A Case of Conscience
James Blish

[online version, v1.0]

I schal declare the disposcioun of rome fro hys
first makyng . . . and the seconde part schal
declar ye holynesse of ye same place fro his
first crystendom; I schal not write but that i
fynde in auctores or ellis that I sey with eye.
 - John Capgrave: The Solace of Pilgrims

The beginning of this novel first appeared in abridged form as "A Case of
Conscience," in IF Worlds of Science Fiction, in which form it is
copyright 1953 by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc.

First Printing: April, 1958
Second Printing: January, 1966
Third Printing: July, 1972
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58-8569

to LARRY SHAW

Pronunciation Key

For any reader who cares, the Lithian words and names he will encounter
here and there in this story are to be pronounced as follows:

Xoredeshch: "X" as English "K" or Greek chi, hard; "shch" contains two
separate sounds, as in Russian, or in English "fish-church."

Sfath: As in English, with a broad "a."

Gton: Guttural "G," against the hard palate, like hawking.

Chtexa: Like German "Stuka," but with the flat "e."

gchteht: Guttural "g" followed by the soft "sh" sound, a flat "e," and
the "h" serving as equivalent of the Old Russian mute sign; thus, a
four-syllable word, with a palatal tick at the end, but sounded as one
syllable.

Gleshchtehk: As indicated, with the guttural "G," the "fish-church"
middle consonants, and the mute "h" throwing the "k" back against the
soft palate.

THE RULE is that "ch" is always English "sh" in the initial position,
always English "ch" as in "chip" elsewhere in the word; and "h" in
isolation is an accented rest which always precedes, never follows, a
consonant. As Agronski somewhere remarks, anybody who can spit can speak
Lithian.

Book One

The stone door slammed. It was Cleaver's trade-mark: there had never been
a door too heavy, complex, or cleverly tracked to prevent him from
closing it with a sound like a clap of doom. And no planet in the
universe could possess an air sufficiently thick and curtained with damp
to muffle that sound--not even Lithia.

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, late of Peru, and always Clerk Regular of the
Society of Jesus, professed father of the four vows, continued to read.
It would take Paul Cleaver's impatient fingers quite a while to free him
from his jungle suit, and in the meantime the problem remained. It was a
century-old problem, first propounded in 1939, but the Church had never
cracked it And it was diabolically complex (that adverb was official,
precisely chosen, and intended to be taken literally.) Even the novel
which had proposed the case was on the Index Expurgatorius, and Father
Ruiz-Sanchez had spiritual access to it only by virtue of his Order.

He turned the page, scarcely hearing the stamping and muttering in the
hall. On and on the text ran, becoming more tangled, more evil, more
insoluble with every word:

"...Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla, an orthodox
savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani,) who
desires to procure Felicia for Gregorius, Leo Vitellius and Macdugalius,
four excavators, if she will not yield to him and also deceive Honuphrius
by rendering conjugal duty when demanded. Anita who claims to have
discovered incestuous temptations from Jeremias and Eugenius- There now,
he was lost again. Jeremias and Eugenius were-? Oh, yes, the
"philadelphians" or, brotherly lovers (another crime hidden there, no
doubt) at the beginning of the case, consanguineous to the lowest degree
with both Felicia and Honuphrius-the latter the apparent prime villain
and husband of Anita. It was Magravius, who seemed to admire Honuphrius,
who had been urged by the slave Mauritius to solicit Anita, seemingly
under the aegis of Honuphrius himself. This, however, had come to Anita
through her tirewoman Fortissa, who was or at one time had been the
common-law wife of Mauritius and had borne him children-so that the whole
story had to be weighed with the utmost caution. And that entire initial
confession of Honuphrius had come out under torture-voluntarily consented
to, to be sure, but still torture. The Fortissa-Mauritius relationship
was even more dubious, really only a supposition of the commentator
Father Ware--

"Ramon, give me a hand, will you?" Cleaver shouted suddenly. "I'm stuck,
and-and I don't feel well."

The Jesuit biologist arose in alarm, putting the novel aside. Such an
admission from Cleaver was unprecedented.

The physicist was sitting on a pouf of woven rushes, stuffed with a
sphagnumlike moss, which was bulging at the equator under his weight. He
was half-way out of his glass-fiber jungle suit, and his face was white
and beaded with sweat, although his helmet was already off. His
uncertain, stubby fingers tore at a jammed zipper.

"Paul! Why didn't you say you were ill in the first place? Here, let go
of that; you're only making things worse. What happened?"

"Don't know exactly," Cleaver said, breathing heavily but relinquishing
the zipper. Ruiz-Sanchez knelt beside him and began to work it carefully
back onto its tracks. "Went a ways into the jungle to see if I could spot
more pegmatite lies. It's been in the back of my mind that a pilot-plant
for turning out tritium might locate here eventually--ought to be able to
produce on a prodigious scale."

"God forbid," Ruiz-Sanchez said under his breath.

"Hm? Anyhow, I didn't see anything. A few lizards, hoppers, the usual
thing. Then I ran up against a plant that looked a little like a
pineapple, and one of the spines jabbed right through my suit and nicked
me. Didn't seem serious, but--"

"But we don't have the suits for nothing. Let's look at it. Here, put up
your feet and we'll haul those boots off. Where did you get the--oh. Well,
it's angry-looking, I'll give it that. Any other symptoms?"

"My mouth feels raw," Cleaver complained.

"Open up," the Jesuit commanded. When Cleaver complied, it became evident
that his complaint had been the understatement of the year. The mucosa
inside his mouth was nearly covered with ugly and undoubtedly painful
ulcers, their edges as sharply defined as though they had been cut with a
cookie punch.

Ruiz-Sanchez made no comment, however, and deliberately changed his
expression to one of carefully calculated dismissal. If the physicist
needed to minimize his ailments, that was all right with Ruiz-Sanchez. An
alien planet is not a good place to strip a man of his inner defenses.

"Come into the lab," he said. "You've got some inflammation in there."

Cleaver arose, a little unsteadily, and followed the Jesuit into the
laboratory. There Ruiz-Sanchez took smears from several of the ulcers
onto microscope slides, and Gram-stained them. He filled the time
consumed by the staining process with the ritual of aiming the
microscope's substage mirror out the window at a brilliant white cloud.
When the timer's alarm went off, he rinsed and flame-dried the first
slide and slipped it under the clips.

As he had half-feared, he saw few of the mixed bacilli and spirochetes
which would have indicated a case of ordinary, Earthly, Vincent's
angina--"trench mouth," which the clinical picture certainly suggested,
and which he could have cured overnight with a spectrosigmin pastille.
Cleaver's oral flora were normal, though on the increase because of all
the exposed tissue.

"I'm going to give you a shot," Ruiz-Sanchez said gently. "And then I
think you'd better go to bed."

"The hell with that," Cleaver said. "I've got nine times as much work to
do as I can hope to clean up now, without any additional handicaps."

"Illness is never convenient," Ruiz-Sanchez agreed. "But why worry about
losing a day or so, since you're in over your head anyhow?"

"What have I got?" Cleaver asked suspiciously.

"You haven't got anything," Ruiz-Sanchez said, almost regretfully. "That
is, you aren't infected. But your 'pineapple' did you a bad turn. Most
plants of that family on Lithia bear thorns or leaves coated with
polysaccharides that are poisonous to us. The particular glucoside you
ran up against today was evidently squill, or something closely related
to it. It produces symptoms like those of trench mouth, but a lot harder
to clear up."

"How long will that take?" Cleaver said. He was still balking, but he was
on the defensive now.

"Several days at least--until you've built up an immunity. The shot I'm
going to give you is a gamma globulin specific against squill, and it
ought to moderate the symptoms until you've developed a high antibody
titer of your own. But in the process you're going to run quite a fever,
Paul; and I'll have to keep you well stuffed with antipyretics, because
even a little fever is dangerous in this climate."

"I know it," Cleaver said, mollified. "The more I learn about this place,
the less disposed I am to vote 'aye' when the time comes. Well, bring on
your shot--and your aspirin. I suppose I ought to be glad it isn't a
bacterial infection, or the Snakes would be jabbing me full of
antibiotics."

"Small chance of that," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "I don't doubt that the
Lithians have at least a hundred different drugs we'll be able to use
eventually, but--there, that's all there is to it; you can relax now-but
we'll have to study their pharmacology from the ground up, first. All
right, Paul, hit the hammock. In about ten minutes you're going to be
wishing you'd been born dead, that I promise you;"

Cleaver grinned. His sweaty face under its thatch of dirty blond hair was
craggy and powerful even in illness. He stood up and deliberately rolled
down his sleeve.

"Not much doubt about how you'll vote, either," he said. "You like this
planet, don't you, Ramon? It's a biologist's paradise, as far as I can
see."

"I do like it," the priest said, smiling back. He followed Cleaver into
the small room which served them both as sleeping quarters. Except for
the window, it strongly resembled the inside of a jug. The walls were
curving and continuous, and were made of some ceramic material which
never beaded or felt wet, but never seemed to be quite dry, either. The
hammocks were slung from hooks which projected smoothly from the walls,
as though they had been baked from clay along with the rest of the house.
"I wish my colleague Dr. Meid were able to see it. She would be even more
delighted with it than I am."

"I don't hold with women in the sciences," Cleaver said, with abstract,
irrelevant irritation. "Get their emotions all mixed up with their
hypotheses. Meid-what kind of name is that, anyhow?"

"Japanese," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Her first name is Liu-the family follows
the Western custom of putting the family name last."

"Oh," Cleaver said, losing interest. "We were talking about Lithia."

"Well, don't forget that Lithia is my first extrasolar planet,"
Ruiz-Sanchez said. "I think I'd find any new, habitable world
fascinating. The infinite mutability of life forms, and the cunning
inherent in each of them... It's all amazing, and quite delightful."

"Why shouldn't that be sufficient?" Cleaver said. "Why do you have to
have the God bit too? It doesn't make sense."

"On the contrary, it's what gives everything else meaning,"

Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Belief and science aren't mutually exclusive--quite
the contrary. But if you place scientific standards first, and exclude
belief, admit nothing that's not proven, then what you have is a series
of empty gestures. For me, biology is an act of religion, because I know
that all creatures are God's--each new planet, with all its
manifestations, is an affirmation of God's power."

"A dedicated man," Cleaver said. "All right. So am I. To the greater
glory of man, that's what I say."

He sprawled heavily in his hammock. After a decent interval, Ruiz-Sanchez
took the liberty of heaving up after him the foot he seemed to have
forgotten. Cleaver didn't notice. The reaction was setting in.

"Exactly so," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "But that's only half the story. The
other half reads, '...and to the greater glory of God.'"

"Read me no tracts, Father," Cleaver said. Then: "I didn't mean that. I'm
sorry... But for a physicist, this place is hell... You'd better get me
that aspirin. I'm cold."

"Surely, Paul."

Ruiz-Sanchez went quickly back into the lab, made up a
salicylate-barbiturate paste in one of the Lithians' superb mortars, and
pressed it into a set of pills. (Storing such pills was impossible in
Lithia's humid atmosphere; they were too hygroscopic.) He wished he
could stamp each pill "Bayer" before it set--if Cleaver's personal
cure-all was aspirin, it would have been just as well to let him think he
was taking aspirin--but of course he had no dies for the purpose. He took
two of the pills back to Cleaver, with a mug and a carafe of
Berkefeld-filtered water.

The big man was already asleep; Ruiz-Sanchez woke him, more or less.

Cleaver would sleep longer, and awaken farther along the road to
recovery, for having been done that small unkindness now. As it was, he
hardly noticed when the pills were put down him, and soon resumed his
heavy, troubled breathing.

That done, Ruiz-Sanchez returned to the front room of the house, sat
down, and began to inspect the jungle suit The tear which the plant spine
had made was not difficult to find, and would be easy to repair. It would
be much harder to repair Cleaver's notion that the defenses of Earthmen
on Lithia were invulnerable, and that plant-spines could be blundered
against with impunity. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered whether either of the other
two members of the Lithian Review Commission still shared that notion.

Cleaver had called the thing which had brought him low a "pineapple." Any
biologist could have told Cleaver that even on Earth the pineapple is a
prolific and dangerous weed, edible only by a happy and irrelevant
accident. In Hawaii, as Ruiz-Sanchez remembered, the tropical forest was
quite impassable to anyone not wearing heavy boots and tough trousers.
Even inside the Dole plantations, the close-packed irrepressible
pineapples could tear unprotected legs to ribbons.

The Jesuit turned the suit over. The zipper that Cleaver had jammed, was
made of a plastic into the molecule of which bad been incorporated
radicals from various terrestrial radio-frequency induction, he felt more
in the dark than ever.

They had a completely marvelous radio network, which among other things
provided a "live" navigational grid for the whole planet, zeroed on (and
here perhaps was the epitome of the Lithian genius for paradox) a tree.
Yet they had never produced a standardized vacuum tube, and their atomic
theory was not much more sophisticated than Democritus' had been!

These paradoxes, of course, could be explained in part by the things that
Lithia lacked. Like any large rotating mass, Lithia had a magnetic field
of its own, but a planet which almost entirely lacks iron provides its
people with no easy way. to discover magnetism. Radioactivity had been
entirely unknown on the surface of Lithia, at least until the Earthmen
had arrived, which explained the hazy atomic theory. Like the Greeks, the
Lithians had discovered that friction between silk and glass produces one
kind of energy or charge, and between silk and amber another; they had
gone on from there to van de Graaf generators, electrochemistry, and the
static jet--but without suitable metals they were unable to make
heavy-duty batteries, or to do more than begin to study electricity in
motion.

In the fields where they had been given fair clues, they had made
enormous progress. Despite the constant cloudiness and endemic drizzle,
their descriptive astronomy was excellent, thanks to the fortunate
presence of a small moon which had drawn their attention outward early.
This in turn made for basic advances in optics, and thence for a
downright staggering versatility in the working of glass. Their chemistry
took full advantage of both the seas and the jungles. From the one they
took such vital and diversified products as agar, iodine, salt, trace
metals, and foods of many kinds. The other provided nearly everything
else that they needed: resins, rubbers, woods of all degrees of hardness,
edible and essential oils, vegetable "butters," rope and other fibers,
fruits and nuts, tannins, dyes, drugs, cork, paper. Indeed, the sole
forest product which they did not take was game, and the reason for this
neglect was hard to find. It seemed to the Jesuit to be religious--yet the
Lithians had no religion, and they certainly ate many of the creatures of
the sea without qualms of conscience.

He dropped the jungle suit into his lap with a sigh, though the popcorned
tooth still was not completely trimmed hack into shape. Outside, in the
humid darkness, Lithia was in full concert. It was a vital, somehow
fresh, new-sounding drone, covering most of the sound spectrum audible to
an Earthman. It came from the myriad insects of Lithia. Many of these had
wiry, trilling songs, almost like birds, in addition to the scrapes and
chirrups and wing-case buzzes of the insects of Earth. In a way this was
lucky, for there were no birds on Lithia. Had Eden sounded like that,
before evil had come into the world? Ruiz-Sanchez wondered. Certainly his
native Peru sang no such song...

Qualms of conscience--these were, in the long run, his essential business,
rather than the taxonomical mazes of biology, which had already become
tangled into near-hopelessness on Earth before space flight had come
along to add whole new layers of labyrinths for each planet, new
dimensions of labyrinths for each star. It was only interesting that the
Lithians were bipedal, evolved from reptiles, with marsupial-like pouches
and pteropsid circulatory systems. But it was vital that they had qualms
of conscience--if they did.

The calendar caught his eye. It was an "art" calendar Cleaver had
produced from his luggage back in the beginning; the girl on it was now
unintentionally modest beneath large patches of brilliant orange mold.
The date was April 19, 2049. Almost Easter--the most pointed of reminders
that to the inner life, the body was only a garment. To Ruiz-Sanchez
personally, however, the year date was almost equally significant, for
2050 was to be a Holy Year.

The Church had returned to the ancient custom, first recognized
officially in 1300 by Boniface VIII, of proclaiming the great pardon only
once every half-century. If Ruiz-Sanchez was not in Rome next year when
the Holy Door was opened, it would never be opened again in his lifetime.

Hurry, hurry! some personal demon whispered inside his brain. Or was it
the voice of his own conscience? Were his sins already so
burdensome--unknown to himself--as to put him in mortal need of the
pilgrimage? Or was that, in turn, only a minor temptation, to the sin of
pride?

In any event, the work could not be hurried. He and the other three men
were on Lithia to decide whether or not the planet would be suitable as a
port of call for Earth, without risk of damage either to Earthmen or to
Lithians. The other three men on the commission were primarily
scientists, as was Ruiz-Sanchez; but he knew that his own recommendation
would in the long run depend upon conscience, not upon taxonomy.

And conscience, like creation, cannot be hurried. It cannot even be
scheduled.

He looked down at the still-imperfect jungle suit with a troubled face
until he heard Cleaver moan. Then he arose and left the room to the
softly hissing flames.

From the oval front window of the house to which Qeaver and Ruiz-Sanchez
had been assigned, the land slanted away with insidious gentleness toward
the ill-defined south edge of Lower Bay, a part of the Gulf of Sfath.
Most of the area was salt marsh, as was the seaside nearly everywhere on
Lithia. When the tide was in, the flats were covered to a depth of a yard
or so almost half the way to the house. When it was out, as it was
tonight, the jungle symphony was augmented by the agonized barking of a
species of lungfish, sometimes as many as a score of them at once.
Occasionally, when the small moon was unoccluded and the light from the
city was unusually bright, one could see the leaping shadow of some
amphibian, or the sinuously advancing sigmoid track of the Lithian
crocodile, in pursuit of some prey faster than itself but which it would
nonetheless capture in its own geological good time.

Still farther--and usually invisible even in daytime because of the
pervasive mists--was the opposite shore of Lower Bay, beginning with tidal
flats again, and then more jungle, which ran unbroken thereafter for
hundreds of miles north to the equatorial sea.

Behind the house, visible from the sleeping room, was the rest of the
city, Xoredeshch Sfath, capital of the great southern continent. As was
the case in all the cities the Lithians built, its most striking
characteristic to an Earthman was that it hardly seemed to be there at
all. The Lithian houses were low, and made of the earth which had been
dug from their foundations, so that they tended to fade into the soil
even to a trained observer.

Most of the older buildings were rectangular, put together without mortar
or rammed-earth blocks. Over the course of decades the blocks continued
to pack and settle themselves until it became easier to abandon an
unwanted building than to tear it down. One of the first setbacks the
Earthmen had suffered on Lithia had come about through Agronski's
ill-advised offer to raze one such structure with TDX; this was a
gravity-polarized explosive, unknown to the Lithians, which had the
property of exploding in a flat plane which could cut through steel
girders as if they were cheese. The warehouse in question, however, was
large, thick-walled, and three Lithian centuries old--312 years by Earth
time. The explosion created an uproar which greatly distressed the
Lithians, but when it was over, the storehouse still stood, unshaken.

Newer structures were more conspicuous when the sun was out, for just
during the past half-century the Lithians had begun to apply their
enormous knowledge of ceramics to house construction. The new houses
assumed thousands of fantastic, quasi-biological shapes, not quite
amorphous but not quite resembling any form in experience, either; they
looked a little like the dream constructions once made by an Earth
painter named Dali out of such materials as boiled beans. Each one was
unique and to the choice of its owner, yet all markedly shared the
character of the community and the earth from which they sprang. These
houses, too, would have blended well with the background of soil and
jungle, except that most of them were glazed and so shone blindingly for
brief moments on sunny days, when the light and the angle of observation
were just right. These shifting coruscations, seen from the air, had been
the Earthmen's first clue as to where the intelligent life was hiding in
the ubiquitous Lithian jungle. (There had never been any doubt that there
was intelligent life there; the tremendous radio pulses emanating from
the planet had made that much plain from afar.)

Ruiz-Sanchez looked out through the sleeping-room window at the city, for
at least the ten thousandth time, on his way to Cleaver's hammock.
Xoredeshch Sfath was alive to him; it never looked the same twice. He
found it singularly beautiful. And singularly strange: though the cities
of Earth were very various, none was like this.

He checked Cleaver's pulse and respiration. Both were fast, even for
Lithia, where a high partial pressure of carbon dioxide raised the pH of
the blood of Earthmen and stimulated the breathing reflex. The priest
judged, however, that Cleaver was in little danger as long as his actual
oxygen utilization was not increased. At the moment he was certainly
sleeping deeply--if not very restfully--and it would do no harm to leave
him alone for a little while.

Of course, if a wild allosaur blundered into the city. . . . But that was
just about as likely as the blundering of an untended elephant into the
heart of New Delhi. It could happen, but it almost never did. And no
other dangerous Lithian animal could break into the house if it was
closed. Even the rats--of the abundant monotreme creatures which were
Lithia's equivalent--found it impossible to infest a pottery house.

Ruiz-Sanchez changed the carafe of fresh water in the niche beside the
hammock, went into the hall, and donned boots, mackintosh and waterproof
hat. The night sounds of Lithia burst in upon him as he opened the stone
door, along with a gust of sea air bearing the characteristic halogen
odor always called "salty." There was a thin drizzle falling, making
halos around the lights of Xoredeshch Sfath. Far out, on the water,
another light moved. That was probably the coastal side-wheeler to
Yllith, the enormous island which stood a-thwart the Upper Bay, barring
the Gulf of Sfath as a whole from the equatorial sea.

Outside, Ruiz-Sanchez turned the wheel which extended bolts on every
margin of the door. Drawing from his mackintosh a piece of soft chalk, he
marked on the sheltered tablet designed for such uses the Lithian symbols
which meant "Illness is here." That would be sufficient. Anybody who
chose to could open the door simply by turning the wheel-the Lithians had
never heard of locks-but the Lithians, too, were overridingly social
beings, who respected their own conventions as they respected natural
law.

That done, Ruiz-Sanchez set out for the center of the city and the
Message Tree. The asphalt streets shone in the yellow lights cast from
windows, and in the white light of the mantled, wide-spaced street
lanterns. Occasionally he passed the twelve-foot, kangaroo-like shape of
a Lithian, and the two exchanged glances of frank curiosity, but there
were not many Lithians abroad now. They kept to their houses at night,
doing Ruiz-Sanchez knew not what. He could see them frequently, alone or
by twos or threes, moving behind the oval windows of the houses he
passed. Sometimes they seemed to be talking.

What about?

It was a nice question. The Lithians had no crime, no newspapers, no
house-to-house communications systems, no arts that could be
differentiated clearly from their crafts, no political parties, no public
amusements, no nations, no games, no religions, no sports, no cults, no
celebrations. Surely they didn't spend every waking minute of their lives
exchanging knowledge, making things go, discussing philosophy or history,
or planning for tomorrow! Or did they? Perhaps, Ruiz-Sanchez thought
suddenly, they simply went inert once they were inside their jugs, like
so many pickles! But even as the thought came, the priest passed another
house, and saw their silhouettes moving to and fro...

A puff of wind scattered cool droplets in his face. Automatically, he
quickened his step. If the night were to turn out to be especially windy,
there would doubtless be many voices coming and going in the Message
Tree. It loomed ahead of him now, a sequoialike giant, standing at the
mouth of the valley of the River Sfath-the valley which led in great
serpentine folds into the heart of the continent, where Gleshchtehk
Sfath, or Blood Lake in English, poured out its massive torrents.

As the winds came and went along the valley, the tree nodded and
swayed-only a little, but that little was enough. With every movement,
the tree's root system, which underlay the entire city, tugged and
distorted the buried crystalline cliff upon which the city had been
founded, as long ago in Lithian pre-history as was the founding of Rome
on Earth. At every such pressure, the buried cliff responded with a vast
heart-pulse of radio waves-a pulse detectable not only all over Lithia,
but far out in space as well. The four Commission members had heard those
pulses first on shipboard, when Alpha Arietis, Lithia's sun, was still
only a point of light ahead of them, and had looked into each other's
faces with eyes gleaming with conjecture.

The bursts, however, were sheer noise. How the Lithians modulated them to
carry information-not only messages, but the amazing navigational grid,
the planet-wide time-signal system, and much more-was something as remote
from Ruiz-Sanchez' understanding as affine theory, although Cleaver said
it was all perfectly simple once you understood it. It had something to
do with semi-conduction and solid-state physics, which (again according
to Cleaver) the Lithians understood better than any Earthman.

A free-association jump which startled him momentarily reminded him of
the current doyen of Earthly affine theory, a man who signed his papers
"H. O. Petard," though his real (if scarcely more likely) name was Lucien
le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne. Nor was the association as free as it
appeared on the surface, Ruiz-Sanchez realized, for the count was a
striking example of the now almost total alienation of modern physics
from the common physical experiences of mankind. His title was not a
patent of nobility, but merely a part of his name which had been
maintained in his family long after the political system which had
granted the patent had vanished away, a victim of the dividing up of
Earth under the Shelter economy. There was more honor appertaining to the
name itself than to the title, for the count had pretensions to
hereditary grandeur which reached all the way back into
thirteenth-century England, to the author of Lucien Wycham His Boke of
Magick.

A high ecclesiastic heritage to be sure, but the latter-day Lucien, a
lapsed Catholic, was a political figure, insofar as the Shelter economy
sheltered any such thing: he carried the additional title of Procurator
of Canarsie-a title which a moment's examination would also show to be
nonsense, but which paid a small honorarium in exemptions from weekly
labor. The subdivided and deeply buried world of Earth was full of such
labels, all of them pasted on top of large sums of money which had no
place to go now that speculation was dead and shareholding had become the
only way by which an ordinary citizen could exercise any control over the
keeps in which he lived. The remaining fortune-holders had no outlet left
but that of conspicuous consumption, on a scale which would have made
Veblen doubt that there had ever been such a thing in the world before.
Had they attempted to assert any control over the economy they would have
been toppled, if not by the shareholders, then by the grim defenders of
the by now indefensible Shelter cities.

Not that the count was a drone. At last reports, he had been involved in
some highly esoteric tampering with the Haertel equations-that
description of the space-time continuum which, by swallowing up the
Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction exactly as Einstein had swallowed Newton
(that is, alive) had made interstellar flight possible. Ruiz-Sanchez did
not understand a word of it, but, he reflected with amusement, it was
doubtless perfectly simple once you understood it.

Almost all knowledge, after all, fell into that category. It was either
perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into
fiction. As a Jesuit-even here, fifty light-years from Rome-Ruiz-Sanchez
knew something about knowledge that Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne
had forgotten, and that Cleaver would never learn: that all knowledge
goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and
the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the
making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless
series of theoretical catastrophes.

The residuum was faith.

The high, sharply vaulted chamber, like an egg stood on its large end,
which had been burned out in the base of the Message Tree, was droning
with life as Ruiz-Sanchez entered it. It would have been difficult to
imagine anything less like an Earthly telegraph office or other message
center, however.

Around the circumference of the lower end of the egg there was a
continual whirling of tall figures, Lithians, entering and leaving
through the many doorless entrances, and changing places in the swirl of
movement like so many electrons passing from orbit to orbit. Despite
their numbers, their voices were pitched so low that Ruiz-Sanchez could
hear, blended in with their murmuring, the soughing of the wind through
the enormous branches far above.

The inner side of this band of moving figures was bounded by a high
railing of black, polished wood, evidently cut from the phloem of the
Tree itself. On the other side of this token division, which reminded
Ruiz-Sanchez irresistibly of the Encke division in the Saturnian rings, a
thin circlet of Lithians took and passed out messages steadily and
without a moment's break, handling the total load faultlessly-if one were
to judge by the way the outer band was kept in motion-and without
apparent effort, by memory alone. Occasionally one of these specialists
would leave the circlet and go to one of the desks which were scattered
over most of the rest of the sloping floor, increasingly thinly, like a
Crape ring, to confer there with the desk's occupant. Then he went back
to the black rail, or sometimes he took the desk, and its previous
occupant went to the rail.

The bowl deepened, the desks thinned, and at the very center stood a
single, aged Lithian, his hands clapped to the ear whorls behind his
heavy jaws, his eyes covered by their nictitating membranes, only his
nasal fossae and heat-receptive post-nasal pits uncovered. He spoke to no
one, and no one consulted him-but the absolute stasis in which he stood
was obviously the reason, the sole reason, for the torrents and
counter-torrents of people which poured along the outermost ring.
Ruiz-Sanchez stopped, astonished. He had never been to the Message Tree
himself before-communicating with Michelis and Agronski, the other two
Earthmen on Lithia, had until now been one of Cleaver's tasks-and the
priest found that he had no idea what to do. The scene before him was
more suggestive of a bourse than of a message center in any ordinary
sense. It seemed unlikely that so many Lithians could have urgent
personal messages to send each time the winds were active; yet it seemed
equally uncharacteristic that the Lithians, with their stable,
abundance-based economy, should have any equivalent for stock or
commodity brokerage.

There seemed to be no choice, however, but to plunge in, try to reach the
polished black rail, and ask one of the Lithians who stood on the other
side to try to raise Agronski or Michelis again. At worst, he supposed,
he could only be refused, or fail to get a hearing at all. He took a deep
breath.

Simultaneously his left arm was caught in a firm four-fingered grip which
ran all the way from his elbow to his shoulder. Letting the stored breath
out again in a snort of surprise, the priest looked around and up at the
solicitously bent head of a Lithian. Under the long, trap-like mouth, the
being's wattles were a delicate, curious aquamarine, in contrast to its
vestigial comb, which was a permanent and silvery sapphire, shot through
with veins of fuchsia.

"You are Ruiz-Sanchez," the Lithian said in his own language.

The priest's name, unlike those of the other Earthmen, fell easily in
that tongue: "I know you by your robe."

That was pure accident. Any Earthman out in the rain in a mackintosh
would have been identified as Ruiz-Sanchez, because the priest was the
only Earthman who seemed to the Lithians to wear the same garment indoors
and out.

"I am," Ruiz-Sanchez said, a little apprehensively.

"I am Chtexa, the metallurgist, who consulted with you earlier on
problems of chemistry and medicine and your mission here, and some other
smaller matters."

"Oh. Yes, of course; I should have remembered your comb."

"You do me honor. We have not seen you here before. Do you wish to talk
with the Tree?"

"I do," Ruiz-Sanchez said gratefully. "It is true that I am new here. Can
you explain to me what to do?"

"Yes, but not to any profit," Chtexa said, tilting his head so that his
completely inky pupils shone down into Ruiz-Sanchez' eyes. "One must have
observed the ritual, which is very complex, until it is habit. We have
grown up with it, but I think you lack the coordination to follow it on
the first attempt. If I may bear your message instead-"

"I would be most indebted. It is for our colleagues Agronski and
Michelis; they are at Xoredeshch Gton on the northeast continent, at
about thirty-two degrees east, thirty-two degrees north-"

"Yes, the second bench mark at the outlet of the Lesser Lakes; that is
the city of the potters, I know it well. And you would say?"

"That they are to join us now, here, at Xoredeshch Sfath. And that our
time on Lithia is almost up."

"That me regards," Chtexa said. "But I will bear it."

The Lithian leapt into the whirling cloud, and Ruiz-Sanchez was left
behind, considering again his thankfulness that he had been moved to
study the painfully difficult Lithian language. Two of the four
commission members had shown a regrettable lack of interest in that
world-wide tongue: "Let 'em learn English" had been Cleaver's unknowingly
classic formulation. Ruiz-Sanchez had been all the less likely to view
this notion sympathetically for the facts that his own native language
was Spanish, and that, of the five foreign languages in which he was
really fluent, the one he liked best was West High German.

Agronski had taken a slightly more sophisticated stand. It was not, he
said, that Lithian was too difficult to pronounce-certainly it wasn't
any harder on the soft palate than Arabic or Russian-but, after all,
"it's hopeless to attempt to grasp the concepts that lie behind a really
alien language, isn't it? At least in the time we have to spend here?"

To both views, Michelis had said nothing; he had simply set out to learn
to read the language first, and if he found his way from there into
speaking it, he would not be surprised and neither would his confreres.
That was Michelis' way of doing things, thorough and untheoretical at the
same time. As for the other two approaches, Ruiz-Sanchez thought
privately that it was close to criminal to allow any contact man for a
new planet ever to leave Earth with such parochial notions. In
understanding a new culture, language is of the essence; if one doesn't
start there, where under God does one start?

Of Cleaver's penchant for referring to the Lithians themselves as "the
Snakes," Ruiz-Sanchez' opinion was of a color admissible only to his
remote confessor.

And in view of what lay before him now in this egg-shaped hollow, what
was Ruiz-Sanchez to think of Cleaver's conduct as communications officer
for the commission? Surely he could never have transmitted or received a
single message through the Tree, as he had claimed to have done. Probably
he had never been closer to the Tree than Ruiz-Sanchez was now.

Of course, it went without saying that he had been in contact with
Agronski and Michelis by some method, but that method had evidently been
something private-a transmitter concealed in his luggage, or... No, that
wouldn't do. Physicist though he most definitely was not, Ruiz-Sanchez
rejected that solution on the spot; he had some idea of the practical
difficulties of operating a ham radio on a world like Lithia, swamped as
that world was on all wave-lengths by the tremendous pulses which the
Tree wrung from the buried crystalline cliff. The problem was beginning
to make him feel decidedly uncomfortable.

Then Chtexa was back, recognizable not so much by any physical detail-for
his wattles were now the same ambiguous royal purple as those of most of
the other Lithians in the crowd-as by the fact that he was bearing down
upon the Earthman.

"I have sent your message," he said at once. "It is recorded at Xoredeshch
Gton. But the other Earthmen are not there. They have not been in the city
for some days."

That was impossible. Cleaver had said he had spoken to Michelis only a
day ago. "Are you sure?" Ruiz-Sanchez said cautiously.

"It admits of no uncertainty. The house which we gave them stands empty.
The many things which they brought with them to the house are gone." The
tall shape raised its four-fingered hands in a gesture which might have
been solicitous. "I think this is an ill word. I dislike to bring it you.
The words you brought me when first we met were full of good."

"Thank you. Don't worry," Ruiz-Sanchez said distractedly. "No man could
hold the bearer responsible for the word, surely."

"The bearer also has responsibilities; at least, that is our custom,"
Chtexa said. "No act is wholly free. And as we see it, you have lost by
our exchange. Your words on iron have been shown to contain great good. I
would take pleasure in showing you how we have used them, especially
since I have brought you in return an ill message. If you could share my
house tonight, without prejudice to your work, I could expose this
matter. Is that possible?"

Sternly Ruiz-Sanchez stifled his sudden excitement. Here was the first
chance, at long last, to see something of the private life of Lithia, and
through that, perhaps, to gain some inkling of the moral life, the role
in which God had cast the Lithians in the ancient drama of good and evil,
in the past and in the times to come. Until that was known, the Lithians
in their Eden might be only spuriously good: all reason, all organic
thinking machines, ULTIMACs with tails-and without souls.

But there remained the hard fact that he had left behind in his house a
sick man. There was not much chance that Cleaver would awaken before
morning. He had been given nearly fifteen milligrams of sedative per
kilogram of body weight. But sick men are like children, whose schedules
persistently defy all rules. If Cleaver's burly frame should somehow
throw that dose off, driven perhaps by some anaphylactic crisis
impossible to rule out this early in his illness, he would need prompt
attention. At the very least, he would want badly for the sound of a
human voice on this planet which he hated, and which had struck him down
almost without noticing that he existed.

Still, the danger to Cleaver was not great. He most certainly did not
require a minute-by-minute vigil; he was, after all, not a child, but an
almost ostentatiously strong man.

And there was such a thing as an excess of devotion, a form of pride
among the pious which the Church had long found peculiarly difficult to
make clear to them. At its worst, it produced the hospital saints, whose
attraction to noisome-ness so peculiarly resembled the vermin-worship of
the Hindi sects-or a St. Simon Stylites, who though undoubtedly
acceptable to God had been for centuries very bad public relations for
the Church. And had Cleaver really earned the kind of devotion
Ruiz-Sanchez had been proposing, up to now, to tender him as a creature
of God-or, to come closer to the mark, a godly creature?

And with a whole planet at stake, a whole people-no, more than that, a
whole problem in theology, an imminent solution to the vast, tragic
riddle of original sin. ... What a gift to bring to the Holy Father in a
jubilee year-a grander and more solemn thing than the proclamation of the
conquest of Everest had been at the coronation of Elizabeth II of
England! Always providing, of course, that this would be the ultimate
outcome of the study of Lithia. The planet was not lacking in hints that
something quite different, and fearful beyond all else, might emerge
under Ruiz-Sanchez' prolonged attention. Not even prayer had yet resolved
that doubt. But should he sacrifice even the possibility of this, for
Cleaver?

A lifetime of meditation over just such cases of conscience had made
Ruiz-Sanchez, like most other gifted members of his order, quick to find
his way to a decision through all but the most complicated of ethical
labyrinths. All Catholics must be devout; but a Jesuit must be, in
addition, agile.

"Thank you," he said to Chtexa, a little shakily. "I will share your
house very gladly."

(A voice): "Cleaver? Cleaver! Wake up, you big slob. Cleaver! Where the
hell have you been?"

Cleaver groaned and tried to turn over. At his first motion, the world
began to rock, gently, sickeningly. He was awash in fever. His mouth,
seemed to be filled with burning pitch.

"Cleaver, turn out. It's me-Agronski. Where's the Father? What's wrong?
Why didn't we ever hear from you? Look out, you'll-"

The warning came too late, and Cleaver could not have understood it
anyhow. He had been profoundly asleep, and had no notion of his situation
in space or time. At his convulsive twist away from the nagging voice,
the hammock rotated on its hooks and dumped him.

He struck the floor stunningly, taking the main blow across his right
shoulder, though he hardly felt it yet. His feet, not yet part of him at
all, still remained far aloft, twisted in the hammock webbing.

"What the hell-"

There was a brief chain of footsteps, like chestnuts dropping on a
roof, and then a hollow noise of something hitting the floor near his
head.

"Cleaver, are you sick? Here, lie still a minute and let me get your feet
free. Mike-Mike, can't you turn the gas up in this jug? Something's wrong
back here."

After a moment, yellow light began to pour from the glistening walls, and
then the white glare of the mantles. Cleaver dragged an arm across his
eyes, but it did him no good; it tired too quickly. Agronski's mild face,
plump and anxious, floated directly above him like a captive balloon. He
could not see Michelis anywhere, and at the moment he was just as glad he
couldn't. Agronski's presence was hard enough to understand.

"How... the hell..." he said. At the words, his lips split painfully at
both corners. He realized for the first time that they had become gummed
together, somehow, while he was asleep. He had no idea how long he had
been out of the picture.

Agronski seemed to understand the aborted question. "We came in from the
Lakes in the 'copter," he said. "We didn't like the silence down here,
and we figured we'd better come in under our own power, instead of
registering in on the regular jet liner and tipping the Lithians off-just
in case there'd been any dirty work afloat-"

"Stop jawing him," Michelis said, appearing suddenly, magically in the
doorway. "He's got a bug, that's obvious. I don't like to feel pleased
about misery, but I'm glad it's that instead of the Lithians."

