 They Twinkled Like Jewels by Philip Jose Farmer. Reading by Greg Marguerite. They Twinkled Like Jewels by Philip Jose Farmer. The dream didn't get the nice man's name, until it was far too late to do anything at all about it. Jack Crane lay all morning in the vacant lot. Now and then he moved a little to quiet the protest of cramped muscles and stagnant blood. But most of the time he was as motionless as the heap of rags he resembled. Not once did he hear or see a Bohas agent or, for that matter, anyone. The pre-dawn darkness had hidden his panting flight from the transient jungle, his dodging across backyards while whistles shrilled and voices shouted, and his crawling on hands and knees down an alley into the high grass and pushes which fringed a hidden garden. For a while his heart had knocked so loudly that he had been sure he would not be able to hear his pursuers if they did get close. It seemed inevitable that they would track him down. A buddy had told him that a new camp had just been built at a place only three hours drive from the town. This meant the Bohas would be thick as hornets in the neighborhood. But no black uniforms had so far appeared. And then, lying there while the passionate and untiring sun mounted the sky, the bang-bang of his heart was replaced by a noiseless but painful movement in his stomach. He munched a candy bar and two dried rolls which a housewife had given him the evening before. The tiger in his belly quit pacing back and forth. It crouched and licked its chops, but its tail was stuck up in his throat. Jack could feel the dry fur swabbing his furrinx and mouth. He suffered, but he was used to that. Night would come as surely as anything did. He'd get a drink then to quench his thirst. Boredom began to sit on his eyelids. Just as he was about to accept some much-needed sleep, he moved a leaf with an accidental jerk of his hand and uncovered a caterpillar. It was dark except for a row of yellow spots along the central line of some of its segments. As soon as it was exposed, it began slowly shimmying away. Before it had gone to feet, it was crossed by a moving shadow. Guiding the shadow was a black wasp with an orange ring around the abdomen. It closed the gap between itself and the worm with a swift, smooth movement and straddled the dark body. Before the wasp could grasp the thick-necked thing with its mandibles, the intended victim began rapidly rolling and unrolling and flinging itself from side to side. For a minute, the delicate dancer above it could not succeed in clenching the neck. Its sharp jaws slid off the frenziedly jerking skin until the tiring creature paused for the chip of a second. Seizing opportunity and larvae at the same time, the wasp stood high on its legs and pulled the worm's front end from the ground, exposing the yellowed band of the underpart. The attacker's abdomen curved beneath its own body. The stinger jabbed between two segments of the prey's jointed length, instantly the writhing stilled, a shutter, and the caterpillar became as inert as if it were dead. Jack had watched with an eye not completely cynical, feeling the sympathy of the hunted and the hounded for a fellow. His own struggles of the past few months had been as desperate, though not as hopeless, and he stopped thinking. His heart again took up the rib-thudding. Out of the corner of his left eye he had seen a shadow that fell across the garden. When he slowly turned his head to follow the stain upon the sun-splashed soil, he saw that it clung to a pair of shining black boots. Jack did not say anything. What was the use? He put his hands against the weeds and pushed his body up. He looked into the silent mouth of a thirty-eight automatic. It told him his running days were over. You didn't talk back to a mouth like that. Section 2 Jack was lucky. As one of the last to be herded into the truck, which had once been used for hauling cattle, he had more room to breathe than most of the others. He faced the rear bars. The vehicle was heading into the sun. His rays were not as hard on him as on some of those who were so jam-packed they could not turn to get the hot yellow splotch out of their eyes. He looked through lowered lids at the youths on either side of him. For the last three days in the transient jungle, the one standing on his left had given signs of what was coming upon him, what had come upon so many of the transies, the muttering, the indifference to food, not hearing you when you talked to him, and now the shock of being caught in the raid has speeded up what everybody had foreseen. He was hardened, like a concrete statue, into a half-crouch. His arms were held in front of him like a praying mantis, and his hands clutched a bar. Not even the pressure of the crowd could break his posture. The man on Jack's right murmured something, but the roaring of motor and clashing of gears shifting on a hill squashed his voice. He spoke louder. Flexibilitas, extreme catatonic state, the fate of us all. You're not, said Jack, not me. I'm no schizo, and I'm not going to become one. As there was no reply, Jack decided he had not moved his lips enough to be heard clearly. Lately, even when it was quiet, people seemed to have trouble making out what he was saying. It made him mildly angry. He shouted, it did not matter if it were overheard, that any of the prisoners were agents of the Bureau of Health and Sanity didn't seem likely. Anyway, he didn't care. They wouldn't do anything to him they hadn't planned before this. Got any idea where we're going? Sure. FMRC-3, Federal Mail Rehabilitation Camp No. 3. I spent two weeks in the hills spying on it. Jack looked the speaker over. Like all those in the truck, he wore a frayed shirt, a stained and torn coat, and greasy dirty trousers. The black bristles on his face were long. The back of his neck was covered by thick curls. The brim of his dusty hat was pulled down low. Beneath its shadow, his eyes roamed from side to side with the same fear that Jack knew was in his own eyes. Hunger and sleepless nights had knobbed the cheekbones and honed his chin to a sharp point. An almost visible air clung to him, a hot aura that seemed to result from veins full of lava and eyeballs spilling out a heat that could not be held within him. He had the face every trans he had, the face of a man who was either burning with fever or who had seen a vision. Jack looked away to stare miserably at the dust boiling up behind the wheels, as if he could see projected against its yellow-brown screen his retreating passed. He spoke out of the side of his mouth. What's happened to us? We should be happy and working at good jobs and sure about the future. We shouldn't just be bums, pobos, walkers of the streets, rod-hoppers, beggars, and thieves. His friend shrugged and looked uneasily from the corners of his eyes. He was probably expecting the question they all asked sooner or later. Why are you on the road? They asked, but none replied with words that meant anything. They lied and they didn't seem to take any pleasure in their lying. When they asked questions about themselves, they knew they wouldn't get the truth, but something forced them to keep on trying anyway. Jack's buddy evaded also. He said, I read a magazine article by a Dr. Vespa, the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity. He'd written the article just after the president created the bureau. He viewed, quote, with alarm and apprehension, unquote, the fact that six percent of those between the ages of twelve and twenty-five were schizophrenics who needed institutionalizing. And he was, quote, appalled and horrified, unquote, that five percent of the nation were homeless, unemployed, and that three point seven percent of those were between the ages of fourteen and thirty. He said that if this schizophrenia kept on progressing, half the world would be in rehabilitation camps. But if that occurred, the same half would go to pot, back to the Stone Age, and the schizos would die. He licked his lips as if he were tasting the figures and found them bitter. I was very interested by Vespa's reply to a mother who had written him. He went on. Her daughters ended up in a bohas camp for schizos, and her son had left his wonderful home and brilliant future to become a bum. She wanted to know why. Vespa took six long paragraphs to give six explanations, all equally valid and all advanced by equally distinguished sociologists. He himself favored the mass hysteria theory. But if you looked at his gobbledygook closely, you could reduce it to one phrase. We don't know. He did say this, though you won't like it, that the schizos and the trances were just two sides of the same coin. Both were infected with the same disease whatever it was, and the trances usually ended up as schizos anyway. It just took them longer. Gears shifted, the floor slanted. Jack was shoved hard against the rear boards by the weight of the other men. He didn't answer until the pressure had eased, and his ribs were free to work for more than mere survival. He said, You're way off, schizo. My hitting the road has nothing to do with those split heads. Nothing. You understand? There's nothing foggy or dreamy about me. I wouldn't be here with you guys if I hadn't been so interested in a wasp catching a caterpillar that I never saw the bohas sneaking up on me. While Jack described the little tragedy, the other allowed an understanding smile to bend his lips. He seemed engrossed, however, and when Jack had finished, he said, That was probably an amofilow wasp. Specs urnaria clug. Lovely. But vicious little she-demon. Injects the poison from her sting into the caterpillar's central nerve cord. That not only paralyzes, but preserves it. The victim is always stowed away with another one in an underground burrow. The wasp attaches one of her eggs to the body of the worm. It's a habit common to many of those little devils. Cellefran cementarium. Umenis coacta. Umenis fraterna. Bembec spinola. Pelopois. Jack's interest wandered. His informant was evidently one of those transies who spent long hours in the libraries. They were ready at the slightest chance to offer their encyclopedic, but often useless, knowledge. Jack himself had abandoned his childhood bookwormishness. For the last three years his days and evenings had worn themselves out on the streets, passed in a parade of faces flickered by in