to a far, hinting rumble and vanished. For a long instant they lay quiet, like graven things of the stone itself, then through the circles, like a spreading wave, rose a thrill of slow motion, quickening, livening, until all were astir! The ranks parted, the giant tetrahedron swept swiftly over the valley floor to the two great spheres, his angular hordes flowing in swift, soft motion in his wake! Again, with that speed and silent mystery of thought, the spheres gaped open and the ranks of the tetrahedra were swallowed up within ! For a long moment I lay there under the bushes at the cliff’s edge, staring out over the valley, stunned by the weird unreality of the thing I had seen. Then, out of the dark be- hind me, came a hand, gripping my shoulder in a vise of iron ! Mad with sudden terror I twisted free, struck blindly at the thing that had seized me, a thing that spoke, its words a hoarse mutter that barely penetrated the gloom ! “For God’s sake, man, be still! Do you want them to hear?” It was a man — a human like myself. My STARTLING STORIES 86 frozen tongue stammered reply. “Who are you ? What are those things out there? What Hell of Earth did they spring from ?” “None of Earth, you may rest sure !” came the grim answer. “But we will tell you all that later. We must get clear of this pla<^! I am Marston of the Museum expedition — the biologist. I suppose you are the aviator — Valdez saw them burn you down last night. Follow me.” “Yes, I’m Hawkins. The plane is some- where over there, if it didn’t burn, with all your supplies in it. But tell me, first — those things, there — are they alive 1” “You’ve wondered that? I suppose anyone would. The Indians make them gods of a kind — realize they’re beyond all experience and tradition. But I’m a biologist. I have had some experience in strange forms of life. They are as much alive as we — perhaps even more than we. But this is no place to moralize — come on!” He vanished into the dark and I followed, plunging blindly after the sound of his crash- ing progress, away from the seared valley and the tetrahedra, to saftey of a sort in the sombre depths of tire rain-forest. They crouched beside a tiny fire of bark and twigs — two gaunt skeletons hung and swathed with soiled rags, brooding over their pitiful little flame. With the crackle of our approach they sprang at bay — two hunted things of the jungle — then relaxed as we came into the firelight. I will always remember them as I saw them then — Hornby, the Museum archaeolo- gist, tall, grey-haired, his haggard face seamed with deep wrinkles of sleeplessness and fear and puzzled wonderment. Valdez, his colleague of the government that had sent me, short, dark, big Portuguese blood blended with that of the squat tribes of the interior. He seemed plumper than the others, and I felt that he could and would care for himself very well if need be. OW, too, I saw my guide for the first time as something more than a black hulk in blackness. Marston, the biologist, looked like an old-time blacksmith, a mas- sive man of bone and muscle, with keen grey eyes under heavy brows and the beginnings oi a mighty beard. “We're all there are, Hawkins,” he rum- bled. “We’ve got to find that plane soon if it’s still whole. Did you see flames, Valdez?” “Flames, Senor Marston? No — I saw merely the falling of the plane, like a great wounded bird seeking the shelter of the jungles, and Senor — Hawkins, is it? — with his parachute. I am not certain that I can find it, now that a day and a night have passed, but I will try. ” Then Hornby's voice — dry and withered as his shrunken body — weary as his tired old eyes. “You have seen the tetrahedra, lieu- tenant Hawkins? You realize that they are living, intelligent beings? You can com- phehend the menace of their presence here on our Earth?” “Yes, Professor,” I answered slowly, “I have seen them and heard them. They have a great leader, twice the size of any of them, and the rest seem to be dissatisfied with the way he is running things.” “You hear that, Marston?” cried the Pro- fessor, almost savagely. “You hear — they are impatient — they will act soon, as soon as they have fed again! We must do something, Marston — ^we must act now — !” “Yes, I saw them too,” said Marston slowly. “They’re on the brink, all right. But I don’t know what we can do — four men with three rifles and a couple of ma- chetes against a hundred of them.” “Marston,” I put in eagerly, “if it’s gtms you want, there are two machine-guns and plenty of ammunition in the plane — it was a government ship, fresh from the uprising in the North. If we can find that, there’ll be guns as well as food.” “Valdez — you hear that? Can you help him search? You are the one who