The rangy, long-jawed chemist helped Agronski lift Cleaver to his feet.
Tentatively, despite the pain, Cleaver got his mouth open again. Nothing
came out but a hoarse croak.

"Shut up," Michelis said, not unkindly. "Let's get him back into the
hammock. Where's the Father, I wonder? He's the only one capable of
dealing with sickness here."

"I'll bet he's dead," Agronski burst out suddenly, his face glistening
with alarm. "He'd be here if he could. It must be catching, Mike."

"I didn't bring my mitt," Michelis said drily. "Cleaver, lie still or
I'll have to clobber you. Agronski, you seem to have dumped his water
bottle; better go get him some more, he needs it. And see if the Father
left anything in the lab that looks like medicine."

Agronski went out, and, maddeningly, so did Michelis- at least out of
Cleaver's field of vision. Setting his every muscle against the pain,
Cleaver pulled his lips apart once more.

"Mike."

Instantly, Michelis was there. He had a pad of cotton between thumb and
forefinger, wet with some solution, with which he gently cleaned
Cleaver's lips and chin.

"Easy. Agronski's getting you a drink. We'll let you talk in a little
while, Paul. Don't rush it."

Cleaver relaxed a little. He could trust Michelis. Nevertheless, the
vivid and absurd insult of having to be swabbed like a baby was more than
he could bear; he felt tears of helpless rage swelling on either side of
his nose. With two deft, non-committal swipes, Michelis removed them.

Agronski came back, holding out one hand tentatively, palm up.

"I found these," he said. "There's more in the lab, and the Father's pill
press is still out. So are his mortar and pestle, though they've been
cleaned."

"All right, let's have 'em," Michelis said. "Anything else?"

"No. Well, there's a syringe cooking in the sterilizer, if that means
anything."

Michelis swore briefly and to the point.

"It means that there's a pertinent antitoxin in the shop someplace," he
added. "But unless Ramon left notes, we'll not have a prayer of figuring
out which one it is."

As he spoke, he lifted Cleaver's head and tipped the pills into his
mouth, onto his tongue. The water which followed was cold at the first
contact, but a split second later it was liquid fire. Cleaver choked, and
at that precise instant Michelis pinched his nostrils shut. The pills
went down with a gulp.

"There's no sign of the Father?" Michelis said.

"Not a one, Mike. Everything's in good order, and his gear's still here.
Both jungle suits are in the locker."

"Maybe he went visiting," Michelis said thoughtfully. "He must have
gotten to know quite a few of the Lithians by now. He liked them."

"With a sick man on his hands? That's not like him, Mike. Not unless
there was some kind of emergency. Or maybe he went on a routine errand,
expected to be back in just a few minutes, and-"

"And was set upon by trolls, for forgetting to stamp his foot three times
before crossing a bridge."

"All right, laugh."

"I'm not laughing, believe me. That's just the kind of damn fool thing
that can kill a man in a strange culture. But somehow I can't see it
happening to Ramon."

"Mike..."

Michelis took a step and looked down at Cleaver. His face was drifting as
if detached through a haze of tears. He said: "All right, Paul. Tell us
what it is. We're listening."

But it was too late. The doubled sedative dose had gotten to Cleaver
first. He could only shake his head, and with the motion Michelis seemed
to go reeling away into a whirlpool of fuzzy rainbows.

Curiously, he did not quite go to sleep. He had had nearly a normal
night's sleep, and he had started out his enormously long day a powerful
and healthy man. The conversation of the two commissioners, and an
obsessive consciousness of his need to speak to them before Ruiz-Sanchez
returned, helped to keep him, if not totally awake, at least not far
below a state of light trance. In addition, the presence in his system of
thirty grains of acetylsalicylic acid had seriously raised his oxygen
consumption, bringing with it not only dizziness but also a precarious,
emotionally untethered alertness. That the fuel which was being burned to
maintain it was in part the protein substrate of his own cells he did not
know, and it could not have alarmed him had he known it. The voices
continued to reach him, and to convey a little meaning. With them were
mixed fleeting, fragmentary dreams, so slightly removed from the surface
of his waking life as to seem peculiarly real, yet at the same time
peculiarly pointless and depressing. In the semiconscious intervals there
came plans, a whole succession of them, all simple and grandiose at once,
for taking command of the expedition, for communicating with the
authorities on Earth, for bringing forward secret papers proving that
Lithia was uninhabitable, for digging a tunnel under Mexico to Peru, for
detonating Lithia in one single mighty fusion of all its lightweight
atoms into one single atom of cleaverium, the element of which the
monobloc had been made, whose cardinal number was Aleph-Null...

AGRONSKI: Mike, come here and look at this; you read Lithian.

There's a mark on the front door, on the message tablet.

(Footsteps.)

MICHELIS: It says "Sickness inside." The strokes aren't casual or deft
enough to be the work of the natives. Ideograms are hard to write rapidly
without long practice. Ramon must have written it there.

AGRONSKI: I wish we knew where he went afterwards. Funny we didn't see it
when we came in.

MICHELIS: I don't think so. It was dark, and we weren't looking for it.

(Footsteps. Door shutting, not loudly. Footsteps. Hassock creaking.)

AGRONSKI: Well, we'd better start thinking about getting up a report.
Unless this damn twenty-hour day has me thrown completely off, our time's
just about up. Are you still set on opening up the planet?

MICHELIS: Yes. I've seen nothing to convince me that there's anything on
Lithia that's dangerous to us. Except maybe Cleaver in there, and I'm not
prepared to say that the Father would have left him if he were in any
serious danger. And I don't see how Earthmen could harm this society;
it's too stable emotionally, economically, in every other way.

(Danger, danger, said somebody in Cleaver's dream. It will explode. It's
all a popish plot. Then he was marginally awake again, and conscious
of how much his mouth hurt.)

AGRONSKI: Why do you suppose those two jokers never called us after we
went north?

MICHELIS: I don't have any answer. I won't even guess until I talk to
Ramon. Or until Paul's able to sit up and take notice.

AGRONSKI: I don't like it, Mike. It smells bad to me. This town's right
at the heart of the communications system of the planet-that's why we
picked it, for Crisake! And yet-no messages, Cleaver sick, the Father not
here... There's a hell of a lot we don't know about Lithia, that's for
damn sure.

MICHELIS: There's a hell of a lot we don't know about central Brazil-let
alone Mars, or the Moon.

AORONSKI: Nothing essential, Mike. What we know about the periphery of
Brazil gives us all the clues we need about the interior-even to those
fish that eat people, the what-are-they, the piranhas. That's not true on
Lithia. We don't know whether our peripheral clues about Lithia are
germane or just incidental. Something enormous could be hidden under the
surface without our being able to detect it.

MICHELIS: Agronski, stop sounding like a Sunday supplement. You
underestimate your own intelligence. What kind of enormous secret could
that be? That the Lithians eat people? That they're cattle for unknown
gods that live in the jungle? That they're actually mind-wrenching,
soul-twisting, heart-stopping, blood-freezing, bowel-moving superbeings
in disguise? The moment you state any such proposition, you'll deflate it
yourself; it's only in the abstract that it's able to scare you. I
wouldn't even take the trouble of examining it, or discussing how we
might meet it if it were true.

AORONSKI: All right, all right. I'll reserve judgment for the time being,
anyhow. If everything turns out to be all right here, with the Father and
Cleaver I mean, I'll probably go along with you. I don't have any reason
I could defend for voting against the planet, I admit that.

MICHELIS: Good for you. I'm sure Ramon is for opening it up, so that
should make it unanimous. I can't see why Cleaver would object.

(Cleaver was testifying before a packed court convened in the UN General
Assembly chambers in New York, with one finger pointed dramatically, but
less in triumph than in sorrow, at Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, S. J. At the sound
of his name the dream collapsed, and he realized that the room had grown
a little lighter. Dawn-or the dripping, wool-gray travesty of it which
prevailed on Lithia-was on its way. He wondered what he had just said to
the court. It had been conclusive, damning, good enough to be used when
he awoke; but he could not remember a word of it. All that remained of it
was a sensation, almost the taste of the words, but nothing of their
substance.)

AGRONSKI: It's getting light. I suppose we'd better knock off.

MICHELIS: Did you stake down the 'copter? The winds down here are higher
than they are up north, I seem to remember.

AGRONSKI: Yes. And covered it with the tarp. Nothing left to do now but
sling our hammocks-

(A sound)

MICHELIS: Shhh. What's that?

AGRONSKI: Eh?

MICHELIS: Listen.

(Footsteps. Faint ones, but Cleaver knew them. He forced his eyes to open
a little, but there was nothing to see but the ceiling. Its even color,
and its smooth, ever-changing slope into a dome of nowhereness, drew him
almost immediately upward into the mists of trance once more.)

AGRONSKI: Somebody's coming.

(Footsteps.)

AGRONSKI: It's the Father, Mike-look out here and you can see him. He
seems to be all right. Dragging his feet a bit, but who wouldn't after
being out helling all night?

MICHELIS: Maybe you'd better meet him at the door. It'd probably be
better than our springing out at him after he gets inside. After all he
doesn't expect us. I'll get to unpacking the hammocks.

AGRONSKI: Sure thing, Mike.

(Footsteps, going away from Cleaver. A grating sound of stone on stone:
the door wheel being turned.)

AGRONSKI: Welcome home, Father! We just got in a little while ago and-My
God, what's wrong? Are you ill too? Is there something that-Mike! Mike!

(Somebody was running. Cleaver willed his neck muscles to lift his head,
but they refused to obey. Instead, the back of his head seemed to force
itself deeper into the stiff pillow of the hammock. After a momentary and
endless agony, he cried out)

CLEAVER: Mike!

AGRONSKI: Mike!

(With a gasp, Cleaver lost the long battle at last. He was asleep.)

IV

As the door of Chtexa's house closed behind him, Ruiz-Sanchez looked
about the gently glowing foyer with a feeling of almost unbearable
anticipation, although he could hardly have said what it was that he
hoped to see. Actually, it looked exactly like his own quarters, which
was all he could in justice have expected-all the furniture at "home" Was
Lithian, except of course for the lab equipment and a few other
terrestrial trappings.

"We have cut up several of the metal meteors from our museums, and
hammered them as you suggested," Chtexa was saying behind him, while he
struggled out of his raincoat and boots. "They show very definite, very
strong magnetism, as you predicted. We now have the whole of our world
alerted to pick up these nickel-iron meteorites and send them to our
electrical laboratory here, regardless of where they are found. The staff
of the observatory is attempting to predict possible falls. Unhappily,
meteors are rare here. Our astronomers say that we have never had a
'shower' such as you describe as frequent on your native planet."

"No; I should have thought of that," Ruiz-Sanchez said, following the
Lithian into the front room. This, too, was quite ordinary by Lithian
standards, and empty except for the two of them.

"Ah, that is interesting. Why?"

"Because in our system we have a sort of giant grinding-wheel-a whole
ring of little planets, many thousands of them, distributed around an
orbit where we had expected to find only one normal-sized world."

"Expected? By the harmonic rule?" Chtexa said, sitting down and pointing
out another hassock to his guest. "We have often wondered whether that
relationship was real."

"So have we. It broke down in this instance. Collisions between all those
small bodies are incessant, and our plague of meteors is the result."

"It is hard to understand how so unstable an arrangement could have come
about," Chtexa said. "Have you any explanation?"

"Not a good one," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Some of us think that there really
was a respectable planet in that orbit ages ago, which exploded somehow.
A similar accident happened to a satellite in our system, creating a
great flat ring of debris around its primary. Others think that at the
formation of our solar system the raw materials of what might have been a
planet just never succeeded in coalescing. Both ideas have many flaws,
but each satisfies certain objections to the other, so perhaps there is
some truth in both."

Chtexa's eyes filmed with the mildly disquieting "inner blink"
characteristic of Lithians at their most thoughtful.

"There would seem to be no way to test either answer," he said at length.

"By our logic, the lack of such tests makes the original question
meaningless."

"That rule of logic has many adherents on Earth. My colleague Dr. Cleaver
would certainly agree with it."

Ruiz-Sanchez smiled suddenly. He had labored long and hard to master the
Lithian language, and to have recognized and understood so completely
abstract a point as the one just made by Chtexa was a bigger victory than
any quantitative gains in vocabulary alone could have been.

"But I can see that you are going to have difficulties in collecting
these meteorites," he said. "Have you offered incentives?"

"Oh, certainly. Everyone understands the importance of the program. We
are all eager to advance it."

This was not quite what the priest had meant by his question. He searched
his memory for some Lithian equivalent for "reward," but found nothing
but the word he had already used, "incentive." He realized that he knew
no Lithian word for "greed," either. Evidently offering Lithians a
hundred dollars for every meteorite they found would simply baffle them.
He had to abandon that fact.

"Since the potential meteor fall is so small," he said instead, "you're
not likely to get anything like the supply of metal that you need for a
real study-no matter how thoroughly you co-operate on the search. A high
percentage of the finds will be stony rather than metallic, too. What you
need is another, supplementary iron-finding program."

"We know that," Chtexa said ruefully. "But we have been able to think of
none."

"If only you had some way of concentrating the traces of the metal you
actually have on the planet now... Our smelting methods would be useless
to you, since you have no ore beds. Hmm... Chtexa, what about the
iron-fixing bacteria?"

"Are there such?" Chtexa said, cocking his head dubiously.

"I don't know. Ask your bacteriologists. If you have any bacteria here
that belong to the genus we call Leptothrix, one of them should be an
iron-fixing species. In all the millions of years that this planet has
had life on it, that mutation must have occurred, and probably very
early."

"But why have we never seen it before? We have done perhaps more research
in bacteriology than we have in any other field."

"Because," Ruiz-Sanchez said earnestly, "you don't know what to look for,
and because such a species would be as rare on Lithia as iron itself. On
Earth, because we have iron in abundance, our Leptothrix ochracea has
found plenty of opportunity to grow. We find their fossil sheaths by
uncountable billions in our great ore beds. It used to be thought, as a
matter of fact, that the bacteria produced the ore beds, but I've always
doubted that. They get their energy by oxidizing ferrous iron into
ferric-but that's a change that can happen spontaneously if the
oxidation-reduction potential and the pH of the solution are right, and
both of those conditions can be affected by ordinary decay bacteria. On
our planet the bacteria grew in the ore beds because the iron was there,
not the other way around-but on Lithia the process will have to be worked
in reverse."

"We will start a soil-sampling program at once," Chtexa said, his wattles
flaring a subdued orchid. "Our antibiotics research centers screen soil
samples by the thousands each month, in search of new microflora of
therapeutic importance. If these iron-fixing bacteria exist, we are
certain to find them eventually."

"They must exist. Do you have a bacterium that is a sulphur-concentrating
obligate anaerobe?"

"Yes-yes, certainly!"

"There you are," the Jesuit said, leaning back contentedly and clasping
his hands across one knee. "You have plenty of sulphur, and so you have
the bacterium. Please let me know when you find the iron-fixing species.
I'd like to make a subculture and take it home with me when I leave.
There are two Earth scientists whose noses I'd like to rub in it."

The Lithian stiffened and thrust his head forward a little, as if
puzzled.

"Pardon me," Ruiz-Sanchez said hastily. "I was translating literally an
aggressive idiom of my own tongue. It was not meant to describe an actual
plan of action."

"I think I understand," Chtexa said. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered if he did. In
the rich storehouse of the Lithian language he had yet to discover any
metaphors, either living or dead. Neither did the Lithians have any
poetry or other creative arts. "You are of course welcome to any of the
results of this program, which you would honor us by accepting. One
problem in the social sciences which has long puzzled us is just how one
may adequately honor the innovator. When we consider how new ideas change
our lives, we despair of giving in kind, and it is helpful when the
innovator himself has wishes which society can gratify."

Ruiz-Sanchez was at first not quite sure that he had understood the
formulation. After he had gone over it once more in his mind, he was not
sure that he could bring himself to like it, although it was admirable
enough. From an Earthman it would have sounded intolerably pompous, but
it was evident that Chtexa meant it.

It was probably just as well that the commission's report on Lithia was
about to fall due. Ruiz-Sanchez had begun to think that he could absorb
only a little more of this kind of calm sanity. And all of it-a
disquieting thought from somewhere near his heart reminded him-all of it
derived from reason, none from precept, none from faith. The Lithians did
not know God. They did things rightly, and thought righteously, because
it was reasonable and efficient and natural to do and to think that way.
They seemed to need nothing else.

Did they never have night thoughts? Was it possible that there could
exist in the universe a reasoning being of a high order, which was never
for an instant paralyzed by the sudden question, the terror of seeing
through to the meaninglessness of action, the blindness of knowledge,
the barrenness of having been born at all? "Only upon this firm
foundation of unyielding despair," a famous atheist once had written,
"may the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

Or could it be that the Lithians thought and acted as they did because,
not being born of man, and never in effect having left the Garden in
which they lived, they did not share the terrible burden of original sin?
The fact that Lithia had never once had a glacial epoch, that its climate
had been left unchanged for seven hundred million years, was a geological
fact that an alert theologian could scarcely afford to ignore. Could it
be that, free from the burden, they were also free from the curse of
Adam? And if they were-could men bear to live among them?

"I have some questions to ask you, Chtexa," the priest said after a
moment. "You owe me no debt whatsoever-it is our custom to regard all
knowledge as community property-but we four Earthmen have a hard decision
to make shortly. You know what it is. And I don't believe that we know
enough yet about your planet to make that decision properly."

"Then of course you must ask questions," Chtexa said immediately. "I will
answer, wherever I can."

"Well then-do your people die? I see you have the word, but perhaps it
isn't the same in meaning as our word." 

"It means to stop changing and to go back to existing," Chtexa said. "A
machine exists, but only a living thing, like a tree, progresses along a
line of changing equilibriums. When that progress stops, the entity is
dead."

"And that happens to you?"

"It always happens. Even the great trees, like the Message Tree, die
sooner or later. Is that not true on Earth?"

"Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said, "yes, it is. For reasons which it would take me
a long time to explain, it occurred to me that you might have escaped
this evil."

"It is not evil as we look at it," Chtexa said. "Lithia lives because of
death. The death of plants supplies our oil and gas. The death of some
creatures is always necessary to feed the lives of others. Bacteria must
die, and viruses be prevented from living, if illness is to be cured. We
ourselves must die simply to make room for others, at least, until we can
slow the rate at which our people arrive in the world-a thing impossible
to us at present."

"But desirable, in your eyes?"

"Surely desirable," Chtexa said. "Our world is rich, but not
inexhaustible. And other planets, you have taught us, have peoples of
their own. Thus we cannot hope to spread to other planets when we have
overpopulated this one."

"No real thing is ever exhaustible," Ruiz-Sanchez said abruptly, frowning
at the iridescent floor. "That we have found to be true over many
thousands of years of our history."

"But exhaustible in what way?" Chtexa said. "I grant you that any small
object, any stone, any drop of water, any bit of soil can be explored
without end. The amount of information, which can be gotten from it is
quite literally infinite. But a given soil can be exhausted of nitrates.
It is difficult, but with bad cultivation it can be done. Or take iron,
about which we have been talking. To allow our economy to develop a
demand for iron which exceeds the total known supply of Lithia-and
exceeds it beyond any possibility of supplementation by meteorites or by
import-would be folly. This is not a question of information. It is a
question of whether or not the information can be used. If it cannot,
then limitless information is of no help."

"You could certainly get along without more iron if you had to,"
Ruiz-Sanchez admitted. "Your wooden machinery is precise enough to
satisfy any engineer. Most of them, I think, don't remember that we used
to have something similar: I've a sample in my own home. It's a kind of
timer called a cuckoo clock, nearly two of our centuries old, made
entirely of wood except for the weights, and still nearly a hundred per
cent accurate. For that matter, long after we began to build seagoing
vessels of metal, we continued to use lignum vitae for ships' bearings."

"Wood is an excellent material for most uses," Chtexa agreed. "Its only
deficiency, compared to ceramic materials or perhaps metal, is that it is
variable. One must know it quite well to be able to assess its qualities
from one tree to the next And of course complicated parts can always be
grown inside suitable ceramic molds; the growth pressure inside the mold
rises so high that the resulting part is very dense. Larger parts can be
ground direct from the plank with soft sandstone and polished with slate.
It is a gratifying material to work, we find."

Ruiz-Sanchez felt, for some reason, a little ashamed. It was a magnified
version of the same shame he had always felt back home toward that old
Black Forest cuckoo clock. The electric clocks elsewhere in his hacienda
outside Lima all should have been capable of performing silently,
accurately, and in less space-but the considerations which had gone into
the making of them had been commercial as well as purely technical. As a
result, most of them operated with a thin, asthmatic whir, or groaned
softly but dismally at irregular hours. All of them were "streamlined,"
oversized and ugly. None of them kept good time, and several of them,
since they were powered by constant-speed motors driving very simple
gearboxes, could not be adjusted, but had been sent out from the factory
with built-in, ineluctable inaccuracies.

The wooden cuckoo clock, meanwhile, ticked evenly away. A quail emerged
from one of two wooden doors every quarter of an hour and let you know
about it, and on the hour first the quail came out, then the cuckoo, and
there was a soft bell that rang just ahead of each cuckoo call. Midnight
and noon were not just times of the day for that clock; they were
productions. It was accurate to a minute a month, all for the price of
running up the three weights which drove it, each night before bedtime.
The clock's maker had been dead before Ruiz-Sanchez was born. In
contrast, the priest would probably buy and jettison at least a dozen
cheap electric clocks in the course of one lifetime, as their makers had
intended he should; they were linearly descended from "planned
obsolescence," the craze for waste which had hit the Americas during the
last half of the previous century.

"I'm sure it is," he said humbly. "I have one more question, if I may. It
is really part of the same question. I have asked you if you die; now I
should like to ask how you are born. I see many adults on your streets
and sometimes in your houses-though I gather you yourself are alone-but
never any children. Can you explain this to me? Or if the subject is not
allowed to be discussed-"

"But why should it not be? There can never be any closed subjects,"
Chtexa said. "Our women, as I'm sure you know, have abdominal pouches
where the eggs are carried. It was a lucky mutation for us, for there are
a number of nest-robbing species on this planet."

"Yes, we have a few animals with a somewhat similar arrangement on Earth,
although they are viviparous."

"Our eggs are laid in these pouches once a year," Chtexa said. "It is
then that the women leave their own houses and seek out the man of their
choice to fertilize the eggs. I am alone because, thus far, I am no
woman's first choice this season; I will be elected in the Second
Marriage, which is tomorrow."

"I see," Ruiz-Sanchez said" carefully. "And how is the choice determined?
Is it by emotion, or by reason alone?"

"The two are in the long run the same," Chtexa said. "Our ancestors did
not leave our genetic needs to chance. Emotion with us no longer runs
counter to our eugenic knowledge. It cannot, since it was itself modified
to follow that knowledge by selective breeding for such behavior."

"At the end of the season, then, comes Migration Day. At that time all
the eggs are fertilized, and ready to hatch. On that day-you will not be
here to see it, I am afraid, for your scheduled date of departure
precedes it by a short time-our whole people goes to the seashores.
There, with the men to protect them from predators, the women wade out to
swimming depth, and the children are born."

"In the sea?" Ruiz-Sanchez said faintly.

"Yes, in the sea. Then we all return, and resume our other affairs until
the next mating season."

"But-but what happens to the children?"

"Why, they take care of themselves, if they can. Of course many perish,
particularly to our voracious brother the great fish-lizard, whom for
that reason we kill when we can. But a majority return home when the time
comes."

"Return? Chtexa, I don't understand. Why don't they drown when they are
born? And if they return, why have we never seen one?"

"But you have," Chtexa said. "And you have heard them often. Can it be
that you yourselves do not--ah, of course, you are mammals; that is
doubtless the difficulty. You keep your children in the nest with you;
you know who they are, and they know their parents."

"Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "We know who they are, and they know us."

"That is not possible with us," Chtexa said. "Here, come with me; I will
show you."

He arose and led the way out into the foyer. Ruiz-Sanchez followed, his
head whirling with surmises.

Chtexa opened the door. The night, the priest saw with a subdued shock,
was on the wane; there was the faintest of pearly glimmers in the cloudy
sky to the east. The multifarious humming and singing of the jungle
continued unabated. There was a high, hissing whistle, and the shadow of
a pterodon drifted over the city toward the sea. Out on the water, an
indistinct blob that could only be one of Lithia's sailplaning squid
broke the surface and glided low over the oily swell for nearly sixty
yards before it hit the waves again. From the mud flats came a hoarse
barking.

"There," Chtexa said softly. "Did you hear it?"

The stranded creature, or another of its kind--it was impossible to tell
which--croaked protestingly again.

"It is hard for them at first," Chtexa said. "But actually the worst of
their dangers are over. They have come ashore."

"Chtexa," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Your children--the lung-fish?"

"Yes," Chtexa said. "Those are our children."

In the last analysis it was the incessant barking of the lung-fish which
caused Ruiz-Sanchez to stumble when Agronski opened the door for him. The
late hour, and the dual strains of Cleaver's illness and the subsequent
discovery of Cleaver's direct lying, contributed. So did the increasing
sense of guilt toward Cleaver which the priest had felt while walking
home under the gradually brightening, weeping sky; and so, of course, did
the shock of discovering that Agronski and Michelis had arrived some time
during the night while he had been neglecting his charge to satisfy his
curiosity.

But primarily it was the diminishing, gasping clamor of the children of
Lithia, battering at his every mental citadel, all the way from Chtexa's
house to his own.

The sudden fugue lasted only a few moments. He fought his way back to
self-control to find that Agronski and Michelis had propped him up on a
stool in the lab and were trying to remove his mackintosh without
unbalancing him or awakening him--as difficult a problem in topology as
removing a man's vest without taking off his jacket. Wearily, the priest
pulled his own arm out of a mackintosh sleeve and looked up at Michelis.

"Good morning, Mike. Please excuse my bad manners."

"Don't be an idiot," Michelis said evenly. "You don't have to talk now,
anyhow. I've already spent much of tonight trying to keep Cleaver quiet
until he's better. Don't put me through it again, please, Ramon."

"I won't. I'm not ill; I'm just tired and a little overwrought."

"What's the matter with Cleaver?" Agronski demanded. Michelis made as if
to shoo him off.

"No, no, Mike, it's a fair question. I'm all right, I assure you. As for
Paul, he got a dose of glucoside poisoning when a plant spine stabbed him
this afternoon. No, it's yesterday afternoon now. How has he been since
you arrived?"

"He's sick," Michelis said. "Since you weren't here, we didn't know what
to do for him. We settled for two of the pills you'd left out."

"You did?" Ruiz-Sanchez slid his feet heavily to the floor and tried to
stand up. "As you say, you couldn't have known what else to doubt you
did overdose him. I think I'd better look in on him--"

"Sit down, please, Ramon." Michelis spoke gently, but his tone showed
that he meant the request to be honored. Obscurely glad to be forced to
yield to the big man's well-meant implacability, the priest let himself
be propped back on the stool. His boots fell off his feet to the floor.

"Mike, who's the Father here?" he asked tiredly. "Still, I'm sure you've
done a good job. He's in no apparent danger?"

"Well, he seems pretty sick. But he had energy enough to keep himself
awake most of the night. He only passed out a short while ago."

"Good. Let him stay out. Tomorrow we'll probably have to begin
intravenous feeding, though. In this atmosphere one doesn't give a
salicylate overdose without penalties." He sighed.

"Since I'll be sleeping in the same room, I'll be on hand if there's a
crisis. So. Can we put off further questions?"

"If there's nothing else wrong here, of course we can."

"Oh," Ruiz-Sanchez said, "there's a great deal wrong, I'm afraid."

"I knew it!" Agronski said. "I knew damn well there was. I told you so,
Mike, didn't I?"

"Is it urgent?"

"No, Mike--there's no danger to us, of that I'm positive. It's nothing
that won't keep until we've all had a rest. You two look as though you
need one as badly as I."

"We're tired," Michelis agreed.

"But why didn't you ever call us?" Agronski burst in aggrievedly. "You
had us scared half to death, Father. If there's really something wrong
here, you should have--"

"There's no immediate danger," Ruiz-Sanchez repeated patiently. "As for
why we didn't call you, I don't understand that any more than you do. Up
to last night, I thought we were in regular contact with you both. That
was Paul's job and he seemed to be carrying it out. I didn't discover
that he hadn't been doing it until after he became ill."

"Then obviously we'll have to wait for him," Michelis said.

"Let's hit the hammock, in God's name. Flying that whirlybird through
twenty-five hundred miles of fog banks wasn't exactly restful, either;
I'll be glad to turn in. ... But, Ramon--"

"Yes, Mike?"

"I have to say that I don't like this any better than Agronski does.
Tomorrow we've got to clear it up, and get our commission business done.
We've only a day or so to make our decision before the ship comes and
takes us off Lithia for good, and by that time we must know everything
there is to know, and just what we're going to tell the Earth about it."

"Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Just as you say, Mike--in God's name."

The Peruvian priest-biologist awoke before the others; actually, he had
undergone far less purely physical strain than had the other three. It
was just beginning to be cloudy dusk when he rolled out of his hammock
and padded over to look at Cleaver.

The physicist was in coma. His face was a dirty gray, and looked oddly
shrunken. It was high time that the neglect and inadvertent abuse to
which he had been subjected was rectified. Happily, his pulse and
respiration were close to normal now.

Ruiz-Sanchez went quietly into the lab and made up a fructose intravenous
feeding. At the same time he reconstituted a can of powdered eggs into a
sort of soufflé, setting it in a covered crucible to bake at the back of
the little oven; that was for the rest of them.

In the sleeping chamber, the priest set up his I-V stand. Cleaver did not
stir when the needle entered the big vein just above the inside of his
elbow. Ruiz-Sanchez taped the tubing in place, checked the drip from the
inverted bottle, and went back into the lab.

There he sat, on the stool before the microscope, in a sort of suspension
of feeling while the new night drew on. He was still poisoned--tired, but
at least now he could stay awake without constantly fighting himself. The
slowly rising souffle in the oven went plup-plup, plup-plup, and after a
while a thin tendril of ardma suggested that it was beginning to brown on
top, or at least thinking about it.

Outside, it abruptly rained buckets. Just as abruptly, it stopped.
Lithia's short, hot summer was drawing to a close; its winter would be
long and mild, the temperature never dropping below 20° centigrade in
this latitude. Even at the poles the winter temperature stayed throughout
well above freezing, usually averaging about 15° C.

"Is that breakfast I smell, Ramon?"

"Yes, Mike, in the oven. In a few minutes now."

"Right."

Michelis went away again. On the back of the workbench, Ruiz-Sanchez saw
the dark blue book with the gold stamping which he had brought with him
all the way from Earth. Almost automatically he pulled it to him, and
almost automatically it fell open at page 573. It would at least give him
something to think about with which he was not personally involved.
He had last quitted the text with Anita, who

"...would yield to the lewdness of Honuphrius to appease the savagery of
Sulla and the mercenariness of the twelve Sullivani, and (as Gilbert at
first suggested) to save the virginity of Felicia for Magravius" -- now
hold on a moment, how could Felicia still be considered a virgin at this
point? Ah "... when converted by Michael after the death of Gillia;" that
covered it, since Felicia had been guilty only of simple infidelities in
the first place. "...but she fears that, by allowing his marital
rights, she may cause reprehensible conduct between Eugenius and
Jeremias. Michael, who has formerly debauched Anita, dispenses her from
yielding to Honuphrius" -- yes, that made sense, since Michael also had
had designs on Eugenius. "Anita is disturbed, but Michael comminates that
he will reserve her case tomorrow for the ordinary Guglielmus even if she
should practice a pious fraud during affrication, which, from experience,
she knows (according to Wadding) to be leading to nullity."

Well. This was all very well. The novel even seemed to be shaping up into
sense, for the first time; evidently the author had known exactly what he
was doing, every step of the way. Still, Ruiz-Sanchez reflected, he would
not like to have known the imaginary family hidden behind the
conventional Latin aliases, or to have been the confessor to any member
of it.

Yes, it added up, when one tried to view it without outrage either at the
persons involved--they were, after all, fictitious, only characters in a
novel--or at the author, who for all his mighty intellect, easily the
greatest ever devoted to fiction in English and perhaps in any language,
had still to be pitied as much as the meanest victim of the Evil One. To
view it, as it were, in a sort of gray twilight of emotion, wherein
everything, even the barnacle-like commentaries the text had accumulated
since it had been begun in the 1920's, could be seen in the same light.

"Is it done, Father?"

"Smells like it, Agronski. Take it out and help yourself, why don't you?"

"Thanks. Can I bring Cleaver--"

"No, he's getting an I-V."

"Check."

Unless his impression that he understood the problem at last was once
more going to turn out to be an illusion, he was now ready for the basic
question, the stumper that had deeply disturbed both the Order and the
Church for so many decades now. He reread it carefully. It asked:

"Has he hegemony and shall she submit?"

To his astonishment, he saw as if for the first time that it was two
questions, despite the omission of a comma between the two. And so it
demanded two answers. Did Honuphrius have hegemony? Yes, he did, because
Michael, the only member of the whole complex who had been gifted from
the beginning with the power of grace, had been egregiously compromised.
Therefore, Honuphrius, regardless of whether all his sins were to be laid
at his door or were real only in rumor, could not be divested of his
privileges by anyone.

But should Anita submit? No, she should not. Michael had forfeited his
right to dispense or to reserve her in any way, and so she could not be
guided by the curate or by anyone else in the long run but her own
conscience--which in view of the grave accusations against Honuphrius
could lead her to no recourse but to deny him. As for Sulla's repentance,
and Felicia's conversion, they meant nothing, since the defection of
Michael had deprived both of them--and everyone else--of spiritual
guidance. The answer, then, had been obvious all the time. It was:

Yes, and No.

And it had hung throughout upon putting a comma in the right place. A
writer's joke. A demonstration that it could take one of the greatest
novelists of all time seventeen years to write a book the central problem
of which is exactly where to put one comma; thus does the Adversary cloak
his emptiness, and empty his votaries.

Ruiz-Sanchez closed the book with a shudder and looked up across the
bench, feeling neither more nor less dazed than he had before, but with a
small stirring of elation deep inside him which he could not suppress. In
the eternal wrestling, the Adversary had taken another fall.

As he looked dazedly out of the window into the dripping darkness, a
familiar, sculpturesque head and shoulders moved into the truncated
tetrahedron of yellow light being cast out through the fine glass into
the rain. Ruiz-Sanchez awoke with a start. The head was Chtexa's, moving
away from the house. Suddenly Ruiz-Sanchez realized that nobody had
bothered to rub away the sickness ideograms on the door tablet. If Chtexa
had come here on some errand, he had been turned back unnecessarily. The
priest leaned forward, snatched up an empty slide box, and rapped with a
corner of it against the inside of the glass.

Chtexa turned and looked in through the streaming curtains of rain, his
eyes completely filmed against the downpour. Ruiz-Sanchez beckoned to
him, and got stiffly off the stool to open the door.

In the oven the priest's share of breakfast dried slowly and began to
burn.

The rapping on the window had summoned forth Agronski and Michelis as
well. Chtexa looked down at the three of them with easy gravity, while
drops of water ran like oil down the minute, prismatic scales of his
supple skin.

"I did not know that there was sickness here," the Lithian said. "I
called because your brother Ruiz-Sanchez left my house this morning
without the gift I had hoped to give him. I will leave if I am invading
your privacy in any way."

"You are not," Ruiz-Sanchez assured him. "And the sickness is only a
poisoning, not communicable and we think not likely to end badly for our
colleague. These are my friends from the north, Agronski and Michelis."

"I am happy to see them. The message was not in vain, then?"

"What message is this?" Michelis said, in his pure but hesitant Lithian.

"I sent a message, as your colleague Ruiz-Sanchez asked me to do, last
night. I was told by Xoredeshch Gton that you had already departed."

"As we had," Michelis said. "Ramon, what's this? I thought you told us
that sending messages was Paul's job. And you certainly implied that you
didn't know how to do it yourself, after Paul took sick."

"I didn't. I don't. I asked Chtexa to send it for me; he just finished
telling you that, Mike."

Michelis looked up at the Lithian.

"What did the message say?" he asked.

"That you were to join them now, here, at Xoredeshch Sfath. And that your
time on our world was almost up."

"What does that mean?" Agronski said. He had been trying to follow the
conversation, but he was not much of a linguist, and evidently the few
words he had been able to pick up had served only to inflame his ready
fears. "Mike, translate, please."

Michelis did so, briefly. Then he said:

"Ramon, was that really all you had to say to us, especially after what
you had found out? We knew that departure time was coming, too, after
all. We can keep a calendar as well as the next man, I hope."

"I know that, Mike. But I had no idea what previous messages you'd
received, if indeed you'd received any. For all I knew, Cleaver might
have been in touch with you some other way, privately. I thought first of
a transmitter in his personal luggage, but later it occurred to me that
he might have been sending dispatches over the regular jet liners; that
would have been easier. He might have told you that we were going to stay
on beyond the official departure time. Or he might have told you that I
had been killed and that he was looking for the murderer. He might have
told you anything. I had to make sure, as well as I could, that you'd
arrive here regardless of what he had or had not said.

"And when I got to the local message center, I had to do all this
message-revision on the spot, because I found that I couldn't communicate
with you directly, or send anything that was at all detailed, anything
that might have been garbled through being translated and passed through
alien minds. Everything that goes out from Xoredeshch Sfath by radio goes
out through the Tree, and until you've seen it you haven't any idea what
an Earthman is up against there in sending even the simplest message."

"Is this true?" Michelis asked Chtexa.

"True?" Chtexa repeated. His wattles were stippled with confusion; though
Ruiz-Sanchez and Michelis had both reverted to Lithian, there were a
number of words they had used, such as "murderer," which simply did not
exist in the Lithian language, and so had been thrown out hastily in
English. "True? I do not know. Do you mean, is it valid? You must be the
judge of that."

"But is it accurate, sir?"

"It is accurate," Chtexa said, "insofar as I understand it." 

"Well, then," Ruiz-Sanchez, a little nettled despite himself, went on,
"you can see why, when Chtexa appeared providentially in the Tree,
recognized me, and offered to act as an intermediary, I had to give him
only the gist of what I had to say. I couldn't hope to explain all the
details to him, and I couldn't hope that any of those details would get
to you undistorted after they'd passed through at least two Lithian
intermediaries. All I could do was shout at the top of my voice for you
two to get down here on the proper date--and hope that you'd hear me."

"This is a time of trouble, which is like a sickness in the house,"
Chtexa said. "I must not remain. I will wish to be left alone when I am
troubled, and I cannot ask that, if I now force my presence on others who
are troubled. I will bring my gift at a better time." He ducked out
through the door, without any formal gesture of farewell, but
nevertheless leaving behind an overwhelming impression of graciousness.
Ruiz-Sanchez watched him go helplessly, and a little forlornly. The
Lithians always seemed to understand the essences of situations; they
were never, unlike even the most cocksure of Earthmen, beset by the least
apparent doubt. They had no night thoughts.