plate-glass windows of restaurants and department stores and business offices while he hoped. Did you say you spied on the camp? Jack interrupted the sonorous, almost chanting flow of Greek and Latin. Huh? Oh, yeah, for two weeks. I saw plenty of transies trucked in, but I never saw any taken out. Maybe they left in the rocket. Rocket? The youth was looking straight before him. His face was hard as bone, but his voice trembled. Yes, a big one. It landed and discharged about a dozen men. You nuts! There's been only one man carrying rocket invented and it lands by parachute. I saw it, I tell you, and I'm not so nutty I'm seeing things that aren't there. Not yet, anyway. Maybe the government's got rockets it's not telling anybody about. Then what connection could there be between rehabilitation camps and rockets? Jack shrugged and said, your rocket story is fantastic. If someone had told you four years ago that you'd be a bomb hauled off to a concentration camp you'd have said that was fantastic, too. Jack did not have time to reply. The truck stopped outside a high barbed wire fence. The gate swung open. The truck bounced down the bumpy dirt road. Jack saw some black uniformed bohas seated by heavy machine guns. They halted at another entrance. More barbed wire was passed. Huge Doberman pincers looked at the transies with cold, steady eyes. The dust of another section of roads swirled up before they squeaked to a standstill and the engine turned off. This time agents began to let down the back of the truck. They had to pry the pitiful schizo's fingers loose from the wood with a crowbar and carry him off still in his half-crouch. A sergeant boomed orders. Stiff in stumbling the transies jumped off the truck. They were swiftly lined up into squads and marched into the enclosure and from there into a huge black barracks. Within an hour each man was stripped at his head-shaven, was showered, given a gray uniform, and handed a tin plate and spoon and cup filled with beans and bread and hot coffee. Afterwards Jack wandered around free to look at the sandy soil underfoot and barbed wire and the black uniforms of the sentries and free to ask himself, Where? Where? Where? Where? Twelve years ago it had been, but where? Where was? Section 3 How easy it would have been to miss all this if only he had obeyed his father, but Mr. Crane was so ineffectual. Jackie, he had said, would you please go outside and play or stay in some other room? It's very difficult to discuss business while you're whooping and screaming around and I have a lot to discuss with Mr. Yes, Daddy. Jackie said before his father mentioned his visitor's name, that he was not Jack Crane in his game. He was Uncus. The big chairs and the divan were trees in his imaginative eyes. The huge easy chair in which Daddy's caller, Jack thought of him only as Mr., sat was a fallen log. He, Uncus, meant to hide behind it in ambush. Mr. did not bother him. He had smiled and said in a shrill voice that he thought Jack was a very nice boy. He wore a light gray green Palm Beach suit and married a big brown leather briefcase that looked too heavy for his soda straw thin legs and arms. He was queer looking because his waist was so narrow and his back so humped. And when he took off his tan Panama hat, a white fuzz exploded from his scalp. His face was pale as the moon in daylight. His broad smile showed teeth that Jack knew were false. But the queerest thing about him was his thick spectacles, so heavily tinted with rose that Jack could not see the eyes behind them. The afternoon light seemed to bounce off the lenses in such a manner that no matter what angle you looked at them you could not pierce them. And they curved to the side to hide his eyes completely. Mr. had explained that he was an albino and he needed the glasses to dim the glare of his eyes. Jack stopped being Uncus for a minute to listen. He had never seen an albino before. And indeed he did not know what one was. I don't mind the youngster, said Mr. Let him play here if he wants to. He's developing his imagination and he may be finding more stimuli in this front room than he could in all of outdoors. We should never cripple the fine gift of imagination in the young. Imagination, fancy, fantasy or whatever you call it is the essence and mainspring of those scientists, musicians, painters and poets who amount to something in later life. They are adults who have remained youths. Mr. addressed Jack. You're the last of the Mohicans and you're about to sneak up on the French captain in Tommy Hawkins, aren't you? Jack blinked. He nodded his head. The opaque rose lenses said in Mr.'s face seemed to open a door into his naked gray skull. The man said, I want you to listen to me, Jack. You'll forget my name, which isn't important, but you will always remember me and my visit, won't you? Jack stared at the impenetrable lenses and nodded dumbly. Mr. turned to Jack's father. Let his fancy grow. It is a necessary wish-fulfillment play. Like all human young who are good for anything at all, he is trying to find the lost tour to the Garden of Eden. The history of the great poets and men of action is the history of the attempt to return to the realm that Adam lost. The forgotten has parodies of the mind. The Avalon buried in our soul. Mr. Crane put his fingertips together. Yes. Personally, I think that some day man will realize just what he is searching for and will invent a machine that will enable the child to project, just as a film throws an image on a screen, the visions in his psyche. I see you're interested, he continued. You would be, naturally, since you're a professor of philosophy. Now, let's call the toy a specterscope, because through it the subject sees the specters that haunt his unconscious. Ha-ha! But how does it work? If you'll keep it to yourself, Mr. Crane, I'll tell you something. My native country's scientists have developed a rather simple device, though they haven't published anything about it in the scientific journals. Let me give you a brief explanation. Light strikes the retina of the eye. The rods and cones pass on impulses to the bipolar cells, which send them on to the optic nerve, which goes to the brain. Elementary and full of gaps, said Jack's father. And me, said Mr., a bare outline should be enough. You'll be able to fill in the details. Very well. The specterscope breaks up the light going into the eye in such a manner that the rods and cones receive only a certain wavelength. I can't tell you what it is, except that it's in the visual red. The scope also concentrates like a burning glass and magnifies the power of the light. Result? A hitherto undiscovered chemical in the visual purple of the rods is activated and stimulates the optic nerve in a way we had not guessed possible. An electrochemical stimulus then irritates the subconscious until it fully wakes up. Let me put it this way. The subconscious is not a matter of location, but of organization. There are billions of possible connections between the neurons of the cortex. Look at those potentialities as so many cards in the same pack. Shuffle the cards one way and you have the common work-a-day cogito ergo sum mind. Reshuffle them and bingo. You have the combination of neurons or cards of the unconscious. The spectroscope does the re-dealing. When the subject gazes through it, he sees for the first time the full impact and result of his underground mind's workings in other perspectives than dreams or symbolical behavior. The subjective garden of Eden is resurrected. It is my contention that this spectroscope will someday be available to all children. When that happens, Mr. Crane, you will understand that the world will profit from man's secret wishes. Earth will be a far better place, paradise, sunken deep in every man can be dredged out and set up again. I don't know, said Jack's father, stroking his chin thoughtfully with a finger. Children like my son are too introverted as it is. Give them this psychological toy, you suggest, and you would watch them grow not into the outside world, but into themselves. They would fester. Man has been expelled from the garden. His history is a long, painful climb toward something different. It is something that is probably better than the soft and flabby golden age. If man were to return, he would regress, become worse than static, become infantile, or even embryonic. He would be smothered in the folds of his own dreams. Perhaps, said the salesman, but I think you have a very unusual child here. He will go much farther than you think. Why? Because he is sensitive and has an imagination that only needs the proper guidance. Too many children become mere bourgeois ciphers with paunches and round O minds full of tripe. They'll stay on earth, that is, I mean they'll be stuck in the mud. You talk like no insurance salesman I've ever met. Like all those who really want to sell, I'm a born psychologist, Mr. Shrilled. Actually, I have an advantage. I have a PhD in psychology. I would prefer staying at home for laboratory work, but since I can help my starving children, I am not joking. So much more by coming to a foreign land and working at something that will put food in their mouths, I do it. I can't stand to see my little ones go hungry. Moreover, he said, with a wave of his long-fingered hand, this whole planet is really a lab that beats anything within four walls. You spoke of famine. Your accent, your name. You're a Greek, aren't you? In a way, said Mr., my name translated means gracious or kindly or well-meaning. His voice became brisker. The translation is apropos. I'm here to do you a service. Now, about these monthly premiums. Jack shook himself and stepped out of the mold of fascination that Mr.'s glasses seemed to have poured around him. Uncus, again, he crawled on all fours from chair to divan to stool to the fallen log which the adults thought was an easy chair. He stuck his head from behind it and sighted along the broomstick musket at his father. He'd shoot that white man dead and then take his scalp. He giggled at that because his father really didn't have any hairlock to take. At that moment, Mr. decided to take off his specs and polish them with his breast pocket handkerchief. While he answered one of Mr. Crane's questions, he let them dangle from his fingers. Accidentally, the lenses were level with Jack's gaze. His careless glance