saw him fall and you have been out with the Indians more than once. How about it?” “Very well, Senor Marston, I will do what J can. But do not hope for too much — re- member, there has been a day and a night and I had only a glimpse. And the guns — what can they do against those devils from the spheres? We would do better to flee, and warn the world of what has come upon it!” “I’ve heard that stuff preached before, Valdez. Stow it ! If it comes to announcing them to the world those things will do it for themselves faster than we could ! You’ll hunt with Hawkins in the morning!” Professor Hornby had said little. Now, at Marten’s words, he roused again. “Marston,” Iris voice came petulantly, “have you seen the Indians in the forest as I have ? Have you seen them, felt them staring TETRAHEDRA OF SPACE 87 at your back, fingering their little darts in the dark? Marston, they take those tetrahedra for gods — things to worship and propitiate with sacrifice ! The forest is full of them — I feel it — I can tell! Marston, what are they doing?” CHAPTER II The Coming of the Tetrahedra MARSTON'S bluff rumble drowned out that final wail. “Sure, Prof, they’re here, all right — all about us, out there in the jungle with the beasts. But they’re harmless — just inquisitive, that’s all. It’s the things yonder that draw them. It’s a legend come true, for them. They’re not apt to hurt us for a while yet but it won’t hurt to slip closer to the valley, where we can watch the things.” Then Valdez slipped in his acid wedge of dissent, smoothly and blandly as ever. “You remember, of course, SenorMarston, that these poor Indios retain the supersti- tions of their ancient masters, and that in time of peril it was the way of the Old People to make blood sacrifice to their gods. Old customs linger long among savages, Senor ! ” “We’re staying and we’re fighting, just as soon as you and Hawkins locate those guns, which is tomorrow. Your memory will improve with a little sleep, I think. And, Prof — I reckon Hawkins here would like to hear about those things yonder. Tell him what there is to tell.” And so, huddled there by the tiny, flicker- ing fire, I listened as the thin, dry voice of the old Professor marched through the awful story of the coming of the tetrahedra. They had come to the little valley in the hills, three white men and a half-dozen In- dian guides from the more civilized tribes to the north. Here in its oval bowl they had made their camp among flowers and waving grasses, with the dark rampart of the jungle standing about them like the walls of a prison. And from those walls came the In- dians of the forests — poor, savage creatures hag-ridden by superstition and ignorance, wracked by famine and disease. They treasured weird legends and aborted ceremonies where understanding of other things had passed. But they bore memories of things that even the savage mind can pon- der, memories of magic and ritual and the adoration of fierce and powerful gods. As the newer magic of this younger, paler race gripped their childish minds, they told of the things that their fathers before them had learned of grandfathers through the centuries, tales not only of custom and life in those long-gone days, but of cities swal- lowed up in the rain-forest, cities of massive stone and untarnishing metal — “the metal of the Sun,” that sleeps in long, fat serpents in the white rock of the mountains. Then, one day — and Professor Hornby’s hoarse voice sank almost to a whisper as he told of it — there came the little group of savages who were to lead the way to the buried ruins of a great city, four little brown men with blow-guns and deadly darts, wait- ing patiently for the great White Ones to take up their magic and follow. Hornby had stepped to the door of his tent to call their chieftain to conference and, as he went he gazed up at the towering Andes. There, drifting like wind-tossed bub- bles just above the tree-tops, floated the spheres of the tetrahedra ! Gently they sank to rest at the other end of the little valley — lay there in the thick grass like the eggs of some huge moth out of fable. The Indians had fled in terror but, as Hardy and Marston raced down the slope toward the twin globes, they sensed that furtive eyes were peering from the under- growth, half-fearful, half-wondering, waiting with timeless patience for new magic — new masters. The three came to the spheres as they lay there in the lush grass— Hornby, Marston, Valdez — and in each heart must have been something of the wonder that I in my turn had felt. For the spheres were unbroken by any opening, were as twin orbs hewn from mother-of-pearl. Yet there came a force from them, a tingling of excess energy that thrilled