And why should they have? They were backed--if Ruiz-Sanchez was right--by
the second-best Authority in the universe, and backed directly, without
intermediary churches or conflicts of interpretations. The very fact that
they were never tormented by indecision identified them as creatures of
that Authority. Only the children of God had been given free will, and
hence were often doubtful.

Nevertheless, Ruiz-Sanchez would have delayed Chtexa's departure had he
been able. In a short-term argument it is helpful to have pure reason on
your side--even though such an ally could be depended upon to stab you to
the heart if you depended upon him too long.

"Let's go inside and thrash this thing out," Michelis said, shutting the
door and turning back toward the front room. He spoke in Lithian still,
and acknowledged it with a wry grimace over his shoulder after the
departed Chtexa before switching to English. "It's a good thing we got
some sleep, but we have so little time left now that it's going to be
touch-and-go to have a formal decision ready when the ship comes."

"We can't go ahead yet," Agronski objected, although along with
Ruiz-Sanchez, he followed Michelis obediently enough. "How can we do
anything sensible without having heard what Cleaver has to say? Every
man's voice counts on a job of this sort."' 

"That's very true," Michelis said. "And I don't like the present
situation any better than you do--I've already said that. But I don't see
that we have any choice. What do you think, Ramon?"

"I'd like to hold out for waiting," Ruiz-Sanchez said frankly.

"Anything I may say now is, to put it realistically, somewhat compromised
with you two. And don't tell me that you have every confidence in my
integrity, because we had every confidence in Cleaver's, too. Right now,
trying to maintain both confidences just cancels out both."

"You have a nasty way, Ramon, of saying aloud what everybody else is
thinking," Michelis said, grinning bleakly. "What alternatives do you
see, then?"

"None," Ruiz-Sanchez admitted. "Time is against us, as you said. We'll
just have to go ahead without Cleaver."

"No you won't," the voice, from the doorway to the sleeping chamber, was
at once both uncertain and much harshened by weakness.

The others sprang up. Cleaver, clad only in his shorts, stood in the
doorway, clinging to both sides of it. On one of his forearms
Ruiz-Sanchez could see the marks where the adhesive tape which had held
the I-V needle had been ripped away. Where the needle itself had been
inserted, an ugly haematoma swelled bluely under the gray skin of
Cleaver's upper arm.

VI

(A silence.)

"Paul, you must be crazy," Michelis said suddenly, almost angrily. "Get
back into your hammock before you make things twice as bad for yourself.
You're a sick man, can't you realize that?"

"Not as sick as I look," Cleaver said, with a ghastly grin.

"Actually I feel pretty fair. My mouth is almost all cleared up, and I
don't think I've got any fever. And I'll be damned if this commission is
going to proceed one single damned inch without me. It isn't empowered to
do it, and I'll appeal any decision--any decision, I hope you guys are
listening--that it makes without me."

The commission was listening; the recorder had already been started, and
the unalterable tapes were running into their sealed cans. The other two
men turned dubiously to Ruiz-Sanchez.

"How about it, Ramon?" Michelis said, frowning. He shut off the recorder
with his key. "Is it safe for him to be up like this?"

Ruiz-Sanchez was already at the physicist's side, peering into his mouth.
The ulcers were indeed almost gone, with granulation tissue forming
nicely over the few that still remained. Cleaver's eyes were still
slightly suffused, indicating that the toxemia was not completely
defeated, but except for these two signs the effect of the accidental
squill inoculation was no longer visible. It was true that Cleaver looked
awful, but that was inevitable in a man quite recently sick, and in one
who had been burning his own body proteins for fuel to boot. As for the
haematoma, a cold compress would fix that.

"If he wants to endanger himself, I guess he's got a right to do so, at
least by indirection," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Paul, the first thing you'll
have to do is get off your feet, and get into a robe, and put a blanket
around your legs. Then you'll have to eat something; I'll fix it for you.
You've staged a wonderful recovery, but you're a sitting duck for a real
infection if you abuse your time during convalescence."

"I'll compromise," Cleaver said immediately. "I don't want to be a hero,
I just want to be heard. Give me a hand over to that hammock. I still
don't walk very straight."

It took the better part of half an hour to get Cleaver settled to
Ruiz-Sanchez' satisfaction. The physicist seemed in a wry way to be
enjoying every minute of it. At last he had in his hand a mug of gchteht,
a local herb tea so delicious that it would probably become a major
article of export before long, and he said:

"All right, Mike, turn on the recorder and let's go."

"Are you sure?" Michelis said.

"One hundred per cent. Turn the goddam key."

Michelis turned the key, took it out and put it in his pocket. From now
on, they were on the record.

"All right, Paul," Michelis said. "You've gone out of your way to put
yourself on the spot. Evidently that's where you want to be. So let's
have the answer: Why didn't you communicate with us?"

"I didn't want to."

"Now wait a minute," Agronski said. "Paul, you're going on record; don't
break your neck to say the first damn thing that comes into your head.
Your judgment may not be well yet, even if your talking apparatus is.
Wasn't your silence just a matter of your being unable to work the local
message system--the Tree or whatever it is?"

"No, it wasn't," Cleaver insisted. "Thanks, Agronski, but I don't need to
be shepherded down the safe and easy road, or have any alibis set up for
me. I know exactly what I did that was ticklish, and I know that it's
going to be impossible for me to set up consistent alibis for it now. My
chances for keeping anything under my hat depended upon my staying in
complete control of everything I did. Naturally those chances went out
the window when I got stuck by that damned pineapple. I realized that
last night, when I fought like a demon to get through to you before the
Father could get back, and found that I couldn't make it."

"You seem to take it calmly enough now," Michelis observed.

"Well, I'm feeling a little washed out. But I'm a realist. And I also
know, Mike, that I had damned good reasons for what I did. I'm counting
on the chance that you'll agree with me wholeheartedly, when I tell you
why I did it."

"All right," Michelis said, "begin."

Cleaver sat back, folding his hands quietly in the lap of his robe. He
looked almost ecclesiastical. He was obviously still enjoying the
situation. He said:

"First of all, I didn't call you because I didn't want to, as I said. I
could have mastered the problem of the Tree easily enough by doing what
the Father did--that is, by getting a Snake to ferry my messages. Of
course I don't speak Snake, but the Father does, so all I had to do was
to take him into my confidence. Barring that, I could have mastered the
Tree itself. I already know all the technical problems involved. Mike,
wait till you see that Tree. Essentially it's a single-junction
transistor, with the semi-conductor supplied by a huge lump of crystal
buried under it; the crystal is piezoelectric and emits in the RF
spectrum every time the Tree's roots stress it. It's fantastic--nothing
like it anywhere else in this galaxy, I'd lay money on that."

"But I wanted a gap to spring up between our party and yours. I wanted
both of you to be completely in the dark about what was going on, down
here on this continent. I wanted you to imagine the worst, and blame it
on the Snakes, too, if that could be managed. After you got here--if you
did--I was going to be able to show you that I hadn't sent any messages
because the Snakes wouldn't let me. I've got more plants to that effect
squirreled away around here than I'll bother to list now; besides,
there'd be no point in it, since it's all come to nothing. But I'm sure
that it would have looked conclusive, regardless of anything the Father
would have been able to offer to the contrary."

"Are you sure you don't want me to turn off the machine?" Michelis said
quietly.

"Oh, throw away your damned key, will you, and listen. From my point of
view it was just a bloody shame that I had to run up against a pineapple
at the last minute. It gave the Father a chance to find out something
about what was up. I'll swear that if that hadn't happened, he wouldn't
have smelt anything until you actually got here--and by then it would have
been too late."

"I probably wouldn't have, that's true," Ruiz-Sanchez said, watching
Cleaver steadily. "But your running up against that 'pineapple' was no
accident. If you'd been observing Lithia as you were sent here to do,
instead of spending all your time building up a fictitious Lithia for
purposes of your own, you'd have known enough about the planet to have
been more careful about 'pineapples.' You'd also have spoken at least as
much Lithian as Agronski, by this time."

"That," Cleaver said, "is probably true, and again it doesn't make any
difference to me. I observed the one fact about Lithia that overrides all
other facts, and that is going to turn out to be sufficient. Unlike you,
Father, I have no respect for petty niceties in extreme situations, and
I'm not the kind of man who thinks anyone learns anything from analysis
after the fact."

"Let's not get to bickering this early," Michelis said. "You've told us
your story without any visible decoration, and it's evident that you have
a reason for confessing. You expect us to excuse you, or at least not to
blame you too heavily, when you tell us what that reason is. Let's hear
it."

"It's this," Cleaver said, and for the first time he seemed to become a
little more animated. He leaned forward, the glowing gaslight bringing
the bones of his face into sharp contrast with the sagging hollows of his
cheeks, and pointed a not-quite-steady finger at Michelis. "Do you know,
Mike, what it is that we're sitting on here? Just to begin with, do you
know how much rutile there is here?"

"Of course I know," Michelis said. "Agronski told me, and since then I've
been working on practicable methods of refining the ore. If we decide to
vote for opening the planet up, our titanium problem will be solved for a
century, maybe even longer. I'm saying as much in my personal report. But
what of it? We anticipated that that would be true even before we first
landed here, as soon as we got accurate figures on the mass of the
planet."

"And what about the pegmatite?" Cleaver demanded softly.

"Well, what about it?" Michelis said, looking more puzzled than before.

"I suppose it's abundant--I really didn't bother to check. Titanium's
important to us, but I don't quite see why lithium should be. The days
when the metal was used as a rocket fuel are fifty years behind us."

"And a good thing, too," Agronski said. "Those old Li-Fluor engines used
to go off like warheads. One little leak in the feed lines, and blooey!"

"And yet the metal's still worth about twenty thousand dollars an English
ton back home, Mike, and that's exactly the same price it was drawing in
the nineteen-sixties, allowing for currency changes since then. Doesn't
that mean anything to you?"

"I'm more interested in knowing what it means to you," Michelis said.
"None of us can make a personal penny out of this trip, even if we find
the planet solid platinum inside--which is hardly likely. And if price is
the only consideration, surely the fact that lithium ore is common here
will break the market for it. What's it good for, after all, on a large
scale?"

"Bombs," Cleaver said. "Real bombs. Fusion bombs. It's no good for
controlled fusion, for power, but the deuterium salt makes the prettiest
multimegaton explosion you ever saw."

Ruiz-Sanchez suddenly felt sick and tired all over again. It was exactly
what he had feared had been on Cleaver's mind; given a planet named
Lithia only because it appeared to be mostly rock, and a certain kind of
mind will abandon every other concern to find a metal called lithium on
it. But he had not wanted to find himself right.

"Paul," he said, "I've changed my mind. I would have caught you out, even
if you had never blundered against your 'pineapple.' That same day you
mentioned to me that you were looking for pegmatite when you had your
accident, and that you thought Lithia might be a good place for tritium
production on a large scale. Evidently you thought that I wouldn't know
what you were talking about. If you hadn't hit the 'pineapple,' you would
have given yourself away to me before now by talk like that. Your
estimate of me was based on as little observation as is your estimate of
Lithia."

"It's easy," Cleaver observed indulgently, "to say 'I knew it all the
time'--especially on a tape."

"Of course it's easy, when the other man is helping you," Ruiz-Sanchez
said. "But I think that your view of Lithia as a potential cornucopia of
hydrogen bombs is only the beginning of what you have in mind. I don't
believe that it's even your real objective. What you would like most is
to see Lithia removed from the universe as far as you're concerned. You
hate the place. It's injured you. You'd like to think that it doesn't
really exist. Hence the emphasis on Lithia as a source of munitions, to
the exclusion of every other fact about the planet; for if that emphasis
wins out, Lithia will be placed under security seal. Isn't that right?"

"Of course it's right, except for the phony mind reading," Cleaver said
contemptuously. "When even a priest can see it, it's got to be
obvious--and it's got to be written off by impugning the motives of the
man who saw it first. To hell with that. Mike, listen to me. This is the
most tremendous opportunity that any commission has ever had. This planet
is made to order to be converted, root and branch, into a thermonuclear
laboratory and production center. It has indefinitely large supplies of
the most important raw materials. What's even more important, it has no
nuclear knowledge of its own for us to worry about. All the clue
materials, the radioactive elements and so on, which you need to work out
real knowledge of the atom, we'll have to import; the Snakes don't know a
thing about them. Furthermore, the instruments involved, the counters and
particle-accelerators and so on, all depend on materials like iron that
the Snakes don't have, and on principles that they don't know, ranging
all the way from magnetism to quantum mechanics. We'll be able to stock
our plants here with an immense reservoir of cheap labor which doesn't
know, and--if we take proper precautions--never will have a prayer of
learning enough to snitch classified techniques.

"All we need to do is to turn in a triple-E Unfavorable on the planet, to
shut off any use of Lithia as a way station or any other kind of general
base for a whole century. At the same time, we can report separately to
the UN Review Committee exactly what we do have in Lithia: a triple-A
arsenal for the whole of Earth, for the whole commonwealth of planets we
control! Only the decision becomes general administrative property back
home; the tape is protected; it's an opportunity it'd be a crime to
flub!"

"Against whom?" Ruiz-Sanchez said.

"Eh? You've lost me."

"Against whom are you stocking this arsenal? Why do we need a whole
planet devoted to nothing but making fusion bombs?"

"The UN can use weapons," Cleaver said drily. "The time isn't very far
gone since there were still a few restive nations on Earth, and it could
come around again. Don't forget also that thermonuclear weapons last only
a few years--they can't be stock-piled indefinitely, like fission bombs.
The half-life of tritium is very short, and lithium-6 isn't very
long-lived either. I suppose you wouldn't know anything about that. But
take my word for it, the UN police would be glad to know that they could
have access to a virtually inexhaustible stock of fusion bombs, and to
hell with the shelf-life problem!

"Besides, if you've thought about it at all, you know as well as I do
that this endless consolidation of peaceful planets can't go on forever.
Sooner or later--well, what happens if the next planet we touch down on is
a place like Earth? If it is, its inhabitants may fight, and fight like a
planetful of madmen, to stay out of our frame of influence. Or what
happens if the next planet we hit is an outpost for a whole federation,
maybe bigger than ours? When that day comes--and it will, it's in the
cards--we'll be damned glad if we're able to plaster the enemy from pole
to pole with fusion bombs, and clean up the matter with as little loss of
life as possible."

"On our side," Ruiz-Sanchez added.

"Is there any other side?"

"By golly, that makes sense to me," Agronski said. "Mike, what do you
think?"

"I'm not sure yet," Michelis said. "Paul, I still don't understand why
you thought it necessary to go through all the cloak-and-dagger
maneuvers. You tell your story fairly enough now, and it has its merits,
but you also admit you were going to trick the three of us into going
along with you, if you could. Why? Couldn't you trust the force of your
argument alone?"

"No," Cleaver said bluntly. "I've never been on a commission like this
before, where there was no single, definite chairman, where there was
deliberately an even number of members so that a split opinion couldn't
be settled if it occurred-and where the voice of a man whose head is
filled with Pecksniffian, irrelevant moral distinctions and
three-thousand-year old metaphysics carries the same weight as the voice
of a scientist."

"That's mighty loaded language, Paul," Michelis said.

"I know it. If it comes to that, I'll say here or anywhere that I think
the Father is a hell of a fine biologist. I've seen him in operation, and
they don't come any better--and for that matter he may have just finished
saving my life, for all any of the rest of us can tell. That makes him a
scientist like the rest of us--insofar as biology's a science."

"Thank you," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "With a little history in your education,
Paul, you would also have known that the Jesuits were among the first
explorers to enter China, and Paraguay, and the North American
wilderness. Then it would have been no surprise to you to find me here."

"That may well be. However, it has nothing to do with the paradox as I
see it. I remember once visiting the labs at Notre Dame, where they have
a complete little world of germ-free animals and plants and have pulled I
don't know how many physiological miracles out of the hat. I wondered
then how a man goes about being as good a scientist as that, and a good
Catholic at the same time--or any other kind of churchman. I wondered in
which compartment in their brains they filed their religion, and in which
their science. I'm still wondering."

"They're not compartmented," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "They are a single
whole."

"So you said, when I brought this up before. That answers nothing; in
fact, it convinced me that what I was planning to do was absolutely
necessary. I didn't propose to take any chances on the compartments
getting interconnected on Lithia. I had every intention of cutting the
Father down to a point where his voice would be nearly ignored by the
rest of you. That's why I undertook the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Maybe it
was stupidly done--I suppose that it takes training to be a successful
agent-provocateur and that I should have realized that."

Ruiz-Sanchez wondered what Cleaver's reaction would be when he found, as
he would very shortly now, that his purpose would have been accomplished
without his having to lift a finger. Of course the dedicated man of
science, working for the greater glory of man, could anticipate nothing
but failure; that was the fallibility of man. But would Cleaver be able
to understand, through his ordeal, what had happened to Ruiz-Sanchez when
he had discovered the fallibility of God? It seemed unlikely.

"But I'm not sorry I tried," Cleaver was saying. "I'm only sorry I
failed."

There was a short, painful hiatus.

"Is that it, then?" Michelis said.

"That's it, Mike. Oh--one more thing. My vote, if anybody is still in any
doubt about it, is to keep the planet closed. Take it from there."

"Ramon," Michelis said, "do you want to speak next? You're certainly
entitled to it, on a point of personal privilege. The air's a mite murky
at the moment, I'm afraid."

"No, Mike. Let's hear from you."

"I'm not ready to speak yet either, unless the majority wants me to.
Agronski, how about you?"

"Sure," Agronski said. "Speaking as a geologist, and also as an ordinary
slob that doesn't follow rarefied reasoning very well, I'm on Cleaver's
side. I don't see anything either for or against the planet on any other
grounds but Cleaver's. It's a fair planet as planets go, very quiet, not
very rich in anything else we need--sure, that gchteht is marvelous stuff,
but it's strictly for the luxury trade--and not subject to any kind of
trouble that I've been able to detect. It'd make a good way station, but
so would lots of other worlds hereabouts.

"It'd also make a good arsenal, the way Cleaver defines the term. In
every other category it's as dull as ditch water, and it's got plenty of
that. The only other thing it can have to offer is titanium, which isn't
quite as scarce back home these days as Mike seems to think; and gem
stones, particularly the semiprecious ones, which we can make at home
without traveling fifty light-years to get them. I'd say, either set up a
way station here and forget about the planet otherwise, or else handle
the place as Cleaver suggested."

"But which?" Ruiz-Sanchez asked.

"Well, which is more important, Father? Aren't way stations a dime a
dozen? Planets that can be used as thermonuclear labs, on the other hand,
are rare--Lithia is the first one that can be used that way, at least in
my experience. Why use a planet for a routine purpose if it's unique? Why
not apply Occam's Razor--the law of parsimony? It works on every other
scientific problem anybody's ever tackled. It's my bet that it's the best
tool to use on this one."

"Occam's Razor isn't a natural law," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "It's only a
heuristic convenience--in short, a learning gimmick. And besides,
Agronski, it calls for the simplest solution of the problem that will fit
all the facts. You don't have all the facts, not by a long shot."

"All right, show me," Agronski said piously. "I've got an open mind."

"You vote to close the planet, then," Michelis said.

"Sure. That's what I was saying, wasn't it, Mike?"

"I wanted to have it Yes or No for the tape," Michelis said.

"Ramon, I guess it's up to us. Shall I speak first? I think I'm ready."

"Of course, Mike."

"Then," Michelis said evenly, and without changing in the slightest his
accustomed tone of grave impartiality, "I'll say that I think both of
these gentlemen are fools, and calamitous fools at that because they're
supposed to be scientists. Paul, your maneuvers to set up a phony
situation are perfectly beneath contempt, and I shan't mention them
again. I shan't even appeal to have them cut from the tape, so you
needn't feel that you have to mend any fences with me. I'm looking solely
at the purpose those maneuvers were supposed to serve, just as you asked
me to do."

Cleaver's obvious self-satisfaction began to dim a little around the
edges. He said, "Go ahead," and wound the blanket a little bit tighter
around his legs.

"Lithia is not even the beginning of an arsenal," Michelis said. "Every
piece of evidence you offered to prove that it might be is either a
half-truth or the purest trash. Take cheap labor, for instance. With what
will you pay the Lithians? They have no money, and they can't be rewarded
with goods. They have almost everything that they need, and they like the
way they're living right now--God knows they're not even slightly jealous
of the achievements we think make Earth great. They'd like to have space
flight but, given a little time, they'll get it by themselves; they have
the Coupling ion-jet right now, and they won't be needing the Haertel
overdrive for another century."

He looked around the gently rounded room, which was shining softly in the
gaslight.

"And I don't seem to see any place in here," he said, "where a vacuum
cleaner with forty-five patented attachments would find any work to do.
How will you pay the Lithians to work in your thermonuclear plants?"

"With knowledge," Cleaver said gruffly. "There's a lot they'd like to
know."

"But what knowledge, Paul? The things they'd like to know are
specifically the things you can't tell them, if they're to be valuable to
you as a labor force. Are you going to teach them quantum mechanics? You
can't; that would be dangerous. Are you going to teach them nucleonics,
or Hilbert space, or the Haertel scholium? Again, any one of those would
enable them to learn other things you think dangerous. Are you going to
teach them how to extract titanium from rutile, or how to accumulate
enough iron to develop a science of electrodynamics, or how to pass from
this Stone Age they're living in now--this Pottery Age, I should say--into
an Age of Plastics? Of course you aren't. As a matter of fact, we don't
have a thing to offer them in that sense. It'd all be classified under
the arrangement you propose--and they just wouldn't work for us under
those terms."

"Offer them other terms," Cleaver said shortly. "If necessary, tell them
what they're going to do, like it or lump it. It'd be easy enough to
introduce a money system on this planet. You give a Snake a piece of
paper that says it's worth a dollar, and if he asks you just what makes
it worth a dollar--well, the answer is, an honest day's work."

"And we put a machine pistol to his belly to emphasize the point,"
Ruiz-Sanchez interjected.

"Do we make machine pistols for nothing? I never figured out what else
they were good for. Either you point them at someone or you throw them
away."

"Item: slavery," Michelis said. "That disposes, I think, of the argument
of cheap labor. I won't vote for slavery. Ramon won't. Agronski?"

"No," Agronski said uneasily. "But isn't it a minor point?"

"The hell it is! It's the reason why we're here. We're supposed to think
of the welfare of the Lithians as well as of ourselves--otherwise this
commission procedure would be a waste of time, of thought, of energy. If
we want cheap labor, we can enslave any planet."

"How do we do that?" Agronski said. "There aren't any other planets. I
mean, none with intelligent life on them that we've hit so far. You can't
enslave a Martian sand crab."

"Which brings up the point of our own welfare," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "We're
supposed to be considering that, too. Do you know what it does to a
people to be slave-owners? It kills them."

"Lots of people have worked for money without calling it slavery,"
Agronski said. "I don't mind getting a pay check for what I do."

"There is no money on Lithia," Michelis said stonily. "It we introduce it
here, we do so only by force. Forced labor is slavery. Q. E. D."

Agronski was silent.

"Speak up," Michelis said. "Is that true, or isn't it?" Agronski said, "I
guess it is. Take it easy, Mike. There's nothing to get mad about."

"Cleaver?"

"Slavery's just a swearword," Cleaver said sullenly. "You're deliberately
clouding the issue."

"Say that again."

"Oh, hell. All right, Mike, I know you wouldn't. But we could work out a
fair pay scale somehow."

"I'll admit that the instant that you can demonstrate it to me," Michelis
said. He got up abruptly from his hassock, walked over to the sloping
window sill, and sat down again, looking out into the rain-stippled
darkness. He seemed to be more deeply troubled than Ruiz-Sanchez had ever
before thought possible for him. The priest was astonished, as much at
himself as at Michelis; the argument from money had never occurred to
him, and Michelis had unknowingly put his finger on a doctrinal sore spot
which Ruiz-Sanchez had never been able to reconcile with his own beliefs.
He remembered the lines of poetry that had summed it up for him--lines
written way back in the 1950's: The groggy old Church has gone toothless,
No longer holds against neshek; the fat has covered their croziers....

Neshek was the lending of money at interest, once a sin called usury, for
which Dante had put men into Hell. And now here was Mike, not a Christian
at all, arguing that money itself was a form of slavery. It was,
Ruiz-Sanchez discovered upon fingering it mentally once more, a very sore
spot.

"In the meantime," Michelis had resumed, "I'll prosecute my own
demonstration. What's to be said, now, about this theory of automatic
security that you've propounded, Paul? You think that the Lithians can't
learn the techniques they would need to be able to understand secret
information and pass it on, and so they won't have to be screened. There
again, you're wrong, as you'd have known if you'd bothered to study the
Lithians even perfunctorily. The Lithians are highly intelligent, and
they already have many of the clues they need. I've given them a hand
toward pinning down magnetism, and they absorbed the material like magic
and put it to work with enormous ingenuity."

"So did I," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "And I've suggested to them a technique
for accumulating iron that should prove to be pretty powerful. I had only
to suggest it, and they were already halfway down to the bottom of it and
traveling fast. They can make the most of the smallest of clues."

"If I were the UN I'd regard both actions as the plainest kind of
treason," Cleaver said harshly. "You'd better think again about using
that key, Mike, on your own behalf--if it isn't already too late. Isn't it
possible that the Snakes found out both items by themselves, and were
only being polite to you?"

"Set me no traps," Michelis said. "The tape is on and it stays on, by
your own request. If you have any second thoughts, file them in your
individual report, but don't try to stampede me into hiding anything
under the rug now, Paul. It won't work."

"That," Cleaver said, "is what I get for trying to help."

"If that's what you were trying to do, thanks. I'm not through, however.
So far as the practical objective that you want to achieve is concerned,
Paul, I think it's just as useless as it is impossible. The fact that we
have here a planet that's especially rich in lithium doesn't mean that
we're sitting on a bonanza, no matter what price per ton the metal
commands back home.

"The fact of the matter is that you can't ship lithium home. Its density
is so low that you couldn't send away more than a ton of it per shipload;
by the time you got it to Earth, the shipping charges on it would more
than outweigh the price you'd get for it on arrival. I should have
thought that you'd know there's lots of lithium on Earth's own moon,
too--and it isn't economical to fly it back to Earth even over that short
a distance, less than a quarter of a million miles. Lithia is three
hundred and fourteen trillion miles from Earth; that's what fifty
light-years comes to. Not even radium is worth carrying over a gap that
great!

"No more would it be economical to ship from Earth to Lithia all the
heavy equipment that would be needed to make use of lithium here. There's
no iron here for massive magnets. By the time you got your
particle-accelerators and mass chromatographs and the rest of your needs
to Lithia, you'd have cost the UN so much that no amount of locally
available pegmatite could compensate for it. Isn't that so, Agronski?"

"I'm no physicist," Agronski said, frowning slightly. "But just getting
the metal out of the ore and storing it would cost a fair sum, that's a
cinch. Raw lithium would burn like phosphorus in this atmosphere; you'd
have to store it and work it under oil. That's costly no matter how you
look at it."

Michelis looked from Cleaver to Agronski and back again.

"Exactly so," he said. "And that's only the beginning. In fact, the whole
scheme is just a chimera."

"Have you got a better one, Mike?" Cleaver said, very quietly.

"I hope so. It seems to me that we have a lot to learn from the Lithians,
as well as they from us. Their social system works like the most perfect
of our physical mechanisms, and it does so without any apparent
repression of the individual. It's a thoroughly liberal society in terms
of guarantees, yet all the same it never even begins to tip over toward
the side of total disorganization, toward the kind of Gandhiism that
keeps a people tied to the momma-and-poppa farm and the roving-brigand
distribution system. It's in balance, and not in precarious balance
either--it's in perfect chemical equilibrium.

"The notion of using Lithia as a fusion-bomb plant is easily the
strangest anachronism I've ever encountered--it's as crude as proposing to
equip an interstellar ship with galley slaves, oars and all. Right here
on Lithia is the real secret, the secret that's going to make bombs of
all kinds, and all the rest of the antisocial armament, as useless,
unnecessary, obsolete as the iron boot.

"And on top of all of that--no, please, I'm not quite finished, Paul--on
top of all that, the Lithians are decades ahead of us in some purely
technical matters, just as we're ahead of them in others. You should see
what they can do with mixed disciplines--scholia like histochemistry,
immunodynamics, biophysics, terataxonomy, osmotic genetics,
electrolimnology, and half a hundred more. If you'd been looking, you
would have seen.

"We have much more to do, it seems to me, than just to vote to open the
planet That's only a passive move. We have to realize that being able to
use Lithia is only the beginning. The fact of the matter is that we
actively need Lithia. We should say so in our recommendation." Michelis
unfolded himself from the window sill and stood up, looking down on all
of them, but most especially at Ruiz-Sanchez. The priest smiled at him,
but as much in anguish regardless of the way time had of turning any
blade. The decision had already cost him many hours of concentrated,
agonized doubt. But he believed that it had to be done.

"I disagree with all of you," he said, "except Cleaver. I believe, as he
does, that Lithia should be reported triple-E Unfavorable. But I think
also that it should be given a special classification: X-One."

Michelis' eyes were glazed with shock. Even Cleaver seemed unable to
credit what he had heard.

"X-One--but that's a quarantine label," Michelis said huskily.

"As a matter of fact--"

"Yes, Mike, that's right," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "I vote to seal Lithia off
from all contact with the human race. Not only now, or for the next
century--but forever."

VIII

Forever.

The word did not produce the consternation that he had been dreading--or,
perhaps, hoping for, somewhere in the back of his mind. Evidently they
were all too tired for that. They took his announcement with a kind of
stunned emptiness, as though it were so far out of the expected order of
events as to be quite meaningless.

It was hard to say whether Cleaver or Michelis was the more overwhelmed.
All that could be seen for certain was that Agronski recovered first, and
was now ostentatiously reaming out his ears, as if in signal that he
would be ready to listen again when Ruiz-Sanchez changed his mind.

"Well," Cleaver began. And then again, shaking his head amazedly, like an
old man: "Well..."

"Tell us why, Ramon," Michelis said, clenching and unclenching his fists.
His voice was quite flat, but Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could feel the
pain under it.

"Of course. But I warn you, I'm going to be very roundabout What I have
to say seems to me to be of the utmost importance. I don't want to see it
rejected out of hand as just the product of my peculiar training and
prejudices--interesting perhaps as a study in aberration, but not germane
to the problem. The evidence for my view of Lithia is overwhelming. It
overwhelmed me quite against my natural hopes and inclinations. I want
you to hear that evidence." The preamble, with its dry scholiast's tone
and its buried suggestion, did its work well.

"He also wants us to understand," Cleaver said, recovering a little of
his natural impatience, "that his reasons are religious and won't hold
water if he states them right out."

"Hush," Michelis said intently. "Listen."

"Thank you, Mike. All right, here we go. This planet is what I think is
called in English 'a set-up.' Let me describe it for you briefly as I see
it, or rather as I've come to see it.

"Lithia is a paradise. It has resemblances to a number of other planets,
but the closest correspondence is to the Earth in its pre-Adamic period,
before the coming of the first glaciers. The resemblance ends there,
because on Lithia the glaciers never came, and life continued to be spent
in the paradise, as it was not allowed to do on Earth."

"Myths," Cleaver said sourly.

"I use the terms with which I'm most familiar; strip off those terms and
what I am saying is still a fact that all of you know to be true. We find
here a completely mixed forest, with plants that fall from one end of the
creative spectrum to the other living side by side in perfect amity,
cycad with cycladella, giant horsetail with flowering; trees. To a great
extent that's also true of the animals. The lion doesn't lie down with
the lamb here because Lithia has neither animal, but as an allegory the
phrase is apt. Parasitism occurs rather less often on Lithia than it does
on Earth, and there are very few carnivores of any sort except in the
sea. Almost all of the surviving land animals eat plants only, and by a
neat arrangement which is typically Lithian, the plants are admirably set
up to attack animals rather than each other.

"It's an unusual ecology, and one of the strangest things about it is its
rationality, its extreme, almost single-minded insistence upon
one-for-one relationships. In one respect it looks almost as though
somebody had arranged the whole planet as a ballet about Mengenlehre--the
theory of aggregates.

"Now, in this paradise we have a dominant creature, the Lithian, the man
of Lithia. This creature is rational. It conforms, as if naturally and
without constraint or guidance, to the highest ethical code we have
evolved on Earth. It needs no laws to enforce this code. Somehow,
everyone obeys it as a matter of course, although it has never even been
written down. There are no criminals, no deviates, no aberrations of any
kind. The people are not standardized--our own very bad and partial
answer to the ethical dilemma--but instead are highly individual. They
choose their own life courses without constraint--yet somehow no
antisocial act of any kind is ever committed. There isn't even any word
for such an act in the Lithian language."

The recorder made a soft, piercing pip of sound, announcing that it was
threading a new tape. The enforced pause would last about eight seconds,
and on a sudden inspiration, Ruiz-Sanchez put it to use. On the next pip,
he said:

"Mike, let me stop here and ask you a question. What does this suggest to
you, thus far?"

"Why, just what I've said before that it suggested," Michelis said
slowly. "An enormously superior social science, evidently founded in a
precise system of psychogenetics. I should think that would be more than
enough."

"Very well, I'll go on. I felt as you did, at first. Then I came to ask
myself some correlative questions. For instance: How does it happen that
the Lithians not only have no deviates--think of that, no deviates!--but
that the code by which they live so perfectly is, point for point, the
code we strive to obey? If that just happened, it was by the uttermost
of all coincidences. Consider, please, the imponderables involved. Even
on Earth we have never known a society which evolved independently
exactly the same precepts as the Christian precepts--by which I mean to
include the Mosaic. Oh, there were some duplications of doctrine, enough
to encourage the twentieth century's partiality toward synthetic
religions like theosophism and Hollywood Vedanta, but no ethical system
on Earth that grew up independently of Christianity agreed with it point
for point. Not Mithraism, not Islam, not the Essenes--not even these,
which influenced or were influenced by Christianity, were in good
agreement with it in the matter of ethics.

"And yet here on Lithia, fifty light-years away from Earth and among a
race as unlike man as man is unlike the kangaroos, what do we find? A
Christian people, lacking nothing but the specific proper names and the
symbolic appurtenances of Christianity. I don't know how you three react
to this, but I found it extraordinary and indeed completely
impossible--mathematically impossible--under any assumption but one. I'll
get to that assumption in a moment." 

"You can't get there any too soon for me," Cleaver said morosely. "How a
man can stand fifty light-years from home in deep space and talk such
parochial nonsense is beyond my comprehension."

"Parochial?" Ruiz-Sanchez said, more angrily than he had intended. "Do
you mean that what we think true on Earth is automatically made suspect
just by the fact of its removal into deep space? I beg to remind you,
Paul, that quantum mechanics seem to hold good on Lithia, and that you
see nothing parochial about behaving as if it does. If I believe in Peru
that God created and still rules the universe, I see nothing parochial in
my continuing to believe it on Lithia. You brought your parish with you;
so did I. This has been willed where what is willed must be." As always,
the great phrase shook him to the heart. But it was obvious that it meant
nothing to anyone else in the room; were such men hopeless? No, no. That
Gate could never slam behind them while they lived, no matter how the
hornets buzzed for them behind the deviceless banner. Hope was with them
yet.

"A while back I thought I had been provided an escape hatch,
incidentally," he said. "Chtexa told me that the Lithians would like to
modify the growth of their population, and he implied that they would
welcome some form of birth control. But, as it turns out, birth control
in the sense that the Church interdicts it is impossible to Lithia, and
what Chtexa had in mind was obviously some form of fertility control, a
proposition to which the Church gave its qualified assent many decades
ago. So there I was, even on this small point forced again to realize
that we had found on Lithia the most colossal rebuke to our aspirations
that we had ever encountered: a people that seems to live with ease the
kind of life which we associate with saints alone.

"Bear in mind that a Muslim who visited Lithia would find no such thing;
though he would find a form of polygamy here, its purposes and methods
would revolt him. Neither would a Taoist. Neither would a Zoroastrian,
presuming that there were still such, or a classical Greek. But for the
four of us--and I include you, Paul, for despite your tricks and your
agnosticism you still subscribe to the Christian ethical doctrines enough
to be put on the defensive when you flout them--what we four have here on
Lithia is a coincidence which beggars description. It is more than an
astronomical coincidence--that tired old metaphor for numbers that don't
seem very large any more--it is a transfinite coincidence. It would take
the shade of Cantor himself to do justice to the odds against it."

"Wait a minute," Agronski said. "Holy smoke. I don't know any
anthropology, Mike, I'm lost here. I was with the Father up to the part
about the mixed forest, but I don't have any standards to judge the rest.
Is it so, what he says?"

"Yes, I think it's so," Michelis said slowly. "But there could be
differences of opinion as to what it means, if anything. Ramon, go on."

"I will. There's still a good deal more to say. I'm still describing the
planet, and more particularly the Lithians. The Lithians take a lot of
explaining. What I've said about them thus far states only the most
obvious fact. I could go on to point out many more, equally obvious
facts. They have no nations and no regional rivalries, yet if you look at
the map of Lithia--all those small continents and archipelagoes separated
by thousands of miles of seas--you'll see every reason why they should
have developed such rivalries. They have emotions and passions, but are
never moved by them to irrational acts. They have only one language, and
have never had more than this same one--which again should have been made
impossible by the geography of Lithia. They exist in complete harmony
with everything, large and small, that they find in their world. In
short, they're a people that couldn't exist--and yet does.

"Mike, I'll go beyond your view to say that the Lithians are the most
perfect example of how human beings ought to behave that we're ever
likely to find, for the very simple reason that they behave now the way
human beings once once behaved before we fell in our own Garden I'd go
even farther: as an example, the Lithians are useless to us, because
until the coming of the Kingdom of God no substantial number of human
beings will ever be able to imitate Lithian conduct. Human beings seem to
have built-in imperfections that the Lithians lack--original sin, if you
like--so that after thousands of years of trying, we are farther away than
ever from our original emblems of conduct, while the Lithians have never
departed from theirs.

"And don't allow yourselves to forget for an instant that these emblems
of conduct are the same on both planets. That couldn't ever have
happened, either--but it did.

"I'm now going to adduce another interesting fact about Lithian
civilization. It is a fact, whatever you may think of its merits as
evidence. It is this: that your Lithian is a creature of logic. Unlike
Earthmen of all stripes, he has no gods, no myths, no legends. He has no
belief in the supernatural--or, as we're calling it in our barbarous
jargon these days, the 'paranormal.' He has no traditions. He has no
tabus. He has no faiths, except for an impersonal belief that he and his
lot are indefinitely improvable. He is as rational as a machine. Indeed,
the only way in which we can distinguish the Lithian from an organic
computer is his possession and use of a moral code.

