 ACCIDENTAL DEATH by Peter Bailey The most dangerous of weapons is the one you don't know is loaded. The wind howled out of the north-west, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice, it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long, furrow-plowed ruler straight through streamlined hummocks of snow. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow-slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artefact thrown down in the dead wilderness. Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing walked, nothing talked. But the thing in the hollow was stirring in stiff jerks like a snake with its back broken or a clockwork toy running down. When the movements stopped there was a click and a strange sound began, thin, scratchy, inaudible, more than a yard away. Weary, but still cocky, there leaked from the shape in the hollow, the sound of a human voice. I've tried my hands and arms and they seem to work. It began. I wriggled my toes with entire success. It's well on the cards that I'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don't see how it could happen. Right now I don't feel like struggling up and finding out. I'm fine where I am, I'll just lie here for a while and relax and get some of this story on tape. The suits got a built-in recorder, I might as well use it. That way, even if I'm not as well as I feel, I'll leave a message, you'll probably know we're back and wonder what went wrong. I suppose I'm in a state of shock, that's why I can't seem to get up, who wouldn't be shocked after a look like that. I've always been lucky, I guess, look got me a place in the whale, sure I'm a good astronomer but so are lots of other guys. If I were ten years older, it would have been an honour being picked for the first long jump in the first starship ever, at my age it was luck. You'll want to know if the ship worked, well she did, went like a bomb. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you'll remember, and James pushed the button marked jump, took his finger off the button and there we were, Alpha Centauri. Two months later your time, one second later by us, we covered a whole survey assignment like that, smooth as a pint of old and mild, which right now I could certainly use, better yet would be a pint of hot black coffee with sugar in. Failing that, I could even go for a long drink of cold water. There was never anything wrong with the whale, till right at the end and even then I doubt it was the ship itself that fouled things up. That was some survey assignment, we astronomers really lived, wait till you see, of course you won't. I could weep when I think of those miles of lovely colour film all gone up in smoke. I'm shocked all right, I never said who I was. Matt Hennessey from Far Side Observatory, back of the moon, just back from a pivoting flight come astronomical survey in the starship whale. Whoever you are who finds this tape, you're made, take it to any radio station or newspaper office. You'll find you can name your price and don't take any wooden nickels. Where had I got to? I told you how we happened to find Chang hadn't I? That's what the natives called it. Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1g gravity and 20% oxygen atmosphere at 15 psi. The odds against finding Chang on a six sun survey of the first star jump ever must be up in the googles. We certainly were lucky. The Chang natives aren't very technical, haven't got space travel for instance. The good astronomers though, we were able to show them our sun in their telescopes. In their way, there are highly civilised people. Look more like cats than people, but they're people all right. If you doubt it, chew these facts over. One, they learnt our language in four weeks. When I say they, I mean a 10 man team of them. Two, they brew a near beer that's a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the whale. Three, they've got a great sense of humour. Run rather to silly practical jokes, but still can't say I care for that hot foot and belly laugh stuff myself. But tastes differ. Four, the 10 man language team also learned chess and table tennis. But while I go on, people who talk English drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers in trousers. It was funny the way they won all the time at table tennis. There certainly weren't so hot at it. Maybe that 10% extra gravity put us off our strokes. As for chess, Svendloff was our champion. He won sometimes. The rest of us seemed to lose whichever Chingzy we played. There again, it wasn't so much that they were good. How could they be in the time? It was more that we all seemed to make silly mistakes when we played them. And that's fatal in chess. Of course, it's a screwy situation playing chess with something that grows its own fur coat, has yellow eyes an inch and a half long and long white whiskers. Could you have kept your mind on the game? And I don't think I fell victim to their feline charm. The children were pets, but you didn't feel like patting the adults on their big grinning heads. Personally, I didn't like the one I knew best. He was called, well, we called him Charlie. And he was the ethnologist, ambassador, contact man, or whatever you like to call him, who came back with us. Why I disliked him was because he was always trying to get the edge on you. All the time, he had to