was enough to jerk his eyes back to them. One glance stunned him so that he could not at once understand that what he was seeing was not reality. There was his father across the room, but it wasn't a room. It was a space outdoors under the low branch of a tree whose trunk was so big it was as wide as the wall had been. Nor was the Persian rug there. It was replaced by a close-crop bright green grass. Here and there, foot-high flowers with yellow petals tipped in scarlets wade beneath an internal wind. Close to Mr. Crane's feet, a white horse, no larger than a fox terrier bit off the flaming end of a plant. All those things were wonderful enough. But was that naked giant who sprawled upon a moss-covered boulder his father? No. Yes. Though the features were no longer pinched and scored and pale, though they were glowing and tanned and smooth like a young athlete's, father's, even the thick curly hair that fell down over a wide forehead and the panther-muscled body could not hide his identity. Though it tore at his nerves and though he was afraid that once he looked away he would never again seize the vision, Jack ripped his gaze away from the rosy view. The descent to the gray and rasping reality was so painful that tears ran down his cheeks and he gasped as if struck in the pit of his stomach. How could beauty like that be around him without his knowing it? He felt that he had been blind all his life until this moment and would be forever eyeless again and unbearable forever if he did not look through the glass again. He stole another hurried glance and the pain in his heart and stomach went away. His insides became wrapped in a soft wind. He was lifted. He was floating a pale red velvety air caressed him and buoyed him. He saw his mother run from around him. That should have seemed peculiar because he had thought she was dead but there she was, no longer flat-walking and coughing and thin and wax-skinned but golden-brown and curvy and bouncy. She jumped at Daddy and gave him a long kiss. Daddy didn't seem to mind that she had no clothes on. Oh, it was wonderful. Jack was drifting on a yielding and wine-tinted air and warmed with a wind that seemed to swell him out like a happy balloon. Suddenly he was falling. Hurdling helplessly and sickeningly through a void while a cold and drab blast gouged his skin and spun him around and around. The world he had always known shoved hard against him. Again he felt the blow in the solar plexus and saw the gray tentacles of the living reality reach for his heart. Jack looked up at the stranger who was just about to put his spectacles on the bridge of his long nose. His eyelids were closed. That didn't bother him. He had other things to think about. He crouched beside the chair while his brain tried to move again, tried to engulf a thought and failed because it could not become fluid enough to find the idea that would move his tongue to shriek no, no, no. And when the salesman rose and placed his papers in his case and padded Jack on the head and bent his opaque rose spectacles at him and said goodbye and that he wouldn't be coming back because he was going out of town to stay. Jack was not able to move or say a thing. Nor for a long time after the door had closed could he break through the mass that gripped him like a hardened lava. By then no amount of screams and weeping would bring Mr. Back. All his father could do was call a doctor who took the boy's temperature and gave him some pills. Section 4 Jack stood inside the wire and bent his neck back to watch a huge black and silver oyster on the dusk for a landing field with its single white foot and its orange toes. Blindingly light sprang to attention over the camp. When Jack had blinked his eyes back to normal he could see over the flat half mile between the fence and the ship. It lay quiet and glittering and smoking in the flood beams. He could see the round door in its side swing open. Man began filing out. A truck rumbled across the plane and pulled up beside the metal bulk. Man stepped out of the cab and halted upon the running board from which he seemed to be greeting the newcomers or giving them instructions. Whatever he was saying took so long that Jack lost interest. Lately he had not been able to focus his mind for any length of time upon anything except that one event in the past. He wandered around and whipped glances at his comrades' faces noting listlessly that their uniforms and shaved heads had improved their appearance of their eyes. Whistles shrilled. Jack jumped. His heart beat faster. He felt as if the end of the quest were suddenly close. Somebody would be around the corner. In a minute that person would be facing him. And then he reflected and sighed with a wave of disappointment at the thought. Then there was nobody around the corner. It always happened that way. Besides, there weren't any corners in this camp. He had reached the wall at the end of the alley. And he stopped looking. Sergeants lined the prisoners up for a breast, preparatory to marching them into the barracks. Jack supposed it was time to turn in for the night. He submitted to their barked orders and hard hands without resentment. They seemed a long way off. For the ten-thousandth time he was thinking that this need not have happened. If he had been man enough to grapple with himself to wrestle as Jacob did with the angel and not let loose until he had felt the problem, he could be teaching philosophy in a quiet little college his father did. He had graduated from high school with only average marks and then, instead of going to college as his father had so much wanted him to, he had decided to work a year. With his earnings he would see the world. He had seen it. But when his money ran out he had not returned home. He had drifted taking jobs here and there, sleeping in flop houses, jungles, park benches and freight cars. When the newly created Bureau of Health and Humanity had frozen jobs in an effort to solve the transiency problem Jack had refused to work. He knew that he would not be able to quit a job without being arrested at once. Like hundreds of thousands of other youths he had begged and stolen and hidden from the local police and the bohas. Even through all those years of misery and wandering he had not once admitted to himself the true nature of this fog-cottoned grail. He knew it and he did not know it. It was patrolling the edge of his mind, circling a far-off periphery recognizable by a crude silhouette but nameless. Any time he wanted to he could have summoned it closer and said, You are it, and I know you, and I know what I am looking for. It is, is what, worthless, foolish, insane, a dream? Jack had never had the courage to take that action. When it seemed the thing was galloping closer charging down upon him he ran away. It must have been the horizon moving on, always moving, staying out of his grasp. All you guys, forward arch! Jack did not move. The truck from the rocket had come through a gate and stopped by the transies and about fifty men were getting off the back. The man behind Jack bumped into him. Jack paid him no attention. He did not move. He squinted at the group who had come from the rocket. They were very tall, hump-shouldered and dressed in light gray-green home-beach suits and tan Panama hats. Each held a brown leather briefcase at the end of a long, thin arm. Each wore on the bridge of his nose a pair of rose-colored glasses. A cry broke hoarsely from the transies. Some of those in front of Jack fell to their knees as if a sudden poison had paralyzed their legs. They called names and stretched out open hands. A boy by Jack's side sprawled face down on the sand while he uttered over and over again, Mr. Pelopius! Mr. Pelopius! The name meant nothing to Jack. He did feel repulsed at seeing the fellow turn on his side, bend his neck forward, bring his clenched fists up against his chest, and jackknife his legs against his arms. He had seen it many times before in the transient jungles, but he had never gotten over the sickness it had first caused him. He turned away and came almost nose-to-nose with one of the men from the rocket. He had put down his briefcase, so he had his leg and taken a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe the dust from his lenses. His lids were squeezed shut as if he found the lights unbearable. Jack stared and could not move while a name that the boy behind him had been crying out slowly worked its way through his consciousness. Suddenly, like the roar of a flash flood that is just rounding the bend of a dry gulch, the syllables struck him. He lunged forward and clutched at the spectacles at the same time he yelled over and over the words that had filled out the blank in his memory. Mr. Oomenes, Mr. Oomenes A sergeant cursed and slammed his fist into Jack's face. Jack fell down flat on his back, though his jaw felt as if it were torn loose from its hinge. He rolled over on his side, raised himself on his hands and knees, and began to get up to his feet. Stand still, bellowed the sergeant. Stay in formation or you'll get more Jack shook his head until it cleared. He crouched and held out his hands toward the man, but he did not move his feet. Over and over, half chanting, half crooning, he said, Mr. Oomenes, the glasses. Please, Mr. Oomenes, the glasses. The forty-nine Mr. Oomenes and otherwise looked incuriously with impenetrable rosy eyes. The fiftieth put the white handkerchief back in his pocket. His mouth opened. False teeth gleamed. With his hand he took off his hat and waved it at the crowd and bowed. His tilted head showed a white fuzz-like hair that shot up over his pale scalp. His gestures were both comic and terrifying. The hat and the inclination of his body said far more than words could. They said, Good-bye forever and bon voyage. Then Mr. Oomenes straightened up and opened his lids. At first the sockets looked as if they held no eyeballs as if they were empty of all but shadows. Jack saw them from a distance. Mr. Oomenes or his twin was shooting away faster and faster and becoming smaller and smaller. No. He himself was. He was broketing away within his own body. He was falling down a deep well. He, Jack Crane, was a hollow shaft down which he slipped and screamed away, away from the world outside. It was like seeing from the wrong end of a pair of binoculars that lengthened while the man with