in every nerve and set their minds on edge with unwonted keenness I ®T GREW in strength, slowly, and it was Marston who first sensed its lurking hostility, who turned his gaze from the enig- matic spheres to see the long grasses about their bases wither and shrivel to soft grey ash under the blasting radiation! It was he who cried the alarm, and in sudden panic they fled a little way up the valley, to stand like startled sheep, then flee anew as the 88 STARTLING STORIES surge of energy poured forth in ever-quick- ening pulses from the opal spheres. It swept all life before it into sudden, luxuriant growth that as suddenly dropped into blighted destruction ! Beside their tents, nearly in the shadow of the brooding forest, they stood at last and watched the slow tor- rent sweep the life of their valley home into the sullen ash of death. And then its in- visible van drifted up the slope to their feet, and again its subtle venom thrilled evilly in their veins, and tliey ran crazily, headlong, into the jungle ! But they could not long shun the brain- troubling enigma that had engulfed their little home. Marston, Hornby, Valdez — they struggled back and stared from the damp dark of the forest at the thing that was happening there in the sunlit oval on the mountainside. Then it was that Marston broke the spell of fear that had been laid upon him — seized rifles, blankets, food from the deserted tents in the ebbing of the invisible waves, and fled again as the second billow of devastation poured from the silent spheres ! Then, for a time, there came a lull — a peace almost of the days and hours when this little spot of light in the green dark was the home of happy, busy men — almost, yet not quite! For there was a boding in it, an ominous sense of oppression, a tension of the very ether, a stress that spread to mind and brain and sucked hungrily at the dazed conscious- ness ! And they were not wrong, for of a sudden, with an awful violence that shook even the stolid Marston, the storm burst in its full fury. In a great beating sea of horrid flame it lashed the oval valley, driving into the soil, into the very rock, waking them into an angry answer of leaping, burning crimson fires. The fires swept the thin black soil from the underlying rock and scored the naked face of the rock itself with an awful furnace of consuming fury. And through the curtain where fire of heavens and fire of Earth met in that terrible holocaust, those three saw the curving flames of the twin spheres gape wide, saw huge angular shapes file from the darkness within — shapes never yet associated in the mind of Man with the meaning of life I They were of a purple that seemed to be of the essence of the things themselves, rather than a pig- mentation of their surface; and near one apex each had two green-yellow unstaring, unseeing eyes! Within them one glimpsed a spherical body — purple too — from which ran hundreds of curious filaments to the' smooth surfaces. Tetrahedra they were — living tetrahedra of chilling terror that feared neither flame nor lightning and spread destruction on every side ! “I cannot tell you of the feeling that came to me,” the weary, dried-out voice of the Professor droned despairingly on. “Here was a power absolutely at odds to all the great, painfully evolved civilization of mankind, a power that could and would crush us as a fly if we came into conflict with the motives of the tetrahedral race! Here were beings endowed by nature with powers beyond our science — alien to our ideas of evolution, well- nigh to our imagination and reason.” His voice trailed off into silence as his deadened eyes saw once more the vision of that awful day. I thought he had done, but again his voice broke the quiet. “Perhaps we can flee, even now — hide away in some corner where they can have no motive for searching. Perhaps, for a little, we can save our lives and yet — I wonder if it is not better to die foolishly, futilely, but to die with the knowledge that we have been closer than any man to the unfathomable, to tire reality that underlies all life.” From the dark beyond the glowing em- bers came Marston’s quiet rumble. “We can’t do less. Prof, and we won’t. In the morning we must lay our plans. They are getting restless — they may strike any minute and we must be ready and waiting. We’re going to die, I guess, but we’ll die as men should!” The events of the past few hours had crowded in upon me with such staggering force and complexity that I found my mind in a whirl. I could get no clear-cut im- pression— no broad meaning — only a blurred, fanastic cyclorama of unearthly event and taut emotion. With the morning all this changed — changed swiftly and utterly as event after