"And that, I beg you to observe, is completely irrational. It is based
upon a set of axioms, a set of propositions which were 'given' from the
beginning--though your Lithian sees no need to postulate any Giver. The
Lithian, for instance Chtexa, believes in the sanctity of the individual.
Why? Not by reason, surely, for there is no way to reason to that
proposition. It is an axiom. Or: Chtexa believes in the right of
juridical defense, in the equality of all before the code. Why? It's
possible to behave rationally from the proposition, but it's impossible
to reason one's way to it. It's given. If you assume that the
responsibility to the code varies with the individual's age, or with what
family he happens to belong to, logical behavior can follow from one of
these assumptions, but there again One can't arrive at the principle by
reason alone.

"One begins with belief: 'I think that all people ought to be equal
before the law.' That is a statement of faith, nothing more. Yet Lithian
civilization is so set up as to suggest that one can arrive at such basic
axioms of Christianity, and of Western civilization on Earth as a whole,
by reason alone--in the plain face of the fact that one cannot. One
rationalist's axiom is another one's madness."

"Those are axioms," Cleaver growled. "You don't arrive at them by faith,
either. You don't arrive at them at all. They're self-evident, that's the
definition of an axiom."

"It was until the physicists kicked that definition to pieces,"
Ruiz-Sanchez said, with a certain grim relish. "There's the axiom that
only one parallel can be drawn to a given line. It may be self-evident,
but it's also untrue, isn't it? And it's self-evident that matter is
solid. Go on, Paul, you're a physicist yourself. Kick a stone for me, and
say, "Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley.'"

"It's peculiar," Michelis said hi a low voice, "that Lithian culture
should be so axiom-ridden, without the Lithians being aware of it. I
hadn't formulated it in quite these terms before, Paul, but I've been
disturbed myself at the bottomless assumptions that lie behind Lithian
reasoning--all utterly unprobed, although in other respects the Lithians
are very subtle. Look at what they've done in solid-state chemistry, for
instance. It's a structure of the purest kind of reason, and yet when you
get down to its fundamental assumptions you discover the axiom: 'Matter
is real.' How can they know that? How did logic lead them to it? It's a
very shaky notion, in my opinion. If I say that the atom is just
a-hole-inside-a-hole-through-a-hole, how can they controvert me?"

"But their system works," Cleaver said.

"So does our solid-state theory--but we work from opposite axioms,"
Michelis said. "Whether it works or not isn't the issue. The question is,
what is it that's working? I don't myself see how this immense structure
of reason which the Lithians have evolved can stand for an instant. It
doesn't seem to rest on anything. 'Matter is real' is a crazy
proposition, when you come right down to it; all the evidence points in
exactly the opposite direction."

"I'm going to tell you," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "You won't believe me, but
I'm going to tell you anyhow, because I have to. It stands because ifs
being propped up. That's the simple answer and the whole answer. But
first I want to add one more fact about the Lithians:

"They have complete physical recapitulation outside the body." 

"What does that mean?" Agronski said.

"You know how a human child grows inside its mother's body. It is a
one-celled animal to begin with, and then a simple metazoan resembling
the fresh-water hydra or a simple jellyfish. Then, very rapidly, it goes
through many other animal forms, including the fish, the amphibian, the
reptile, the lower mammal, and finally becomes enough like a man to be
born. I don't know how this was taught to you as a geologist, but
biologists call the process recapitulation.

"The term assumes that the embryo is passing through the various stages
of evolution which brought life from the single-celled organism to man,
but on a contracted time scale. There is a point, for instance, in the
development of the fetus when it has gills, though it never uses them. It
has a tail almost to the very end of its time in the womb, and rarely it
still has it when it is born; and the tail-wagging muscle, the
pubococcygeus, persists in the adult--in women it becomes transformed
into the contractile ring around the vestibule. The circulatory system of
the fetus in the last month is still reptilian, and if it fails to be
completely transformed before birth, the infant emerges as a 'blue baby"
with patent ductus arteriosus, the tetralogy of Fallot, or a similar
heart defect which allows venous blood to mix with arterial--which is the
rule with terrestrial reptiles. And so on." 

"I see," Agronski said. "It's a familiar idea; I just didn't recognize
the term. I had no idea that the correspondence was that close either,
come to think of it."

"Well, the Lithians, too, go through this series of metamorphoses as they
grow up, but they go through it outside the bodies of their mothers. This
whole planet is one huge womb. The Lithian female lays her eggs in her
abdominal pouch, the eggs are fertilized, and then she goes to the sea to
give birth to her children. What she bears is not a miniature of the
marvelously evolved reptile which is the adult Lithian; far from it:
instead, she hatches a fish, rather like a lamprey. The fish lives in the
sea a while, and then develops rudimentary lungs and comes to live
along the shore lines. Once it's stranded on the flats by the tides, the
lungfish's pectoral fins become simple legs, and it squirms away through
the mud, changing into an amphibian and learning to endure the rigors of
living away from the sea. Gradually their limbs become stronger, and
better set on their bodies, and they become the big froglike things we
sometimes see down the hill, leaping in the moonlight, trying to get away
from the crocodiles.

"Many of them do get away. They carry their habit of leaping with them
into the jungle, and there they change once again, into the small,
kangaroo-like reptiles we've all seen, fleeing from us among the
trees--the things we called the 'hoppers.' The last change is
circulatory--from the sauropsid blood system which still permits some
mixing of venous and arterial blood, to the pteropsid system we see in
Earthly birds, which supplies nothing to the brain but oxygenated
arterial blood. At about the same time, they become homeostatic and
homeothermic, as mammals are. Eventually, they emerge, fully grown, from
the jungles, and take their places among the folk of the cities as young
Lithians, ready for education.

"But they have already learned every trick of every environment that
their world has to offer. Nothing is left them to learn but their own
civilization; their instincts are fully matured, fully under control;
their rapport with nature on Lithia is absolute; their adolescence is
passed and can't distract their intellects--they are ready to become
social beings in every possible sense." Michelis locked his hands
together again in an agony of quiet excitement, and looked up at
Ruiz-Sanchez.

"But that-that's a discovery beyond price!" he whispered.

"Ramon, that alone is worth our trip to Lithia. What a stunning,
elegant--what a beautiful sequence--and what a brilliant piece of
analysis!"

"It is very elegant," Ruiz-Sanchez said dispiritedly. "He who would damn
us often gives us gracefulness. It is not the same thing as Grace."

"But is it as serious as all that?" Michelis said, his voice charged with
urgency. "Ramon, surely your Church can't object to it in any way. Your
theorists accepted recapitulation in the human embryo, and also the
geological record that showed the same process in action over longer
spans of time. Why not this?"

"The Church accepts facts, as it always accepts facts," Ruiz-Sanchez
said. "But--as you yourself suggested hardly ten minutes ago--facts have a
way of pointing in several different directions at once. The Church is as
hostile to the doctrine of evolution--particularly to that part of it
which deals with the descent of man--as it ever was, and with good
reason."

"Or with obdurate stupidity," Cleaver said.

"I confess that I haven't followed the ins and outs of all this,"
Michelis said. "What is the present position?"

"There are really two positions. You may assume that man evolved as the
evidence attempts to suggest that he did, and that somewhere along the
line God intervened and infused a soul; this the Church regards as a
tenable position, but does not endorse it, because historically it has
led to cruelty to animals, who are also creations of God. Or, you may
assume that the soul evolved along with the body; this view the Church
entirely condemns. But these positions are not important, at least not in
this company, compared with the fact that the Church thinks the evidence
itself to be highly dubious."

"Why?" Michelis said.

"Well, the Diet of Basra is hard to summarize in a few words, Mike; I
hope you'll look it up when you get home. It's not exactly recent--it met
in 1995, as I recall. In the meantime, look at the question very simply,
with the original premises of the Scriptures in mind. If we assume that
God created man, just for the sake of argument, did He create him
perfect? I see no reason to suppose that He would have bothered with any
lesser work. Is a man perfect without a navel? I don't know, but I'd be
inclined to say that he isn't. Yet the first man--Adam, again for the sake
of argument--wasn't born of woman, and so didn't really need to have a
navel. Did he have one? All the great painters of the Creation show him
with one: I'd say that their theology was surely as sound as their
aesthetics."

"What does that prove?" Cleaver said.

"That the geological record, and recapitulation too, do not necessarily
prove the doctrine of the descent of man. Given my initial axiom, which
is that God created everything from scratch, it's perfectly logical that
he should have given Adam a navel, Earth a geological record, and the
embryo the process of recapitulation. None of these need indicate a real
past; all might be there because the creations involved would have been
imperfect otherwise."

"Wow," Cleaver said. "And I used to think that Haertel relativity was
abstruse."

"Oh, that's not a new argument by any means, Paul; it dates back nearly
two centuries--a man named Gosse invented it, not the Diet of Basra.
Anyhow, any system of thought becomes abstruse if it's examined long
enough. I don't see why my belief in a God you can't accept is any more
rarefied than Mike's vision of the atom as
a-hole-inside-a-hole-through-a-hole. I expect that in the long run, when
we get right down to the fundamental stuff of the universe, we'll find
that there's nothing there at all, just no-things moving no-place through
no-time. On the day that that happens, I'll have God and you will
not, otherwise there'll be no difference between us.

"But in the meantime, what we have here on Lithia is very clear indeed.
We have--and now I'm prepared to be blunt--a planet and a people propped up
by the Ultimate Enemy. It is a gigantic trap prepared for all of us--for
every man on Earth and off it. We can do nothing with it but reject it,
nothing but say to it, Retro me, Sathanas. If we compromise with it in
any way, we are damned."

"Why, Father?" Michelis said quietly.

"Look at the premises, Mike. One: Reason is always a sufficient guide.
Two; The self-evident is always the real. Three: Good works are an end in
themselves. Four: Faith is irrelevant to right action. Five: Right action
can exist without love. Six: Peace need not pass understanding. Seven:
Ethics can exist without evil alternatives. Eight: Morals can exist
without conscience. Nine: Goodness can exist without God. Ten--but do I
really need to go on? We have heard all these propositions before, and we
know What proposes them."

"A question," Michelis said, and his voice was painfully gentle. "To set
such a trap, you must allow your Adversary to be creative. Isn't that, a
heresy, Ramon? Aren't you now subscribing to a heretical belief? Or did
the Diet of Basra--" For a moment, Ruiz-Sanchez could not answer. The
question cut to the heart. Michelis had found the priest out in the full
agony of his defection, his belief betrayed, and he in full betrayal of
his Church. He had hoped that it would not happen so soon.

"It is a heresy," he said at last, his voice like iron. "It is called
Manichaeanism, and the Diet did not readmit it." He swallowed.

"But since you ask, Mike, I do not see how we can avoid it now. I do not
do this gladly, Mike, but we have seen these demonstrations before. The
demonstration, for instance, in the rocks--the one that was supposed to
show how the horse evolved from Eohippus, but which somehow never managed
to convince the whole of mankind. If the Adversary is creative, there is
at least some divine limitation that rules that Its creations be maimed.
Then came the discovery of intra-uterine recapitulation, which was to
have clinched the case for the descent of man. That one failed because
the Adversary put it into the mouth of a man named Haeckel, who was so
rabid an atheist that he took to faking the evidence to make the case
still more convincing. Nevertheless, despite their flaws, these were both
very subtle arguments, but the Church is not easily swayed; it is founded
on a rock.

"But now we have, on Lithia, a new demonstration, both the subtlest and
at the same time the crudest of all. It will sway many people who could
have been swayed in no other way, and who lack the intelligence or the
background to understand that it is a rigged demonstration. It seems to
show us evolution in action on an inarguable scale. It is supposed to
settle the question once and for all, to rule God out of the picture, to
snap the chains that have held Peter's rock together all these many
centuries. Henceforth there is to be no more question; henceforth there
is to be no more God, but only phenomenology--and, of course, behind the
scenes, within the hole that's inside the hole that's through a hole, the
Great Nothing itself, the Thing that has never learned any word but No
since it was cast flaming from heaven. It has many other names, but we
know the name that counts. That will be all that's left us.

"Paul, Mike, Agronski, I have nothing more to say than this: We are all
of us standing on the brink of Hell. By the grace of God, we may still
turn back. We must turn back-- for I at least think that this is our last
chance."

IX

The vote was cast, and that was that. The commission was tied, and the
question would be thrown open again in higher echelons on Earth, which
would mean tying Lithia up for years to come. Proscripted area pending
further study. The planet was now, in effect, on the Index Expurgatorius.

The ship arrived the next day. The crew was not much surprised to find
that the two opposing factions of the commission were hardly speaking to
each other. It often happened that way. The four commission members
cleaned up in almost complete silence the house in Xoredeshch Sfath that
the Lithians had given them. Ruiz-Sanchez packed the dark blue book with
the gold stamping without being able to look at it except out of the
corner of his eye, but even obliquely he could not help seeing its
long-familiar title:

FINNEGANS WAKE
James Joyce

So much for his pride in his solution of the case of conscience the
novel proposed. He felt as though he himself had been collated, bound and
stamped, a tortured human text for future generations of Jesuits to
explicate and argue.

He had rendered the verdict he had found it necessary for him to render.
But he knew that it was not a final verdict, even for himself, and
certainly not for the UN, let alone the Church. Instead, the verdict
itself would be a knotty question for members of his Order yet unborn:

Did Father Ruiz-Sanchez correctly interpret the Divine case, and did this
ruling, if so, follow from it?

Except, of course, that they would not use his name--but what good would
it do them to use an alias? Surely there would never be any way to
disguise the original of this problem. Or was that pride again--or misery?
It had been Mephistopheles himself who had said, Solamen miseris socios
habuisse doloris...

"Let's go, Father. It'll be take-off time shortly."

"All ready, Mike."

It was only a short journey to the clearing, where the mighty spindle of
the ship stood ready to weave its way back through the geodesies of deep
space to the sun that shone on Peru. There was even some sunlight here,
piercing now and then through low, scudding clouds; but it had been
raining all morning, and would begin again soon enough.

The baggage went on board smoothly and without any fuss. So did the
specimens, the films, the tapes, the special reports, the recordings, the
sample cases, the slide boxes, the vivariums, the type cultures, the
pressed plants, the animal cages, the tubes of soil, the chunks of ore,
the Lithian manuscripts in their atmospheres of helium--everything was
lifted decorously by the cranes and swung inside.

Agronski went up the cleats to the air lock first, with Michelis
following him, a barracks bag slung over one shoulder. On the ground
Cleaver was stowing some last-minute bit of gear, something that seemed
to require delicate, almost reverent bedding down before the cranes could
be allowed to take it in their indifferent grip; Cleaver Was fanatically
motherly about his electronic apparatus. Ruiz-Sanchez took advantage of
the delay to look around once more at the near margins of the forest. At
once, he saw Chtexa. The Lithian was standing at the entrance to the path
the Earthmen themselves had taken from the city to reach the ship. He was
carrying something.

Cleaver swore under his breath and undid something he had just done to do
it in another way. Ruiz-Sanchez raised his hand. Immediately Chtexa
walked toward the ship, in great loping strides which nevertheless seemed
almost leisurely.

"I wish you a good journey," the Lithian said, "wherever you may go. I
wish also that your road may lead back to this world at some future time.
I have brought you the gift that I sought before to give you, if the
moment is now appropriate."

Cleaver had straightened and was now glaring up suspiciously at the
Lithian. Since he did not understand the language, he was unable to find
anything to which he could object. He simply stood there and radiated
unwelcomeness.

"Thank you," Ruiz-Sanchez said. This creature of Satan made him miserable
all over again, made him feel intolerably in the wrong. Yet how could
Chtexa know--?

The Lithian was holding out to him a small vase, sealed at the top and
provided with two gently looping handles. The gleaming porcelain of which
it had been made still carried inside it, under the glaze, the fire which
had formed it; it was iridescent, alive with long quivering festoons and
plumes of rainbows, and the form as a whole would have made any potter of
Greece abandon his trade in shame. It was so beautiful that one could
imagine no use for it at all. Certainly one could not make a lamp of it,
or fill it with leftover beets and put it in the refrigerator. Besides,
it would take up too much space.

"This is the gift," Chtexa said. "It is the finest container yet to come
out of Xoredeshch Gton. The material of which it is made includes traces
of every element to be found on Lithia, even including iron, and thus, as
you see, it shows the colors of every shade of emotion and of thought. On
Earth, it will tell Earthmen much of Lithia."

"We will be unable to analyze it," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "It is too perfect
to destroy, too perfect even to open."

"Ah, but we wish you to open it," Chtexa said. "For it contains our other
gift."

"Another gift?"

"Yes, and a more important one. It is a fertilized, living egg of our
species. Take it with you. By the time you reach Earth, it will have
hatched, and will be ready to grow up with you in your strange and
marvelous world. The container is the gift of all of us; but the child
inside is my gift, for it is my child."

Appalled, Ruiz-Sanchez took the vase in trembling hands, as though he
expected it to explode--as indeed he did. It shook with subdued flame in
his grip.

"Good-bye," Chtexa said. He turned and walked away, back toward the
entrance to the path. Cleaver watched him go, shading his eyes.

"Now what was that all about?" the physicist said. "The Snake couldn't
have made a bigger thing of it if he'd been handing you his own head on a
platter. And all the time it was only a jug!"

Ruiz-Sanchez did not answer. He could not have spoken even to himself. He
turned away and began to ascend the cleats, cradling the vase carefully
in one elbow. It was not the gift he had hoped to bring to the holy city
for the grand indulgence of all mankind, no; but it was all he had.

While he was still climbing, a shadow passed rapidly over the hull:
Cleaver's last crate, being borne aloft into the hold by a crane.

Then he was in the air lock, with the rising whine of the ship's Nernst
generators around him. A long shaft of sunlight was cast ahead of him,
picking out his shadow on the deck. After a moment, a second shadow
overlaid and blurred his own: Cleaver's. Then the light dimmed and went
out. The air lock door slammed.

Book Two
X

At first Egtverchi knew nothing, in the peculiarly regular and chilly
womb where he floated, except his name. That was inherited, and marked in
a twist of desoxyribonucleic acid upon one of his genes; farther up on
the same chromosome, the x-chromosome, another gene carried his father's
name: Chtexa. And that was all. At the moment he had begun his
independent life, as a zygote or fertilized egg, that had been written
down in letters of chromatin: his name was Egtverchi, his race Lithian,
his sex male, his inheritance continuous back through Lithian centuries
to the moment when the world of Lithia began. He did not need to
understand this; it was implicit.

But it was dark, chilly, and too regular in the pouch. Tiny as a speck of
pollen, Egtverchi drifted in the fluid which sustained him, from wall to
smoothly curved and unnaturally glazed wall, not conscious yet, but
constantly, chemically reminded that he was not in his mother's pouch. No
gene that he carried bore his mother's name, but he knew--not in his
brain, for he had none yet, but by feel, with purely chemical
revulsion--whose child he was, of what race he was, and where he should
be: not here. And so he grew--and drifted, seeking to attach himself at
every circuit to the chilly glass-lined pouch which rejected him always.
By the time of gastrulation, the attachment reflex had run its course and
he forgot it. Now he merely floated, knowing once more only what he had
known at the beginning: his race Lithian, his sex male, his name
Egtverchi, his father Chtexa, his life due to begin; and his birth world
as bitter and black as the inside of a jug.

Then his notochord formed, and his nerve cells congregated in a tiny knot
at one end of it. Now he had a front end and a hind end, as well as an
address. He also had a brain--and now he was a fish--a spawn, not even a
fingerling yet, circling and circling in the cold enclave of sea. That
sea was tideless and lightless, but there was some motion in it, the slow
roll of convection currents. Sometimes, too, something went through it
which was not a current, forcing him far down toward the bottom, or
against the walls. He did not know the name of this force--as a fish he
knew nothing, only circled with the endlessness of his hunger --but he
fought it, as he would have fought cold or heat. There was a sense in his
head, aft of his gills, which told him which way was up. It told him,
too, that a fish in its natural medium has mass and inertia, but no
weight. The sporadic waves of gravity--or acceleration--which whelmed
through the lightless water were no part of his instinctual world, and
when they were over he was often swimming desperately on his back.

There came a time when there was no more food in the little sea; but time
and the calculations of his father were kind to him. Precisely at that
time the weight force returned more powerfully than had even been
suggested as possible before, and he was driven to sluggish immobility
for a long period, fanning the water at the bottom of the jug past his
gills with slow exhausted motions.

It was over at last, and then the little sea was moving jerkily from side
to side, up and down, and forward. Egtverchi was now about the size of a
larval fresh-water eel. Beneath his pectoral bones twin sacs were
forming, which connected with no other system of his body, but were
becoming more and more richly supplied with capillaries. There was
nothing inside the sacs but a little gaseous nitrogen, just enough to
equalize the pressure. In due course, they would be rudimentary lungs.

Then there was light.

To begin with, the top of the world was taken off. Egtverchi's eyes
would not have focussed at this stage in any case and, like any evolved
creature, he was subject to the neo-Lamarckian laws which provide that
even a completely inherited ability will develop badly if it is formed in
the absence of any opportunity to function. As a Lithian, with a
Lithian's special sensitivity to the modifying pressures of environment,
the long darkness had done him less potential damage than it surely would
have done another creature--say, an Earth creature; nevertheless, he would
pay for it in due course. Now, he could sense no more than that in the up
direction (now quite stable and unchanging) there was light. He rose
toward it, his pectoral fins strumming the warm harps of the water.

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, late of Peru, late of Lithia, and always
Fellow in the Society of Jesus, watched the surfacing, darting little
creature with surfacing strange emotions. He could not help feeling for
the sinuous eel the pity that he felt for every living thing, and an
aesthetic delight in the flashing unpredictable certainty of its motions.
But this little animal was Lithian.

He had had more time than he had wanted to explore the black ruin that
underlay his position. Ruiz-Sanchez had never underestimated the powers
which evil could still exercise, powers retained--even by general
agreement within the Church--after its fall from beside the throne of the
Most High. As a Jesuit he had examined and debated far too many cases of
conscience to believe that evil is unsubtle or impotent. But that among
these powers the Adversary numbered the puissance to create--no, that had
never entered his head, not until Lithia. That power, at least, had to be
of God, and of God only. To think that there could be more than one
demiurge was outright heresy, and a very ancient heresy at that.

So be it, it was so, heretical or not. The whole of Lithia, and in
particular the whole of the dominant, rational, infinitely admirable race
of Lithians, had been created by Evil, out of Its need to confront men
with a new, a specifically intellectual seduction, springing like Minerva
from the brow of Jove. Out of that unnatural birth, as out of the fabled
one, there was to come a symbolic clapping of palms to foreheads for
everyone who could admit for an instant that any power but God could
create; a ringing, splitting ache in the skull of theology; a moral
migraine; even a cosmological shell-shock, for Minerva was the mistress
of Mars, on Earth as--undoubtedly, Ruiz-Sanchez remembered with anguish--as
it is in heaven.

After all, he had been there, and he knew.

But all that could wait a little while, at least. For the moment it was
sufficient that the little creature, so harmlessly like a three-inch eel,
was still alive and apparently healthy.

Ruiz-Sanchez picked up a beaker of water, cloudy with thousands of
cultured Cladocera and Cyclops, and poured nearly half of it into the
subtly glowing amphora. The infant Lithian flashed instantly away into
the darkness, in chase after the nearly microscopic crustaceans.
Appetite, the priest reflected, is a universal barometer of health.

"Look at him go," a soft voice said beside his shoulder. He looked up,
smiling. The speaker was Liu Meid, the UN laboratory chief whose
principal charge the Lithian child would be for many months. A small,
black-haired girl with an expression of almost childlike calm, she peered
into the vase expectantly, waiting for the image to reappear.

"They won't make him sick, do you think?" she said.

"I hope not," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "They're Earthly, it's true, but Lithian
metabolism is remarkably like ours. Even the blood pigment is an analogue
of hemoglobin, though the metal base isn't iron, of course. Their
plankton includes forms very like Cyclops and the water flea. No; if he's
survived the trip, I dare say our subsequent care won't kill him, not
even with kindness."

"The trip?" Liu said slowly. "How could that have hurt him?"

"Well, I really can't say exactly. It was simply the chance that we took,
Chtexa--that was his father--presented him to us inside this vase, already
sealed in. We had no way of knowing what provisions Chtexa had made for
his child against the various strains of space flight. And we didn't dare
look inside to see; if there was one thing of which I was certain, it was
that Chtexa wouldn't have sealed the vase without a reason; after all,
he does know the physiology of his own race better than any of us, even
Dr. Michelis or myself."

"That's what I was getting at," Liu said.

"I know; but you see, Liu, Chtexa doesn't know space flight. Oh, ordinary
flight stresses are no secret to him--the Lithians fly jets; it was the
Haertel overdrive that I was worried about. You'll remember the fantastic
time effects that Garrard went through on that first successful Centaurus
Sight. I couldn't explain the Haertel equations to Chtexa even if I'd had
the time. They're classified against him; besides, he couldn't have
understood them, because Lithian math doesn't include transfinites. And
time is of the utmost importance in Lithian gestation." 

"Why?" Liu said. She peered down into the amphora again, with an
instinctive smile.

The question touched a nerve which had lain exposed in Ruiz-Sanchez for a
long time. He said carefully: "Because they have physical recapitulation
outside the body, Liu. That's why that creature in there is a fish; as an
adult, it will be a reptile, though with a pteropsid circulatory system
and a number of other unreptilian features. The Lithian females lay their
eggs in the sea--"

"But it's fresh water in the jug."

"No, it's sea water; the Lithian seas are not so salt as ours. The egg
hatches into a fishlike creature, such as you see in there; then the fish
develops lungs and is beached by the tides. I used to hear them barking
in Xoredeshch Sfath-- they barked all night long, blowing the water out of
their lungs and developing their diaphragm musculature."

Unexpectedly, he shuddered. The recollection of the sound was far more
disturbing than the sound itself had been. Then, he had not known what it
was--or, no, he had known that, but he had not known what it meant.

"Eventually the lungfish develop legs and lose their tails, like a
tadpole, and go off into the Lithian forests as true amphibians. After a
while, their respiratory system loses its dependence upon the skin as an
auxiliary source, so they no longer need to stay near water. Eventually,
they become true adults, a very advanced type of reptile, marsupial,
bipedal, homeostatic--and highly intelligent. The new adults come out of
the jungle and are ready for education in the cities."

Liu took a deep breath. "How marvelous," she whispered.

"It is just that," he said somberly. "Our own children go through nearly
the same changes in the womb, but they're protected throughout; the
Lithian children have to tun the gauntlet of every ecology their planet
possesses. That's why I was afraid of the Haertel overdrive. We insulated
the vase against the drive fields as best we could, but in a maturation
process so keyed to the appearances of evolution, a time slowdown could
have been crucial. In Garrard's case, he was slowed down to an hour a
second, then whipped up to a second an hour, then back again, and so on
along a sine wave. If there'd been the slightest break in the insulation,
something like that might have happened to Chtexa's child, with
unknowable results. Evidently, there was no leak, but I was worried."

The girl thought about it. In order to keep himself from thinking about
it, for he had already pondered himself in dwindling spirals to a
complete, central impasse, Ruiz-Sanchez watched her think. She was always
restful to watch, and Ruiz-Sanchez needed rest. It now seemed to him that
he had had no rest at all since the moment when he had fainted on the
threshold of the house in Xoredeshch Sfath, directly into the astonished
Agronski's arms.

Liu had been born and raised in the state of Greater New York. It was
Ruiz-Sanchez' most heartfelt compliment that nobody would have guessed
it; as a Peruvian he hated the nineteen-million-man megalopolis with an
intensity he would have been the first to characterize as unchristian.
There was nothing in the least hectic or harried about Liu. She was calm,
slow, serene, gentle, her reserve unshakable without being in the least
cold or compulsive, her responses to everything that impinged upon her as
direct and uncomplicated as a kitten's; her attitude toward her fellow
men virtually unsuspicious, not out of naivete, but out of her confidence
that the essential Liu was so inviolable as to prevent anyone even from
wanting to violate it. These were the abstract terms which first came to
Ruiz-Sanchez' mind, but immediately he came to grief over a transitional
thought. As nobody would take Liu for a New Yorker--even her speech
betrayed not a one of the eight dialects, all becoming more and more
mutually unintelligible, which were spoken in the city, and in particular
one would never have guessed that her parents spoke nothing but Bronix--so
nobody could have taken her for a female laboratory technician.

This was not a line of thought that Ruiz-Sanchez felt comfortable in
following, but it was too obvious to ignore. Liu was as small-boned and
intensely nubile as a geisha. She dressed with exquisite modesty, but it
was not the modesty of concealment, but of quietness, of the desire to
put around a firmly feminine body clothes that would be ashamed of
nothing, but would also advertise nothing. Inside her soft colors, she
was a Venus Callipygous with a slow, sleepy smile, inexplicably unaware
that she--let alone anybody else --was expected by nature and legend to
worship continually the firm dimpled slopes of her own back. There now,
that was quite enough; more than enough. The little eel chasing
fresh-water crustaceae in the ceramic womb presented problems enough,
some of which were about to become Liu's. It would hardly be suitable to
complicate Liu's task by so much as an unworthy speculation, though it be
communicated by no more than a curious glance. Ruiz-Sanchez was confident
enough of his own ability to keep himself in the path ordained for him,
but it would not do to burden this grave sweet girl with a suspicion her
training had never equipped her to meet.

He turned away hastily and walked to the vast glass west wall of the
laboratory, which looked out over the city thirty-four storeys from the
street--not a great height, but more than sufficient for Ruiz-Sanchez. The
thundering, heat-hazed, nineteen-million-man megalopolis repelled him, as
usual--or perhaps even more than usual, after his long stay in the quiet
streets of Xoredeshch Sfath. But at least he had the consolation of
knowing that he did not have to live here the rest of his life. In a way,
the state of Manhattan was only a relic anyhow, not only politically, but
physically. What could be seen of it from here was an enormous
multi-headed ghost. The crumbling pinnacles were ninety per cent empty,
and remained so right around the clock. At any given moment most of the
population of the state (and of any other of the thousand-odd city-states
around the globe) was underground. The underground area was
self-sufficient. It had its own thermonuclear power sources; its own tank
farms, and its thousands of miles--of illuminated plastic pipe througn
which algae suspensions flowed richly, grew unceasingly; decades worth of
food and medical supplies in cold storage; water-processing equipment
which was a completely closed circuit, so that it could recover moisture
even from the air and from the city's own sewage; and air intakes
equipped to remove gas, virus, fall-out particles or all three at once.
The city-states were equally independent of any central government; each
was under the hegemony of a Target Area Authority modeled on the old,
self-policing port authorities of the previous century--out of which,
indeed, they had evolved inevitably.

This fragmentation of the Earth had come about as the end product of the
international shelter race of 1960-85. The fission-bomb race, which had
begun in 1945, was effectively over five years later; the fusion-bomb
race and the race for the intercontinental ballistic missile had each
taken five years more. The Shelter race had taken longer, not because any
new physical knowledge or techniques had been needed to bring it to
fruition--quite the contrary--but because of the vastness of the building
program it involved.

Defensive though the shelter race seemed on the surface, it had taken on
all the characteristics of a classical arms race--for the nation that
lagged behind invited instant attack. Nevertheless, there had been a
difference. The shelter race had been undertaken under the dawning
realization that the threat of nuclear war was not only imminent but
transcendent; it could happen at any instant, but its failure to break
out at any given time meant that it had to be lived with for at least a
century, and perhaps five centuries. Thus the race was not only hectic,
but long-range. And, like all arms races, it defeated itself in the end,
this time because those who planned it had planned for too long a span of
time. The shelter economy was world-wide now, but the race had hardly
ended when signs began to appear that people simply would not live
willingly under such an economy for long; certainly not for five hundred
years, and probably not for a century. The Corridor Riots of 1993 were
the first major sign; since then, there had been many more.

The riots had provided the United Nations with the excuse it needed to
set up, at long last, a. real supranational government and world state
with teeth in it. The riots had provided the excuse--and the shelter
economy, with its neo-Hellenic fragmentation of political power, had
given the UN the means. Theoretically, that should have solved
everything. Nuclear war was no longer likely between the member states;
the threat was gone... but how do you unbuild a shelter economy? An
economy which cost twenty-five billion dollars a year, every year for
twenty-five years, to build? An economy now embedded in the face of the
Earth in uncountable billions of tons of concrete and steel, to a depth
of more than a mile? It could not be undone; the planet would be a
mausoleum for the living from now until the Earth itself perished:
gravestones, gravestones, gravestones...

The word tolled in Ruiz-Sanchez' ears, distantly. The infra-bass of the
buried city's thunder shook the glass in front of him. Mingled with it
there was an ominous grinding sound of unrest, more marked than he had
ever heard it before, like the noise of a cannon ball rolling furiously
around and around in "a rickety, splintering wooden track..."

"Dreadful, isn't it?" Michelis' voice said at his shoulder. Ruiz-Sanchez
shot a surprised glance at the big chemist--not surprised that he had not
heard Michelis enter, but that Mike was speaking to him again.

"It is," he said. "I'm glad you noticed it too. I thought it just might
be hypersensitivity on my part--from having been away so long."

"It might well be that," Michelis agreed gravely. "I was away myself."

Ruiz-Sanchez shook his head.

"No, I think it's real," be said, "These are intolerable conditions to
ask people to live under. And it's more than a matter of making them live
ninety days out of every hundred at the bottom of a hole. After all, they
think of living every day of their lives on the verge of destruction. We
trained their parents to think that way, otherwise there'd never have
been enough taxes to pay for the shelters. And of course the children
have been brought up to think that too. It's inhuman."

"Is it?" Michelis said. "People lived all their lives on the verge for
centuries--all the way up until Pasteur. How long ago was that?"

"Only about 1860," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "But no, it's quite different now.
The pestilence was capricious; one's children might survive it; but
fusion bombs are catholic." He winced involuntarily. "And there it is. A
moment ago, I caught myself thinking that the shadow of destruction we
labor under now is not only imminent but transcendent; I was burlesquing
a tragedy; death in premedical days was always both imminent and
immanent, impending and indwelling--but it was never transcendent. In
those days, only God was impending, indwelling and transcendent all at
once, and that was their hope. Today, we've given them Death instead."

"Sorry," Michelis said, his bony face suddenly turning flinty.

"You know I can't argue with you on those grounds, Ramon. I've already
been burned once. Once is enough." The chemist turned away. Liu, who had
been making a serial dilution at the long bench, was holding the ranked
test tubes up to the daylight, and peeping up at Michelis from under her
half-shut eyelids. She looked promptly away again as Ruiz-Sanchez' gaze
fell on her face. He did not know whether she knew that he had caught
her; but the tubes rattled a little in the rack as she put them down
again.

"Excuse me," he said. "Liu, this is Dr. Michelis, one of my confreres on
the commission to Lithia. Mike, this is Dr. Liu Meid, who'll be taking
care of Chtexa's child for an indefinite period, more or less under my
supervision. She's one of the world's best xenozoologists."

"How do you do," Mike said gravely. "Then you and the Father stand in
loco parentis to our Lithian guest. It's a heavy responsibility for a
young woman, I should think." The Jesuit felt a thoroughly unchristian
impulse to kick the tall chemist in the shins; but there seemed to be no
conscious malice in Michelis' voice.

The girl merely looked down at the ground and sucked in her breath
between slightly parted lips. "Ah-so-deska," she said, almost inaudibly.

Michelis' eyebrows went up, but in a moment it became obvious that Liu
was not going to say anything more, to him, right now. With a slight huff
of embarrassment, Michelis addressed himself to the priest, catching him
erasing the traces of a smile.

"So I'm all feet," Michelis said, grinning ruefully. "But I won't have
time to practice my manners for a while yet. There are lots of loose ends
to tie up. Ramon, how soon do you think you can leave Chtexa's child in
Dr. Meid's hands? We've been asked to do a non-classified version of the
Lithia report--"

"We?"

"Yes. Well, you and I."

"What about Cleaver and Agronski?"

"Cleaver's not available," Michelis said. "I don't offhand know where he
is. And for some reason they don't want Agronski; maybe he doesn't have
enough letters after his name. It's The Journal of Interstellar Research,
and you know how stuffy they are--they're nouveau-riche in terms of
prestige, and that makes them more academic than the academicians. But I
think it would be worth doing, just to get some of our data out into the
open. Can you find the time?"

"I think so," Ruiz-Sanchez said thoughtfully. "Providing it can be
sandwiched in between getting Chtexa's child born, and my pilgrimage."

Michelis raised his eyebrows again. "That's right, this is a Holy Year,
isn't it?"

"Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said.

"Well, I think we can work it in," Michelis said. "But, excuse me for
prying, Ramon, but you don't strike me as a man in urgent need of the
great pardon. Does this mean that you've changed your mind about Lithia?"

"No, I haven't changed my mind," Ruiz-Sanchez said quietly.

"We are all in need of the great pardon, Mike. But I'm not going to Rome
for that."

"Then--"

"I expect to be tried there for heresy."

XI

There was light on the mud flat where Egtverchi lay, somewhere eastward
of Eden, but day and night had not been created yet, nor was there yet
wind or tide to whelm him as he barked the wafer from his itchy lungs and
wbooped in the fiery air. Hopefully he squirmed with his new forelimbs,
and there was motion; but there was no place to go, and no one and
nothing from which to escape. The unvarying, glareless light was
comfortingly like that of a perpetually overcast sky, but Somebody had
failed to provide for that regular period of darkness and negation during
which an animal consolidates its failures and seeks in the depths of its
undreaming self for sufficient joy to greet still another morning.

"Animals have no souls," said Descartes, throwing a cat out the window to
prove, if not his point, at least his faith in it. The timid genius of
mechanism, who threw cats well but Popes badly, had never met a true
automaton, and so never saw that what the animal lacks is not a soul, but
a mind. A computer which can fill the parameters of the Haertel equations
for all possible values and deliver them in two and a half seconds is an
intellectual genius but, compared even to a cat, it is an emotional
moron.

As an animal which does not think, but instead responds to each minute
experience with the fullness of immediately apprehended--and immediately
forgotten--emotions which involve its whole body, needs the temporary
death of nightfall to protract its life, so the newly emerged animal body
requires the battles appointed to the day in order to become, at long
last, the somnolent self-confident adult which has been written aforetime
in its genes; and here, too, Somebody had failed Egtverchi. There was
soap in his mud, a calculated percentage which allowed him to thrash on
the floor of his cage without permitting him to make enough progress to
bump his head against its walls. This was conservative of his head, but
it wasted the muscles of his limbs. When his croaking days were over, and
he was transformed into a totally air-breathing, leaping thing, he did
not leap well. This too had been arranged, in a sense. There was nothing
in this childhood of his from which he needed to leap away in terror, nor
was there any place in it to which a small leap could have carried him.
Even the smallest jump ended with an invisible bang and a slithering fall
for the end of which, harmless though it invariably proved to be, no
instinct prepared him, and for which no learning-reflex helped him to
cultivate a graceful recovery. Besides, an animal with a perpetually
sprained tail cannot be graceful regardless of its instincts.