the long sought-for treasure in his hand flew in the opposite direction as if he had been connected to the horizon by a rubber band and somebody had released it and he was flying towards it, away from Jack. Even as this happened he knew vaguely that his muscles were locking into the posture of a beggar, hands out, pleading, face twisted into an agony of asking, lips repeating his croon chant. He saw what had occurred. The realization was like the sudden blinding and at the same time clarifying light that sometimes comes to epileptics just as they are going into a seizure. It was the thought that he had kept away on the horizon of his mind, the thought that now charged in on him with long leaps and bounds and then stopped and sat on its haunches and grinned at him while its long tongue lolled. Of course he should have known all these years what it was. He should have known that Mr. Umenes was the worst thing in the world for him. He had known it, but, like a drug addict, he had refused to admit it. He had searched for the man, yet he had known it would be fatal to find him. The rose-colored spectacles would swing gates that should never be fully open, and he should have guessed what and who Mr. Umenes was when that encyclopedic fellow in the truck had singsonged those names. How could he have been so stupid? Stupid? It was easy. He had wanted to be stupid. And how could the Mr. Umenes or otherwise have used such obvious giveaway names? It was a measure of their contempt for the humans around them and of their own grim wit. Look at all the double entendres the salesman had given his father and his father had never suspected. Even the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity had been terrifyingly blasé about it. Dr. Vespa. He had thrown his name like a gauntlet to humanity and humanity had stared idiotically at it and never guessed its meaning. Vespa was a good Italian name. Jack didn't know what it meant but he supposed that it had the same meaning as the Latin. He remembered it from his high school class. As for his not encountering the salesman until now he had been lucky. If he had run across him during his search he would have been denied the glasses as now. And the shock would have made him unable to cry out and betray the man. He would have done what he was so helplessly doing at this moment and he would have been carted off to pollution. How many other transies had seen that unforgettable face on the streets, the end of their search and gone at once into that state that made them legal prey of the bohas. That was almost his last rational thought. He could no longer feel his flesh. A thin red curtain was falling between him and his senses. Everywhere it billowed out beneath him and eased his fall. Everywhere it swirled and softened the outlines of things that were streaking by. A large tree remembered seeing in his living room a naked giant, his father leaning against it and eating an apple and a delicate little white creature cropping flowers. Yet all this while he lived in two worlds. One was the passage downwards towards the Garden of Eden. The other was that hemisphere in which he had dwelt so reluctantly, the one he now perceived through the thickening red veil of his sight and other senses. They were not yet gone. He could feel the hands of the black officers lifting him up and laying him upon some hard substance that rocked and dumped. Every lurch and thud was only dimly felt. Then he was placed upon something softer and carried into what he vaguely sensed was the interior of one of the barracks. Some time later he didn't know or care when, for he had lost all conception or even definition of time. He looked up the deep ever-lengthening shaft of himself into the eyes of another Mr. Umanes or Mr. Svex or Dr. Kispa or whatever he called himself. He was in white and wore a stethoscope around his neck. Beside him stood another of his own kind. This one wore lipstick and a nurse's cap. She carried a tray on which were several containers. One container held a large and sharp scalpel. The other held an egg. It was about twice the size of a hen's egg. Jack saw all this just before the veil took on another shade of red and blurred completely his vision of the outside. But the final thickening did not keep him from seeing that Dr. Umanes was staring down at him as if he were peering into a dusky burrow. And Jack could make out the eyes. They were large, much larger than they should have been at the speed with which Jack was receding. They were not the pale pink of an albinos. They were black from corner to corner and built of a dozen or so hexagons whose edges caught the light. They twinkled, like jewels, were the eyes of an enormous and evolved wasp. End of They Twinkled Like Jewels by Philip Jose Farmer Warm by Robert Sheckley This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Reading by Bologna Times Anders lay on his bed fully dressed, except for his shoes and black bow tie, contemplating with a certain uneasiness the evening before him. In twenty minutes he would pick up Judy at her apartment and that was the uneasy part of it. He had realized only seconds ago that he was in love with her. Well, he'd tell her. The evening would be memorable. He would propose there would be kisses and the seal of acceptance would, figuratively speaking, be stamped across his forehead. Not too pleasant an outlook, he decided. It really would be much more comfortable not to be in love. What had done it? A look? A touch? A thought? It didn't take much, he knew, and stretched his arms for a thorough yawn. Help me! a voice said. His muscles spasmed. Cutting off the yawn in mid-moment he sat upright on the bed then grinned and lay back again. You must help me! the voice insisted. Andrew sat up, reached for a polished shoe and fitted it on, giving his full attention to the tying of the laces. Can you hear me? the voice asked. You can, can't you? That did it. Yes, I can hear you. Andrew said, still in a high good humor. Don't tell me you're my guilty subconscious. Attacking me for a childhood trauma I never bothered to resolve. I suppose you want me to join a monastery. I don't know what you're talking about, the voice said. I'm no one subconscious. I'm me. Will you help me? Andrews believed in voices as much as anyone. He didn't believe in them at all until he heard them. Swiftly he catalogued the possibilities. Schizophrenia was the best answer, of course, and one in which his colleagues would concur. But Andrews had a lamentable confidence in his own sanity. In which case? Who are you? he asked. I don't know, the voice answered. Andrews realized that the voice was speaking in his own mind. Very suspicious. You don't know who you are, Andrews stated. Very well, where are you? I don't know that either. The voice paused and went on. Look, I know how ridiculous this must sound. Believe me, I'm in some sort of limbo. I don't know how I got here or who I am, but I want desperately to get out. Will you help me? Having the idea of a voice speaking within his head, Andrews knew that his next decision was vital. He had to accept or reject his own sanity. He accepted it. All right, Andrews said lacing the other shoe. I'll grant that you're a person in trouble, and that you're in some sort of telepathic contact with me. Is there anything else you can tell me? I'm afraid not, the voice said, with infinite sadness. You'll have to find out for yourself. Can you contact anyone else? No. Then how can you talk with me? I don't know. Andrews walked to his bureau mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, whistling softly under his breath. Having just discovered that he was in love, he wasn't going to let a little thing like a voice in his mind disturb him. I really don't see how I can be of any help, Andrews said, brushing a bit of lint from his jacket. You don't know where you are, and there don't seem to be any distinguishing landmarks. How am I to find you? He turned and looked around the room to see if he'd forgotten anything. I don't know when you're close, the voice said. You were warm just then. Just then? All he had done was look around the room. He did so again, turning his head slowly. Then it happened. The room, from one angle, looked different. It was suddenly a mixture of muddled colors, instead of the carefully blended pastel shades he had selected. The lines of wall, floor, and ceiling were strangely off proportion, zigzag, unrelated. Then everything went back to normal. You were very warm, the voice said. It's a question of saying things correctly. Andrews resisted the urge to scratch his head for fear of disarranging his carefully combed hair. What he had seen wasn't so strange. Everyone sees one or two things in his life that make him doubt his normality, doubt sanity, doubt his very existence. For a moment the orderly universe is disarranged, and the fabric of belief is ripped. But the moment passes. Andrews remembered once, as a boy, awakening in his room in the middle of the night, how strange everything had looked. Chairs, table, all out of proportion, in the dark. The ceiling pressing down, as in a dream. But that had also passed. Well, old man, he said, if I get warm again, let me know. I will, the voice in his head whispered, I'm sure you'll find me. I'm glad you're so sure. Andrews said gaily, switched off the lights, and left. When smiling, Judy greeted him at the door. Looking at her, Andrews sensed her knowledge of the moment. Had she felt the change in him, or predicted it, or was love making him grin like an idiot? Would you like a before-party drink? She asked. He nodded, and she led him across the room, to the improbable green and yellow couch. Sitting down, Andrews decided he would tell her when she came back no use in putting off the fatal moment, a lemming in love, he told himself. You're getting warm again, the voice said. He had almost forgotten his invisible friend, or feigned as the case could well be. What would Judy say if she knew he was hearing voices? Little things like that, he reminded himself, often break up the best of romances. Here, she said, handing him a drink. Still smiling, he noticed the number two smile to a prospective suitor, provocative and understanding. It had been preceded in their relationship by the number one nice girl smile, the don't misunderstand me smile to be worn on all occasions until