event rushed upon us, broke like a tidal wave upon our outraged consciousness, and van- ished before the tumultuous onslaught of another, greater clash of mind and matter. We were up with the dawn. I wanted to return to the valley to get my bearings but Valdez claimed it was uselessly dangerous. TETRAHEDRA OF SPACE 89 that he could make better time from where we were. We struck into the tangle of dank underwood, Valdez leading, and within seconds of our leaving camp I was utterly lost. My companion seemed sure of his way, slipping through the maze of fine growth like a beast of the jungle. For nearly an hour we plunged ahead, then of a sudden came a gap in the forest roof as the level of the ground fell in a narrow ravine, and I woke to angry realization of what was happening ! The sun, on our right when we started, lay behind us! We were traveling dead away from the valley, the camp and the plane! Angrily I sprang forward, seized Valdez by the shoulder I He spun like a striking snake, fury in his half-closed eyes, fury and crazed fear ! In his hand was a gun ! “So — ^you have awakened at last, Senor Hawkins,” he sneered. “You fool — did you for one moment think I would cast my lot with those idiots back there? You were not invited to our little party, but you came — and you will do as I say or wish you had I Am I clear?” “You’re too damn’ clear !” I shouted. “So you’re going to sneak off and leave your comrades to the tender mercies of those tet- rahedra — you want to make sure of your precious hide ! What do you think these savages will do to you when they catch you out here alone, running away from their new gods? You’re a damned, yellow, mad dog!” “You say unfortunate things, Senor Haw- kins,” he replied coldly, the ugly sneer still on his thin, red lips. "I think that I can dis- pense with your company. It might interest you to know that Valdez is the name of my father by adoption, Senor. My people are those whom you have so kindly classified as savages — my home is these very forests that you seem to find so unpleasant ! And, Senor Hawkins, have I not said that I can always find your plane?” “What do you mean by that?” 'T mean, Senor, that it has always been I who could find the plane, and I who did find it, not very many minutes after it crashed. You would be disappointed, Senor Hawkins, were you to see it now. The food, the guns and ammunition of which you boasted — they can never have existed save in a mind disordered by jungle fevers.” I stared up through the matted branches at the blandly shining sun. I raised both hands, fists clenched, as if to crash them down upon that evilly smiling face ! But the little snub-nosed gun that bored into my belly spoke eloquent warning and of a sudden came clear thought. “So even in this you must lie, Valdez ! It is bred in the blood, I think ! I do not question that you stole the food and weapons that meant life to your comrades — it is much too characteristic an act to doubt — but, Senor Valdez, no Indian would so steal another’s food. Was it, perhaps, your mother who was white f’’ I saw murder staring at me and in the in- stant when he stood frozen with his hate I leaped — swung with all my weight on the great liana that was looped over the branch above me ! Even as the gun spat flame, the tautening vine caught him full at the base of the skull and toppled him forward into the black mold of the forest floor, out, and out for good ! CHAPTER III The Tetrahedra’s Power IT WAS his life or mine, but I had not contemplated killing him. The vine was heavy and swung loose on the limb, and it whipped taut with the force of a snapping hawser, catching him squarely at the base of his maddened brain! I turned him over, and as I lifted him his head flopped forward like that of a rag dum- my ! With a shudder I dropped him after searching his body for weapons and food. In his breast pocket was a rough sketch-map, showing the valley, the camp, and a small cross where the plane had fallen. Across its penciled contours ran a fine dotted line, due north from the camp nearly to the place where the plane lay, then bearing off to the west, toward the mountains. Just beyond was a second little cross, to the south of the trail. I knew what it meant — the food and guns from the looted plane ! Within five minutes I had uncovered Valdez’ cache, under the cover of an out cropping ledge of quartz, and loaded one of the packs we had brought along. How to return to camp with my news was another question entirely. I knew it was futile for me to try to follow the back trail. STARTUNG STORIES 90 There remained the valley — straight south along the ravine — and I felt certain that once there I could regain my lost sense of direc- tion