Finally, he forgot how to leap entirely, and simply sat huddled until the
next transformation overcame him, looking back dully at the many bobbing
heads that were beginning to ring him round during his every waking hour.
By the time he realized that all these watchers were alive like himself,
and much larger than he was, his instincts were so far submerged as to
produce in him nothing more than a vague alarm which resulted in no
action. The new transformation turned him into a weak and spindly walker
with no head for distance, oversized though it was. It was here that
Somebody saw to it that he was transferred to the terrarium.

Here at last the hormones of his true adolescence awakened and began to
flow in his blood. The proper responses for a world something like this
tiny jungle had been written imperatively upon every chromosome in his
body; here, all at once, he was almost at home. He roved through the
verdure of the terrarium on his shaky shanks with a counterfeit of
gladness, looking for something to flee, something to fight, something to
eat, something to learn. Yet in the long run he hardly found even a place
to sleep, for in the terrarium night was as unknown as ever. Here he also
became aware for the first time that there were differences among the
creatures who looked in at him and sometimes molested him. There were two
who were almost always to be seen, either alone or together. They were
always the molesters, as well--except-except that it was not always
exactly molestation, for sometimes these beings with their sharp stings
and their rough hands would give him something to eat which he had never
tasted before, or do something else to him which pleased as much as it
annoyed. He did not understand this relationship at all, and he did not
like it.

After a while, he hid from all the watchers except these two--and even
from them most of the time, for he was always sleepy. When he wanted
them, he would call: "Szan-tchez!" (For he could not say "Liu" at all;
his mesentery-tied tongue and almost cleft palate would never master so
demanding a combination of liquid sounds--that had to wait for his
adulthood.)

But eventually he stopped calling, and took to squatting apathetically
beside the pond in the center of the miniature jungle. When on the last
night of his lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in
that hollow of mosses where there was the most dimness, he knew in his
blood that on the morrow, when he awoke into his doom as a thinking
creature, he would be old with that age which curses those who have never
even for an instant been young. Tomorrow he would be a thinking creature,
but the weariness was on him tonight...

And so he awoke; and so the world was changed. The multiple doors from
sense to soul had closed; suddenly, the world was an abstract; he had
made that crossing from animal to automaton which had caused all the
trouble eastward of Eden in 4004 B. C. He was not a man, but he would pay
the toll on that bridge all the same. From this point on, nobody would
ever be able to guess what he felt in his animal soul, least of all
Egtverchi himself. "But what is he thinking about?" Liu said wonderingly,
staring up at the huge, grave Lithian head which bent down upon them from
the other side of the transparent pyroceram door.

Egtverchi--he had told them his name very early--could hear her, of course,
despite the division of the laboratory into two;, but he said nothing.
Thus far, he was anything but talkative, though he was a voracious
reader.

Ruiz did not respond for a while, though the nine-foot, young Lithian awed
and puzzled him quite as much as he did Liu--and for better reasons. He
looked sidewise at Michelis. The chemist was ignoring them both. Ruiz
could understand that well enough, as far as he himself was concerned;
the attempt to write a joint but impartial report on the Lithia
expedition for the J.I.R. had proven disastrous for the already tense
relationship between the two scientists. But that same tension, he could
see, was distressing Liu without her being quite aware of it, and that he
could not let pass; she was innocent. He mustered a last-ditch attempt to
draw Mike out.

"This is their learning period," he said. "Necessarily, they spend most
of it listening. They're like the old legend of the wolf boy, who is
raised by animals and comes into human cities without even knowing human
speech--except that the Lithians don't learn speech in infancy and so have
no block against learning it in young adulthood. To do that, they must
listen very hard--most wolf boys never learn to talk at all--and that's
what he's doing."

"But why won't he at least answer questions?" Liu said troubledly,
without quite looking at Michelis. "How is he going to learn if he won't
practice?"

"He hasn't anything to tell us yet, by his lights," Ruiz said. "And for
him, we lack the authority to put questions. Any adult Lithian could
question him, but obviously we don't qualify--and what Mike calls the
foster-parent relationship couldn't mean anything to a creature adapted
to a solitary childhood."

Michelis did not respond.

"He used to call us," Liu said sadly. "At least, he used to call you."

"That's different. That's the pleasure response; it has nothing to do
with authority, or affection either. If you were to put an electrode into
the septal or caudate nucleus areas in the brain of a cat, or a rat, so
that they could stimulate themselves electrically by pushing a pedal, you
could train them to do almost anything that's within their powers, for no
other reward but that jolt in the head. In the same way, a cat or a rat
or a dog will learn to respond to its name, or to initiate some action,
in order to gain pleasure. But you don't expect the animal to talk to you
or answer questions just because it can do that."

"I never heard of the brain experiments," Liu said. "I think that's
horrible."

"I think so too," Ruiz said. "It's an old line of research that got
sidetracked somehow. I've never understood why some of our megalomaniacs
didn't follow it up in human beings. A dictatorship founded on that
device might really last a thousand years. But it has nothing to do with
what you're asking of Egtverchi. When he's ready to talk, he'll talk. In
the meantime, we don't have the stature to compel him to answer
questions. For that, we would have to be twelve-foot Lithian adults."

Egtverchi's eyes filmed, and he brought his hands together suddenly.

"You are already too tall," his harsh voice said over the annunciator
system.

Liu clapped her hands together in delighted imitation.

"See, see, Ramon, you're wrong! Egtverchi, what do you mean? Tell us!"

Egtverchi said experimentally: "Liu. Liu. Liu."

"Yes, yes. That's right, Egtverchi. Go on, go on--what did you mean--tell
us!"

"Liu." Egtverchi seemed satisfied. The colors in his wattles died down.
He was again almost a statue.

After a moment, there was an explosive snort from Michelis. Liu turned
to him with a start, and, without really meaning to, so did Ruiz. But it
was too late. The big New Englander had already turned his back on them,
as though disgusted at himself for having broken his own silence. Slowly,
Liu too turned her back, if only to hide her face from everyone, even
Egtverchi. Ruiz was left standing alone at the vertex of the tetrahedron
of disaffection.

"This is going to be a fine performance for a prospective citizen of the
United Nations to turn in," Michelis said suddenly, bitterly, from
somewhere behind his shoulder. "I suppose you expected nothing else when
you asked me here. What moved you to tell me what vast progress he was
making? As I got the story, he ought to have been propounding theorems by
this time."

"Time," Egtverchi said, "is a function of change, and change is the
expression of the relative validity of two propositions, one of which
contains a time t and the other a time f-prime, which differ from each
other in no respect except that one contains the coordinate t and the
other the coordinate f-prime."

"That's all very well," Michelis said coldly, turning to look up at the
great head. "But I know where you got it from. If you're only a parrot,
you're not going to be a Citizen of this culture; you can take that from
me."

"Who are you?" Egtverchi said.

"I'm your sponsor, God help me," Michelis said. "I know my own name, and
I know what kind of record goes with it. If you expect to be a citizen,
Egtverchi, you'll have to do better than pass yourself off as Bertrand
Russell, or Shakespeare for that matter."

"I don't think he has any such notion," Ruiz said. "We explained the
citizenship proposal to him, but he didn't give us any sign that he
understood it. He just finished reading the Principia last week, so
there's nothing unlikely about his feeding it back. He does that now and
then."

"In first-order feedback," Egtverchi said somnolently, "if the
connections are reversed, any small disturbance will be self-aggravating.
In second-order feedback, going outside normal limits will force random
changes in the network which will stop only when the system is stable
again."

"God damn it!" Mike said savagely. "Now where did he get that? Stop it,
you! You don't fool me for a minute!"

Egtverchi closed his eyes and fell silent.

Suddenly Michelis shouted: "Speak up, damn it!"

Without opening his eyes, Egtverchi said: "Hence the system can develop
vicarious function if some of its parts are destroyed." Then he was
silent again; he was asleep. He was often asleep, even these days.

"Fugue," Ruiz said softly. "He thought you were threatening him."

"Mike," Liu said, turning to him with a kind of desperate earnestness,
"what do you think you're doing? He won't answer you, he can't answer
you, especially when you speak to him like that! He's only a child,
whatever you think when you have to look up at him! Obviously he learns
many of these things by rote. Sometimes he says them when they seem to be
apposite, but when we question him, he never carries it any farther. Why
don't you give him a chance? He didn't ask you to bring any citizenship
committee here!"

"Why don't you give me a chance?" Michelis said raggedly.

Then he turned white-on-white. After a moment, so did Liu. Ruiz looked up
again at the slumbering Lithian and, as assured as he could be that
Egtverchi was truly asleep, pressed the button which brought the rumbling
metal curtain down in front of the transparent door. To the last,
Egtverchi did not seem to move. Now they were isolated and away from him;
Ruiz did not know whether this would make any difference, but he had his
doubts about the innocence of Egtverchi's responses. To be sure, he had
not overtly done anything but make an enigmatic statement, ask a simple
question, quote from his reading--yet somehow everything he said had
helped matters to go more badly than before.

"Why did you do that?" Liu said.

"I wanted to clear the air," Ruiz said quietly. "He's asleep, anyhow.
Besides, we don't have any argument with Egtverchi yet. He may not be
equipped to argue with us. But we've got to talk to each other--you too,
Mike."

"Haven't you had enough of that already, Ramon?" Michelis said, in a
voice a little more like his own.

"Preaching is my vocation," Ruiz said. "If I make a vice of it, I expect
to atone for that somewhere else than here. But in the meantime--Liu,
part of our trouble is the quarrel that I mentioned to you. Mike and I
sharply disagreed on what Lithia means to the human race, indeed we
disagreed on whether Lithia poses us any philosophical question at all.
I think the planet is a time bomb; Mike thinks that's nonsense. And he
thought that a general article for a scientific audience was no place to
raise such questions, especially since this particular question has been
posed officially and hasn't been adjudicated yet. And that's one reason
why we're all snarling at each other right now, without any surface
reason for it."

"What a cold thing to be heated about!" Liu said. "Men are so
exasperating. How could a problem like that matter now?"

"I can't tell you," Ruiz said helplessly. "I can't be specific--the whole
issue is under security seal. Mike thinks even the general issues I
wanted to raise are graveyarded for the time being."

"But what we're waiting for is to find out what's going to happen to
Egtverchi," Liu said. "The UN examining group must be already on its way.
What business do you have to be hatching philosophical mandrake's-eggs
when the life of a--of a human being, there's no other way to put it--is
hanging on the next half hour?"

"Liu," Ruiz said gently, "forgive me, but are you so convinced that
Egtverchi is what you mean by a human being--a hnau, a rational soul?
Does he talk like one? You were complaining yourself that he won't answer
questions, and that very often when he speaks he doesn't make much sense.
I've talked to adult Lithians, I knew Egtverchi's father well, and
Egtverchi isn't much like them, let alone much like a human being. Hasn't
anything that's happened in the past hour changed your mind?"

"Oh, no," Liu said warmly, reaching out her hands for the Jesuit's.

"Ramon, you've heard him talk yourself, as much as I have--you've tended
him with me--you know he's not just an animal! He can be brilliant when he
wants to be!"

"You're right, the mandrake's eggs have nothing to do with the case,"
Michelis said, turning and looking at Liu with dark, astonishingly
pain-haunted eyes. "But I can't make Ramon listen to me. He's becoming
more and more bound in some rarefied theological torture of his own. I'm
sorry Egtverchi isn't as far along as I'd thought, but I foresaw almost
from the beginning, I think, that he was going to be a serious
embarrassment to us all, the closer he approaches his full intelligence.

"And I didn't get all my information from Ramon. I've seen the protocol
on the progressive intelligence tests. Either they're reports on
something phenomenal, or else we have no really trustworthy way of
measuring Egtverchi's intelligence at all--and that may add up to the same
thing in the end. If the tests are right, what's going to happen when
Egtverchi finally does grow up? He's the son of a highly intelligent
inhuman culture, and he's turning out to be a genius to boot-- and his
present status is that of an animal in a zoo! Or far worse than that,
he's an experimental animal; that's how most of the public tends to think
of him. The Lithians aren't going to like that, and furthermore the
public won't like it when it learns the facts.

"That's why I brought up this whole citizenship question in the
beginning. I see no other way out; we've got to turn him loose." He was
silent a moment, and then added, with almost his wonted gentleness:

"Maybe I'm naive. I'm not a biologist, let alone a psychometrist. But
I'd thought he'd be ready by now, and he isn't, so I guess Ramon wins by
default. The interviewers will take him as he is, and the results
obviously can't be good." This was precisely Ruiz-Sanchez' opinion,
though he would hardly have put it that way.

"I'll be sorry to see him go, if he leaves," Liu said abstractedly. It
was evident, however, that she was hardly thinking about Egtverchi at all
any more. "But Mike, I know you're right, there's no other solution in
the long run--he has to go free. He is brilliant, there's no doubt about
that. Now that I come to think of it, even this silence isn't the natural
reaction of an animal with no inner resources. Father, is there nothing
we can do to help?"

Ruiz shrugged; there was nothing that he could say. Michelis' reaction to
the apparent parroting and unresponsiveness of Egtverchi had of course
been far too extreme for the actual situation, springing mostly from
Michelis' own disappointment at the equivocal outcome of the Lithia
expedition; he liked issues to be clear-cut, and evidently he had thought
he had found in the citizenship maneuver a very sharp-edged tool indeed.
But there was much more to it than that: some of it, of course, tied into
the yet unadmitted bond which was forming between the chemist and the
girl; in that single word "Father" she had shucked the priest off as a
foster parent of Egtverchi, and put him in a position to give her away
instead.

And what remained left over to be said would have no audience here.
Michelis had already dismissed it as "some rarefied theological torture"
which was personal to Ruiz and of no importance outside the priest's own
skin. What Michelis dismissed would shortly fail to exist at all for Liu,
if indeed it had not already been obliterated.

No, there was nothing further that could be done about Egtverchi; the
Adversary was protecting his begotten son with all the old, divisive,
puissant weapons; it was already too late. Michelis did not know how
skilled UN naturalization commissions were at detecting intelligence and
desirability in a candidate, even through the thickest smoke screen of
language and cultural alienation, and at almost any age after the disease
called "talking" had set in. And he did not realize how primed the
commission would be to settle the Lithia question by a <i>fait accompli</i>. 
The visitors would see through Egtverchi within an hour at most, and then--

And then, Ruiz would be left with no allies at all. It seemed now to be
the will of God that he be stripped of everything, and brought before the
Holy Door with no baggage, not even such comforters as Job had, no, not
even burdened by belief. For Egtverchi would surely pass. He was as good
as free--and closer to being a citizen in good standing than Ruiz
himself.

XII

Egtverchi's coming-out party was held at the underground mansion of
Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne, a fact which greatly complicated
the already hysterical life of Aristide, the countess' caterer.
Ordinarily, such a party would have presented Aristide with no problems
reaching far beyond the technical ones with which he was already
familiar, and used to drive the staff to that frantic peak which he
regarded as the utmost in efficiency; but planning for the additional
presence of a ten-foot monster was an affront to his conscience as well
as to his artistry.

Aristide--born Michel di Giovanni in the timeless brutal peasantry of
un-Sheltered Sicily--was a dramatist who knew well the intricate stage
upon which he had to work. The count's New York mansion was many levels
deep. The part of it in which the party was being held protruded one
storey above the surface of Manhattan, as though the buried part of the
city were coming out of hibernation--or not quite finished digging in for
it. The structure had been a carbarn, Aristide had discovered, a dismal
block-square red brick building which had been put up in 1887 when cable
street cars had been the newest and most hopeful addition to the city's
circulatory system. The trolley tracks, with their middle division for
the cable grips, were still there in the asphalt floor, with only a
superficial coating of rust--steel does not rust appreciably in less than
two centuries. In the center of the top storey was a huge old steam
elevator with a basketwork shaft, which had once been used to tower the
trolley cars below ground for storage. There were more tracks in the
basement and sub-basement, whose elaborate switches led toward the
segments of rail in the huge elevator cab. Aristide had been stunned when
he first encountered this underlying blueprint, but he had promptly put
it to good use.

The countess' parties, thanks to his genius, were now confined in their
most formal phase to the uppermost of these three levels, but Aristide
had installed a serpentine of fourteen two-chair cars which wound its way
sedately along the trolley tracks, picking up as passengers those who
were already bored with nothing but chatter and drinking, and rumbled
onto the elevator to be taken down--with a great hissing and a cloud of
rising steam, for the countess was a stickler for surface authenticity in
antiques--to the next level, where presumably more interesting things were
happening. As a dramatist, Aristide also knew his audience: it was his
job to provide that whatever was seen on the next levels was more
interesting than what had been going on above. And he knew his dramatis
personae, too: he knew more about the countess' regular guests than they
knew about themselves, and much of his knowledge would have been decidedly
destructive had he been the talkative type. Aristide, however, was an
artist; he did not bribe; the notion was as unthinkable to him as
plagiarism (except, of course, self-plagiarism; that was how you kept
going during slumps.) Finally, as an artist, Aristide knew his patroness:
he knew her to the point where he could judge just how many parties had
to pass by before he could chance repeating an Effect, a Scene or a
Sensation.

But what could you do with a ten-foot reptilian kangaroo? From where he
stood in a discrete pillared alcove on the above-ground entrance floor,
Aristide watched the early guests filtering in from the reception room to
the formal cocktail party, one of his favorite anachronisms, and one
which the countess seemed prepared to allow him to repeat year after
year. It required very little apparatus, but the most absurd and
sub-lethal concoctions, and even more absurd costumes on the part of both
staff and guests. The nice rigidity of the costumes provided a pleasant
contrast to the of the psyche which the drinks quickly induced.

Thus far, there were only the early comers: here, Senator Sharon,
waggling her oversize eyebrows in wholesome cheeriness at the remaining
guests, ostentatiously refusing drinks, secure in the knowledge that her
good friend Aristide had provided for her below five strong young men no
one of whom she had ever seen before; there, Prince William of East
Orange, a young man whose curse was that he had no vices, and who came
again and again to ride the serpentine in hopes of discovering one that
he liked; and, nearby, Dr. Samuel P. Shovel, M. D., a jovial,
red-cheeked, white-haired man who was the high priest of psichonetology,
"the New Science of the Id," and a favorite of Aristide's, since he was
easy to provide for--he was fundamentally nothing more complicated than a
bottom-pincher.

Faulkner, the head butler, was approaching Aristide stiffly from the
left. Ordinarily, Faulkner ran the countess' household like an oriental
despot, but he was no longer in control while Aristide was on the
premises.

"Shall I order in the embryos in wine?" Faulkner said.

"Don't be such a blind, stupid fool," Aristide said. He had learned his
first English from sentimental 3-C 'casts, which gave his ordinary
conversation decidedly odd overtones; he was well aware of it, and these
days it was one of his principal weapons for driving his underlings, who
could not tell when he said these things dispassionately from when he was
really angry. "Go below, Faulkner. I'll call you when I need you--if I
do."

Faulkner bowed slightly and vanished. Fuming mildly at the interruption,
Aristide resumed his survey of the early comers. In addition to the
regulars, there was, of course, the countess, who had posed him no
special problems yet. Her gilded make-up was still unmussed and the
mobiles in the little caves Stefano had contrived in her hair spun
placidly or blinked their diamond eyes. Then there were the sponsors of
the Lithian monster into Shelter society, Dr. Michelis and Dr. Meid;
these two might present special problems, for he had been unable to find
out enough about them to decide what personal tastes they might need to
have catered to down below, despite the fact that they were key guests,
second only to the impossible creature itself. There was an explosive
potential here, Aristide knew with the certainty of fate, for that
impossible creature was already more than an hour late, and the countess
had let it be known to all the guests and to Aristide that the creature
was to be the guest of honor; fully half of the party would be coming to
see him.

There was no one else in the room at the moment but a UN man wearing a
funny hat--a sort of crash helmet liberally provided with communications
apparatus and other, unnamable devices, including bubble goggles which
occasionally filmed over to become a miniature 3-V screen--and a Dr.
Martin Agronski, whom Aristide could not place at all, and whom he
regarded with the consequent intense suspicion he reserved for people
whose weaknesses he could not even guess at. Agronski's face was as
petulant as that of the Prince of East Orange, but he was a much older
man, and it seemed unlikely that he was there for the same reasons. He
had something to do with the guest of honor, which made Aristide all the
more uneasy. Dr. Agronski seemed to know Dr. Michelis, but for an
unaccountable reason shied away from him at every opportunity; he was
spending most of his time at one of the most potent of Aristide's
punches, with the glum determination of a non-drinker who believes that
he can perfect his poise by poisoning his timidity. Perhaps a woman ... ?

Aristide crooked a finger. His assistant scuttled around the back of the
hanging floral decorations with a practiced stoop, covering even the
sound of his movements by a brief delay which allowed the serpentine to
come into its station, and cocked his ear to Aristide's mouth under the
squeal of the train's brakes.

"Watch that one," Aristide said through motionless lips, pointing with
the apex of one pelvic bone. "He will be drunk within the next half hour.
Take him out before he falls down, but don't take him off the premises.
She may ask for him later. Better put him in the recovery room and taper
him off as soon as he begins to wobble."

The assistant nodded and pedaled away, bent double. Aristide was still
talking to him in blunt, businesslike English; that was a good sign, as
far as it went.

Aristide returned to watching the guests; their number was growing a
little, but he was still most interested in assessing the countess'
reaction to the absence of the guest of honor. For the moment Aristide
himself was in no danger, though he could see that the countess' hints
had begun to acquire a certain hardness. Thus far, however, she was
directing them at the monster's sponsors, Dr. Michelis and Dr. Meid, and
it was plain that they had no answer for these gambits. Dr. Michelis
could only say over and over again, with a politeness which was becoming
more and more formal as his patience visibly evaporated:

"Madame, I don't know when he's coming. I don't even know where he lives
now. He promised to come. I'm not surprised that he's late, but I think
he'll show up eventually." The countess turned away petulantly, swinging
her hips. Here was the first danger point for Aristide. There was no
other pressure that the countess could bring to bear upon the monster's
sponsors, regardless of how ignorant they were of the actual situation in
the countess' household. By some trick of heredity, Lucien le Comte des
Bois-d'Averoigne, Procurator of Canarsie, had been shrewd enough to spend
his money wisely: he gave ninety-eight per cent of it to his wife, and
used the other two per cent to disappear with for most of the year. There
were even rumors that he did scientific research, though nobody could say
in what field; certainly it could not be psichonetology or ufonics, or
the countess would have known about it, since both were currently
fashionable. And without the count, the countess was socially a nullity
supported only by money; if the Lithian creature failed to show up at
all, there was nothing that the countess could do to his sponsors but
fail to invite them to the next party--which she would probably fail to do
anyhow. On the other hand, there was a great deal that she might do to
Aristide. She could not fire him, of course--he had kept careful dossiers
against that possibility--but she could make his professional life with
her very difficult indeed.

He signaled his second-in-command.

"Give Senator Sharon the canape with the jolt in it as soon as there are
ten more people on the floor," he directed crisply. "I don't like the way
this is going. As soon as we have a minimum crowd, we'll have to get them
rolling on the trains--Sharon's not the best Judas goat for the purpose,
but she'll have to do. Take my advice, Cyril, or you will rue the day."

"Very good, Maestro," the assistant, whose name was not Cyril at all,
said respectfully.

Michelis had hardly noticed the serpentine at the beginning, except as a
novelty, but somehow or other it became noisier as the party grew older.
It seemed to wind along the floor about every five minutes, but he soon
realized that there were actually three such trains: the first one
collected passengers up here; the second returned parties from the second
level, to discharge wildly exhilarated recruiters among the cautiously
formal newcomers on the first level; and the third train, usually almost
empty this early in the party's course, brought glassy-eyed party-poopers
from the sub-basement, who were removed efficiently by the countess'
livery in a covered station stop well apart from the main entrance and
well out of sight of new boarders for the nether levels. Then the whole
cycle repeated itself.

Michelis had had every intention of staying off the serpentine entirely.
He did not like the diplomatic service, especially now that it had
nothing left to be diplomatic about, and anyhow he was far too dedicated
to loneliness to be comfortable even at small parties, let alone anything
like this. After a while, however, he became bored with repeating that
same apology for Egtverchi, and aware that the top level of the party was
now so empty that his and Liu's presence there was keeping their hostess
against her will.

When Liu finally noticed that the serpentine not only toured this level
but went below, he lost his last excuse to stay off it; and the elevator
took all the rest of the newcomers down, leaving behind only the servants
and a few bewildered scientific attachés who probably were at the wrong
party to begin with. He looked about for Agronski, whose presence had
astonished him early, but the hollow-eyed geologist had disappeared.

Everyone on the train shouted with glee and mock terror as the steam
elevator took it down to the second level in utter blackness and
rusty-smelling humidity. Then the great doors rolled up sharply in their
eyes, and the train surged out, making an abrupt turn along its banked
rails. Its plowlike nose butted immediately through a set of swinging
double doors, plunged its passengers into even deeper darkness, and
stopped completely with a grinding shudder.

From out of the darkness came a barrage of shrieking, hysterical feminine
laughter and the shouting of men's voices.

"Oh, I can't stand!"

"Henry, is that you?"

"Leggo of me, you bitch."

"I'm so dizzy!"

"Look out, the damn thing's speeding up again!"

"Get off my foot, you bastard."

"Hey, you're not my husband."

"Ugh. Lady, I couldn't care less."

"Woman's gone too far this--"

Then they were drowned out by a siren so prolonged and deafening that
Michelis' ears rang frighteningly even after the sound had risen past the
upper limits of audibility. Then there was the groan of machinery, a dim
violet glow--

The serpentine was turning over and over in midspace, supported by
nothing. Many-colored stars, none of them very bright, whirled past,
rising on one side and sweeping over and then under the train with a
period of only ten seconds from one "horizon" to the other. The shouts
and the laughter were heard again, accompanied by a frantic scrabbling
sound--and there came the siren again, first as a pressure, then as a
thin singing which seemed to be inside the skull, and then as a prolonged
sickening slide toward the infrabass.

Liu clutched frantically at Michelis' arm, but he could do nothing but
cling to his seat. Every cell in Ms brain was flaring with alarm, but he
was paralyzed and sick with giddiness--

Lights.

The world stabilized instantly. The serpentine sat smugly on its tracks,
which were supported by cantilever braces; it had never moved. At the
bottom of a gigantic barrel, disheveled guests looked up at the nearly
blinded passengers of the train and howled with savage mockery. The
"stars" had been spots of fluorescent paint, brought to life by hidden
ultraviolet lamps. The illusion of spinning in midspace had been made
more real by the siren, which had disturbed their vestibular apparatus,
the inner ear which maintains the sense of balance.

"All out!" a rough male voice shouted. Michelis looked down cautiously;
he was still a little dizzy. The shouter was a man in rumpled black
evening clothes and fire-red hair; his huge shoulders had burst one seam
of his jacket. "You get the next train. That's the rules." Michelis
thought of refusing, and changed his mind. Being tumbled in the barrel
was probably less likely to produce serious wounds than would fighting
with two people who had already "earned"' their passage out in his and
Liu's seats. There were rules of conduct for everything. A gang ladder
protruded up at them; when their turn came, he helped Liu down it.

"Try not to fight it," he told her in a low voice. "When it starts to
revolve, slide if you can, roll if you can't. Got a pyrostyle? All right,
here's mine--jab if anybody stays too close, but don't worry about the
drum--it looks thoroughly waxed."

It was; but Liu was frightened and Michelis in a murderously ugly mood by
the time the next train came through and took them out; he was glad that
he had not decided to argue with his predecessors in the barrel. Anybody
who had tried the same thing with him might well have been killed. The
fact that he was drenched with perfume as the serpentine passed through
the next cell did not exactly improve his temper, but at least the cell
did not require anyone's participation. It was a sizable and beautiful
garden made of blown glass in every possible color, in which live
Javanese models were posed in dioramas of discovered lust; the situations
depicted were melodramatic in the extreme but, except for their almost
imperceptible breathing, the models did not move a muscle; they were
almost as motionless as the glass foliage. To Michelis' surprise--for
outside the sciences he had almost no aesthetic sense--Liu regarded these
lascivious, immobile scenes with a kind of withdrawn, grave approval. 

"It's an art, to suggest a dance without moving," she murmured suddenly,
as though she had sensed his uneasiness. "Difficult with the brush, far
more difficult with the body. I think I know the man who designed this;
there couldn't be but one."

He stared at her as though he had never seen her before, and by the pure
current of jealousy that shot through him he knew for the first time that
he loved her. "Who?" he said hoarsely.

"Oh, Tsien Hi, of course. The last classicist. I thought he was dead, but
this isn't a copy--"

The serpentine slowed before the exit doors long enough for two models,
looking obscenely alive in very modest movement, to hand them each a fan
covered with brushed drawings in ink. A single glance was enough to make
Michelis thrust his fan in his pocket, unwilling to acknowledge ownership
of it by so definite a gesture as throwing it away; but Liu pointed
mutely to an ideogram and folded hers with reverence. "Yes," she said.
"It is he; these are the original sketches. I never thought I'd own one--"

The train lurched forward suddenly. The garden vanished, and they were
plunged into a vague, colored chaos of meaningless emotions. There was
nothing to see or hear or feel, yet Michelis was shaken to his soul, and
then shaken again, and again. He cried out, and dimly heard others
crying. He fought for control of himself, but it eluded him, and... no,
he had it now, or almost had it... If he could only think for an
instant--

For an instant, he managed it, and saw what was happening. The new cell
was a long corridor, divided by invisible currents of moving air into
fifteen sub-cells. Inside each sub-cell was a colored smoke, and in each
smoke was some gas which went instantly home to the hypothalamus.
Michelis recognized some of them: they were crude hallucinogenic
compounds which had been developed during the heyday of tranquilizer
research in the mid-twentieth century. Under the waves of fright,
religious exaltation, berserker bravery, lust for power, and less namable
emotions which each induced, he felt a mounting intellectual anger at
such irresponsible wholesale tampering with the pharmacology of the mind
for the sake of a momentary "experience"; but he knew that this kind of
jolt--breathing was anything but uncommon in the Shelter state. The smokes
had the reputation of being non-addicting, which for the most part they
were--but they were certainly habit-forming, which is quite a different
thing, and not necessarily less dangerous.

A hazy, formless curtain of pink at the far end of the corridor proved to
be a pure free-serotonin antagonist in high concentration, a true
ataraxic which washed his mind free of every emotion but contentment with
everything in all the wide universe. What must be, must be... it is all
for the best... there is peace in everything--

In this state of uncritical yea-saying, the passengers on the serpentine
were run through an assembly line of elaborate and bestial practical
jokes. It ended with a 3-V tape recreation of Belsen, in which the
scenarist had cunningly made it appear that the people on the serpentine
would be next into the ovens. As the furnace door closed behind them
there was a blast of mind-cleansing oxygen; staggering with horror at
what they had been about to accept with joy, the passengers were helped
off the train to join a guffawing audience of previous victims. Michelis'
only impulse was to escape--above all he did not want to stay to laugh at
the next load of passengers in shock--but he was too exhausted to get
beyond the nearest bench in the amphitheater, and Liu could hardly walk
even that far. They were forced to sit there in the press until they had
made a better recovery.

It was fortunate that they did. While they were nursing their drinks
Michelis, had been deeply suspicious of the warm amber cups, but their
contents had proved to be nothing but honest and welcome brandy--the next
train was greeted with a roar of delight and a unanimous surge of the
crowd to its feet.

Egtverchi had arrived.

There was a real mob now in the cocktail lounge above ground, but
Aristide was far from happy; he had already cut off quite a few heads
down below on the catering staff. He had somewhere inside him a very
delicate sense which told him when a party was going sour, and that sense
had put up the red alarms long before this. The arrival of the guest of
honor in particular had been an enormous fiasco. The countess had not
been on hand, the creature's sponsors had not been there, none of the
really important guests who had been invited specifically to see the
guest of honor had been there, and the guest himself had betrayed
Aristide into showing, before all the staff, that he was frightened out
of his wits. He was bitterly ashamed of his fright, but the fact was now
beyond undoing. He had been told to anticipate a monster, but not such a
monster as this--a creature well more than ten feet high, a reptile which
walked more like a man than like a kangaroo, with vast grinning jaws,
wattles which changed color every few moments, small clawlike hands which
looked as though they could pluck one like a chicken, a balancing tail
which kept sweeping trays off tables, and above all a braying laugh and
an enormous tenor voice which spoke English with a perfection so cold and
carefully calculated as to make Aristide feel like a thumb-fingered
leather-skinned Sicilian who had just landed.

And at the monster's entrance, nobody but Aristide had been there
to welcome him...

A train rumbled into the atrium of the recovery room, but before it
stopped, Senator Sharon tumbled out with a vast display of piano legs and
black eyebrows. "Look at him!" she squealed, full of the five-fold
revival Aristide had conscientiously arranged for her. "Isn't he male!"

Another failure for Aristide: it was one of the countess' standing orders
that the Senator had to be put through her cell and fired out into the
Shelter night long before the party proper could be said to have begun;
otherwise the Senator would spend the rest of the evening, after her
five-fold awakening, climbing from one pair of shoulders to another to a
political, literary, scientific or any other eminence she could manage to
attain at the expense of everyone else who could be bought with half an
hour on a table top--and never mind that she would spend the rest of the
next week falling down from that eminence into the swamps of nymphomania
again. If Senator Sharon were not properly ejected this early, and with
due assurances, in the warm glow of her aftermath, she was given to
lawsuits.

The empty train pulled out invitingly into the lounge. The Lithian
monster saw it and his grin got wider.

"I always wanted to be an engine driver," he said in a brassy English
which nevertheless was more precise than anything to which Aristide would
be able to pretend to the end of his life.

"And there's the major-domo. Good sir, I've brought two, three, several
guests of my own. Where is our hostess?"

Aristide pointed helplessly, and the tall reptile boarded the train at
the front car, with a satisfied crow. He was scarcely settled in before
the rest of his party was pouring across the lounge floor and piling in
behind him. The train started with a jerk, and rumbled to the elevator.
It sank down amid tali wisps of steam.

And that was that. Aristide had muffed the grand entrance. Had he had any
doubts about it, they would have been laid to rest most directly: less
than ten minutes later, he was snooted egregiously by Faulkner. So much
for being a dedicated artist with a loyal patroness, he thought dismally.
Tomorrow, he would be a short-order cook in some Shelter commissariat,
dossiers or no dossiers. And why? Because he had been unable to
anticipate the time of arrival, let alone the desires or the friends, of
some creature which had never been born on Earth at all. He marched
deliberately and morosely away from his post toward the recovery room,
kicking assistants who were green enough to stay within range. He could
think of nothing further to do but to supervise personally the
tapering-off of Dr. Martin Agronski, the unknown guest who had something
to do with the Lithian.

But he had no illusions. Tomorrow, Aristide, caterer to the Countess des
Bois-d'Averoigne, would be lucky to be Michel di Giovanni, late of the
malarial plains of Sicily.

Michelis was sorry he had allowed himself and Liu aboard the serpentine
the moment he understood the construction of the second level, for he saw
at once that they would have virtually no chance of seeing Egtverchi's
arrival. Fundamentally, the second level was divided by soundproof walls
into a number of smaller parties, some of them only slightly drunker and
more unorthodox than the cocktail party had been, but the rest running a
broad spectrum of frenetic exoticism. He and Liu were carried completely
around the course before he was able to figure out how to get the girl
and himself safely off the serpentine; and each time he was moved to
attempt it, the train began to go faster in unpredictable spurts,
producing a sensation rather like that of riding a roller coaster in
the middle of the night.

Nevertheless, they saw the only entrance that counted. Egtverchi emerged
from the last gas bath standing in the head car of the serpentine, and
stepped out of the car under his own power. In the next five cars behind
him, also standing, were ten nearly identical young men in uniforms of
black and lizard-green with silver piping, their arms folded, their
expressions stern, their eyes straight ahead.

"Greetings," Egtverchi said, with a deep bow which his disproportionately
small dinosaurian arms and hands made both comical and mocking. "Madame
the Countess, I am delighted. You are protected by many bad smells, but I
have braved them all." The crowd applauded. The countess' reply was lost
in the noise, but evidently she had chided him with being naturally
immune to smokes which would affect Earthmen, for he said promptly, with
a trace of hurt in his voice:

"I thought you might say that, but I'm grieved to be caught in the right.
To the pure all things are pure, however, did you ever see such
upstanding, unshaken young men?" He gestured at the ten. "But of course I
cheated. I stopped their nostrils with filters, as Ulysses stopped his
men's ears with wax to pass the sirens. My entourage will stand for
anything; they think I am a genius."

With the air of a conjurer, the Lithian produced a silver whistle which
seemed small in his hand, and blew into the thick air a white, warbling
note which was utterly inadequate to the gesture which had preceded it.
The ten soldierly young men promptly melted. The forefront of the crowd
gleefully toed the limp bodies, which took the abuse with lax
indifference.

"Drunk," Egtverchi said with fatherly disapproval. "Of course. Actually I
didn't stop their noses at all. I prevented their reticular formations
from reporting the countess' smokes to their brains until I gave the cue.
Now they have gotten all the messages at once; isn't it disgraceful?
Madame, please have them removed, such dissoluteness embarrasses me. I
shall have to institute discipline."

The countess clapped her hands. "Aristide! Aristide?" She touched the
transceiver concealed in her hair, but there was no response that
Michelis could detect. Her expression changed abruptly from childish
delight to infant fury. "Where is that lousy rustic--"

Michelis, boiling, shouldered his way into Egtverchi's line of sight with
difficulty.

"Just what the hell do you think you're doing?" he said in a hoarse
voice.

"Good evening, Mike. I am attending a party, just as you are. Good
evening, dear Liu. Countess, do you know my foster parents? But I am sure
you do."

"Of course," the countess said, turning her bare shoulders and back
unmistakably on Michelis and Liu, and looking up at Egtverchi's
perpetually grinning head from under gilded eyelids.

"Let's go next door--there's more room, and it will be quieter. We've all
seen enough of these train riders. After you, their arrivals will seem
all alike."

"I cultivate the unique," Egtverchi said. "But I must have Mike and Liu
by my side. Countess. I am the only reptile in the universe with
mammalian parents, and I cherish them. I have a notion that it may be a
sin; isn't that interesting?"

The gilded eyelids lowered. It had been years since the countess'
caterers had come up with a new sin interesting enough to be withheld
from the next evening's guests for private testing; that was common
knowledge. She looked as if she scented one now, Michelis thought; and
since she was, in fact, a woman of small imagination, Michelis was not in
much doubt as to what it was. For all his saurian shape and texture,
there was something about Egtverchi that was intensely, overwhelmingly
masculine.

And intensely childlike, too. That the combination was perfectly capable
of overriding any repugnance people might feel toward his additionally
overwhelming reptilian-ness had already been demonstrated, in the
response to his first interview on 3-V. His wry and awry comments on
Earthly events and customs had been startling enough, and perhaps it
could have been predicted even then that the intelligentsia of the world
would pick him up as a new fad before the week was out. But nobody had
anticipated the flood of letters from children, from parents, from lonely
women. Egtverchi was a sponsored news commentator now, the first such
ever to have an audience composed half-and-half of disaffected
intellectuals and delighted children. There was no precedent for it in
the present century, at least; learned men in communications compared him
simultaneously with two historical figures named Adlai E. Stevenson and
Oliver J. Dragon.