be the top. Great sense of humor, of course. I nearly broke my neck on that butter slide he fixed up in the metal alleyway down to the Wales engine room. Charlie laughed fit to bust. Everyone laughed. I even laughed myself, though doing it hurt me more than the tumble had. Yes, life and soul are the party, old Charlie. My last sight of the minnow was a cabin full of dead and dying men, the sweetest stink of burnt flesh and the choking reek of scorching insulation, the boat jolting and shuddering and beginning to break up. And in the middle of the flames, still on her, was Charlie. He was laughing. My god, it's dark out here. I wouldn't know how high I am. Must be all of 50 miles and doing 800 miles an hour at least. I'll be doing more than that when I land. What's final velocity for a 50 mile fall? Same as a 50,000 mile fall, I suppose. Same as escape, 24,000 miles an hour. I'll make a mess. That's better. Why didn't I close my eyes before? Oh, star streaks make me dizzy. I'll make a nice shooting star when I hit air. Come to think of it, I must be deep in here now. Let's take a look. It's getting lighter. Look at those peaks down there, like great knives. I don't seem to be falling as fast as I expected, though. Almost seem to be floating. Let's switch on the radio and tell the world hello. Hello, Earth. Hello, again, and goodbye. Sorry about that. I passed out. I don't know what I said, if anything. And the suit recorder has no playback or eraser. What must have happened is that the suit ran out of oxygen and I lost consciousness due to anoxia. I dreamed I switched on the radio, but I actually switched on the emergency tank, thank the Lord, and that brought me round. Come to think of it, why not crack the suit and breathe fresh air instead of bottled? No, I'd have to get up to do that. I think I'll just lie here for a little bit longer and get properly rested up before I try anything big, like standing up. I was telling about the return journey, wasn't I? The long jump back home, which should have dumped us between the orbits of Earth and Mars, instead of which, when James took his finger off the button, the mass detectors showed nothing except the noise level of the universe. We were out in that no place for a day. We astronomers had to establish our exact position relative to the solar system. The crew had to find out exactly what went wrong. The physicists had to make mystic passes in front of meters and mutter about residual folds in stress-free space. Our task was easy because we were about half a light year from the sun. The crew's job was also easy. They found what went wrong in less than half an hour. It still seems incredible to program the ship for a star jump. You merely told it where you were and where you wanted to go. In practical terms, that entailed at first a series of exact measurements which had to be translated into the somewhat abstruse coordinate system we used based on the topological order of mass points in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on the computer and hit the button. Nothing was wrong with the computer. Nothing was wrong with the engines. We'd hit the right button and we'd gone to the place we'd aimed for. All we'd done was aim for the wrong place. It hurts me to tell you this and I'm just attached to personnel with no space flight tradition. In practical terms, one highly trained crew member had punched a wrong pattern of holes on the tape. Another, equally skilled, had failed to notice this when reading back. A childish error, highly improbable, twice repeated, thus squaring the improbability. Incredible. But that's what happened. Anyway, we took good care with the next lot of measurements. That's why we're out there so long. They were cross-checked about five times. I got sick, so I climbed into a spacesuit and went outside and took some photographs of the sun which I hoped would help to determine hydrogen density in the outer regions. When I got back, everything was ready. We disposed ourselves about the control room and relaxed for all we were worth. We're all praying that this time, nothing would go wrong and all looking forward to seeing Earth again after four months' subjective time away, except for Charlie, who was still chuckling and shaking his head and Captain James, who was glaring at Charlie and obviously wishing human dignity permitted him to tear Charlie limb from limb. Then James pressed the button. Everything twang'd like a bowstring. I felt myself turned inside out, passed through a small sieve, and poured back into shape. The entire bow wall screen was full of Earth. Something was wrong all right, and this time it was much, much worse. We'd come out of the jump about 200 miles above the Pacific, pointed straight down, travelling at a relative speed of about 2,000 miles an hour. It was a fantastic situation. Here was the whale, the most powerful ship ever built, which could cover 50 light-years in a subjective time of one second, and it was helpless. For, as of course you know, the Star Drive couldn't be used again for at least two hours. The whale also had ion rockets, of course, the standard deuterium fusion thing with direct conversion. As again, you know, this is good for interplanetary flight because you can run it continuously and it has extremely high exhaust velocity. But in our situation it was no good because it has rather a low thrust. It would have taken more time than we had to deflect us enough to avoid a smash. We had five minutes to abandon ship. James got us all into the Mino at a dead run. There was no time to take anything at all except the clothes we stood in. The Mino was meant for short, heavy hops to planets or asteroids. In addition to ion drive, it had emergency atomic rockets using steam for reaction mass. We thank God for that when Kazamiyan canceled our downwards velocity with them in a few seconds. We curved away up over China and from about 50 miles high we saw the whale hit the Pacific. 