or wait until one of the others found me. The valley — and the tetrahedral Driven by instinct or intuition, I shouldered one of the very light machine-guns and wrapped three belts of ammunition about my waist, under my shirt. The going was easier along the rim erf the little ravine than at its bottom, where extra moisture made the tangle thicker. The trail finally swung away from the stream-bed to- ward the east and suddenly emerged on a sort of peninsula jutting into the valley just above the point where the twin spheres lay. Here were gathered the forest Indians, clustered behind the thin screen of vege- tation, gazing in dumb adoration at the things below. So rapt were they that my ap- proach went unnoticed, and I was able to retreat and bear to the west, creeping up to the edge of the valley midway between clear- ing and ravine. Now, in the full light of day, I could see that it was as Professor Hornby had said. The tetrahedra were formed from some hard, crystalline mineral, black almost to invisi- bility, with a faint wash of rich purple run- ning through it. As they moved, the sun sent up glittering flashes of brilliance from their polished flanks. For the tetrahedra were restless, were weaving aimlessly in and out among the boulders in weird arabesques. Apart from the rest, motionless in a sort of circular clearing among the rocks, squatted the giant leader of the tetrahedra. In him the deep violet of the crystal became a rich, plum-like hue, purple flushed with warm red, and the underlying black seemed less harsh. And now the giant leader was dinning out his mighty call in long, slow billows of beat- ing sound that seemed to thrust me back, press me into the dark of the forest, away from the alien monsters of the valley ! In re- sponse came thirty of the lesser tetrahedra, chosen seemingly at random from the scat- tered ranks, to range themselves at equal in- tervals about their master, forming a single great circle a dozen yards in diameter. GAIN the throbbing call shattered against the cliffs about me, and now all the hordes of the tetrahedra broke into flow- ing motion, converging in a torrent of glitter- ing purple crystal upon the natural amphi- theater, clustering in threes at the spots that their fellows had marked — all but ten, who glided into place before every third group, forming a giant toothed wheel with hub and rim and spokes of living, sentient crystal — crystal with a purpose! I could see that the groups of three that formed the toothed rim of the giant crystal wheel were tipping inward, bringing their peaks together in a narrow focus, and more, that the ten that were the spokes, the binding members of the wheel, were of the same rich hue as their master. As the sun soared higher, pouring its blazing rays straight down upon the swelter- ing world, I sensed the beginning of a vague roseate glow at the foci of the circling trios, a glow as of energy, light, focused by the tet- rahedra themselves, yet not of themselves, but sucked from the flood of light that poured upon them from above. The rose-glow deepened to angry vermil- ion, seemingly caged within the spheres de- fined by the tips of the tilted tetrahedra. Now the scarlet flame of the prisoned light was mounting swiftly in an awful pinnacle of out- rageous color — pure fire torn from the warm rays of the sun — raw energy for the glutting of these tetrahedral demons of another world ! Slowly the great ring contracted, slowly the tetrahedra tipped toward their common center, bearing at their foci the globes of angry flame. Then they loosed the cradled energy of the spheres in one mighty blaze of blinding crimson that swept out in a single huge sheet of flame, blanketing all the giant wheel with its glory, then rushing into the blazing vortex of its center. Here, all the freed energy of the flame was flowing into the body of the mighty ruler of the tetra- hedra. And now, as in recoil, there spouted from his towering peak a fine, thin fountain of pale blue fire, soundless, like the blaze of man- made lightning between two mightily ener- gized electrodes— the blue of electric fire — the seepage of the giant’s feast! Like slaves snatching at the crumbs from their master’s board, the ten lesser tetrahedra crowded close. As their fierce hunger voiced itself in awful, yearning force, the fountain of blue flame split into ten thin tongues, barely visi- ble against the black rock, that bent down into the pinnacles of the ten and poured through them into the crowding rim of the giant wheel. TETRAHEDRA OF SPACE 91 As I watched, each tetrahedron began to swell, visibly, creeping in horrid slow growth to a magnitude very little less than that of their giant leader. And as they mounted