the correct words have been mumbled. That's right, the voice said. It's in how you look at things. Look at what? Andrews glanced at Judy, annoyed at his thoughts. If he was going to play the lover, let him play it. Even through the astigmatic haze of love, he was able to appreciate her blue-gray eyes, her fine skin, if one overlooked a tiny blemish eye. Her lips slightly were shaped by lipstick. How did your classes go today? She asked. Well, of course, she'd asked that, Andrews thought. Love is marking time. All right, he said, teaching psychology to young apes. Oh, come now. Warmer, the voice said. What's the matter with me? Andrews wondered. The girl. They get shtalt, that is, Judy. A pattern of thoughts, expressions, movements, making up the girl I... I what? Love? Andrews shifted his long body uncertainly on the couch. He didn't quite understand how this train of thought had begun. It annoyed him. The analytical young instructor was better off in the classroom. Couldn't science wait until I was thinking about you today? Judy said. And Andrews knew that she had sensed the change in his mood. Do you see? The voice asked him. You are getting much better at it. I don't see anything, Andrews thought. But the voice was right. It was as though he had a clear line of inspection into Judy's mind. Her feelings were nakedly apparent to him, as meaningless as his room had been in that flash of undistorted thought. I really was thinking about you, she repeated. Now look, the voice said. Andrews, watching the expressions on Judy's face, felt the strangeness descend on him. He was back in the nightmare perception of that moment in his room. This time it was as though he were watching a machine in a laboratory. The object of this operation was the evocation and preservation of a particular mood. The machine goes through a searching process, invoking trains of ideas to achieve the desired end. Oh, were you? He asked. Amaze at his new perspective. Yes, I wondered what you were doing at noon. The reactive machine opposite him expanding its shapely chest slightly. Good, the voice said, commanding him for his perception. Dreaming of you, of course. He said to the flesh-clad skeleton behind the total gestalt Judy. The flesh machine rearranged its limbs, widened its mouth to denote pleasure. The mechanism searched through a complex of fears, hopes, worries, through half-remembrances of analogous situations, analogous solutions. And this was what he loved. Anders saw too clearly and hated himself for saying. Through his new nightmare perception, the absurdity of the entire room struck him. Were you really? The articulating skeleton asked him. You're coming closer? The voice whispered. To what? The personality? There wasn't such thing. There was no true cohesion, no depth, nothing except a web of surface reactions stretched across automatic visceral movements. He was coming closer to the truth. Sure. He said sourly. The machine stirred, searching for a response. Anders felt a quick tremor of fear at the sheer alien quality of his viewpoint. His sense of formalism had been slowed off. His agreed-upon reactions bypassed. What would be revealed next? He was seeing clearly, he realized, as perhaps no man had ever seen before. It was an oddly exhilarating thought. But could he still return to normality? Can I get you a drink? The reaction machine asked. At that moment Anders was as thoroughly out of love as a man could be. Viewing ones intended as a de-personalized sexless piece of machinery is not especially conducive to love, but it is quite stimulating intellectually. Anders didn't want normality. A curtain was being raised and he wanted to see behind it. What was it some Russian scientist Waspensky wasn't it? had said. Think in other categories. That was what he was doing and would continue to do. Goodbye, he said suddenly. The machine watched him, open-mouthed, as he walked out the door. Delayed circuit reactions kept it silent until it heard the elevator door close. You were very warm in there. The voice within his head whispered once he was on the street. But you still don't understand everything. Tell me then. Anders said, marveling a little at his equanimity. In an hour he had bridged the gap to a completely different viewpoint, yet it seemed perfectly natural. I can't, the voice said. You must find it to yourself. Well, let's see now. Anders began. He looked around at the masses of masonry, the convention of streets cutting through the architectural piles. Human life, he said, is a series of conventions. When you look at a girl, you're supposed to see a pattern, not the underlying formlessness. That's true, the voice agreed, but with a shade of doubt. Basically there is no form. Anders then produces gestalts and cuts form out of the plethora of nothingness. It's like looking at a set of lines and saying that they represent a figure. We look at a mass of material, extract it from the background and say it's a man. But in truth there is no such thing. There are only the humanizing features that we, myopically, attach to it. Matter is conjoined, a matter of viewpoint. You're not seeing it now, said the voice. Damn it, Anders said. He was certain that he was on the track of something big, perhaps something ultimate. Everyone's had the experience. At some time in his life, everyone looks at a familiar object and can't make any sense out of it. Momentarily, the gestalt fails, but the true moment of sight passes. The mind reverts to the superimposed pattern, normalcy continues. The voice was silent. Anders walked on through the gestalt sitting. There's something else, isn't there? Anders asked. Yes. What could that be? He asked himself. Through clearing eyes, Anders looked at the formality he had called his world. He wondered momentarily if he would come to this if the voice hadn't guided him. Yes, he decided after a few moments it was inevitable. But who was the voice and what had he left out? Let's see what a party looks like now, he said to the voice. The party was a masquerade. The guests were all wearing their faces. To Anders, their motives individually and collectively were painfully apparent. Then his vision began to clear further. He saw that the people weren't truly individual. They were discontinuous lumps of flesh sharing a common vocabulary yet not even truly discontinuous. The lumps of flesh were part of the decoration of the room and almost indistinguishable from it. They were one with the lights which lent their tiny vision. They were joined to the sounds they made. A few feeble tones out of the great possibility of sound. They blended into the walls. The kaleidoscopic view came so fast that Anders had trouble sorting his new impressions. He knew now that these people existed only as patterns on the same basis as the sounds they made and the things they thought they saw. Ingestalts sifted out of the vast unbearable real world. Where's Judy? A discontinuous lump of flesh asked him. This particular lump possessed enough nervous mannerisms to convince the other lumps of his reality. He wore a loud tie as further evidence. She's sick. Anders said. The flesh quivered into an instant sympathy. Lines of formal mirth shifted to formal woe. Hope it isn't anything serious. The flesh remarked. You're warmer, the voice said to Anders. Anders looked at the object in front of him. She hasn't long to live, he stated. The flesh quivered. Stomach and intestines contracted in sympathetic fear. Eyes distended, mouth quivered. The loud tie remained the same. My God! You don't mean it! Anders asked quietly. What do you mean? The indignant flesh attached to the tie demanded serene within its reality. It gaped at Anders. Its mouth twitched undeniable proof that it was real and sufficient. You're drunk, it's neared. Anders laughed and left the party. There is still something you don't know, the voice said. I could feel you near me. What are you? Anders asked again. I don't know, the voice admitted. I am a person. I am I. I am trapped. So are we all? Anders said. He walked on asphalt surrounded by heaps of concrete, silicates, aluminum, and iron alloys. Shapeless, meaningless heaps of asphalt city. And then there were the imaginary lines of demarcation dividing city from city, the artificial boundaries of water and land. I'll ridicule us. Give me a dime for some coffee, Mista? Something asked. A thing indistinguishable from any other thing. Old Bishop Berkeley would give a non-existent dime to your non-existent I'm in a really bad way, the voice whined. And Anders perceived that it was no more than a series of modulated vibrations. Yes, go on, the voice commanded. If he could spare me a quarter, the vibrations said, with a deep pretence at meaning. No, what was there behind the senseless patterns, flesh, mass, what was that, all made up of atoms. I'm really hungry, the intricately arranged atoms muttered. All atoms conjoined. There were no true separations between atom and atom. Flesh was stone, stone was light. Anders looked at the masses of atoms that were pretending to solidity, meaning, and reason. Can't you help me? A clump of atoms asked. But the clump was identical with all the other atoms. Once you ignored the superimposed patterns you could see the atoms were random scattered. I don't believe in you, Anders said. The pile of atoms was gone. Yes, the voice cried. Yes! I don't believe in any of it, Anders said. After all, what was an atom? Go on, the voice shouted. You're hot! Go on! What was an atom? An empty space surrounded by an empty space. Absurd. Then it's all false, Anders said, and he was alone under the stars. That's right. The voice within his head screamed, Nothing! But stars, Anders thought, how can one believe? The stars disappeared. There was nothingness, a void. There was nothing around him except shapeless grey. Where was the voice? Gone. Anders perceived the delusion behind the greyness, and then there was nothing at all. Complete nothingness and himself within it. Where was he? What did it mean? Anders' mind tried to add it up. Impossible. That couldn't be true. Even the score was tabulated, but Anders' mind couldn't accept the total. In desperation, the overloaded mind erased the figures, eradicated the knowledge, erased itself. Where am I? In nothingness, alone, trapped. Who am I? A voice. The voice of Anders searched the nothingness, shouted, where? No