Egtverchi also had a lunatic following, though its composition had not
yet been analyzed publicly by his 3-V network. Ten of these followers
were being lugged limply out by the countess' livery right now, and
Michelis' eyes followed them speculatively while he trailed with the
crowd after Egtverchi and the countess, out of the amphitheater and into
the huge lounge next door. The uniforms were suggestive--but of what? They
might have been no more than costumes, designed for the party alone; had
the ten young men who fell to the bleat of Egtverchi's silver whistle
been physically different from each other, the effect would have been
smaller, as Egtverchi would have known. And yet the whole notion of
uniforms was foreign to Lithian psychology, while it was profoundly
meaningful in Earth terms--and Egtverchi knew more about Earth than most
Earthmen did, already.

Lunatics in uniforms, who thought Egtverchi to be a genius who could do
no wrong; what could that mean?

Were Egtverchi a man, one would know instantly what it meant. But he was
not a man, but a musician playing upon man as on an organ. The structure
of the composition would not be evident for a long time to come--if it had
a structure; Egtverchi might only be improvising, at least this early.
That was a frightening thought in itself.

And all this had happened within a month of the awarding of citizenship
to Egtverchi. That had been a pleasant surprise. Michelis was none too
sure how he felt about the surprises that had followed; about those
certain to come he was decidedly wary.

"I have been exploring this notion of parenthood," Egtverchi was saying.
"I know who my father is, of course--it is a knowledge we are born
with--but the concept that goes with the word is quite unlike anything you
have here on Earth. Your concept is a tremendous network of
inconsistencies."

"In what way?" the countess said, not very much interested.

"Why, it seems to be based on a reverence for the young, and an extremely
patient and protective attitude toward their physical and mental welfare.
Yet you make them live in these huge caves, utterly out of contact with
the natural world, and you teach them to be afraid of death--which of
course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can
do about death. It is like teaching them to be afraid of the second law
of thermodynamics, just because living matter sets that law aside for a
very brief period. How they hate you!"

"I doubt that they know I exist," the countess said drily. She had no
children.

"Oh, they hate their own parents first of all," Egtverchi said, "but
there is enough hatred left over for every other adult on your planet.
They write me about it. They have never had anybody to say this to
before, but they see in me someone who has had no hand in their torment,
who is critical of it, and who obviously is a comical, harmless fellow
who won't betray them."

"You're exaggerating," Michelis said uneasily.

"Oh no, Mike. I have prevented several murders already. There was one
five-year-old who had a most ingenious plan, something involving garbage
disposal. He was ready to include his mother, his father, and his
fourteen-year-old brother, and the whole affair would have been blamed on
a computational error in his city's sanitation department. Amazing that a
child that age could have planned anything so elaborate, but I believe it
would have worked--these Shelter cities of yours are so complex, they
become lethal engines if even the most minute errors creep into them. Do
you doubt me, Mike? I shall show you the letter."

"No," Michelis said slowly. "I don't think I do."

Egtverchi's eyes filmed briefly. "Some day I will let one of these
affairs proceed to completion," he said. "As a demonstration, perhaps.
Something of the sort seems to be in order."

Somehow Michelis did not doubt that he would, nor that the results would
be as predicted. People did not remember their childhoods clearly enough
to take seriously the rages and frustrations that shook children--and the
smaller the child, the less superego it had to keep the emotions tamed.
It seemed more than likely that a figure like Egtverchi would be able to
tap this vast, seething underworld of impotent fury and there was where
you had to tap it, if you were hoping to do any good. Tapping it by
hindsight, through analysis of adults, was successful with neurotics, but
it had never proved effective against the psychoses; those had to be
attacked pharmacologically, by regulating serotonin metabolism with
ataraxics--the carefully tailored chemical grandchildren of the countess'
crude smokes.

That worked, but it was not a cure, but a maintenance operation--like
giving insulin or sulfonylureas to a diabetic. The organic damage had
already been done. In the great raveled knot of the brain, the basic
reverberating circuits, once set in motion, could be interrupted but
never discontinued--except by destructive surgery, a barbarity now a
century out of use.

And it all fitted some of the disturbing things he had been discovering
about the Shelter economy since his return from his long sojourn on
Lithia. Having been born into it, Michelis had always taken that economy
pretty much for granted; or at least his adult memory of his childhood
told him that. Maybe it had really been different, and perhaps a little
less grim, back in those days, or maybe that was just an illusion
cherished by the silent censor in his brain. But it seemed to him that in
those days people had let themselves become reconciled to these endless
caverns and corridors for the sake of their children, in the hope that
the next generation would be out from under the fear and could know
something a little better, a glimpse of sunlight, a little rain, the fall
of a leaf.

Since then, the restrictions on surface living had been relaxed greatly,
nobody now believed in the possibility of nuclear war, since the Shelter
race had produced an obvious impasse--but somehow the psychic atmosphere
was far worse instead of better.

The number of juvenile gangs roaming the corridors had increased four
hundred per cent while Michelis was out of the solar system; the UN was
now spending about a hundred million dollars a year on elaborate
recreation and rehabilitation programs for adolescents, but the rec
centers stayed largely deserted, and the gangs continued to multiply. The
latest measure taken against them was frankly punitive: a tremendous
increase in the cost of compulsory insurance on power scooters, seemingly
harmless, slow-moving vehicles which the gangs had adapted first to
simple crimes like purse-snatching, and then to such more complicated and
destructive games as mass raids on food warehouses, industrial
distilleries, even utilities--it had been drag-racing in the air ducts
that had finally triggered the confiscatory insurance rates. 

In the light of what Egtverchi had said, the gangs made perfect and
horrible sense. Nobody now believed in the possibility of nuclear war,
but nobody could believe in the possibility of a full return to surface
life, either. The billions of tons of concrete and steel were far too
plainly there to stay. The adults no longer had hopes even for their
children, let alone for themselves. While Michelis had been away in the
Eden of Lithia, on Earth the number of individual crimes without
motive--crimes committed just to distract the committer from the grinding
monotony of corridor life--had passed the total of all other crimes put
together. Only last week some fool on the UN's Public Polity Commission
had proposed putting tranquilizers in the water supplies; the World
Health Organization had had him ousted within twenty-four hours--actually
putting the suggestion into effect would have "doubled crimes of this
kind, by cutting the population further free of its already feeble grip
on responsibility--but it was too late to counteract the effect on morale
of the suggestion alone.

The WHO had had good reason to be both swift and arbitrary about it. Its
last demographic survey showed, under the grim heading of "Actual
Insanity," a total of thirty-five million unhospitalized early paranoid
schizophrenics who had been clearly diagnosed, every one of whom should
have been committed for treatment at once--except that, were the WHO to
commit them, the Shelter economy would suffer a manpower loss more
devastating than any a war had inflicted on mankind in all of its
history. Every one of those thirty-five million persons was a major
hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but the Shelter economy was too
complicated to do without them, let alone do without the unrecognized,
subclinical cases, which probably totaled twice as many. The Shelter
economy could not continue operating much longer without a major
collapse; it was on the verge of a psychotic break at this instant. With
Egtverchi for a therapist?

Preposterous. But who else--?

"You're very gloomy tonight," the countess was complaining.

"Won't you amuse anyone but children?"

"No one," Egtverchi said promptly. "Except, of course, myself. And of
course I am also a child. There now: not only do I have mammals for
parents, but I am myself my own uncle, these 3-V amusers of children are
always everyone's uncle. You do not appreciate me properly, Countess; I
become more interesting every minute, but you do not notice. In the next
instant I may turn into your mother, and you will do nothing but yawn."

"You've already turned into my mother," the countess said, with a
challenging, slumbrous look. "You even have her jowls, and all those
impossibly even teeth. And the talk. My God. Turn into something else--and
don't make it Lucien."

"I would turn into the count if I could," Egtverchi said, with what
Michelis was almost sure was genuine regret. "But I have no affinity for
affines; I don't even understand Haertel yet. Tomorrow, perhaps?"

"My God," the countess said again. "Why in the world did I think I should
invite you? You're too dull to be borne. I don't know why I count on
anything any more. I should know better by now." Astonishingly, Egtverchi
began to sing, in a high, pure, costrato tenor: "Swef, swef, Susa..." For
a moment Michelis thought the voice was coming from someone else, but the
countess swung on Egtverchi instantly, her face twisted into a Greek mask
of pure rage.

"Stop that," she said, her voice as raw as a wound. Her expression, under
the gilded gaiety of her party paint, was savagely incongruous.

"Certainly," Egtverchi said soothingly. "You see I am not your mother
after all. It pays to be careful with these accusations."

"You lousy snake-scaled demon!"

"Please, Countess; I have scales, you have breasts; this is proper and
fitting. You ask me to amuse you; I thought you might enjoy my jongleur's
lullaby."

"Where did you hear that song?"

"Nowhere," Egtverchi said. "I reconstructed it. I could see from the cast
of your eyes that you were a born Norman."

"How did you do it?" Michelis said, interested in spite of himself. It
was the first sign he had encountered that Egtverchi had any musical
ability.

"Why, by the genes, Mike," Egtverchi said; his literal Lithian mind had
gone to the substance of Michelis' question rather than to its sense.
"This is the way I know my name, and the name of my father.
E-G-T-V-E-R-C-H-I is the pattern of genes on one of my chromosomes; the
G, V and I alleles are of course from my mother; my cerebral cortex has
direct sensual access to my genetic composition. We see ancestry
everywhere we look, just as you see colors--it is one of the spectra of
the real world. Our ancestors bred that sense into us; you could do worse
than imitate them. It is helpful to know what a man is before he even
opens his mouth."

Michelis felt a faint but decided chill. He wondered if Chtexa had ever
mentioned this to Ruiz. Probably not; a discovery so fascinating to a
biologist would have driven the Jesuit to talking about it. In any event,
it was too late to ask him, for he was on the way to Rome; Qeaver was
even farther away by now; and Agronski wouldn't know.

"Dull, dull, dull," the countess said. She had got back most of her
self-possession.

"To be sure, to the dull," Egtverchi said, with his eternal grin, which
somehow managed to disarm almost anything that he said.

"But I offered to amuse you; you did not enjoy my entertainment. It is
your doom to amuse me, too, you know; I am the guest here. What do you
have in the sub-basement, for instance? Let us go see. Where are my
summer soldiers? Somebody wake them; we have a trip to take."

The packed guests had been listening intently, obviously enjoying the
countess' floundering upon Egtverchi's long and multiple-barbed gaff.
When she bowed her high-piled, gilded head and led the way back toward
the trolley tracks, a blurred and almost animal cheer shook the lounge.
Liu shrank back against Michelis; he put his arm tightly around her
waist.

"Mike, let's not go," she whispered. "Let's go home. I've had enough."

XIII

ENTRY IN EGTVERCHI'S JOURNAL:

June 13th, 13th week of citizenship; This week I stayed home. Elevators
on Earth never stop at this floor. Must check why. They have reasons for
everything they do.

It was during the week Egtverchi's program was off the air that Agronski
stumbled across the discovery that he no longer knew who he was. Though
he had not recognized it for what it was at the time, the first
forebodings of this devastation had come creeping over him as far back as
that four-cornered debate in Xoredeshch Sfath, when he had begun to
realize that he did not know what Mike, the Father and Cleaver were
talking about. After a while, it had begun to seem to him that they
didn't know, either; the long looping festoons of logic and emotion with
which they so determinedly bedecked the humid Lithian air seemed to hang
from nothing, and touch no ground on which he or any other human being he
knew had ever stood.

Then, after he had come home, he had hardly even been angered--only
vaguely irritated--when the J. L. R. had failed to include him in its
invitation to prepare the preliminary article on Lithia. The Lithian
experience had already begun to seem remote and dreamlike to him, and he
already knew that he and the senior authors could have nothing more to
say to each other on that subject which would make mutual sense.

So far, so good; but so far there was no explanation for the sensation of
bottomless despair, loneliness and disgust which had swept over him here
at the discovery, seemingly of no consequence in itself, that his
favorite 3-V program would not be on tonight. Superficially, everything
else was as it should be. He had been invited to a year of residency at
Fordham's seismological laboratories on the basis of his previous
publications on gravity waves--tidal and seismic tremors--and his arrival
had been greeted with just the proper mixture of respect and enthusiasm
by the Jesuits who ran the great university's science department. His
apartment in the bachelor scientists' quarters was not at all monastic,
indeed it was almost luxurious for a single man; he had as much apparatus
as any geologist in his field could have dreamed of having under such an
arrangement, he was virtually free of lecture duties, he had made several
new friends among the graduate students assigned to him--and yet, tonight,
looking blankly at the replacement program which had appeared instead of
Egtverchi on his 3-V screen--

In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable,
and yet they had all been so small! He had been looking forward to his
return to Earth with an unfocussed but intense excitement, not directed
toward any one aspect of Earthly life, but simply eager for the pat wink
of all things familiar. But when he had returned, he found no reassurance
in the familiar; indeed, it all seemed rather flat. He put it down to
having been a relatively free-wheeling, nearly unique individual on a
virtually unpopulated world; there was bound to be a certain jolt in
readapting oneself to the life of one mole among billions.

And yet a jolt was precisely what it had not been. Instead, it had been a
most peculiar kind of lack of all sensation, as though the familiar were
powerless to move him or even to touch him. As the days wore by, this
intellectual, emotional, sensual numbness became more and more
pronounced, until it became a kind of sensation in itself, a sort of
giddiness--as though he were about to fall, and yet could not see anything
to grab hold of to steady himself, or indeed what kind of ground he was
standing on at the moment.

Somewhere along in there he had taken up listening to Egtverchi's news
broadcasts, out of simple curiosity insofar as he could remember any
feeling so far removed in time. There had been something there that was
useful to him, though he could not know what it was. At the very least,
Egtverchi occasionally amused him. Sometimes the creature reminded him
obscurely that on Lithia, no matter how divorced he had been from the
thinking and the purposes of the other members of the commission, he had
been almost unique; that was comforting, though it was a watery comfort.
And sometimes, during Egtverchi's most savage sallies against Agronski's
familiar Earth, he felt a slight surge of genuine pleasure, as though
Egtverchi were his agent in acting out a long and complicated revenge
against enemies hidden and unknown. More usually, however, Egtverchi
failed to penetrate the slightly nauseating numbness which had closed
around him; the broadcasts simply became a habit.

In the meantime, increasingly it came over him that he did not understand
what his fellow men were doing or, in the minority of instances where he
did understand it, it seemed to him to be something utterly trivial; why
did people bind themselves to these regimes? Where were they going that
was so important? The air of determined dull preoccupation with which the
average troglodyte went to his job, got through it, and came away again
to his cubby in his target area would have seemed tragic to him if the
actors had not all been such utter ciphers; the eagerness, dedication,
chicanery, short-cutting, brilliance, hard labor and total immersion of
people who thought themselves or their jobs important would have seemed
absurd had he been able to think of anything in the world more worth all
this attention, but the savor was leaking rapidly out of everything now.
Even the steaks he had dreamed of on Lithia were now only something else
to be got through, an exercise in cutting, forking, swallowing, and
disturbed cat naps.

In brief flashes of a few minutes at a time, he was able to envy the
Jesuit scientists. They still believed geology to be important, an
illusion which now seemed far in the past--a matter of weeks--to Agronski.
Their religion, too, seemed to be a constant source of great intellectual
excitement, especially during this Holy Year; Agronski had gathered from
conversations with Ramon two years ago that the Jesuit order is the
cerebral cortex of the Church, concerned with its knottiest moral,
theological and organizational problems. In particular, Agronski
remembered, the Jesuits were charged with weighing questions of polity
and making recommendations to Rome, and it was here that the area of
greatest excitement at Fordham was centered. Although he never did arouse
himself sufficiently to find out the core of the issue, Agronski knew
that this year was to mark the settlement by papal proclamation of one of
the great dogmatic questions of Catholicism, comparable to the dogma of
the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin which had been proclaimed a century
ago; from the hot discussions he overheard in the refectory, and
elsewhere after working hours, he gathered that. the Society of Jesus had
already made its recommendation, and all that remained to be debated was
the most probable decision which Pope Hadrian would arrive at. That there
should still be any question about the matter surprised him a little,
until a scrap of conversation overheard in the commissariat told him that
there was nothing in the least binding about the Order's decisions. The
doctrine of the Assumption had been heavily recommended against by the
Jesuits of the time, despite the fact that it had been an obvious
personal preference of the then incumbent Pope, but it had been adopted
all the same--the decision of St. Peter's was beyond all appeal.

Nothing in the world, Agronski was learning with this feeling of general
giddiness and nausea, was that certain. In the end his colleagues here at
Fordham came to seem as remote to him as Ruiz-Sanchez had on Lithia. The
Catholic Church in 2050 was still fourth in rank in terms of number of
adherents, with Islam, the Buddhists and the Hindi sects commanding the
greater number of worshipers, in that order; after Catholicism, there was
the confusing number of Protestant groups, which might well outnumber the
Catholics if one included all those in the world who had no faith worth
mentioning--and it was probable that the agnostics, atheists and
don't--cares taken as a separate group were at least as numerous as the
Jews, perhaps more so. As for Agronski, he knew grayly that he belonged
no more with one of these groups than with any other; he had been cut
adrift; he was slowly beginning to doubt the existence of the phenomenal
universe itself, and he could not bring himself to care enough about the
probably unreal to feel that it mattered what intellectual organization
you imposed on it, whether it was High Episcopalian or Logical
Positivist. If one no longer likes steak, what does it matter how well it
has been aged, butchered, cooked or served?

The invitation to Egtverchi's coming-out party had almost succeeded in
piercing the iron fog which had descended between Agronski and the rest
of creation. He had nad the notion that the sight of a live Lithian might
do something for him, though what he could hardly have said; and besides,
he had wanted to see Mike and the Father again, moved by memories of
having been fond of them once. But the Father was not there, Mike had
been removed light-years away from him by having taken up in the meantime
with a woman--and of all the meaningless obsessions of mankind, Agronski
was most determined now to avoid the tyranny of sex--and in person
Egtverchi had turned out to be a grotesque and alarming Earthly
caricature of the Lithians that Agronski remembered. Disgusted with
himself, he kept sedulously away from all of them, and in the process,
quite inadvertently, got drunk. He remembered no more of the party except
scraps of a fight that he had had with some swarthy flunkey in a huge
dark room bounded by metal webwork, like being inside the shaft of the
Eiffel Tower at midnight--a memory which seemed to include inexplicable
rising clouds of steam and a jerky intensification of his catholic,
nauseating vertigo, as though he and his anonymous adversary were being
lowered into hell on the end of a thousand-mile-long hydraulic piston.

He had awakened after noon the next day in his rooms with a thousand-fold
increase in the giddiness, an awful sense of mission before a holocaust,
and the worst hangover he had had since the drunk he had staged on
cooking sherry in the first week of his freshman year hi college. It took
him two days to get rid of the hangover, but the rest remained, shutting
him off utterly even from the things that he could see and touch in his
own apartment. He could not taste his food; words on paper had no
meaning; he could not make his way from his chair to the toilet without
wondering if at the next step the room would turn upside down or vanish
entirely. Nothing had any volume, texture, or mass, let alone any color;
the secondary properties of things, which had been leaking steadily out
of his world ever since Lithia, were gone entirely now, and the primary
qualities were beginning to follow.

The end was clear and predictable. There was to be nothing left but the
little plexus of habit patterns at the center of which lived the
dwindling unknowable thing that was his I. By the time one of those
habits brought him before the 3-V set and snapped open the switch, it was
already too late to save anything else. There was nobody left in the
universe but himself--nobody and nothing--

Except that, when the screen lighted and Egtverchi failed to appear, he
discovered that even the I no longer had a name. Inside the thin shell of
unwilling self-consciousness, it was as empty as an upended jug.

XIV

Ruiz-Sanchez put the much-folded, sleazy airletter down into his lap and
looked blindly out the compartment window of the rapido. The train was
already an hour out from Naples, slightly less than halfway to Rome, and
as yet he had seen almost nothing of the country he had been hoping to
reach all of his adult life; and now he had a headache. Michelis'
sprawling cursive handwriting was under the best of circumstances about
as legible as Beethoven's, and obviously he had written this letter under
the worst circumstances imaginable. And after emotion had done its
considerable worst to Michelis' scrawl, the facsimile reducer had
squeezed it all down onto a single piece of tissue for missile mail, so
that only a man who knew the handwriting as well as Assyriologists know
cuneiform could have deciphered the remaining ant tracks at all.

After a moment, he picked up where he had left off; the letter went on:

Which is why I missed the subsequent debacle.
There is still some doubt in my mind as to whether
or not Egtverchi was entirely responsible--it
occurs to me that maybe the countess' smokes did
affect him in some way after all, since his
metabolism can't be totally different from
ours--but you'd know much more about that than I
would. It's perfectly possible that I'm just
whistling past the graveyard.

In any event, I don't know any more about the
sub-130 basement shambles than the papers have
reported. In case you haven't seen them, what
happened was that Egtverchi and his bravoes
somehow became impatient with the progress the
serpentine was making, or with the caliber of the
entertainment they could see from it, and went on
an expedition of their own, breaking down the
barriers between cells when they couldn't find any
other way in. Egtverchi is still pretty weak for a
Lithian, but he's big, and the dividing walls
apparently didn't pose him any problems.

What happened thereafter is confused--it depends on
which reporter you believe. Insofar as I've been
able to piece all these conflicting accounts
together, Egtverchi himself didn't hurt anybody,
and if his condottieri did, they got as good as
they gave; one of them died. The major damage is
to the countess, who is ruined. Some of the cells
he broke into weren't on the serpentine's route at
all, and contained public figures in private hells
especially designed by the countess' caterers: The
people who haven't themselves already succumbed to
the sensation-mongers--though in some instances the
publicity is no more vicious than they had
coming--are out to revenge themselves on the whole
house of Averoigne.

Of course the count can't be touched directly,
since he wasn't even aware of what was going on.
(Did you see that last paper from "H. O. Petard,"
by the way? Beautiful stuff: he has a fundamental
twist on the Haertel equations which make it look
possible to see around normal space-time, as well
as travel around it. Theoretically you might
photograph a star and get a contemporary image,
not one light-years old. Another blow to the chops
for poor old Einstein.) But he is already no
longer Procurator of Canarsie and, unless he takes
his money promptly out of the countess' hands, he
will wind up as just another moderately
comfortable troglodyte. And at the moment nobody
knows where he is, so unless he has been reading
the papers it is already too late for him to make
a drastic enough move. In any event, whether he
does or he doesn't, the countess will be persona
non grata in her own circles to the day she dies.

And even now I haven't any idea whether Egtverchi
intended exactly this, or whether it was all an
accident springing out of a wild impulse. He says
he will reply to the newspaper criticism of him on
his 3-V program next week--this week nobody can
reach him, for reasons he refuses to explain--but
I don't see what he could possibly say that would
salvage more than a fraction of the good will he'd
accumulated before the party. He's already
half-convinced that Earth's laws are only
organized whims at best--and his present audience
is more than half children! I wish you were the
kind of man who might say "I told you so"; at
least I could get a melancholy pleasure out of
nodding. But it's too late for that now. If you
can spare any time for further advice, please send
it post haste. We are in well over our heads.

-Mike

P.S.: Liu and I were married yesterday. It was
earlier than we had planned, but we both feel a
sense of urgency that we can't explain--almost a
desperation. It's as though something crucial were
about to happen. I believe something is; but what?
Please write. -M.

Ruiz groaned involuntarily, drawing incurious glances from his
compartment-mates: a Pole in a sheepskin coat who had spent the entire
journey wordlessly cutting his way through a monstrous and smelly cheese
he had boarded the train with, and a Hollywood Vedantist in sandals,
burlap and beard whose smell was not that of cheese and whose business in
Rome in a Holy Year was problematical.

He closed his eyes against them. Mike had had no business even thinking
about such matters on his wedding morning. No wonder the letter was hard
to read.

Cautiously, he opened his eyes again. The sunlight was almost intolerably
bright, but for a moment he saw an olive grove sweeping by against
burnt-umber hills lined beneath a sky of incredibly clear blue. Then the
hills abruptly came piling down upon him and the express shot screaming
into a tunnel.

Ruiz lifted the letter once more, but the ant tracks promptly puddled
into a dirty blur; a sudden stab of pain lanced vertically through his
left eye. Dear God, was he going blind? No, nonsense, that was
hypochondria--there was nothing wrong with him but simple eyestrain. The
stab through the eyeball was pressure in his left sphereoid sinus, which
had been inflamed ever since he left Lima for the wet North, and had
begun to become acute in the dripping atmosphere of Lithia.

His trouble was Michelis' letter, that was plain. Never mind the
temptation to blame eyes or sinuses, which were only surrogates for hands
empty even of the amphora in which Egtverchi had been brought into the
world. Nothing was left of his gift but the letter.

And what answer could he give?

Why, only what Michelis obviously was already coming to realize: that the
reason for both Egtverchi's popularity and his behavior lay in the fact
that he was both mentally and emotionally a seriously displaced person.
He had been deprived of the normal Lithian upbringing which would have
taught him how fundamental it is to know how to survive in a
predominantly predatory society. As for Earth's codes and beliefs, he had
only half-absorbed them when Michelis forcibly expelled him from the
classroom straight into citizenship. Now he had already had ample
opportunity to see the hypocrisy with which some of those codes were
served and, to the straight-line logic of the Lithian mind, this could
mean only that the codes must therefore be only some kind of game at
best. (He had encountered the concept of a game here, too; it was unknown
on Lithia.) But he had no Lithian code of conduct to substitute or to
fall back on, since he was as ignorant of Lithian civilization as he was
innocent of experience of Lithia's seas, savannas and jungles.

In short, a wolf child.

The rapido hurled itself from the mouth of the tunnel as impetuously as
it had entered, and the renewed blast of sunlight forced Ruiz to close
his eyes once more. When he opened them he was rewarded by the sight of
an extensive terraced vineyard. This was obviously wine country and,
judging by the mountains, which were especially steep here, they must be
nearing Terracina. Soon, if he was lucky, he might see Mt. Circeo; but he
was far more interested in the vineyards.

From what he had been able to observe thus far, the Italian states were
far less deeply buried than was most of the rest of the world, and the
people were on the surface for much greater proportions of their
lifetimes. To some extent this was a product of poverty--Italy as a whole
had not had the wealth to get into the Shelter race early, or on anything
like the scale which had been possible for the United States or even the
other continental countries. Nevertheless, there was a huge Shelter
installation at Naples, and the one under Rome was the world's fourth
biggest; that one had got itself dug with funds from all over the Western
world, and with a great deal of outright voluntary help, when the first
deep excavations had begun to turn up an incredible wealth of unsuspected
archaeological finds.

In part, however, sheer stubbornness was responsible. A high proportion
of Italy's huge population, which had never known any living but in and
by the sun, simply could not be driven underground on any permanent
basis. Of all the Shelter nations--a class which excluded only countries
still almost wholly undeveloped, or unrecoverably desert--Italy appeared
to be the least thoroughly entombed.

If that turned out to hold true for Rome in particular, the Eternal City
would also be by far the sanest major capital on the planet. And that,
Ruiz realized suddenly, would be an outcome nobody would have dared
predict for an enterprise founded in 753 B.C. by a wolf child.

Of course, about the Vatican he had never been in any doubt, but Vatican
City is not Rome. The thought reminded him that he had been commanded to
an <i>udienza speciale</i> with the Holy Father tomorrow, before the
ring-kissing, which meant before 10:00 at the latest--probably as early as
7:00, for the Holy Father was an early riser, and in this year of all
years would be holding audiences of all kinds nearly around the clock.
Ruiz had had nearly a month to prepare, for the command had reached him
very shortly after the order of the College to appear for inquisition,
but he felt unreadier than ever. He wondered how long it had been since
any Pope had personally examined a Jesuit convert to an admitted heresy,
and what the man had found to say; doubtless the transcript was there in
the Vatican library, as recorded by some papal master of ceremonies,
assiduous as always in bis duty toward history, as masters of ceremonies
had been ever since the invaluable Burchard--but Ruiz would not have time
to read it.

From here on out, there would be a thousand petty distractions to keep
him from settling his mind and heart any further. Just getting his
bearings was going to be a chore, and after that there was the matter of
accommodations. None of the <i>case religiose</i> would take him in--word had
apparently got around--and he had not the purse for a hotel, though if
worse came to worst he had a confirmed-reservation slip from one of the
most expensive which just might let him into some linen closet there.
Finding a pensione, the only other tolerable alternative, was going to be
particularly difficult, for the one which had been contracted for him by
the tourist agency had become impossible the moment he received the papal
summons; it was too far from St. Peter's. The agency had been able to do
nothing else for him except suggest that he sleep in the Shelter, which
he was resolved not to do. After all, the agent had told him
belligerently, it's a Holy Year, almost as though he were saying, "Don't
you know there's a war on?"

And of course his tone had been right. There was a war on. The Enemy was
presently fifty light-years away, but He was at the gates all the same.

Something prompted him to check the date of Michelis' letter. It was, he
discovered with astonishment and disquiet, nearly two weeks old. Yet the
postmark read today; the letter had been mailed, in fact, only about six
hours ago, just in time to catch the dawn missile to Naples. Michelis had
been sitting on it--or perhaps adding to it, but the facsimile process and
the ensmallment, together with Ruiz' gathering eyestrain. all conspired
to make it impossible to detect differences in the handwriting or the
ink.

After a moment, Ruiz realized what importance the discrepancy had for
him. It meant that Egtverchi's 3-V answer to his newspaper critics had
been broadcast a week ago, and that he was due on the air again tonight!

Egtverchi's program was broadcast at 3:00 Rome time; Ruiz was going to be
up earlier than the pontiff himself. In fact, he thought grimly, he was
going to get no sleep at all.

The express pulled into the Stations Termini in Rome five minutes ahead
of schedule with a feminine shriek. Ruiz found a porter with no
difficulty, tipped him the standard 100 lire for his two pieces of
luggage, and gave directions.

The priest's Italian was adequate, but hardly standard; it made the
facchino grin with delight every time Ruiz opened his mouth. He had
learned it by reading, partly in Dante, mostly in opera libretti, and
consequently what he lacked in accent he made up for in flowery phrases:
he was unable to ask the way to the nearest fruit stall without sounding
as though he would throw himself into the Tiber unless he got an answer.

"Be" "a!" the porter kept saying after every third sentence from Ruiz.
"Che be' 'a!"

Still, that was easier to get along with than the French attitude had
been, on Ruiz' one visit to Paris fifteen years ago. He remembered a taxi
driver who had refused to understand his request to be taken to the
Continental Hotel until he had written the name down, after which the
hackie had said, miming sudden comprehension: "Ah, ah! Le
Con-ti-nen-TAL!" This he had found to be an almost universal pretense;
the French wanted one to know that without a perfect accent one is not
intelligible at all.

The Italians, apparently, were willing to meet one halfway. The porter
grinned at Ruiz' purple prose, but he guided the priest deftly to a
newsstand where he was able to buy a news magazine containing a high
enough proportion of text over pictures to insure an adequate account of
what Egtverchi had said last week; and then took him down the left
incline from the station across the Piazza Cinquecento to the corner of
the Via Viminale and the Via Diocletian, precisely as requested. Ruiz
promptly doubled his tip without even a qualm; guidance like that would
be invaluable now that time was so short, and he might see the man again.

He had been left in the Casa del Passegero, which had the reputation of
being the finest travelers' way station in Italy--which, Ruiz quickly
discovered, means the finest in the world, for there are no other
institutions precisely like the alberghi diurni anywhere else. Here he
was able to check his luggage, read his magazine over a pastry in the
caffe, have his hair cut and his shoes shined, have a bath while his
clothes were being pressed, and then begin the protracted series of
telephone calls which, he hoped, would eventually allow him to spend the
coming night in a bed--preferably near by, but at least anywhere in Rome
but in a Shelter dormitory.

In the coffee shop, in the barber's chair, and even in the tub, he pored
again and again over the account of Egtverchi's broadcast. The Italian
reporter did not give a text, for obvious reasons--a thirteen-minute
broadcast would have filled an entire page of the journal in which he was
limited to a single column of type--but he digested it skillfully, and he
had an inside story to go with it. Ruiz was impressed.

Evidently Egtverchi had composed his rebuttal by weaving together the
news items of the evening, just as they had come in to him off the wires
beyond any possibility of his selecting them, into a brilliant extempore
attack upon Earthly moral assumptions and pretensions. The thread which
wove them all together was summed up by the magazine's reporter in a
phrase from the Inferno: <i>Perche mi scerpi?/non hai tu spirto di pietate
alcuno?</i>--the cry of the Suicides, who can speak only when the Harpies rend
them and the blood flows: "Wherefore pluckest thou me?" It had been a
scathing indictment, at no point defending Egtverchi's own conduct, but
by implication making ridiculous the notion that any man could be
stainless enough to be casting stones. Egtverchi had obviously absorbed
Schopenhauer's vicious Rules for Debate down to the last comma.

"And in fact," the Italian reporter added, "it is widely known in
Manhattan that QBC officials were on the verge of cutting off the
outworlder in mid-broadcast as he began to cover the Stockholm brothel
war. They were dissuaded by the barrage of telephone calls, telegrams and
radiograms which began to pour down upon QBC's main office at precisely
that moment. The response of the public has hardly diminished since, and
it continues to be overwhelmingly approving. The network, encouraged by
Signor Egtverchi's major sponsor, Bridget Bifalco World Kitchens, now is
issuing almost hourly releases containing statistics 'proving' the
broadcast a spectacular success. Signor Egtverchi is now a hot property,
and if past experience is any guide (and it is) this means that
henceforth the Lithian will be encouraged to display those aspects of his
public character for which formerly he was being widely condemned, for
which the network was considering taking him off the air in the middle of
a word. Suddenly, in short, he is worth a lot of money." 

The report was both literate and overheated--a peculiarly Roman
combination--but as long as Ruiz lacked the text of the broadcast itself,
he could not take exception to a word of it. Both the reporter's
editorializing and the precise passion of his language seemed no more
than justified. Indeed, a case could be made for a claim that the man had
indulged in understatement. To Ruiz, at least, Egtverchi's voice came
through. The accent was familiar and perfect. And this for an audience
full of children! Had any independent person called Egtverchi ever really
existed? If so, he was possessed--but Ruiz did not believe that for an
instant. There had never been any real Egtverchi to possess. He was
throughout a creature of the Adversary's imagination, as even Chtexa had
been, as the whole of Lithia had been. In the figure of Egtverchi He had
already abandoned subtlety; already He dared to show Himself more than
half-naked, commanding money, fathering lies, poisoning discourse,
compounding grief, corrupting children, killing love, building 
armies--and all in a Holy Year.

Ruiz-Sanchez froze, one arm halfway into his summer jacket, looking up
at the ceiling of the dressing room. He had yet to make more than two
telephone calls, neither of them to the general of his Order, but he had
already changed his mind. Had he really failed, all this time, to read
such obvious signs--or was he as crazed as heretics are supposed to be,
smelling the Dies irae, the day of the wrath of God, in the steam of
nothing but a public bath? Armageddon--in 3-V? The pit opened to let loose
a comedian for the amusement of children?

He did not know. He could only be sure that he needed to hunt for no bed
tonight, after all; what he needed was stones. He got out of the Casa del
Passegero as quickly as he could, leaving everything he owned behind, and
found his way alone back to the Via del Termini; the guidebook showed a
church just off there, on the Piazza, della Republica, by the Baths of
Diocletian. The book was right. The church was there: Santa Maria
d'Angeli. He did not stop in the porch to cool off, though the early
evening sunlight was almost as hot as noon. Tomorrow might be much
hotter--unredeemably hotter. He went through the portals at once.

Inside, in the chill darkness, he knelt; and in cold terror, he prayed.

It did not seem to do him much good.

XV

All about Michelis the jungle stood frozen in a riot of motionlessness.
Filtered through it, the sourceless blue-gray daylight was tinged with
deep green, and where the light fell on one or another clear reflection
it seemed to penetrate rather than glance off, carrying the jungle on in
an inversion of images to the eight corners of the universe. The illusion
was made doubly real by the stillness of everything; at any moment it
seemed as though a breeze would spring up and ruffle the reflections, but
there was no breeze, and nothing but time would ever disturb those
images. Egtverchi moved, of course; though his figure was ensmalled as
if by distance, he was about the right size for the rest of the jungle,
and almost more convincingly colored and in the round. His circumscribed
gestures seemed to be beckoning, as though he were attempting to lead
Michelis out of this motionless wilderness.

Only his voice was jarring: it was at normal conversational volume, which
meant that it was far too loud to be in scale with himself or his (and
Michelis') surroundings. It seemed so loud to Michelis, indeed, that in
his reverie he almost missed the content of Egtverchi's final speech.
Only when Egtverchi had bowed ironically and faded away and his voice
died, leaving behind only the omni-present muted insect buzz, did the
meaning penetrate. Michelis sat where he was, stunned. A full thirty
seconds of commercial for Mammale Bifalco's Delicious Instant Knish Mix
went by before he remembered to put his finger over the 3-V's cut-off
stud. Then this year's Bridget Bifalco in turn faded in mid-mix,
smothered before she reached her famous brogue tag-line ("Give it t' me a
minute, dharlin', till I give it a lhashin'.") The scurrying electrons in
the phosphor complex migrated back to the atoms from which they had been
driven by the miniature de Broglie scanner imbedded in the picture frame.
The atoms resumed their chemical identity, the molecules cooled, and the
screen became a static reproduction of Paul Klee's "Caprice in February."
The principle, Michelis recalled with gray irrelevancy, had emerged out
of d'Averoigne's first "Petard" paper, the count's only venture into
applied math, published when he was seventeen.

"What does he mean?" Liu said faintly. "I don't understand him at all any
more. He calls it a demonstration--but what can he possibly demonstrate by
that? It's childish!"

"Yes," Michelis said. For the moment he could think of nothing else to
say. He needed to get his temper back; he was losing it more and more
easily these days. That had been one of the reasons for his urgency hi
marrying Liu: he needed her calmness, for his own was vanishing with
frightening rapidity.

No calmness seemed to be passing from her to him now. Even the apartment,
originally such a source of satisfaction and repose for them both, felt
like a trap. It was far above ground, in one of the mostly unused project
buildings on the upper East Side of Manhattan. Originally Liu had had a
far smaller set of rooms in the same building, and Michelis, after he had
got used to the idea, had had them both installed in the present
apartment with only a minimum of wirepulling. It was not customary, it
was certainly not fashionable, and they were officially warned that it
was considered dangerous--the gangs raided surface structures now and
then; but apparently it was no longer outright illegal, if one had the
money to live that high up in the slums.