in size, the torrent of blue fire paled and died, leaving them glutted and expectant of the final stage ! It came with startling suddenness ! In an instant each of the hundred clustering mon- sters budded, burst, shattered into four of half its size that cleaved from each corner of the parent tetrahedron. Only the giant ruler lay unchanged beneath the downward slant- ing rays of the sun. The hundred had be- come four hundred ! The tetrahedra had spawned ! Drinking in the light of the noonday sun, sucking up its energy to give them substance, these tetrahedral beings from an alien world held it in their power to smother out the slightest opposition by sheer force of ever- mounting numbers ! Man was doomed ! On the jutting point to my left I sensed new activity. The Indians were chanting in weird low tones, to the rhythm of a deep- throated drum. It was some monotonous hymn or supplication to their ancient gods — gods now personified in the things below. Through the screen of shrubbery between us, I glimpsed their cdiieftain, taller by a head than the rest, his arms upraised, leading the exhortation. Their voices rose, broke in an angry clamor as a dozen of their kind burst from the forest dragging the bound form of a white man — of Marston! Separated from them by a hundred feet of space and a double screen of matted vines, I dared not fire for fear of slaying friend with foe ! Headlong I dived into the tangle, shov- ing the machine-gun ahead of me ! Had they not been utterly engrossed in their savage ritual, the Indians must surely have heard my blundering approach. By chance or fortune the tangle was less matted than else- where and I burst into the cleared space barely in the nick of time. ARSTON’S huge; straining frame Xv Ja was bent back over a rounded slab of polished rock in the center of the clearing, the dwarfed forest-men fairly swarming over him to hold him in place! Arms raised in supplication, their chieftain stood over him, his features distorted by fear of his gods and frenzy of sacrifice! In his clenched fist he grasped a glittering knife of steel, a knife that half an hour ago I had seen buried in the black soil of the forest floor — Valdes’ knife! With a cackle of savage laughter my gun woke the echoes, sweeping leaden death across the clearing, mowing its swath of lives in sacrifice more terrible than any savage mind could plan ! I raked their bewildered ranks with the laughing death, then the belt of cartridges was gone and, as I fumbled for a second, the few cowering survivors fled screaming into the sheltering jungle ! Stumbling over the torn and bleeding win- drows of slain humanity, I raced across the bloody clearing to where he lay. And, as I reached the rude altar, Marston heaved his blood-soaked frame free of the bodies that covered it, sat up and growled. “Are you quite sure you’ve killed enough for the day? Or didn’t you know it was loaded?’’ “Marston, man!’’ I shouted frantically, “Are you all right? Did I hit you?” “Oh, not at all. I’m quite all right. You’re a rotten shot if I do say it — bring in a blasted flail and then you can’t hit me ! Though I’ll not say you didn’t try hard enough.” As a matter of fact I had nicked a chunk out of his arm — a nice, clean hit — and the blood on him was not all Indian. Still, his sarcastic joshing served its purpose and brought me out of my near-hysteria. Not until we were well clear of the shambles around the altar did he speak of Valdez. “What happened?” he asked. “Did Val- dez bolt?” “He tried to,” I replied glumly. “He had the stuff from the plane cached on the trail out, and — well, we had it out. I broke his neck — killed him.” “I’m not blaming you for it. I saw it com- ing, and I reckon it was you or he. But it’s stirred up merry hell among the Indians. Did you know he was a breed? He claimed to be pure Indian, son of a jungle chieftain and a princess of some remnants of the Old People, but he was a breed and crossed the wrong way ! “I told you I was suspicious of Valdez. I tried to follow you and they jumped me. south of here, near the ravine. It must have been shortly after they found Valdez, for they were all crazy mad. I think the Doc is safe, though. Do you realize that this spawn- ing means that they’re ready to go ahead and burn their way right through everything — make this whole planet a safer and better place for tetrahedra? 92 STAETUNG STORIES “Doc has figured they’re from Mercury — overcrowded, probably, by this wholesale system of reprc^uction in job-lots, and hunt- ing for new stamping grounds. I don’t know what our chances are of bucking them — about a quarter of what they were an hour ago — but they’re mighty slim, armed as we are. You’ve got the other machine-gun?’’ “It’s at the cache, with most of the food, if the Indians didn’t find it when they found Valdez. I have a map here that he was using. ’’ “Good. Let’s have it. You keep an eye on the Professor tomorrow, now that the In- dians are out for blood and I’ll get the stuff back to camp. Come on — ^let’s hunt him up now, while they’re still scared.” “Wait, Marston,” I replied. “You get the stuff now. I have a hunch we’ll need it, and that soon. I can find Professor Hornby well enough, and I don’t think the Indians will want any more for some time to come.” “Right you are !” he exclaimed. “So long then. ” CHAPTER IV At Bay! 1HAD no trouble in finding the Professor. In truth, he found me. He was all but boiling over with excitement, for he had seen something we had not. “Hawkins,” he exclaimed, “did you see them spawn? It is remarkable — ^absolutely unequalled ! I saw two that divided and re- divided into three-inch tetrahedra — over a thousand of them ! Hawkins, they can over- run our little planet in a few days, once they start! We’re done for!” “I guess you’re right, Professor,” I re- plied. “But tell me — ^have you seen anything of the Indians?” “The Indians? Yes — they seem to have lost their reverence for the tetrahedra. These tribes do not paint much but those I have seen were decorated for battle. They may resist now if the tetrahedra try to start some- thing.” “Marston will be glad to hear that ! Right now, I think we had better strike for the high ground across the ravine, where their flame is less likely to reach us. I’ll leave you there and then look for Marston and the guns. We’re going to need them before long.” We found an ideal fortress, high on the west side of the ravine, where a little spur ran down from the highlands to the valley of the tetrahedra. Indeed, it had been used as a lookout by the ancient inhabitants of the region ages ago. Enough of the ancient walls remained to provide a decent bulwark against attack and I left Professor Hornby with the gun to hold the fort until I could find Mars- ton. I had little difficulty in locating him and between us we transferred the supplies from cache to lookout while the Professor kept a perfunctory guard over them. He was more interested in digging around in the ancient floor for potsherds and tools of the former inhabitants. It was two days before the hostilities began. Meanwhile we had found the wreck of the plane, nearly intact but quite useless in this dense jungle. We drained the tanks of what gasoline they contained, storing in it great glazed jars of painted earthenware that Professor Hornby had found intact in a niche below our present floor-level. His idea was to fight fire with fire. Marston and I cleared out the brush as best we could, and cut deep slots in the larger trees on the downhill side, piling the quickly drying underbrush at the far side of our little swath, saturating it with gasoline, then digging in to one of the Professor’s ex- cavations while the fireworks went off. We more or less leveled the thick forest for about two hundred feet on all sides before the fire petered out. The next morning, there was renewed activity. The tetrahedra cleared out a siz- able ring of forest before sun-set. The next noon they had another sunfeast and the blackened valley was fairly teeming with their angular forms, large and small. In vast waves of horrid destruction, with ' rays of angry yellow flame darting from apexes, their flaming floods of energy swept over the jungle and not even its damp dark could resist. Mighty forest-giants toppled headlong, by the cleaving yellow flame, to melt into powdery ash before they touched the ground. By evening, our spur of rock was a lone peninsula, an oasis in a desert of harsh black. Aside from the vegetation which they were so methodically blasting, the Mercutian TETRAHEDBA OF SPACE 93 tetrahedra — for such Professor Hornby swore they were and such we later found them to be — had not yet come into real con- tact with the life of our planet, much less its master, Man. Now all that was changed. It began with the Indians. It ended with us. MOW that we were shut off from the jungle, we no longer sensed the unease and stealthy activity of the forest people. Their gods had betrayed them — their sacri- fice had been interrupted and their chief men slaughtered unmercifully by the slayers of their half-white brother. Their whole life and legend had gone wrong. The tetrahedra were to blame and the tetrahedra must pay ! The invaders did not start their daily pro- gram of devastation until the sun was high. Of late, the people' of the forest had become creatures of the night, and so it was that Marston roused us about midnight to watch the fun, as he put