answer. But there was someone. All directions were the same. Yet moving along, one he could make contact with someone. The voice of Anders reached back to someone who could save him, perhaps. Save me, the voice said to Anders, lying fully dressed on his bed except for his shoes that were warm, by Robert Shuckley. You are a stubborn Dutchman and Jan van Arteveld was the stubbornest Dutchman on Venus. Jan Willem van Arteveld claimed dissent from William of Orange. He had no genealogy to prove it, but on Venus there was no one who could disprove it either. Jan Willem van Arteveld smoked a clay pipe which only a Dutchman can do properly, because the clay bit grates on less stubborn teeth. Jan needed all his Dutch stubbornness and a good deal of pure physical strength besides to maneuver the roach-flat ground car across the tumbled terrain of Dinhorn into the teeth of the howling gale that swept from the west. The huge wheels twisted and jolted against the rocks outside, and Jan bounced against his seatbelt, wrestled the steering wheel and puffed at his pipe. The mild aroma of heron by Tabak filled the tight ground car. There came a new swaying that was not the roughness of the terrain. Through the thick windshield Jan saw all the ground about him buckle and heave for a second or two before it settled to rugged quiescence again. This time he was really heaved about. Jan mentioned this to the ground car radio. That's the third time in half an hour, he commented. This place tosses like the isle-mir on a rough day. You just don't forget it isn't the Zowder Z retorted Hames Kirk from the other end. You sink there and you don't come up three times. Don't worry, said Jan, I'll be back on time with a broom at the mast head. This I shall want to see chuckled Hames Kirk, a logical reaction considering the scarcity of brooms on Venus. Two hours earlier the two men had sat across the small table playing chess with little indication that there would be anything else to occupy their time before blast off of the stubby gravity boat. It would be their last chess game for many months, for Jan was a member of the Dutch colony at Ostport in the northern hemisphere of Venus while Hames Kirk was a pilot of the G-Boat from the Dutch spaceship van der Decken, scheduled to begin an earthward orbit in a few hours. It was near the dusk of the 485 hour vanarian day and the twilight gale already had arisen, sweeping from the comparatively chill vanarian nightside into the superheated dayside. Ostport established near some outcroppings that contained uranium or was protected from both the dawn gale and the twilight gale, for it was in a valley in midst the small range of mountains. Jan had just figured out a combination by which he hoped to cheat Hames Kirk out of one of his nights when Decker, the burger maester of Ostport, entered the spaceport ready room. There's been an emergency radio message, said Decker. They've got a passenger for the earthship over at Rathol. Rathol? repeated Hames Kirk. What's that? I didn't know there was another colony within 2,000 kilometers. Well, it isn't a colony in the sense Ostport is, explained Decker. The people are the families of a bunch of laborers left behind when the colony folded several years ago. It's about 80 kilometers away, but they don't have the horn, but they don't have any vehicles that can navigate when the wind's up. Hames Kirk pushed his short-build cap back on his close-cropped head, leaned back in his chair, and folded his hands over his comfortable stomach. Then the passenger will have to wait for the next ship he pronounced. The van der Decken has to blast off in 30 hours to catch earth at the right orbital spot, and the G-boat has to blast off the van der Decken. The passenger can't wait, said Decker. He needs to be evacuated to earth immediately. He's suffering from the Venus shadow. Jan whistled softly. He had seen the effects of that disease. Decker was right. Jan, you're the best driver in Ostport, said Decker. You will have to take a ground car to Rathol and bring the fellow back. So now Jan gripped his clay pipe underneath and piloted the ground car into the teeth of the twilight gale. Dinhorn was a comparatively flat desert sweep that ran along the western side of the Ost mountains, just over the mountain from Ostport. It was a thin fault area of a planet whose crust was particularly subject to earthquakes, particularly at the beginning and end of each long day when the temperatures of the surface rocks changed. On the other side lay Rathol, a little settlement that eked out a precarious living from the Venerian vegetation. Jan had never seen it. He had little difficulty driving up and over the mountain. For the Dutch settlers had carved a rough road through the ravines. But even the two and a half meter wheels of the ground car had trouble amid the tumbled rocks of Dinhorn. The wind hit the car in full strength here and though the body of the ground car was suspended from the axles there was constant danger of its being flipped over by a gust if not handled just right. The three earthshocks that had shaken Dinhorn since he had been driving made his task no easier, but he was obviously lucky at that. Often he had to detour far from his course to skirt long deep cracks in the surface or steep breaks where the crust had been raised or dropped several meters from the crust's quakes. The ground car is exact slowly westward. The tattered violet and indigo clouds boiled low above it but the wind was as dry as the breadth of an oven. Despite the heavy cloud cover the afternoon was as bright as an earth day. The thermometer showed the outside temperature to have dropped to 40 degrees centigrade in the west wind and it was still going down. Jan reached the edge of a crack and further progress seemed impossible. A hundred meters wide of unknown depth it stretched out of sight in both directions for the first time he entertained serious doubts that Dinhorn could be crossed by land. After a moment's hesitation he swung the ground car northward and raced along the edge of the chasm as fast as the car would negotiate the terrain. He looked anxiously at his watch. Nearly three hours had passed since he left Ostport. He had seven hours to go and he was still at least 16 kilometers from Rathol. His pipe was out but he could not take his hands from the wheel to refill it. He had driven at least eight kilometers before he realized that the crack was narrowing. At least as far again and the two edges came together but not at the same level. A sheer cliff three meters high now barred his passage. He had a very steep ramp on and he had a steep ramp on. Apparently it was a result of an old quake. He found a spot where rocks had tumbled down making a steep rough ramp up the break. He drove up it and turned back southwestward. He made it just in time. He had driven less than 300 meters when a quake more severe than any of the others struck. Suddenly behind him the break reversed itself and moving westward he would now have to climb a cliff of equal heights returning eastward. The ground heaved and buckled like a tempestuous sea. Rocks rolled and leaped through the air several large winds striking the ground car with ominous force. The car staggered forward on its giant wheels like a drunken man. The quake was so violet that at one time the vehicle was hurled several meters sideways and almost overturned and the winds smashed down on it unrelentingly. The quake lasted for several minutes during which Jan was able to make no progress at all and struggled only to keep the ground car upright. Then in unison both the earthquake and wind died to absolute quiescence. Jan made use of this calm to step down on the accelerator and send the ground car speeding forward. The terrain was easier here nearing the western edge of Dinhorn and he covered several kilometers before the winds struck again cutting his speed down considerably. He judged he must be nearing Rathol. Not long thereafter he rounded an outcropping of rock and it lay before him. A wave of nostalgia swept over him. Back at Ostport the power was nuclear but this little settlement made use of the cheapest most obviously available power source. It was dotted with more than a dozen windmills. Windmills tears came to Jan's eyes for a moment he was carried back to the flat lands around Skrabenhake for a moment he was a toe headed rounded eyed boy again clumping in wooden shoes along the edge of Tulip fields but there were no canals here the flat lands stretching into the darkening west dotted with patches of cactus and leatherleaved venerian plants. Amid the windmills low domes protruded from the earth indicating that the dwellings of Rathol were appropriately partly underground. He drove into the place there were no streets as such but there were avenues between lines of heavy chains strung to short iron posts evidently as handholds against the wind. A lavage gale piled dust and sand in drifts against the domes then shifting slightly swept them clean again there was no one moving abroad but just inside the community Jan found half a dozen men in a group clinging to one of the chains and waving to him he pulled the ground car to a stop beside them stuck his pipe in a pocket of his plastic vinsuit donned his helmet and got out the domes took him away before one of them grabbed him and he was able to grasp the chain himself they gathered around him they were swarthy black-eyed men with curly hair one of them grasped his hand Bienvenido Señor said the man Jan recoiled and dropped the man's hand all the orange men blood he claimed protest and outraged Spaniards all these men were Spaniards Jan recovered himself at once he had been reading too much ancient history during his leisure hours the hot monotony of Venus was beginning to affect his brain it had been five hundred years since the Netherlands revolted against Spanish rule a lot of water over the dam since then a look at the men around him the sound of their chatter convinced him that he need not try German or hollandish here he fell back on international language do you speak english he asked the man brightened but shook his head no hablo ingles he said pero el médico lo habla venga amigo he gestured for Jan to follow him and started off pulling his way against the wind along the chain Jan followed and the other men fell behind in single file a hundred