Given the additional space, the artist buried inside Liu's demure
technician's exterior had run quietly wild. In the green glow of
concealed light which washed the apartment, Michelis was surrounded by
what seemed to be a miniature jungle. On small tables stood Japanese
gardens with real Ming trees or dwarf cedars in them. An oriental lamp
was fashioned out of a piece of fantastically sculptured driftwood. Long,
deep, woven flower boxes ran completely around the room at eye level;
they were thickly planted with ivy, wandering Jew, rubber plants,
philodendron, and other non-flowering species, and benind each box a
mirror ran up to the ceiling, unbroken anywhere except by the placidly
witty Klee reproduction which was the 3-V set; the painting, made almost
wholly of detached angles and glyphs like the symbols of mathematics, was
a welcome oasis of dryness for which Liu had paid a premium--QBC's stock
"covers" were mostly Sargents and van Goghs. Since the light tubes were
hidden behind the planting boxes, the room gave an effect of
extraterrestrial exuberance kept under control only with the greatest
difficulty.

"I know what he means," Michelis said at last. "I just don't know quite
how to put it. Let me think a minute--why don't you get dinner while I do
it? We'd better eat early. We're going to have visitors, that's a cinch."

"Visitors? But--All right, Mike."

Michelis walked to the glass wall and looked out onto the sun porch. All
of Liu's flowering plants were out there, a real garden, which had to be
kept sealed off from the rest of the apartment; for in addition to being
an ardent amateur gardener, Liu bred bees. There was a colony of them
there, making singular and exotic honeys from the congeries of blossoms
Liu had laid out so carefully. The honey was fabulous and ever-changing,
sometimes too bitter to eat except in tiny fork-touches like Chinese
mustard, sometimes containing a heady touch of opium from the sticky
hybrid poppies that nodded in a soldierly squad along the sun porch
railing, sometimes sickly-sweet and insipid until, with a surprisingly
small amount of glassware, Liu converted it into a liqueur that mounted
to the head like a breeze from the Garden of Allah. The bees that made it
were tetraploid monsters the size of hummingbirds, with tempers as bad as
Michelis' own was getting to be; only a few of them could kill even a big
man. Luckily, they flew badly in the gusts common at this altitude, and
would starve anywhere but in Liu's garden, otherwise Liu would never have
been licensed to keep them on an open sun porch in the middle of the
city. Michelis had been more than a little wary of them at first, but
lately they had begun to fascinate him: their apparent intelligence was
almost as phenomenal as their size and viciousness. 

"Damn." Liu said behind him.

"What's the matter?"

"Omelettes again. That's the second wrong number I've dialed this week."

Both the oath--mild though it was--and the error were uncharacteristic.
Mike felt a twinge, a mixture of compassion and guilt. Liu was changing;
she had never been so distractible before. Was he responsible?

"It's all right. I don't mind. Let's eat."

"All right."

They ate silently, but Michelis was conscious of the pressure of inquiry
behind Liu's still expression. The chemist thought furiously, angry with
himself, and yet unable to phrase what he wanted to say. He should never
have got her into this at all. No, that couldn't have been prevented; she
had been the logical scientist to handle Egtverchi in his infancy--
probably nobody else could have brought him through it even this well.
But surely it should have been possible to keep her from becoming
emotionally involved--

No, that had not been possible either; that was the woman of it. And the
man of it, now that he was forced to think about his own role. It was no
use; he simply did not know what he should think; Egtverchi's broadcast
had rattled him beyond the point of logical thought. He was going to wind
up with his usual bad compromise with Liu, which was to say nothing at
all. But that would not do either.

And yet it had been a simple enough piece of foolery that the Lithian had
perpetrated--childish, as Liu had said. Egtverchi had been urged to be off
beat, rebellious, irresponsible, and he had come through in spades. Not
only had he voiced his disrespect for all established institutions and
customs, but he had also challenged his audience to show the same
disrespect. In the closing mornents of his broadcast, he had even told
them how: they were to mail anonymous, insulting messages to
Egtverchi's own sponsors.

"A postcard will do," he had said, gently enough, through his grinning
chops. "Just make the message pungent. If you hate that powdered concrete
they call a knish mix, write and tell them so. If you can eat the knishes
but our commercials make you sick, write them about that, and don't pull
any punches. If you loathe me, tell the Bifalcos that, too, and make sure
you're spitting mad about it. I'll read the five messages I think in the
worst possible taste on my broad--"

'To nobody," Michelis said angrily.

"Quite so. And yet I repeat that I didn't select it deliberately for
shock value, Dr. Michelis. It's a bagatelle--very mild, compared to some
of the stuff we've been getting. This Snake obviously has an audience of
borderline madmen, and he means to use it. That's why I came to see you.
We think you might have some idea as to what he intends to use it for."

"For nothing, if you people have any control over what you yourselves
do," Michelis said. "Why don't you cut him off the air? If he's poisoning
it, then you don't have any other choice."

"One man's poison is another man's knish mix," the UN man said smoothly.
"The Bifalcos don't see this--the way we do. They have their own analysts,
and they know as well as we do that they're going to get more than seven
and a half million dirty postcards in the next week. But they like the
idea. In fact, they're positively wriggling with delight. They think it
will sell products. They will probably give the Snake a whole half hour,
solely sponsored by them, if the response comes through as predicted--and
it will."

"Why can't you cut Egtverchi off anyhow?" Liu said.

"The charter prevents us from interfering with the right of free speech.
As long as the Bifalcos put up the money, we are obligated to keep the
program on the air. It's a good principle at bottom; we've had
experiences with it before that threatened to turn out nastily, but in
every case we sweated them out and the public got bored with them
eventually. But that was a different public--the broad public, which used
to be mostly sane. The Snake obviously has a selected audience, and
that's not sane at all. This time--for the first time--we are thinking of
interfering. That's why we came to you."

"I can't help you," Michelis said.

"You can, and you will, Dr. Michelis. I'm talking from under both my hats
now. QBC wants him off the air, and the UN is beginning to smell
something which might prove to be much worse than the 1993 Corridor
Riots. You sponsored this Snake, and your wife raised him from an egg, or
damn near an egg. You know him better than anyone else on Earth. You will
have to give us the weapon that we need against him. That's what I came
to tell you. Think about it. You are responsible under the naturalization
law. It's not often that we have to invoke that clause, but we're
invoking it now. You'll have to think fast, because we have to have him
closed out before his next broadcast."

"And suppose we have nothing to offer?" Michelis said stonily.

"Then we will probably declare the Snake a minor, and you his guardians,"
the UN man said. "Which will hardly be a solution from our point of view,
but you would probably find it painful--you'd be well advised to come up
with something better. I'm sorry to bring such bad news, but the news is
bad tonight; that sometimes happens. Good-night, and thank you."

He went out. He did not have to resume any of his three hats; he had
never taken any of them off, visible or metaphorical. Michelis and Liu
stared at each other, appalled.

"We-we couldn't possibly have him as a ward now," Liu whispered.

"Well," Michelis said harshly, "we were talking about wanting a son--"

"Mike, don't!"

"I'm sorry," he said inadequately. "That officious son of a bitch. He was
the man that passed on the application--and now he's throwing it right
back in our laps. They must be really desperate. What are we going to do?
I haven't an idea in my head."

Liu said, after a moment's hesitation: "Mike--we don't know enough to
come up with anything useful in a week. At least I don't, and I don't think
you do either. We've got to get through to the Father somehow."

"If we can," Michelis said slowly. "But even so, what good will that do?
The UN won't listen to him--they've bypassed him."

"How? What do you mean?"

"They've made a de facto decision in favor of Cleaver," Michelis said.
"It won't he announced until after Ramon's church has finished disavowing
him, but it's already in effect. I knew about it before he left for Rome,
but I didn't have the heart to tell him. Lithia has been closed; the UN
is going to use it as a laboratory for the study of fusion power
storage--not exactly what Cleaver had in mind originally, but close
enough."

Liu was silent for a long time. She arose and went to the window, against
which the huge bees were still butting like live battering-rams.

"Does Cleaver know?" she said, her back still turned.

"Oh yes, he knows," Michelis said. "He's in charge. He was scheduled to
land back at Xoredeshch Sfath yesterday. I tried to tip Ramon off
indirectly as soon as I heard about it--that's why I promoted that
collaboration for the J.I.R.--but Ramon just didn't seem to hear any of
my hints. And I just couldn't tell him outright that his cause was
already lost, before he'd even had a hearing."

"It's ugly," Liu said slowly. "Why won't they announce it until after
Ramon is officially excommunicated? Why does that make any difference?"

"Because the decision is tainted, that's all," Michelis said fiercely.
"Whether you agree with Ramon's theological arguments or not, to decide
for Cleaver is a dirty act--impossible to defend except in terms of raw
power. They know that well enough, damn them, and sooner or later they're
going to have to let the public see what the arguments were on the other
side. When that day comes, they want Ramon's arguments discredited in
advance by his own church."

"What precisely is Cleaver doing?"

"I can't say, precisely. But they're building a big Nernst generator
plant inland on the south continent, near Glesh-chtehk Sfath, to turn out
the power, so that much of his dream is already realized. Later they'll
try to trap the power raw, as it comes off, instead of stepping it down
and throwing away ninety-five per cent of it as heat. I don't know how
Cleaver proposes to do that, but I should guess he'd begin with a
modification of the Nernst effect itself--the 'magnetic bottle' dodge.
He'd better be damned careful." He paused. "I suppose I'd have told Ramon
if he'd asked me. But he didn't, so I didn't say anything. Now I feel
like a coward."

Liu turned swiftly at that, and came back to sit on the arm of his chair.
"That was right to do, Mike," she said. "It's not cowardice to refuse to
rob a man of hope, I think."

"Maybe not," Michelis said, taking her hand gratefully.

"But what it all comes out to is that Ramon can't help us now. Thanks to
me, he doesn't even know yet that Cleaver is back on Lithia."

XVI

Shortly past dawn, Ruiz-Sanchez walked stiffly into the vast circle of
the Piazza San Pietro toward the towering dome of St. Peter's itself. The
piazza was swarming with pilgrims even this early, and the dome, more
than twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, seemed frowning and ominous
in the early light, rising from the forest of pillars like the forehead
of God.

He passed under the right arch of the colonnade, past the Swiss Guards in
their gorgeous, outré uniforms, and through the bronze door. Here he
paused to murmur, with unexpected intensity, the prayers for the Pope's
intentions obligatory for this year. The Apostolic Palace soared in front
of him; he was astonished that any edifice so crowded with stone could at
the same time contrive to be so spacious, but he had no time for further
devotions now. Near the first door on the right a man sat at a table.
Ruiz-Sanchez told him: "I am commanded to a special audience with the
Holy Father."

"God has blessed you. The major-domo's office is on the first floor, to
the left. No, one moment--a special audience? May I see your letter,
please?"

Ruiz-Sanchez showed it.

"Very good. But you will need to see the major-domo anyhow. The special
audiences are in the throne room; he will show you where to go." The
throne room! Ruiz-Sanchez was more unsettled than ever. That was where
the Holy Father received heads of state, and members of the college of
cardinals. Certainly it was no place to receive a heretical Jesuit of
very low rank--

"The throne room," the major-domo said. "That's the first room in the
reception suite. I trust your business goes well, Father. Pray for me."

Hadrian VIII was a big man, a Norwegian by birth, whose curling beard had
been only slightly peppered with gray at his election. It was white now,
of course, but otherwise age seemed to have marked him little; indeed, he
looked somewhat younger than his photographs and 3-V 'casts suggested,
for they had a tendency to accentuate the crags and furrows of his huge,
heavy face.

Ruiz-Sanchez found his person so overwhelming that he barely noticed the
magnificence of his robes of state. Needless to say, there was nothing in
the least Latin in the Holy Father's mien or temperament. In his rise to
the gestatorial chair he had made a reputation as a Catholic with an
almost Lutheran passion for the grimmer reaches of moral theology; there
was something of Kierkegaard in him, and something of the Grand
Inquisitor as well. After his election, he had surprised everyone by
developing an interest--one might almost call it a businessman's
interest--in temporal politics, though the characteristic coldness of
Northern theological speculation continued to color everything he said
and did. His choice of the name of a Roman emperor was perfectly
appropriate, Ruiz-Sanchez realized: here was a face that might well have
been stamped on imperial coin, for all the beneficence which tempered its
harshness.

The Pope remained standing throughout the interview, staring down at
Ruiz-Sanchez with what seemed at first to be nine-tenths frank curiosity.

"Of all the thousands of pilgrims here, you may stand in the greatest
need of our indulgence," he observed in English. Near by, a tape recorder
raced silently; Hadrian was an ardent archivist, and a stickler for the
letter of the text. "Yet we have small hope of your winning it. It is
incredible to us that a Jesuit, of all our shepherds, could have fallen
into Manichaeanism. The errors of that heresy are taught most
particularly in that college."

"Holiness, the evidence--"

Hadrian raised his hand. "Let us not waste time. We have already informed
ourself of your views and your reasoning. You are subtle, Father, but you
have committed a grievous oversight all the same--but we wish to defer
that subject for the moment. Tell us first of this creature Egtverchi--not
as a sending of the Devil, but as you would see him were he a man."

Ruiz-Sanchez frowned. There was something about the word "sending" that
touched some weakness inside him, like an obligation forgotten until too
late to fulfill it. The feeling was like that which had informed a
ridiculous recurrent nightmare of his student days, in which he was not
to graduate because he had forgotten to attend all his Latin classes. Yet
he could not put his finger on what it was.

"There are many ways to describe him, Holiness," he said. "He is the kind
of personality that the twentieth-century critic Colin Wilson called an
Outsider, and that is the kind of Earth man he appeals to--he is a
preacher without a creed, an intellect without a culture, a seeker
without a goal. I think he has a conscience as we would define the term;
he's very different from the rest of his race in that and many other
respects. He seems to take a deep interest in moral problems, but he's
utterly contemptuous of all traditional moral frames of
reference--including the kind of rationalized moral automation that
prevails on Lithia."

"And this strikes some chord in his audience?"

"There can be no doubt of that, surely, Holiness. It remains to be seen
how wide his appeal is. He ran off a very shrewdly designed experiment
last night, obviously intended to test that very question; we should soon
know just how great the response will be. But it already seems clear that
he appeals to all those people who feel cut off, emotionally and
intellectually, from our society and its dominant cultural traditions."

"Well put," Hadrian said, surprisingly. "We stand at the brink of
unguessable events, that is certain; we have had forebodings that this
might be the year. We have commanded the Inquisition to put away its
bell, book and candle for the time being; we think such a move would be
most unwise."

Ruiz-Sanchez was stunned. No trial--and no excommunication? The drumming
of events around his head had begun to remind him of the numbing,
incessant rains of Xoredeshch Sfath.

"Why, Holiness?" he said faintly.

"We believe you may be the man appointed by our Lord to bear St.
Michael's arms," the Pope said, weighing every word.

"I, Holiness? A heretic?"

"Noah was not perfect, you will recall," Hadrian said, with what might
have been a half-smile. "He was merely a man who was given another
chance. Goethe, himself more than a little heretical, reshaped the legend
of Faustus to the same lesson: redemption is always the crux of the great
drama, and there must be a peripataea first. Besides, Father, consider
for a moment the unique nature of this case of heresy. Is not the
appearance of a solitary Manichaean in the twenty-first century either a
wildly meaningless anachronism--or a grave sign?"

He paused and fingered his beads.

"Of course," he added, "it will be necessary for you to purge yourself,
if you can. That is why we have called you. We believe as you do that the
Adversary is the moving spirit behind this whole Lithian crisis; but we
do not believe that any repudiation of dogma is required. It all hinges
upon this question of creativity. Tell us, Father: when you first became
convinced that the whole of Lithia was a sending, what did you do about
it?"

"Do about it?" Ruiz-Sanchez said numbly. "Why, Holiness, I did only what
was recorded. I could think of nothing else to do."

"Then did it never occur to you that sendings can be banished--and that
God has given that power into your hands?"

Ruiz-Sanchez had no emotions left.

"Banished... Holiness, perhaps I have been stupid. I feel stupid. But as
far as I know, exorcism was abandoned by the Church more than two
centuries ago. My college taught me that meteorology replaced the
'spirits and powers of the air,' and neurophysiology replaced
'possession.' It would never have occurred to me."

"Exorcism was not abandoned, merely discouraged," Hadrian said. "It had
become limited, as you have just pointed out, and the Church wished to
prevent its abuse by ignorant country priests--they were bringing the
Church into disrepute trying to drive demons out of sick cows and
perfectly healthy goats and cats. But I am not talking about animal
health, the weather or mental illness now, Father."

"Then... is Your Holiness truly proposing that... that I should have
attempted to... to exorcise a whole planet?"

"Why not?" Hadrian said. "Of course, the fact that you were standing on
the planet at the time might have helped to prevent you, unconsciously,
from thinking of it. We are convinced that God would have provided for
you--in Heaven certainly, and possibly you might have received temporal
help as well. But it was the only solution to your dilemma. Had the
exorcism failed, then there might have been some excuse for falling into
heresy. But surely it should be easier to believe in a planet-wide
hallucination--which in principle we know the Adversary has the power to
do--than in the heresy of satanic creativity!" 

The Jesuit bowed his head. He felt overwhelmed by his own ignorance. He
had spent almost all his leisure hours on Lithia minutely studying a book
which to all intents and purposes might have been dictated by the
Adversary himself, and he had seen nothing that mattered, not in all
those 628 pages of compulsive demoniac chatter.

"It is not too late to try," Hadrian said, almost gently. "That is the
only road left for you to travel." Suddenly his face became stern,
flinty. "As we have pointed out to the Inquisition, your excommunication
is automatic. It began the instant that you admitted this abomination
into your soul. It does not need to be formalized to be a fact--and there
are political reasons, as well as spiritual ones, for not formalizing it
now. In the meantime, you must leave Rome. We withhold our blessing and
our indulgence from you, Dr. Ruiz-Sanchez. This Holy Year is for you a
year of battle, with the world as prize. When you have won that battle
you may return to us--not before. Farewell."

Dr. Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a layman, damned, left Rome for New York that
night by air. The deluge of happenstance was rising more rapidly around
him; the time for the building of arks was almost at hand. And yet, as
the waters rose, and the words, Into your hand are they delivered, passed
incessantly across the tired surfaces of his brain, it was not of the
swarming billions of the Shelter state that he was thinking. It was of
Chtexa; and the notion that an exorcism might succeed in dissolving
utterly that grave being and all his race and civilization, return them
to the impotent mind of the Great Nothing as though they had never been,
was an agony to him.

Into your hand.... Into your hand....

XVII

The figures were in. The people who had taken Egtverchi as both symbol
and spokesman for their passionate discontents were now tallied, although
they could not be known. Their nature was no surprise--the crime and
mental disease statistics had long provided a clear picture of that--but
their number was stunning. Apparently nearly a third of
twenty-first-century society loathed that society from the bottom of its
collective heart. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered suddenly whether, had a similar
tally been possible in every age, the proportion would have turned out to
be stable.

"Do you think it would do any good to talk to Egtverchi?" he asked
Michelis. Over his protests, he was staying in the Michelis' apartment
for the time being.

"Well, it hasn't done any good for me to talk with him," Michelis said.
"With you it might be a different story--though frankly, Ramon, I'm
inclined to doubt even that. He's doubly hard to reason with because he
himself seems to be getting no satisfaction out of the whole affair."

"He knows his audience better than we do," Liu added. "And the more the
numbers pile up, the more embittered he seems to become. I think they
remind him continually that he can never be fully accepted on Earth,
fully at home on it. He thinks he's of interest only to people who
themselves don't feel at home on their own planet. That's not true, of
course, but that's how he feels."

"There's enough truth in it so that he'd be unlikely to be dissuaded of
it," Ruiz-Sanchez agreed gloomily.

He shifted his chair so as not to be able to see Liu's bees, which were
hard at work in the shafts of sunlight on the porch. At another time he
could not have torn himself away from them, but he could not afford to be
distracted now.

"And of course he's also well aware that he'll never know what it means
to be a Lithian--regardless of his shape and inheritance," he added.
"Chtexa might get a shadow of that through to him, if only they could
meet--but no, they don't even speak the same language."

"Egtverchi's been studying Lithian," Michelis said. "But it's true that
he can't speak it, not even as well as I can. He has nothing to read but
your grammar--the documents are still all classified against him--and
nobody to talk to. He sounds as rusty as an iron hinge. But, Ramon, you
could interpret."

"Yes, I could. But Mike, it's physically impossible. There just isn't
time to get Chtexa here, even if we had the resources and the--authority
to do it."

"I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of CirCon, d'Averoigne's new
circum-continuum radio. I don't know what shape it's in, but the Message
Tree puts out a powerful signal--possibly d'Averoigne could pick it up. If
so, you might be able to talk to Chtexa. I'll see what I can find out,
anyhow."

"I'm willing to try," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "But it doesn't sound very
promising."

He stopped to think, not of more answers--he had already hit his head
against that wall more than often enough--but of what questions he still
needed to ask, Michelis' appearance gave him the cue. It had shocked him
at first, and he could still not quite get used to it. The big chemist
had aged markedly: his face was drawn, and he had deeply cut, liverish
circles under his eyes. Liu looked no better; while she had not seemed to
age any, she looked miserable. There was a tension in the air between
them, too, as though they had failed to find in each other sufficient
release from the tensions of the world around them.

"It's possible that Agronski might know something that would be helpful,"
he said, only half-aloud.

"Maybe," Michelis said. "I've seen him only once--at a party, the one
where Egtverchi caused such a stink. He was behaving very oddly. I'm sure
he recognized us, but he wouldn't meet our eyes, let alone come and talk
to us. As a matter of fact, I can't remember seeing him talking to
anybody. He just sat in a corner and drank. It wasn't at all like him."

"Why did he come, do you suppose?"

"Oh, that's not hard to guess. He's a fan of Egtverchi's."

"Martin? How do you know?"

"Egtverchi bragged about it. He said he hoped to have the whole Lithia
commission on his side eventually." Michelis grimaced.

"The way Agronski was acting, he'll be of no use to Egtverchi or anybody
else."

"And so we have still another soul on the way to damnation," Ruiz-Sanchez
said grimly. "I should have suspected it. There's so little meaning in
Agronski's life as it is, it won't take Egtverchi long to cut him off
from any contact with reality at all. That is what evil does--it empties
you."

"I'm none too sure Egtverchi's to blame," Michelis said, his voice
steeped in gloom. "Except as a symptom. The Earth is riddled with
schizophrenics already. If Agronski had any tendency that way, and
obviously he did, then all he needed was to be planted here again for the
tendency to flower."

"That wasn't my impression of him," Liu said. "From what little I saw of
him, and from what you've told me, he seemed dreadfully normal--even
simple-minded. I don't see how he could get deep enough into any question
to be driven insane--or how he could be tempted to fall into your
theological vacuum, Ramon."

"In this universe of discourse, Liu, we are all very much alike,"
Ruiz-Sanchez said dispiritedly. "And from what Mike tells me, I think we
may be already too late to do much for Martin. And he's only-only a
sample of what's happening everywhere within the sound of Egtverchi's
voice."

"It's a mistake to think of schizophrenia as a disease of the wits,
anyhow," Michelis said. "Back in the days when it was first being
described, the English used to call it 'lorry-driver's disease.' When
intellectuals get it, the results are spectacular only because they can
articulate what they feel: Nijinski, van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, Nietzsche,
Wilson... it's a long list, but it's nothing compared to the ordinary
people who've had it. And they get it fifty-to-one over intellectuals.
Agronski is just the usual kind of victim, no more, no less."

"What has happened to that threat you mentioned?" Ruiz-Sanchez said.
"Egtverchi got on the air again last night without his being made a ward
of yours. Was your friend in the complicated hat just flailing the air?"

"I think that's partly the answer," Michelis said hopefully. "They
haven't said another word to us, so I'm just guessing, but it may be that
your arrival disconcerted them. They expected you to be publicly
unfrocked--and the fact that you weren't has thrown their schedule for
announcing the Lithia decision seriously out of joint. They're probably
waiting to see what you will do now."

"So," Ruiz-Sanchez said grimly, "am I. I might just do nothing, which
would probably be the most confusing thing I could do. I think their
hands are tied, Mike. He's never mentioned the Bifalcos' products but
that once, but obviously he must be selling them by the warehouse-load,
so his sponsors won't cut him off. Nor can I see on what grounds the UN
Communications Commission can do it." He laughed shortly. "They've been
trying for decades to encourage more independent comment on 3-V
anyhow--and Egtverchi is certainly a giant step in that direction."

"I should think he'd be open to charges of inciting to riot," Michelis
said.

"He hasn't incited any riots that I've heard about," Ruiz-Sanchez said.
"The Frisco affair happened spontaneously as far as anyone could see--and
I noticed that the pictures didn't show a single one of those uniformed
followers of his in the crowds."

"But he praised the rioters' spirit, and made fun of the police," Liu
pointed out. "He as good as endorsed it."

"That's not incitement," Michelis said. "I see what Ramon means. He's
smart enough to do nothing for which he could be brought to trial--and a
false arrest would be suicide, the UN would be inciting a riot itself."

"Besides, what would they do with him if they got a conviction?" Ruiz
asked. "He's a citizen, but his needs aren't like ours; they'd be
chancing killing him with a thirty-day sentence. I suppose they could
deport him, but they can't declare him an undesirable, alien without
declaring Lithia a foreign country--and until that report is released,
Lithia is a protectorate, with a right to admission to the UN as a member
state!"

"Small chance of that," Michelis said. "That would mean ditching
Cleaver's project."

Ruiz-Sanchez felt the same sinking of the heart that had overcome him
when Michelis first gave him that news. "How far advanced is it now?" he
asked.

"I'm not sure. All I know is that they've been shipping equipment to him
in huge amounts. There's another load scheduled to leave in two weeks.
The scuttlebutt says that Cleaver has some kind of crucial experiment
ready to go as soon as that shipment gets there. That puts it pretty
close--the new ships make the trip in less than a month."

"Betrayed again," Ruiz-Sanchez said bitterly.

"Then is there nothing you can do, Ramon?" Liu asked.

"I'll interpret for Egtverchi and Chtexa, if anything comes of that
project."

"Yes, but...."

"I know what you mean," he said. "Yes, there is something decisive that I
can do. And possibly it would work. In fact, it is something that I must
do."

He stared blindly at them. The buzzing of the bees, so reminiscent of the
singing of the jungles of Lithia, probed insistently at him.

"But," he said, "I don't think that I'm going to do it."

Michelis moved mountains. He was formidable enough under normal
conditions, but when he was desperate and saw a possible way out, no
bulldozer could have been more implacable in crushing through an opening.

Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne, late Procurator of Canarsie, and
always fellow in the brotherhood of science, received them all cordially
in his Canadian retreat. Not even the sardonically silent figure of
Egtverchi made him blink; he shook hands with the displaced Lithian as
though they were old friends meeting again after a lapse of a few weeks.
The count himself was a large, rotund man 'in his early sixties, with a
protuberant belly, and he was brown all over: his remaining hair was
brown, his suit was brown, he was deeply tanned, and he was smoking a
long brown cigar.

The room in which he received them--Ruiz-Sanchez, Michelis, Liu, and
Egtverchi--was a curious mixture of lodge and laboratory. It had an open
fireplace, rough furniture, 257 mounted guns, an elk's head, and an
amazing mess of wires and apparatus.

"I am by no means sure that this is going to work," he told them
promptly. "Everything I have is still in the breadboard stage, as you can
see. It's been years since I last handled a soldering iron and a
voltmeter, too, so we may well have a simple electronic failure somewhere
in this mass of wiring--but it wasn't a task I could leave to a
technician."

He waved them to seats while he made final adjustments. Egtverchi
remained standing in the rear of the room in the shadows, motionless
except for the gentle rise and fall of his great chest as he breathed,
and an occasional sudden movement of his eyes.

"There will be no image, of course," the count said abstractedly.

"This giant J-J coupling you describe obviously doesn't broadcast in that
band. But if we are very lucky, we may get some sound. . . . Ah."

A loudspeaker almost hidden in the maze crackled and then began to emit
distant, patterned bursts of hissing. Except for the pattern, it seemed
to Ruiz-Sanchez to be nothing but noise, but the count said at once:

"I'm getting something in that region. I didn't expect to pick it up so
soon. I don't make much sense of it, however."

Neither did Ruiz, and for a few moments he had all he could do to get
over his amazement. "Those are signals--the Message Tree is broadcasting
now?" he said, with a touch of incredulity.

"I hope so," the count said drily. "I have been busy all day installing
chokes against any other possible signal."

The Jesuit's respect for the mathematician came close to awe. To think
that this disorderly tangle of wiring, little black acorns, small red and
brown objects like firecrackers, the shining interlocking blades of
variable condensers, massively heavy coils, and flickering meters was
even now reaching directly through the subether, around fifty light-years
of space-time, to eavesdrop on the pulses of the crystalline cliff buried
beneath Xoredeshch Sfath....

"Can you tune it?" he said at last. "I think those must be the stutter
pattern--what the Lithians use as a navigational grid for their ships and
planes. There ought to be an audio band--"

Except, he recalled suddenly, that that band couldn't possibly be an
"audio" band. Nobody ever spoke directly to the Message Tree--only to the
single Lithian who stood in the center of the Tree's chamber. How he got
the substance of the message transformed into radio waves had never been
explained to any of the Earthmen.

And yet suddenly there was a voice.

"--a powerful tap on the Tree," the voice said in clear, even, cold
Lithian. "Who is receiving? Do you hear me? I do not understand the
direction your carrier is coming from. It seems inside the Tree, which is
impossible. Does anyone understand me?" Silently, the count thrust a
microphone into Ruiz' hand. He discovered that he was trembling.

"We understand you," he said in Lithian in a shaky voice. "We are on
Earth. Can you hear me?"

"I hear you," the voice said at once. "We understood that what you say is
impossible. But what you say is not always accurate, we have found. What
do you want?"

"I would like to speak to Chtexa, the metallist," Ruiz said. "This is
Ruiz-Sanchez, who was in Xoredeshch Sfath last year."

"He can be summoned," said the cold, distant voice. There was a brief
hashing sound from the speaker; then it went away again. "If he wishes to
speak to you."

"Tell him," Ruiz-Sanchez said, "that his son Egtverchi also wishes to
speak to him."

"Ah," said the voice after a pause. "Then no doubt he will come. But you
cannot speak long on this channel. The direction from which your signal
comes is damaging my sanity. Can you receive--a sound-modulated signal if
we can arrange to send one?"

Michelis murmured to the count, who nodded energetically and pointed to
the loudspeaker.

"That is how we are receiving you--now," Ruiz said. "How are you
transmitting?"

"That I cannot explain to you," said the cold voice. "I cannot speak to
you any longer or I will be damaged. Chtexa has been called."

The voice stopped and there was a long silence. Ruiz-Sanchez wiped the
sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

"Telepathy?" Michelis muttered behind him. "No, it fits into the
electro-magnetic spectrum somewhere. But where? Boy, there sure is a lot
we don't know about that Tree."

The count nodded ruefully. He was watching his meters like a hawk but,
judging from his expression, they were not telling him anything he did
not already know.

"Ruiz-Sanchez," the loudspeaker said. Ruiz started.

It was Chtexa's voice, clear and strong.

Ruiz beckoned at the shadows, and Egtverchi came forward. He was in no
hurry. There was something almost insolent in his very walk.

"This is Ruiz-Sanchez, Chtexa," Ruiz said. "I'm talking to you from
Earth--a new experimental communications system one of our scientists has
evolved. I need your help."

"I will be glad to do whatever I can," Chtexa said. "I was sorry that you
did not return with the other Earthman. He was less welcome. He and his
friends have razed one of our finest forests near Gleshchtehk Sfath, and
built ugly buildings here in the city."

"I'm sorry, too," Ruiz-Sanchez said. The words seemed inadequate, but it
would be impossible to explain to Chtexa exactly what the situation
was--impossible, and illegal. "I still hope to come some day. But I am
calling about your son."

There was a brief pause, during which the speaker emitted a series of
muted, anomalous sounds, almost yet not quite recognizable. Evidently the
Lithians' audio hookup was catching some background noise from inside the
Tree, or even outside it. The clarity of the reception was astonishing;
it was impossible to believe that the Tree was fifty light-years away.

"Egtverchi is an adult now," Chtexa's voice said. "He has seen many
wonders on your world. Is he with you?"

"Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said, beginning to sweat again. "But he does not know
your language, Chtexa. I will interpret as best I can.''

"That is strange," Chtexa said. "But I will hear his voice. Ask him when
he is coming home; he has much to tell us."

Ruiz put the question.

"I have no home," Egtverchi said indifferently.

"I can't just tell him that, Egtverchi. Say something intelligible, in
heaven's name. You owe your existence to Chtexa, you know that."

"I may visit Lithia some day," Egtverchi said, his eyes filming. "But I
am in no hurry. There is still a great deal to be done on Earth."

"I hear him," Chtexa said. "His voice is high; he is not as tall as his
inheritance provided, unless he is ill. What does he answer?"

There simply was not time to provide an interpretive translation;
Ruiz-Sanchez told him the answer literally, word by word from English
into Lithian.

"Ah," Chtexa said. "Then he has matters of import to his hand. That is
good, and is generous of the Earth. He is right not to hurry. Ask him
what he is doing."

"Breeding dissension," Egtverchi said, with a slight widening of his
grin. Ruiz-Sanchez could not translate that literally; the concept was
not in the Lithian language. It took him the better part of three long
sentences to transmit even a dubious shadow of the idea to Chtexa.

"Then he is ill," Chtexa said. "You should have told me, Ruiz-Sanchez.
You had best send him to us. You cannot treat him adequately there."

"He is not ill, and he will not go," Ruiz-Sanchez said carefully. "He is
a citizen of Earth and cannot be compelled. This is why I called you. He
is a trouble to us, Chtexa. He is doing us hurts. I had hoped you might
reason with him; we can do nothing."

The anomalous sound, a sort of burring metallic whine, rose in the
background and fell away again.

"That is not normal or natural," Chtexa said. "You do not recognize his
illness. No more do I, but I am not a physician. You must send him here.
I see I was in error in giving him to you. Tell him he is commanded home
by the Law of the Whole."

"I never heard of the Law of the Whole," Egtverchi said when this was
translated for him. "I doubt that there is any such thing. I make up my
own laws as I go along. Tell him he is making Lithia sound like a bore,
and that if he keeps it up I'll make a point of never going there at
all."

"Blast it, Egtverchi--" Michelis burst in.

"Hush, Mike, one pilot is enough. Egtverchi, you were willing to
co-operate with us up to now; at least, you came here with us. Did you do
it just for the pleasure of defying and insulting your father? Chtexa is
far wiser than you are; why don't you stop acting like a child and listen
to him?"

"Because I don't choose to," Egtverchi said. "And you make me no more
willing by wheedling, dear foster father. I didn't choose to be born a
Lithian, and I didn't choose to be brought to Earth--but now that I'm a
free agent I mean to make my own choices, and explain them to nobody if
that's what pleases me."

"Then why did you come here?"

"There's no reason why I should explain that, but I will. I came to hear
my father's voice. Now I've heard it. I don't understand what he says,
and he makes no better sense in your translation, and that's all there is
to it as far as I am concerned. Bid him farewell for me--I shan't speak to
him again."

"What does he say?" Chtexa's voice said.

"That he does not acknowledge the Law of the Whole, and will not come
home," Ruiz-Sanchez told the microphone. The little instrument was
slippery with sweat in his palm. "And he says to bid you farewell."

"Farewell, then," Ghtexa said. "And farewell to you, too, Ruiz-Sanchez. I
am at fault, and this fills me with sorrow; but it is too late. I may not
talk to you again, even by means of your marvelous instrument."

Behind the voice, the strange, half-familiar whine rose to a savage,
snarling scream which lasted almost a minute. Ruiz-Sanchez waited until
he thought he could be heard over it again.

"Why not, Chtexa?" he said huskily. "The fault is ours as much as it is
yours. I am still your friend, and wish you well."

"And I am your friend, and wish you well," Chtexa's voice said. "But we
may not talk again. Can you not hear the power saws?"

So that was what that sound was!

"Yes. Yes, I hear them."

"That is the reason," Chtexa said. "Your friend Xlevher is cutting
down the Message Tree."

The gloom was thick in the Michelis apartment. As the time drew closer
for Egtverchi's next broadcast, it became increasingly apparent that
their analysis of the UN's essential helplessness had been correct.
Egtverchi was not openly triumphant, though he was exposed to that
temptation in several newspaper interviews; but he floated some
disquieting hints of vast plans which might well be started in motion
when he was next on the air. Ruiz-Sanchez had not the least desire to
listen to the broadcast, but he had to face the fact that he would be
unable to stay away from it. He could not afford to be without any new
data that the program might yield. Nothing he had learned had done him
any good thus far, but there was always the slim chance that something
would turn up.

In the meantime, there was the problem of Cleaver, and his associates.
However you looked at it, they were human souls. If Ruiz-Sanchez were to
be driven, somehow, to the step that Hadrian VIII had commanded, and it
did not fail, more than a set of attractive hallucinations would be lost.
It would plunge several hundred human souls into instant death and more
than probable damnation; Ruiz-Sanchez did not believe that the hand of
God would reach forth to pluck to salvation men who were involved in such
a project as Cleaver's, but he was equally convinced that his should not
be the hand to condemn any man to death, let alone to an unshriven
death. Ruiz was condemned already--but not yet of murder.

It had been Tannhauser who had been told that his salvation was as
unlikely as the blossoming of the pilgrim's staff in his hand. And
Ruiz-Sanchez' was as unlikely as sanctified murder.

Yet the Holy Father had commanded it; had said it was the only road back
for Ruiz-Sanchez, and for the world. The Pope's clear implication had
been that he shared with Ruiz-Sanchez the view that the world stood on
the brink of Armageddon--and he had said flatly that only Ruiz-Sanchez
could avert it. Their only difference was doctrinal, and in these matters
the Pope could not err...

But if it was possible that the dogma of the infertility of Satan was
wrong, then it was possible that the dogma of Papal infallibility was
wrong. After all, it was a recent invention; quite a few Popes in history
had got along without it. Heresies, Ruiz-Sanchez thought--not for the
first time--come in snarls. It is impossible to pull free one thread; tug
at one, and the whole mass begins to roll down upon you.

I believe, O Lord; help me in mine unbelief. But it was useless. It was
as though he were praying to God's back.

There was a knock on his door. "Coming, Ramon?" Michelis' tired voice
said. "He's due to go on in two minutes."

"All right, Mike."

They settled before the Klee, warily, already defeated, awaiting--what? It
could only be a proclamation of total war. They were ignorant only of the
form it would take.

"Good evening," Egtverchi said warmly from the frame. "There will be no
news tonight. Instead of reporting news, we will make some. The time has
come, it is now plain, for the people to whom news happens--those hapless
people whose grief-stricken, stunned faces look out at you from the
newspapers and the 3-V 'casts such as mine--to throw off their
helplessness. Tonight I call upon all of you to show your contempt for
the hypocrites who are your bosses, and your total power to be free of
them.