it. The spheres were too small to hold all the tetrahedral hosts, now, and they lay crowded in great confocal ovals about them, sleeping, if such things can be said to sleep. The first indication of the attack was a tiny fire of leaves and twigs on the rocks above the ravine. Then came a low, wailing chant, rising swiftly in vehemence and bitter hatred — a curse designed to blast the unearthly in- vaders where they lay. It suddenly broke in a shrill, senile yammer of sheer madness ! The strain was more than some old priest could stand. As in answer, other greatef fires sprang up all along the walls of the valley, and by their light we could see the Indians closing in from the edge of the forest — thousands of them, drawn to worship over untold leagues of jungle paths, racing into battle with all the mad fanaticism of an outraged religion! It was like a tidal wave of screeching humanity, pouring down over the black rock to break over the sleeping tetrahedra! Like a great city of black, tetrahedral tents the Mercutians lay, dim-lit by^ the falling moon. It was I who first noticed the faint, rosy glow that hung over the silent ranks — a glow like that which had brought dowm my plane. I whispered to Marston, and he told me that it had not been there before — that the tetrahedra must be awake. He was right. The red glow was spreading swiftly, out over the valley floor, and there must have been another, invisible emana- tion that preceded it, for all round the valley, the first ranks of the savages were meeting this slowly advancing wall of unseen death — meeting it, and falling before it ! In long windrow's they lay, body after body piling up before the momentum of the un- leashed rush of the red-skinned hordes ! Stones, arrows, spears flew through the thickening red mist to clatter harmlessly as it seemed, for only here and there among them showed a little spurt of pale blue flame as one of the smaller things was crushed by a hurtling stone ! They were hard, but their skins of crystal were thin and they were not invulnerable I The Indians sensed this, too, for they deserted spears and darts in favor of a hail of stones, large and small, that clattered among the tetrahedra in a veritable down- pour, dealing really telling destruction among those who had not attained a fair size. The savages were yelling in triumph, now, thrilled with success and their blind on- slaught was checked, but still the invisible barrier crept on, dealing death all along their evilly grimacing front, and still the rose-red haze followed after. The yelling circle was thinning fast, yet they had not realized the futility of their attack when suddenly the tetrahedra deserted quiet defense for active combat ! Five Indians on the upslope had shoved' over the cliff a huge rounded boulder that bounded like a live thing among the rocks and crashed full into the side of a great eight- foot tetrahedron, splintering its flinty flank and freeing the pent-up energy in a blinding torrent of blue flame. The mad attack had be- come a thing of real menace to the tetrahe- dra, and they sprang into swift retribution. From their apexes flashed the flaming yellow streaks of destruction. Now at last the Indians broke and fled be- fore the advancing hordes, but flight came too late, for the tetrahedra were aroused and they gave no quarter ! The doomed Indians seem^ to float in a yellow sea and what the sea touched was gone in an instant ! Before that awful barrage nothing living could stand ! Of a sudden the tragedy was borne forci- bly to our own quarter, as a handful of In- dians sought the refuge of our rocky spur! They were men like ourselves, men in awful danger of their lives, and Marston and Hornb)' sprang to the parapet, shouting at them in their native tongue. 94 STARTLING STORIES But the frightened savage knows no friend, and their re^y was a volley of long arrows that toppled the Professor into my arms and sent Marston cursing for the guns ! Lips set grimly, he sprayed the rocky slope with leaden death, mowing down the savages as I had done in the place of sacrifice ! Like locusts they came on frc«n every side, eyes red with blood-lust, teeth bared in hate. It was the debris of our back-fire, piled in a matted belt around the spur, that saved us, for here the mad charge must halt and here our guns took their toll. Even so, I think our defense must have failed but for the tetrahedra. They had not been slow to recognize the changed na- ture of the Indians’ flight and they turned that realization to their own advantage, curv- ing around the spur to cut off a second re- treat, then laying down their fiery yellow bar- rage upon the rear of the clamoring savage host, licking them up as a bear lid