meters further on they turned descended some steps and entered one of the half-buried domes a gray-haired bearded man was in the well-lighted room apparently the living room of a home with a young woman el médico said the man who had greeted Jan gesturing el habla ingles he went out shutting the airlock door behind him you must be the man from Osport said the bearded man out his hand I am Dr. Sanchez we are very grateful you have come I thought for a while I wouldn't make it said Jan ruefully removing his venus helmet this is Mrs. Murillo said Sanchez the woman was a Spanish blonde full-lipped and beautiful with golden hair and dark liquid eyes she smiled at Jan en cantada de cancerlos señor she greeted him is this the patient doctor? asked Jan astonished she looked in the best of health no the patient is in the next room answered Sanchez well as much as I would like to stop for a pipe we better start it once said Jan it's a hard drive back and blast off cant be delayed the woman seemed to sense his meaning she turned and called Diego a boy appeared in the door a black-skinned sleepy-eyed boy of about eight he yawned then catching sight of the big Dutchman he opened his eyes wide and smiled the boy was healthy looking alert but the mark of the venus shadow was on his face there was a faint modeling a crisscross of dead white lines Mrs. Murillo spoke to him rapidly in Spanish and he nodded she zipped him into a venus suit and fitted a small helmet on his head good luck amigo said Sanchez shaking Jan's hand again thanks replied Jan he donned his own helmet I'll need it if the trip over was any indication Jan and Diego made their way back down the chain to the ground car there was a score of men there now and a few women they let the pair go through and waved farewell as Jan swung the ground car around and headed back eastward it was easier driving with the wind behind him and Jan hit a hundred kilometers an hour several times before striking the rougher ground of Dinhorn now if he could only find a way over the bluff raised by that last quake the ground of Dinhorn was still shivering Jan did not realize this until he had to break the ground car almost to a stop at one point because it was not shaking in severe periodic shocks as it had earlier it quivered constantly like the surface of quicksand the ground far ahead of him had a strange color to it Jan watching for the cliff he had to skirt and scale had picked up speed over some fairly even terrain but now he slowed again puzzled there was something wrong ahead he couldn't quite figure it out Diego beside him had sat quietly so far peering eagerly through the windshield not saying a word now suddenly he cried in high thin terror Cuidado! Cuidado! Un abismo! Jan saw it at the same time and hit the brake so hard the ground car would have stood on its nose had its wheels been smaller they skidded to a stop the chasm that had caused him such a long detour before had widened evidently in the big quake that had hit earlier now it was a canyon half a kilometer wide five meters from the edge he looked over the blank space at the far wall and could not see a bottom cursing choice dutch profanity Jan wheeled the ground car northward and drove along the edge of the abyss as fast as he could he wasted a half an hour before realizing it was getting no narrower there was no point in going back southward it might be a hundred kilometers long or a thousand but he could never reach the end of it and the thread of the tumbled rocks of din horn to Ostport before the g-boat blast off there was nothing to do but turn back to Rathol and see if some other way could not be found Jan sat in the half buried room and enjoyed the luxury of a pipe filled with some of Theodorus Nymeyer's mild tobacco before him Dr. Sanchez sat with crossed legs cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel Diego's mother talked to the boy in low liquid tones in the corner of a room Jan was at a loss to know how people whose technical knowledge was so skimpy as it was obviously in Rathol were able to build these semi-underground dunes to resist the earth shocks that came from din horn but this one showed no signs of stress a religious print in a small pencil sketch of Senor Mario probably done by the boy were awry on the inward curving walls but that was all Jan felt justifiably exasperated at these Spanish speaking people if some effort had been made to take the boy to Ostport from here instead of calling on us to send a car din horn could have been crossed before the cracked open he pointed out an effort was made replied Sanchez quietly perhaps you do not fully realize our position here we have no engines except the stationary generators that give us current for our air conditioning and our utilities they are powered by the windmills we do not have gasoline engines for vehicles and all our vehicles are operated by hand you push them demanded Jan incredulously no you've seen pictures of the pump cars that were once used on terrestrial railroads ours are powered like that but we cannot operate them when the venerian wind is blowing by the time I diagnosed the Venus shadow in Diego the wind was coming up and we had no way to get him to Ostport grunted Jan he shifted uncomfortably and looked at the pair in the corner the blonde head was bent over the boy protecting and over his mother's shoulder Diego's black eyes return Jan's glance if the disease has just started the boy could wait for the next earthship couldn't he? asked Jan I said I had just diagnosed it not that it just started senior corrected Sanchez as you know the trip to earth takes a hundred and forty five days and it can be only started when two planets are in the right positions in their orbits have you ever seen anyone die of it before? yes I have replied Jan in a low voice he had seen two people die of it and it had not been pleasant medical men thought it was a deficiency disease but they had not traced down the deficiency responsible treatment by vitamins, diet antibiotics, infrared ultraviolet rays all were useless the only thing that could arrest a child hung surface of Venus and return to a moist sunny climate on earth without that treatment once the typical model texture of the skin appeared the flesh rapidly deteriorated and fell away in chunks the victim remained unfevered and agonizingly conscious until the degeneration reached a vital spot if you have said Sanchez you must realize that Diego if his life is to be saved he must get to earth at once Jan puffed at his hair and by tobacco and cogitated the place was aptly named it was a ratty community the boy was a dark skin little Spaniard Mexican origin perhaps but he was a boy and a human being a thought occurred to him from what he had seen and heard a dark economy of rat hole could not support the tremendous expense of sending the boy across millions of miles to earth by spaceship who's paying his passage he asked the Dutch central venus company isn't exactly a charitable institution your senior decker said that that would be taken care of replied Sanchez Jan relid his pipe silently making a mental resolution that decker wouldn't take care of it alone salaries for venerian service were high and many of the men at Osport would contribute readily to such a cause who is Diego's father he asked he was Ramon Mario a very good mechanic answered Sanchez with a side long glance at Jan's face he has been dead for three years Jan grunted the copters at Osport can't buck this wind he said thoughtfully or I would have come in one of those in the first place instead of trying to cross din horn by land but if you have any sort of aircraft here it might make it downwind if it isn't wrecked on takeoff I'm afraid not said Sanchez too bad there's nothing we can do then the nearest settlement west of here is more than a thousand kilometers away and I happen to know they have no planes either just copters so that's no help wait said Sanchez lifting a scapegoat and tilting his head I believe there is something that we cannot use it this was once an American naval base and the people here were civilian employees who refused to move north with it there was a flying machine they used for short range work and one was left behind probably with a little help from the people of the settlement but what kind of machine copter or plane they called it a flying platform it carries two men I believe but senor oh I know them, I've operated them before I left earth man you don't expect me to try to fly one of those little things in this wind they're as tricky as they can be and the passengers are completely unprotected uh, senor I have asked you to do nothing no you haven't mother Gyan but you know I'll do it Sanchez looked into his face smiling faintly and a little sadly I was sure you would be willing he said he turned and spoke in Spanish to Mrs. Mariel the woman rose to her feet and came to them as Gyan arose she looked up at him tears in her eyes gracias she murmured un millon de gracias she lifted his hands at hers and kissed them Gyan disengaged himself gently embarrassed but it occurred to him looking down on this bowed head of a beautiful young widow that he might be making some flying trips back over here in his leisure time language barriers were not impassable and feminine companionship might cure his neurotic history born to stays for Spaniards for more than one reason Sanchez was tugging at his elbow senor I've been trying to tell you he said it is generous and good of you and I wanted Senora Mariel to know what a brave man you are but have you forgotten that we have no gasoline engines here there is no fuel for the flying platform the platform was in a warehouse which like the rest of the structures in Rathol was a half-buried dome the platform's ring-shaped base was less than a meter thick standing on four metal legs on top of it in the center was a railed circle that could hold two men but would crowd them two small gasoline engines sat on each side of this railed circle and between them on the third side was the fuel tank the passengers entered it on the fourth side the machine was dusty and spotted with rust young surrounded by Sanchez Diego and a dozen men inspected it thoughtfully the letters USN N star SES were painted in white on the platform itself and each engine bore the label Hiller Yon peered over the edge of the platform