"You have a message for them. Tell them this: tell them, 'Your beasts,
sirs, are a great people.'

"I will be the first. As of tonight, I renounce my citizenship in the
United Nations, and my allegiance to the Shelter state. From now on I
will be a citizen--"

Michelis was on his feet, shouting incoherently.

"--a citizen of no country but that bounded by the limits of my own mind.
I do not know what those limits are, and I may never find out, but I
shall devote my life to searching for them, in whatever manner seems good
to me, and in no other manner whatsoever.

"You must do the same. Tear up your registration cards. If you are asked
your serial number, tell them you never had one. Never fill in another
form. Stay above ground when the siren sounds. Stake out plots; grow
crops; abandon the corridors. Do not commit any violence; simply refuse
to obey. Nobody has the. right to compel you, as non-citizens. Passivity
is the key. Renounce, resist, deny!

"Begin now. In half an hour they will overwhelm you. When--"

An urgent buzzer sounded over Egtverchi's voice, and for an instant a
checkerboard pattern in red and black blotted out bis figure: the UN's
crash-priority signal, overriding the bypass recording circuit. Then the
face of the UN man looked out at them from under its funny hat, with
Egtverchi underlying it dimly, his exhortations only a whisper in the
background.

"Dr. Michelis," the UN man said exultantly. "He's done it. He's
overreached himself. As a non-citizen, he's right in our hands. Get down
here--we need you right away, before he gets off the air. Dr. Meid too."

"What for?"

"To sign pleas of nolo contendere. Both of you are under arrest for
keeping a wild animal--a technicality only; don't be alarmed. But we have
to have you. We mean to put Mr. Egtverchi in a cage for the rest of his
life--a soundproof cage."

"You are making a mistake," Ruiz-Sanchez said quietly.

The UN man's face, a mask of triumph with blazing eyes, swung toward him
briefly.

"I didn't ask what you thought, Mister," he said. "I have no orders
concerning you, but as far as I'm concerned, you've been closed out of
this case entirely. If you try to force your way back in, you'll get
burned. Dr. Michelis, Dr. Meid? Do we have to come and get you?"

"We'll come," Michelis said stonily. "Sign off." He did not wait for the
UN man, however, but killed the set himself.

"Do you think we should do it, Ramon?" he said. "If not, we'll stay right
here, and the hell with him. Or we'll take you along if you want."

"No, no," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Go ahead. No balking on your part will
accomplish a thing but getting you both in deep trouble. Do me one favor,
though."

"Gladly. What is it?"

"Stay off the streets. When you get to the UN offices, make them keep you
there. As arrested citizens, you have the right to be jailed." Michelis
and Liu both stared at him. Then comprehension began to break over
Michelis' face.

"You think it will be that bad?" he said.

"Yes, I do. Do I have your promise?"

Michelis looked at Liu and nodded grimly. They went out The collapse of
the Shelter state had already begun.

XVIII

The beast Chaos roared on unslaked for three days. Ruiz-Sanchez was able
to follow much of its progress from the beginning, via the Michelises'
3-V set. There were times when he would also have liked to look out over
the sun porch rail, but the roar of the mob, the shots, explosions,
police whistles, sirens, and unnamable noises had driven the bees
frantic; under such conditions he would not have trusted Liu's protective
garments for an instant, even had they been large enough for him. The UN
squads had made a well-organized attempt to bear Egtverchi off directly
from the broadcasting station, but Egtverchi was not there--in fact, he
had never been there at all. The audio, video and tri-di signals had all
been piped into the station via coaxial cable from some unspecified
place. The necessary connections had been made at the last minute, when
it became obvious that Egtverchi was not going to show up, by a
technician who had volunteered word of the actual situation; a sacrifice
piece in Egtverchi's gambit. The network had sent an alert to the proper
UN officers at once, but another sacrifice piece saw to it that the alert
was shunted through channels. It took nearly all night to sweat out of
the QBC technician the location of Egtverchi's studio (the stooge at the
UN obviously did not know) and by that time, of course, he was no longer
there either. Also by that time, the news of the attempted arrest and the
misfire was being blared and headlined in every Shelter in the world.

Even this much did not get to Ruiz-Sanchez until somewhat later, for the
noise in the street began immediately after the first announcement had
been made. At first it was disconnected and random, as though the streets
were gradually filling with people who were angry or upset but were
divided over what, if anything, they ought to do about it. Then there was
a sudden change in the quality of the sound, and instantly Ruiz-Sanchez
knew that the transformation from a gathering to a mob had been made. The
shouting could not very well have become any louder, but abruptly it was
a frightening uniform growl, like the enormous voice of a single animal.

He had no way of knowing what had triggered the change, and perhaps the
crowd itself never knew either. But now the shots began--not many, but one
shot is a fusillade if there have been no shots before. A part of the
overall roar detached itself and took on an odd and even more frightening
hollow sound; only when the floor shook slightly under him did he realize
what that meant.

A pseudopod of the beast had thrust itself into the building.

Ruiz-Sanchez realized that he should have expected nothing else. The fad
of living above ground was still essentially a privilege, reserved to
those UN employees and officials who knew how to get the necessary and
elaborate permissions, and who furthermore had enough income to support
such an inconvenient arrangement; it was the twenty-first century's
version of commuting from Maine--here was where they lived.

Ruiz-Sanchez checked the door hastily. It had elaborate locks--left over
from the last period of the Shelter race, when the great untended
buildings had been natural targets for looters--but they had gone unused
for years. Ruiz-Sanchez used them all now.

He was just in time. There was an obscene shouting in the corridor just
outside as part of the mob burst into it from the fire stairs. They had
avoided the elevator by instinct--it was too slow to sustain their
thoughtless ferocity, too confined for lawlessness, too mechanical for
men who were letting their muscles do their thinking.

Somebody rattled the door knob and then shook it.

"Locked," a muffled voice said.

"Break the damned thing down. Here, get out of the way--"

The door shuddered, but held easily. There was another, harder thump, as
though several men had lunged against it at the same time; Ruiz-Sanchez
could hear them grunt with the impact Then there were five hammerlike
blows.

"Open up in there! Open up, you lousy government fink, or we'll burn you
out!"

The spontaneous threat seemed to surprise them all, even the utterer.
There was a confused whispering. Then someone said hoarsely: "All right,
but find some paper or something." Ruiz-Sanchez thought confusedly of
finding and filling a bucket, though he could not see how any fire could
be introduced around the door--there was no transom, and the sill was
snug--but at the same time a blurred shout from farther down the hall
seemed to draw everyone outside stampeding away. The subsequent noises
made it clear that they had found either an open, empty apartment, or an
inadequately secured, occupied one where nobody was at home.

Yes, it was occupied; Ruiz-Sanchez could hear them breaking furniture as
well as windows.

Then, with a shock of terror, their voices began to come at him from
behind his back. He whirled, but there seemed to be nobody in the
apartment; the shouting was coming from the glassed-in sun porch, but of
course there was nobody out there either--

"Jesus! Look, the guy's got his porch glassed in. It's a goddam garden."

"They don't let you have no goddam gardens in the Shelters."

"And you know who paid for it. Us, that's who."

He realized that they were on the neighboring balcony. He felt a surge of
relief which he knew to be irrational. The next words confirmed its
irrationality.

"Get some of that kindling out here, "No, heavier stuff.
Something to throw, you meathead."

"Can we get over there from here?"

"If we could throw a ladder across there--"

"It's a long way down--"

The leg of a chair burst through the glass on the sun porch. A heavy
vase followed.

The bees came pouring out. Ruiz-Sanchez had not realized how many of them
there were. The porch was black with them. For a moment they hovered
uncertainly. They would have found the gaps in the glass almost at once
in any event, but the men on the next porch, who could not have
understood what it was they were seeing, gave the great insects the
perfect cue. Something small and massive, possibly a torn-off piece of
plumbing, shattered another pane and whirled through the midst of the
cloud. Snarling like an old-fashioned aircraft engine, the bees swarmed.

Ruiz-Sanchez pushed at it, but it was partly locked. He got it open about
six inches and wormed through.

The contorted man on the floor, his incredibly puffed, taut skin slowly
turning black, his eyes glassy with agony, was Agronski.

The geologist did not recognize him; he was already beyond that. There
was no mind behind the eyes. Ruiz-Sanchez fell to his knees, clumsily in
the tight protective clothing. He heard himself begin to mutter the
rites, but he was no more hearing the Latin words than Agronski was.

This could be no coincidence. He had come here to give grace, if such a
one as he could still give grace; and before him was the most blameless
of the Lithian commission, struck down where Ruiz-Sanchez would be sure
to find him. It was the God of Job who was abroad in the world now, not
the God of the Psalmist or the Christ. The face that was bent upon
Ruiz-Sanchez was the face of the avenging, the jealous God--the God who
made hell before He made man, because He knew that He would have need of
it. That terrible truth Dante had written down; and in the black face
with the protruding tongue which rolled beside Ruiz-Sanchez' knee, he saw
that Dante had been right, as every Catholic who reads the Divine Comedy
knows in his heart of hearts.

There is a demonolater abroad in the world. He shall be deprived of
grace, and then called upon to administer extreme unction to a friend. By
this sign, let him know himself for what he is.

After a while, Agronski was dead, choked to death by his own tongue. But
still it was not over. It was necessary now to make Mike's apartment
secure, kill any bees that might have got in, see to it that the escaped
swarm died. It was easy enough. Ruiz-Sanchez simply papered over the
broken panes on the sun porch. The. bees could not feed anywhere but in
Liu's garden; they would come back there within a few hours; denied
entrance, they would die of starvation an hour or so later. A bee is not
a well-designed flying-machine; it keeps itself in the air by expending
energy, in short, by pure brute force. A trapped bumblebee can starve to
death in half a day, and Liu's tetraploid monsters would die far sooner
of their freedom...

The 3-V muttered away throughout the dreary business. The terror was not
local, that was clear. The Corridor Riots of 1993 had been nothing but a
premonitory flicker, compared to this.

Four target areas were blacked out completely. Egtverchi's uniformed
thugs, suddenly reappearing from nowhere in force, had seized the control
centers. At the moment, they were holding roughly twenty-five million
people as hostages for Egtverchi's safe-conduct, with the active
collusion of perhaps five million of them. The violence elsewhere was not
as systematic, though some of the outbursts of wrecking must have been
carefully planned to allow for the placing of the explosives alone, there
seemed to be no special pattern to it--but in no case could it be
described as "passive" or "non-violent."

Sick, wretched and damned, Ruiz-Sanchez waited in the Michelises' jungle
apartment, as though part of Lithia had followed him home and enfolded
him there.

After the first three days, the fury had exhausted itself sufficiently to
permit Michelis and Liu to risk the trip back to their apartment in a UN
armored car. They were wan and ghastly-looking, as Ruiz-Sanchez supposed
he was himself; they had had even less sleep than he had. He decided at
once to say nothing about Agronski; that horror they could be spared.
There was no way, however, that he could avoid explaining what had
happened to the bees.

Liu's sad little shrug was somehow even harder to bear than Agronski.

"Did they find him yet?" Ruiz-Sanchez said huskily.

"We were going to ask you the same thing," Michelis said. The tall New
Englander was able to get a glimpse of himself in a mirror above a
planting box and winced. "Ugh, what a beard! At the UN everybody's too
busy to tell you anything, except in fragments. We thought you might have
heard an announcement."

"No, nothing. The Detroit vigilantes have surrendered, according to QBC."

"Yes, so have those goons in Smolensk; they ought to be putting that on
the air in an hour or so. I never did think they'd succeed in pulling
that operation off. They can't possibly know the corridors as well as the
target area authorities themselves do. In Smolensk they got them with the
fire door system--drained all the oxygen out of the area they were holding
without their realizing what was going on. Two of them never came to."

Ruiz-Sanchez crossed himself automatically. Up on the wall, the Klee
muttered in a low voice; it had not been off since Egtverchi's broadcast.

"I don't know whether I want to listen to that damn thing or not,"
Michelis said sourly. Nevertheless, he turned up the volume. There was
still essentially no news. The rioting was dying back, though it was as
bad as ever in some shelters. The Smolensk announcement was duly made,
bare of detail. Egtverchi had not yet been located, but UN officials
expected a break in the case "shortly."

"'Shortly,' hell," Michelis said. "They've run out of leads entirely.
They thought they had him cold the next morning, when they found a trail
to the hideaway where he'd arranged to tide himself over and direct
things. But he wasn't there--apparently he'd gotten out in a hurry, some
time before. And nobody in his organization knows where he would go
next--he was supposed to be there, and they're thoroughly demoralized to
be told that he's not."

"Which means that he's on the run," Ruiz-Sanchez suggested.

"Yes, I suppose that's some consolation," Michelis said. "But where could
he run to, where he wouldn't be recognized? And how would he run? He
couldn't just gallop naked through the streets, or take a public
conveyance. It takes organization to ship something as outré as that
secretly--and Egtverchi's organization is as baffled about it as the UN
is." He turned the 3-V off with a savage gesture.

Liu turned to Ruiz-Sanchez, her expression appalled beneath its
weariness.

"Then it's really not over after all?" she said hopelessly.

"Far from it," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "But maybe the violent phase of it is
over. If Egtverchi stays vanished for a few days more, I'll conclude that
he is dead. He couldn't stay unsighted that long if he were still moving
about. Of course his death won't solve most of the major problems, but at
least it would remove one sword from over our heads."

Even that, he recognized silently, was wishful thinking. Besides, can you
kill a hallucination?

"Well, I hope the UN has learned something," Michelis said.

"There's one thing you have to say for Egtverchi: he got the public to
bring up all the unrest that's been smoldering down under the concrete
for all these years. And underneath all the apparent conformity, too.
We're going to have to do something about that now--maybe take
sledgehammers in our hands and pound this damned Shelter system down into
rubble and start over. It wouldn't cost any more than rebuilding what's
already been destroyed. One thing's certain: the UN won't be able to
smother a revolt of this size in slogans. They'll have to do something."

The Klee chimed.

"I won't answer it," Michelis said through gritted teeth. "I won't answer
it. I've had enough."

"I think we'd better, Mike," Liu said. "It might be news."

"News!" Michelis said, like a swearword. But he allowed himself to be
persuaded. Underneath all the weariness, Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could
detect something like a return of warmth between the two, as though,
during the three days, some depth had been sounded which they had never
touched before. The slight sigh of something good astonished him. Was he
beginning, like all demonolaters, to take pleasure in the prevalence of
evil, or at least in the expectation of it?

The caller was the UN man. His face was very strange underneath his funny
hat, and his head was cocked as if to catch the first word. Suddenly,
blindingly, Ruiz-Sanchez saw the hat in the light of the attitude, and
realized what it was: an elaborately disguised hearing aid. The UN man
was deaf and, like most deaf people, ashamed of it. The rest of the
apparatus was a decoy.

"Dr. Michelis, Dr. Meid, Dr. Ruiz," he said. "I don't know how to begin.
Yes, I do. My deepest apologies for past rudeness. And past damn
foolishness. We were wrong--my God, but we were wrong. It's your turn
now. We need you badly, if you feel like doing us a favor. I won't blame
you if you don't."

"No threats?" Michelis said, with unforgiving contempt.

"No, no threats. My apologies, please. No, this is purely a favor,
requested by the Security Council." His face twisted suddenly, and then
was composed once more. "I volunteered to present the petition. We need
you all, right away, on the Moon."

"On the Moon! Why?"

"We've found Egtverchi."

"Impossible," Ruiz-Sanchez said, more sharply than he had intended. "He
could never have gotten passage. Is he dead?"

"No, he's not dead. And he's not on the Moon, I didn't mean to imply
that."

"Then where is he, in God's name?"

"He's on his way back to Lithia."

The trip to the Moon, by ferry-rocket, was rough, hectic and long. As the
sole space voyage now being made in which the Haertel overdrive could not
be used--across so short a distance, a Haertel ship would have overshot
the target--very little improvement in techniques had been made in the
trip since the old von Braun days. It was only after they had been
bundled off the rocket into the moonboat, for the slow,
paddle-wheel-driven trip across the seas of dust to the Comte
d'Averoigne's observatory, that Ruiz-Sanchez managed to piece the whole
story together.

Egtverchi had been found aboard the vessel that was shipping the final
installment of equipment to Cleaver, when the ship was two days out. He
was half-dead. In a final, desperate improvisation, he had had himself
crated, addressed to Cleaver, marked "FRAGILE - RADIOACTIVE - THIS END
UP," and shipped via ordinary express into the spaceport. Even a normally
raised Lithian would have been shaken up by this kind of treatment, and
Egtverchi, in addition to being a spindling specimen of his race, had
been on the run for many hours before being shipped.

The vessel, by no very great coincidence, was also carrying the pilot
model of the Petard CirCon; the captain got the news back to the count on
the first test, and the count passed it along to the UN by ordinary
radio. Egtverchi was in irons now, but he was well and cheerful. Since it
was impossible for the ship to turn back, the UN was now, in effect,
doing his running for him, at a good many times the speed of light.

Ruiz-Sanchez found a trace of pity in his heart for the born exile,
harried now like a wild animal, penned behind bars, on his way back to a
fatherland for which no experience in his life had fitted him, whose very
language he could not speak. But when the UN man began to question them
all--what was needed was some knowledgeable estimate of what Egtverchi
might do next--his pity did not survive his speculations. It was right and
proper to pity children, but Ruiz-Sanchez was beginning to believe that
adults generally deserve any misfortune that they get.

The impact of a creature like Egtverchi on the stable society of Lithia
would be explosive. On Earth, at least, he had been a freak; on Lithia,
he would soon be taken for another Lithian, however odd. And Earth had
had centuries of experience with deranged and displaced messiahs like
Egtverchi; such a thing had never happened before on Lithia. Egtverchi
would infect that garden down to the roots, and remake it in his own
image--transforming the planet into that hypothetical dangerous enemy
against whose advent Cleaver had wanted to make it an arsenal!

Yet something like that had happened when Earth was a stable garden, too.
Perhaps--O felix culpa!--it always happened that way, on every world.

Perhaps the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was like the Yggdrasil
of the legends of Pope Hadrian's birthland, with its roots in the floor
of the universe, its branches bearing the planets--and whosoever would eat
of its fruit might eat thereof...

No, that must not be. Lithia as a rigged Garden had been dangerous
enough; but Lithia transformed into a planet-wide fortress of Dis was a
threat to Heaven itself.

The Count d'Averoigne's main observatory had been built by the UN, to his
specifications, approximately in the center of the crater Stadius, a once
towering cup which early in its history had been swamped and partially
melted in the outpouring sea of lava which made the Mare-Imbrium. What
remained of its walls served the count's staff as a meteor--rampart during
showers, yet they were low enough to be well below the horizon from the
center of the crater, giving the count what was effectively a level plain
in all directions. He looked no different than he had when they had first
met, except that he was wearing brown coveralls instead of a brown suit,
but he seemed glad to see them. Ruiz-Sanchez suspected that he was
sometimes lonely, or perhaps lonely all the time--not only because of his
current isolation on the Moon, but in his continuing remoteness from his
family and indeed the whole of ordinary humanity.

"I have a surprise for you," he told them. "We've just completed the new
telescope--six hundred feet in diameter, all of sodium foil, perched on
top of Mount Piton a few hundred miles north of here. The relay cables
were brought through to Stadius yesterday, and I was up all night testing
my circuits. They have been made a little neater since you last saw
them." This was an understatement. The breadboard rigs had vanished
entirely; the object the count was indicating now was nothing but a black
enamel box about the size of a tape recorder, and with only about that
many knobs.

"Of course to do this is simpler than picking up a broadcast from a
transmitter that doesn't have CirCon, like the Tree," the count admitted.
"But the results are just as gratifying. Regard." He snapped a switch
dramatically. On a large screen on the opposite wall of the dark
observatory chamber, a cloud-wrapped planet swam placidly.

"My God!" Michelis said in a choked voice. "That's--is that Lithia, Count
d'Averoigne? I'd swear it is."

"Please," the count said. "Here I'm Dr. Petard. But yes, that's Lithia;
its sun is visible from the Moon a little over twelve days of the month.
It's fifty light-years away, but here we see it at an apparent distance
of a quarter of a million miles, give or take ten thousand--about the
distance of the Moon from the Earth. It's remarkable how much light you
can gather with a six-hundred-foot paraboloid of sodium when there's no
atmosphere in the way. Of course with an atmosphere we couldn't maintain
the foil, either--the gravity here is almost too much for it."

"It's stunning," Liu murmured.

"That's only the beginning, Dr. Meid. We have spanned not only the space,
but also the time--both together, as is only appropriate. What we are
seeing is Lithia today--right now, in fact--not Lithia fifty years ago."

"Congratulations," Michelis said, his voice hushed. "Of course the
scholium was the real achievement--but you threw up an installation in
record time, too, it seems to me."

"It seems that way to me, too," the count said, taking his cigar out of
his mouth and regarding it complacently. "Are we going to be able to
catch the ship's landing?" the UN man said intensely.

"No, I'm afraid not, unless I have my dates wrong. According to the
schedule you gave me, the landing was supposed to have taken place
yesterday, and I can't back my device up and down the time spectrum. The
equations nail it to simultaneity, and simultaniety is what I get--neither
more, nor less."

His voice changed color suddenly. The change transformed him from a fat
man delighted with a new toy into the philosopher-mathematician Henri
Petard as no disclaimer of his hereditary title could ever have done.

"I invited you to hold your conference here," he said, "because I thought
you should all be witnesses to an event which I hope profoundly is not
going to happen. I will explain:

"Recently I was asked to check the reasoning on which Dr. Cleaver based
the experiment he has programmed for today. Briefly, the experiment is an
attempt to store the total output of a Nernst generator for a period of
about ninety seconds, through a special adaptation of what is called the
pinch effect.

"I found the reasoning faulty--not obviously, Dr. Cleaver is too careful a
craftsman for that, but seriously, all the same. Since lithium 6 is
ubiquitous on that planet, any failure would be totally disastrous. I
sent Dr. Cleaver an urgent message on the CirCon, to be tape-recorded on
the ship that landed yesterday; I would have used the Tree, but of course
that has been cut down, and I doubt that he would have accepted any such
message from a Lithian had it not been. The captain of the ship promised
me that the tape would be delivered to Dr. Cleaver before any of the
remaining apparatus was unloaded. But I know Dr. Cleaver. He is
bullheaded. Is that not so?"

"Yes," Michelis said. "God knows that's so."

"Well, we are ready," Dr. Petard said. "As ready as we can be. I have
instruments to record the event.  Let us pray that I won't need them."

The count was a lapsed Catholic; his injunction was a habit. But
Ruiz-Sanchez could no more pray for any such thing than the count
could--and no more could he leave the outcome to chance. St. Michael's
sword had been put into his hand now so unmistakably that even a fool
could not fail to recognize it. The Holy Father had known it would be so,
and had planned for it with the skill of a Disraeli. Ruiz-Sanchez
shuddered to think what a less politically minded Pope would have made of
such an opportunity, but of course it had been God's will that this
should happen in the time of Hadrian and not during any other
pontificate. By specifically ruling out any formal excommunication,
Hadrian had reserved to Ruiz-Sanchez' use the one gift of grace which was
pertinent to the occasion at hand. And perhaps he had seen, too, that the
time Ruiz-Sanchez had devoted to the elaborate, capriciously hypercomplex
case of conscience in the Joyce novel had been time wasted; there was a
much simpler case, one of the classical situations, which applied if
Ruiz-Sanchez could only see it. It was the case of the sick child, for
whose recovery prayers were offered.

These days, most sick children recovered in a day or so, after a shot of
spectrosigmin or some similar drug, even from the brink of the terminal
coma. Question: Has prayer failed, and temporal science wrought the
recovery?

Answer; No, for prayer is always answered, and no man may choose for God
the means He uses to answer it. Surely a miracle like a life-saving
antibiotic is not unworthy of the bounty of God.

And this, too, was the answer to the riddle of the Great Nothing. The
Adversary is not creative, except in the sense that He always seeks evil,
and always does good. He cannot claim any of the credit for temporal
science, nor imply truthfully that a success for temporal science is a
failure, for prayer. In this as in all other matters, He is compelled to
lie.

And there on Lithia was Cleaver, agent of the Great Nothing, foredoomed
to failure, the very task to which he was putting his hand in the
Adversary's service tottering on the edge of undoing all His work. The
staff of Tannhauser had blossomed: These fruits are shaken from the
wrath-bearing tree.

Yet even as Ruiz-Sanchez rose, the searing words of Pope Gregory VIII
trembling on his lips, he hesitated still again. What if he were wrong
after all? Suppose, just suppose, that Lithia were Eden, and that the
Earth-bred Lithian who had just returned there were the Serpent
foreordained for it? Suppose it always happened that way, world without
end?

The voice of the Great Nothing, pouring forth lies to the last.

Ruiz-Sanchez raised his hand. His shaken voice resounded and echoed in
the cave of the observatory.

"I, A PRIEST OF CHRIST, DO COMMAND YE, MOST FOUL SPIRITS
WHO DO STIR UP THESE CLOUDS--"

"What? For heaven's sake, be quiet," the UN man said irritably. Everyone
else was staring in wonder, and in Liu's glance there appeared to be a
little fear. Only the count's glance was knowing and solemn.

"--THAT YE DEPART FROM THEM, AND DISPERSE YOURSELVES
INTO WILD AND UNTILLED PLACES, THAT YE MAY BE NO
LONGER ABLE TO HARM MEN OR ANIMALS OR FRUITS OR
HERBS, OR WHATSOEVER IS DESIGNED FOR HUMAN USE:

"AND THOU GREAT NOTHING, THOU LUSTFUL AND STUPID
ONE, SCROFA STERCORATE, THOU SOOTY SPIRIT FROM
TARTARUS, I CAST THEE DOWN, O PORCARIE PEDICOSE, 
INTO THE INFERNAL KITCHEN:

"BY THE APOCALYPSE OF JESUS CHRIST, WHICH GOD HATH
GIVEN TO MAKE KNOWN UNTO HIS SERVANTS THOSE THINGS
WHICH ARE SHORTLY TO BE; AND HATH SIGNIFIED, SENDING
BY HIS ANGEL; I EXORCISE THEE, ANGEL OF PERVERSITY:

"BY THE SEVEN GOLD CANDLESTICKS, AND BY ONE LIKE
UNTO THE SON OF MAN, STANDING IN THE MIDST OF THE
CANDLESTICKS; BY HIS VOICE, AS THE VOICE OF MANY
WATERS; BY HIS WORDS, 'I AM LIVING, WHO WAS DEAD; AND
BEHOLD, I LIVE FOREVER AND EVER; AND I HAVE THE KEYS
OF DEATH AND OF HELL;' I SAY UNTO YOU, ANGEL
OF PERDITION: DEPART, DEPART, DEPART!"

The echoes rang and dwindled. The lunar silence flowed back, underlined
by the breathing of the people in the observatory and the sound of pumps
laboring somewhere beneath.

And slowly, and without a sound, the cloudy planet on the screen turned
white all over. The clouds and the dim oceans and continents blended into
a blue-white glare which shone out from the screen like a searchlight. It
seemed to penetrate their bloodless faces down to the bone.

Slowly, slowly, it all melted away: the chirruping forests, Chtexa's
porcelain house, the barking lungfish, the stump of the Message Tree, the
wild allosaurs, the single silver moon, the great beating heart of Blood
Lake, the city of the potters, the flying squid, the Lithian crocodile
and his winding track, the tall noble reasoning creatures and the mystery
and the beauty around them. Suddenly the whole of Lithia began to swell,
like a balloon--

The count tried to turn the screen off, but he was too late. Before he
could touch the black box, the whole circuit went out with a puffing of
fuses. The intolerable light vanished instantly; the screen went black,
and the universe with it. They sat blinded and stunned.

"An error in Equation Sixteen," the count's voice said harshly in the
swimming darkness.

No, Ruiz-Sanchez thought, no. An instance of fulfilled desire. He had
wanted to use Lithia to defend the faith, and he had been given that.
Cleaver had wanted to turn it into a fusion-bomb plant, and he had got
that in full measure, all at once. Michelis had seen in it a prophecy of
infallible human love, and had been stretched on that rack ever since.
And Agronski--Agronski had wanted nothing to change, and now was
unchangeably nothing.

In the darkness, there was a long, ragged sigh. For a moment,
Ruiz-Sanchez could not place the voice; he thought it was Liu. But no. It
was Mike.

"When we have our eyesight back," the count's voice said, "I propose
that we suit up and go outside. We have a nova to watch for."

That was only a maneuver, an act of misdirection on the count's part--an
act of kindness. He knew well enough that that nova would not be visible
to the naked eye until the next Holy Year, fifty years to come; and he
knew that they knew.

Nevertheless, when Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, sometime Clerk Regular in
the Society of Jesus, could see again, they had left him alone with his
God and his grief.

APPENDIX

The Planet Lithia (from Michelis, D., and Ruiz-Sanchez, R.: Lithia--a
preliminary report. J. I. R. 4:225, 2050; abstract.) Lithia is the second
planet of the solar type star Alpha Arietis, which is located in the
constellation Aries and is approximately 50 light-years from Sol. [1]

It revolves around its primary at a mean distance of 108,600,000 miles,
with a year of approximately 380 terrestrial days. The orbit is
definitely elliptical, with an eccentricity of 0.51, so that the long
axis of the ellipse is approximately 15 per cent longer than the short
axis.

The axis of the planet is essentially perpendicular to the orbit, and the
planet rotates on its axis with a day of about 20 terrestrial, hours.
Hence, the Lithian year consists of 456 Lithian days. The eccentricity of
the orbit produces mild seasons, with long, relatively cold winters, and
short, hot summers.

The planet has one moon with a diameter of 1,256 miles, which revolves
about its primary at a distance of 326,000 miles, twelve times in the
Lithian year.

The outer planets of the system have not yet been explored. Lithia is
8,267 miles in diameter, and has a surface gravity of 0.82 that of Earth.
The light gravity of the planet is accounted for by the relatively low
density, which in turn is the result of its composition. When the planet
was formed there was a much lower percentage of the heavy elements with
atomic numbers above 20 included in its make-up than was the case with
the Earth. Furthermore, the odd-numbered elements are even rarer than
they are on Earth; the only odd-numbered elements that appear in any
quantity are hydrogen, nitrogen, sodium and chlorine. Potassium is quite
rare, and the heavy odd-numbered elements (gold, silver, copper) appear
only in microscopic quantities and never in the elemental form. In fact,
the only uncombined metal that has ever appeared on the planet has been
the nickel-iron of an occasional meteorite. The metallic core of the
planet is considerably smaller than that of the Earth, and the basaltic
inner coating correspondingly thicker. The continents are built, as on
Earth, basically of granite, overlaid with sedimentary deposits.

[1. An earlier figure of 40 light-years, often quoted in the literature,
arose from application of the so-called Cosmological Constant. Einstein's
reluctance to allow this "constant" into his scholium has now been fully
justified, v. Haertel, J. I. R. 1:21, 2047]

The scarcity of potassium has led to an extremely static geology. The
natural radioactivity of K40 is the major source of the internal heat of
the Earth, and Lithia has less than a tenth of the K40 content of the
Earth. As a result, the interior of the planet is much cooler, vulcanism
is extremely rare, and geological revolutions even rarer. The planet
seems to have settled down early in life, and nothing very startling has
happened since. The major part of its uneventful geological history is at
best conjectural, because the scarcity of radioactive elements has led to
great difficulties in dating the strata.

The atmosphere is somewhat similar to that of the Earth. [2] The
atmospheric pressure is 815.3 mm at sea level, and the composition of dry
air is as follows:

Nitrogen 66.26 per cent by volume
Oxygen 31.27 
Argon, &c. 2.16
CO2 0.31

The relatively high CO2 concentration (partial pressure about 11 times
that of the gas in the Earth's atmosphere) leads to a hothouse type of
climate, with relatively slight temperature differences from pole to
equator. The average summer temperature at the pole is about 30° C., at
the equator near 38° C., while the winter temperatures are about 15°
colder. The humidity is generally high and there is a lot of haze;
gentle, drizzling rain is chronic. There has been little change in the
climate of the planet for about 700 million years. 

Since there is little vulcanism, the CO2 content of the air does not rise
appreciably from that cause, and the amount consumed in photosynthesis by
the lush vegetation is compensated for by the rapid oxidation of dead
vegetable matter induced by the high temperature, high humidity, and high
oxygen content of the air. In fact, the climate of the planet has been in
equilibrium for more than half a billion years. As has the geography of
the planet. There are three continents, of which the largest is the
southern continent, extending roughly from latitude 15° south to 60°
south, and two-thirds of the way around the planet. The two northern
continents are squarish in shape, and of sizes similar to each other.
They extend from about 10° south to about 70° north, and each one about
80° east and west. One is located north of the eastern end of the
southern continent, the other north of the western end. On the other side
of the world there is an archipelago of large islands, the size of
England and Ireland, running from 20° north to 10° south of the equator.
There are thus five seas or oceans: the two polar seas; the equatorial
sea separating the southern from the northern continents; the central sea
between the two latter, " and connecting the equatorial sea with the
north polar sea; and the great sea, stretching from pole to pole, broken
only by the archipelago, extending a third of the way around the planet.

The southern continent has one low mountain range (highest peak 2263
meters) paralleling its southern shore, and moderating the never very
momentous effect of the south winds. The northwestern continent has two
ranges, one paralleling the eastern and one the western sea, so that the
polar winds have a free run, and give this continent a more variable
climate than that of the southern one. The northeastern continent has a
slight range along its southern shore. The islands of the archipelago
have few hills, and possess an oceanic type of climate. The trade winds
are much like those of Earth, but of lesser velocity, due to the lesser
temperature differentials between the different parts of the planet. The
equatorial sea is nearly windless.

Except for the few mountain ranges, the terrain of the continents is
rather flat, particularly near the coasts, and the lower reaches of all
the rivers are of the meandering type, bordered with marshes, and with
low plains that are flooded, miles wide, every spring.

There are tides, milder than on Earth, producing an appreciable tidal
current in the equatorial sea. As the coastal terrain is generally quite
flat, except where the mountain ranges come to the sea, wide tidal flats
separate the shore from the open sea. The water is similar to that of
earth, but considerably less salty. Life began in the sea, and evolved
much as it did on Earth. There is a rich assortment of microscopic sea
life, types resembling such forms as seaweed and sponges, and many
Crustacea and mollusklike forms. The latter are very highly developed and
diversified, particularly the mobile types. Quite familiar fishlike forms
have emerged and dominate the seas as they do on Earth.

Present-day Lithian land plant life would be unfamiliar, but not
surprising, to a terrestrial observer. There are no plants exactly like
those of earth, but most of them have a noticeable similarity to those
with which the visitor would be familiar. The most surprising aspect is
that the forests are of a remarkably mixed type. Flowering and
non-flowering trees, palms and pines, tree ferns, shrubs and grasses all
grow together in remarkable amity. Since Lithia never had a glacial
period, these mixed forests, rather than the uniform type prevailing on
Earth, are the rule. In general the vegetation is lush and the forests
can be considered as typical rain-forests. There are several varieties of
poisonous plants, including most of the edible-looking tubers. Their
roots resemble potatoes and they produce extremely toxic alkaloids, whose
structure has not yet been worked out, in large quantities. There are
several types of bushes which grow thorns impregnated with glucosides
which are extremely irritating to the skins of most vertebrates.

The grasses are more prevalent on the plains, shading into rushes and
similar swamp-adapted plants in the marshes. There are few desert
areas--even the mountains are rounded and smooth, and covered with grasses
and shrubs. Seen from space, the land areas of the planet are almost
entirely green. Bare rock is found only in the river valleys, where the
streams have cut their way down to the lime and sandstone, and in
ligneous outcroppings, where flint, quartz and quartzite frequently
found. Obsidian is rare, of course, because of the lack of volcanic
activity. There is clay to be found in some of the river valleys, with an
appreciable alumina content, and rutile (titanium dioxide) is not
uncommon. There are no concentrated deposits of iron ore, and hematite is
almost unknown.

The land-living animal forms include orders similar to those found on
Earth. There is a large variety of arthropods, including eight-legged
insectlike forms of all sizes, up to a pseudo dragonfly with two pairs of
wings and a wingspread which has been recorded at 86.5 cm. maximum. This
variety lives exclusively on other insects, but there are several types
dangerous to higher forms of animals. Several have dangerous bites (the
poison is generally an alkaloid) and one insect can eject a stream of
poisonous gas (reputed to be largely HCN) in quantity sufficient to
immobilize a small animal. These insects are social in nature, like ants,
living in colonies which are usually left severely alone by otherwise
insectivorous organisms.

There are also many amphibians, small lizardlike forms with three fingers
on each limb instead of the five that are common to terrestrial land
vertebrates. They form an extremely important class, and there are some
species that are as large as a St. Bernard dog at maturity. Except for
some small and unimportant forms, however, the amphibians are confined to
the marshy lowlands near the sea, and the rest of the land is dominated
by a class resembling Earthly reptiles. Among these is the dominant
species, a large, highly intelligent animal with a bipedal gait which
balances itself with a rather stiff, heavy tail.

Two groups of the reptiles went back to the sea and engaged in successful
competition with the fish. One adopted a completely streamlined form and
is, outwardly, just another 30-foot fish. But its tail fin is in the
horizontal plane and its internal structure shows its ancestry. It is the
fastest thing in the waters of Lithia, doing nearly 80 knots when pressed
(as it usually is by its insatiable appetite.) The other group of
returned reptiles resembles crocodiles, and is competent either in the
open sea or on the mud flats, although it is not very fast in either
situation. Several genera of the reptiles have taken to the air, as did
the terrestrial pteranodons. The largest of these has a wingspread of
nearly three meters, but is very lightly built. It roosts mainly on the
sea cliffs of the southern coast of the northeastern continent, and lives
mainly on fish, and such of the gliding cephalopods as it can manage to
catch above water. This flying reptile has a large assortment of sharp,
backward-curving teeth in its long beak. One other species of flying
reptile is of special interest, because it has developed something
resembling feathers, in a many-colored crest down its long neck. They
appear only on the mature reptile; the young are completely naked.

Some 100,000,000 years ago the land-living reptiles were almost
completely wiped out by one of the smallest of their own family, which
adopted the easiest method of making a living: eating the eggs of its
larger relatives. The larger forms almost completely disappeared, and
those that survived (such as the Lithian allosaur) are now almost as rare
as the terrestrial elephant (as compared for instance, with the many
elephant species of the Pleistocene.) The smaller forms survived better,
but are not nearly so abundant now as they once were.

The dominant species is an exception. The female of this species has an
abdominal pouch in which the eggs are carried until they hatch. This
animal is about twelve feet tall at the crown, with a head shaped for
bifocal vision. One of the three fingers on the free forelimb is an
opposable thumb.