at the twin-ducted fans in their plastic shrouds they appeared in good shape each was powered by one of the engines transmitted to it by heavy rubber belts Yon's side it was an unhappy situation as far as he could determine without making tests the engines were in perfect condition two perfectly good engines and no fuel for them you're sure there's no gasoline anywhere in Rathol? he asked Sanchez Sanchez smiled ruefully as he had once before at Yon's appellation for the community the inhabitants termed Fort was simply La Ciudad Nuestra our town he turned to one of the other men and talked rapidly for a few moments in Spanish none senor he said turning back to Yon the Americans of course kept much of it when they were here but the few things we take to Ostport to trade could not buy precious gasoline we have electricity in plenty if you can power the platform with it Yon thought that over trying to find a way no it wouldn't work he said batteries on the platform and electric motors to turn the propellers but batteries big enough to power it all the way to Ostport would be so heavy the machine couldn't lift them off the ground if there's some way to carry a power line all the way to Ostport or to broadcast the power to it but it's a light load machine and must have an engine that gives it all the necessary power from very little weight wild schemes ran through his head if they were on water instead of land he could rig up a sail he could still rig up a sail for a ground car except for the chasm out on Din Horn the ground car Yon straightened and snapped his fingers doctor he explained send a couple of bin to drain the rest of the fuel from my ground car and let's get this platform above ground and tie it down until we can get it started Sanchez gave rapid orders in Spanish two of the men left at a run carrying five gallon cans with them three others picked up the platform and carried it up a ramp and outside as soon as they reached ground level the wind hit them they dropped the platform to the ground where it shuttered and swayed momentarily and two of the men fell successfully on their stomachs the wind caught the third and somersaulted him half a dozen times before he skidded to a stop and outstretched arms and legs he turned over cautiously and crawled back to them Yon his head just above ground level surveyed the terrain there was flat ground to the east clear and a fairly broad alley for at least half a kilometer before any of the domes protruded up into it this is a good spot for takeoff as we'll find he said to Sanchez the men put three heavy ropes on the platform's windward rail and secured it by them to the heavy chain that ran by the dome the platform quivered and shuttered in the heavy wind but its base was too low for it to overturn shortly the two men returned with the fuel from the ground car struggling along the chain Yon got above ground in a crouch clinging to the rail of the platform and helped them fill the fuel tank with it he primed the carburetors and spun the engines nothing happened he turned the engines over again one of them coughed and a cloud of blue smoke burst from its exhaust but they did not catch what is the matter, senor? asked Sanchez from the dome entrance I don't know, replied Yon maybe it's that the engines haven't been used in so long I'm afraid I'm not as good enough mechanic to tell some of these men were good mechanics when the navy was here said Sanchez, wait he turned and spoke to someone in the dome one of the men of Rat Hall came to Yon's side and tried the engines they refused to catch the man made carburetor adjustments and tried again no success he sniffed, took the cap from the fuel tank and stuck a finger inside he withdrew it, wet and oily and examined it he turned and spoke to Sanchez he says that your ground car must have a diesel engine Sanchez interpreted to Yon is that correct? why yes, that's true he says the fuel will not work then, senor he said it is low grade fuel and the platform must have high octane gasoline Yon threw up his hands and went back into the dome I should have known that, he said unhappily I would have known if I had thought of it what is to be done then, asked Sanchez there's nothing that can be done answered Yon they may as well put the fuel back in my ground car Sanchez called orders to the men at the platform while they worked, Yon stared out at the furiously spinning windmills that dotted Rat Hall there's nothing that can be done he repeated we can't make the trip overland because of a chasm out there in Din Horn and we can't fly the platform because we have no power for it windmills again Yon could imagine that flat land around them as his native Holland with his outer seas sparkling to the west where here the desert stretched under darkening clouds Yon looked at his watch a little more than two hours before the G-boats blast off time and it couldn't wait for them it was nearly eight hours since he had left Ostport and the afternoon was getting noticeably darker Yon was sorry he'd done his best but Venus had beaten him he looked around for Diego the boy was not in the dome he was outside crouched in the lee of the dome playing with some sticks Diego must know of his ailment and why he had to go to Ostport if Yon was any judge of character Sanchez would have told him that whether Diego knew it was life or death matter for him to be aboard the Bander Deck and when it blasted off for earth he did not know but the boy was around eight years old and he was bright and he must realize the seriousness involved in the decision to send him all the way to earth Yon felt ashamed of his exuberant foolishness which had led him to spout ancient history and claim dissent from William of Orange it had been a hobby an artificial topic for conversation that amused him and his companions in the history of Venus that had begun to affect his personality perhaps a bit more than he realized he did not dislike Spaniards he had no reason to dislike them they were all humans the Spanish, the Dutch the Germans, the Americans and even the Russians fighting a hostile planet together he could not understand a word Diego said when the boy spoke to him but he liked Diego and he wished desperately he could do something outside the windmills of rat holes spun merrily there was power the power that lighted an air-conditioned rat hole power in the air all around them if only he could use it but to turn the platform on its side and let the wind spin the propellers was pointless he turned to Sanchez asked the men if there are any spare parts for the platform he said some of those legs it stands on the mission-belt spare propellers Sanchez asked yes he said many spare parts but no fuel Jan smiled a tight smile tell them to take the engines out he said since we have no fuel we may as well have no engines Peter Hames Kirk stood by the ramp to the stubby G boat and checked his watch it was X minus 15 15 minutes before blast-off time Hames Kirk wore a space suit everything was ready except climbing a board closing the airlock and pressing the firing pin what on Venus could have happened to Van Artevelte the last radio message they had received more than an hour ago had said he and his patient took off successfully in an aircraft what sort of aircraft could he be flying that would require an hour to cover 80 kilometers with the wind Hames Kirk could only draw the conclusion that the aircraft had been wrecked somewhere in Denhorn as a matter of fact he knew that preparations were being made now to send a couple of ground cars out to search for it this of course would be too late to help the patient Van Artevelte was bringing but Hames Kirk had no personal interest in the patient his worry was all for his friend the two of them had enjoyed chess the last three trips to Venus and Hames Kirk hoped very sincerely that the big blonde man wasn't hurt he glanced at his watch again X minus 12 in two minutes it would be time for him to walk up the ramp into the G-Boat in seven minutes the backward count before blast off would start over the area loudspeakers Hames Kirk shook his head sadly and Van Artevelte had promised to come back triumphant with a broom at his mast head it was a high thin wine born on the wind carrying even through the walls of his space helmet that attracted Hames Kirk's attention and caused him to pause with his foot on the ramp around him the rocket mechanics were staring up at the sky trying to pinpoint the noise Hames Kirk looked westward at first he could see nothing and then there was a moving dot above the mountain against the indigo umbrella of clouds it grew it swooped it approached and became a strange little flying disc with two people standing on it and something sticking up from its deck in front of them a broom? no the platform hovered and began to settle nearby and there was Van Artevelte leaning over its rail and fiddling frantically with whatever that was stuck up on it a weird angled contraption of pipes topped by a whirring blade a boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him as the platform descended to a few meters above the ground the Dutchman slashed at the contraption the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly and the platform slid to the ground with a rush it hit with a clatter and its two passengers tumbled prone to the ground yawn boomed Hames Kirk forcing his voice through the helmet diaphragm and rushing to his friend I was afraid you were lost yawn struggled to his feet and leaned down to help the boy up here's your patient Peter he said hope you have a space suit his size I can find one and we have to hurry for blastoff but first what happened even that damn thing ought to get here from rattle faster than that had no fuel replied yawn briefly my engines were all right but I had no power to run them to pull the engines and rig up a power source Hames Kirk stared at the platform on its railing was rigged a tripod of battered middle pipes a top which of big four blade propellers spun slowly in what wind was left after it had come over the western mountain over the edges of the platform running from the two propellers at its base hung a series of tattered transmission belts power source repeated Hames Kirk that certainly replied yawn with dignity the power source any good Dutchman turns to in an emergency a windmill end of wind by Charles L. Fontenay