600 tons of mass at well over 2000 miles an hour make an almighty splash. By now you'll have divers down but I doubt they'll salvage much you can use. I wonder why James went down with the ship as the saying is. Not that it made any difference. It must have broken his heart to know that his lovely ship was getting the chopper. Or did he suspect another human error? We didn't have time to think about that or even to get the radio working. The steam rockets blew up. Poor Kazamiyan was burnt to a crisp. Only thing that saved me was the space suit I was still wearing. I snapped the faceplate down because the cabin was filling with fumes. I saw Charlie coming out of the toilet. That's how he escaped and I saw him beginning to laugh. Then the port side collapsed and I fell out. I saw the launch spinning away glowing red against a purplish black sky. I tumbled head over heels towards the huge curved shield of earth 50 miles below. I shut my eyes and that's about all I remember. I don't see how any of us could have survived. I think we're all dead. I'll have to get up and crack this suit and let some air in. But I can't. I fell 50 miles without a parachute. I'm dead, so I can't stand up. There was silence for a while except for the vicious howl of the wind. Then snow began to shift on the ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and came shakily to his feet. He moved slowly around for some time. After about two hours, he returned to the hollow, squatted down and switched on the recorder. The voice began again, considerably wearier. Hello there. I'm in the bleakest wilderness I've ever seen. This place makes the moon look cozy. There's a precipice around me every way but one and that's up. So it's up, I'll have to go till I find a way to go down. I've been chewing snow to quench my thirst but I could eat a horse. I picked up a short wave broadcast on my suit but I couldn't understand a word. Not English, not French, and their eyes stick. Listen to it for 15 minutes just to hear a human voice again. I haven't much hope of reaching anyone with my five milliwatt suit transmitter but I'll keep trying. Just before I start the climb, there are two things I want to get on tape. The first is how I got here. I've remembered something from my military training when I did some parachute jumps. Terminal velocity for a human body falling through air is about 120 miles per hour. Falling 50 miles is no worse than falling 500 feet. You'd be lucky to live through a 500 foot fall. True, but I've been lucky. The suit is bulky but light and probably slowed my fall. I hit a 60 mile an hour updraft this side of the mountain skidded downhill for about half a mile of snow and fetched up in a drift. The suit is part warm but still operational. I'm fine. The second thing I want to say is about the jeansie and here it is. Watch out for them. Those jokers are dangerous. I'm not telling how because I've got a scientific reputation to watch. You'll have to figure it out for yourselves and here are the clues. One, the jeansie talk and laugh but after all they aren't human. On an alien world a hundred light years away, why shouldn't alien talents develop? A talent that's so uncertain and rudimentary here that most people don't believe it might be highly developed out there. Two, the whale expedition did fine until it found Chang. Then it hit a seam of bad luck, real stinking bad luck that went on and on till it looks fishy. We lost the ship, we lost the launch all but one of us lost our lives. We couldn't even win a game of ping-pong. So what is luck? Good or bad? Scientifically speaking, future chance events are by definition chance. They can turn out favourable or not. When a preponderance of chance events has occurred unfavourably, you've got bad luck. It's a fancy name for a lot of chance results that didn't go your way but the gambler defines it differently. For him, luck refers to the future and you've got bad luck when future chance events won't go your way. Scientific investigations into this have been inconclusive but everyone knows that some people are lucky and others aren't. All we've got are hints and glimmers, the fumbling touch of a rudimentary talent. There's the evil eye legend and the Jonah bad luck bringers. Superstition? Maybe. But ask the insurance companies about accident prones. What's in a name? Call a man unlucky and you're superstitious. Call him accident prone and that sound business sense have said enough. All the same. Search the space flight records, talk to the actuaries when a ship's working perfectly and is operated by a hand-picked crew of highly trained men in perfect condition. How often is it wrecked by a series of silly errors happening to one after another in defiance of probability? I'll sign off with two thoughts, one depressing and one cheering. A single Ching-Z wrecked our ship and our launch. What could a whole planet full of them do? On the other hand, a talent that manipulates chance events is bound to be chancey no matter how highly developed it can't be sure fire. The proof is that I've survived to tell the tale. At 20 below zero and 50 miles an hour the wind ravaged the mountain. Peering through his polarised visor at the white waste and the snow-filled air howling over it, sliding and stumbling with every step on a slope that got gradually steeper and seemed to go on forever, Matt Hennessey began to inch his way up, the north face of Mount Everest. End of accidental death by Peter Bailey. Recording by Giles Baker. Advanced Chemistry. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Advanced Chemistry by Jack G. Heuchels. Professor Karbonik was diligently at work in his spacious laboratory, analyzing, mixing and experimenting. He had been employed for more than 15 years in the same pursuit of happiness in the same house, same laboratory, and attended by the same servant woman who, in her long period of service, had attained the plumpness and respectability of 290 pounds. Magnesia, called the Professor. The servant's name was Maggie Nessia. Professor Karbonik had contracted the title to save time. For in 15 years he had not mounted the heights of greatness. He must work harder and faster as life is short and eliminate such shameful waste of time as putting the gi on Maggie. Magnesia, the Professor repeated. The old woman rolled slowly into the room. Get rid of these and bring the ones the boy brought today. He handed her a tray containing three dead rats whose brains had been subjected to analysis. Yes, Mars, answered Magnesia in a tone like citrate. The Professor busied himself with a new preparation of zinc oxide and copper sulfate and salamoniac, his latest concoction, which was about to be used and, like its predecessors, to be abandoned. Magnesia appeared bringing another rat, dead. The Professor made no experiments on live animals. He had hired a boy in the neighborhood to bring him fresh dead rats at 25 cents per head. Taking the tray, he prepared a hyperdermic filled with the new preparation. Carefully, he made an incision above the right eye of the carcass through the bone. He lifted the hyperdermic half hopelessly, half expectantly. The old woman watched him as she had done many times before with always the same pitiful expression. Pitiful, either for the man himself or for the dead rat, Magnesia seldom expressed her views. Inserting the hyperdermic needle and injecting the contents of the syringe, Professor Carbonic stepped back. Great saints! His voice could have been heard a mile. Slowly, the rat's tail began to point skyward and as slowly Magnesia began to turn white. Professor Carbonic stood as paralyzed. The rat trembled and moved his feet. The man of sixty years made one jump with the alacrity of a boy of sixteen. He grabbed the enlivened animal and held it high above his head as he jumped about the room, spying the servant who until now had seemed unable to move. He threw both his arms around her, bringing the rat close to her face. Around the laboratory they danced to the tune of the woman's shrieks. The professor held on and the woman yelled, up and down spasmodically on the laboratory floor came the two hundred and ninety pounds with the professor thrown in. Bottles tumbled from the shelves. Furniture was upset. Precious liquids flowed unrestrained and unnoticed. Finally the professor dropped with exhaustion and the rat and Magnesia made a dash for freedom. Early in the morning, pedestrians on Arlington Avenue were attracted by a sign in brilliant letters. Professor Carbonic early in the morning betook himself to the nearest hardware store and purchased the tools necessary for his new profession. He was an MD and his recently acquired knowledge put him in a position to startle the world. Having procured what he needed, he returned home. Things were developing fast. Magnesia met him at the door and told him that Sally Soda, who was known to the neighborhood as Sal or Sal Soda generally, had fallen down two flights of stairs and to use her own words was pretty bad. Sal Soda's mother, inciting for a doctor, had read the elaborate sign of the new enemy of death and begged that he come to see Sal as soon as he returned. Bidding Magnesia to accompany him, he went to the laboratory and secured his precious preparation. Professor Carbonic and the unwilling Magnesia started out to put new life into a little Sal Soda who lived in the same block. Reaching the house, they met the family physician, then attendant on little Sal. Dr. X. Ray had also read the sign of the professor and his greeting was very chilly. How is the child? asked the professor, fatally hurt and can live but an hour. Then he added, I have done all that can be done. All that you can do, corrected the professor with a withering glance. Dr. X. Ray left the room and the house. His reputation was such as to admit of no intrusion. I am sorry, she is not dead. It would be easier to work and also a more reasonable charge. Giving Magnesia his instruments, he administered a local anesthetic. This done, he selected a brace and a bit that he procured that morning. With these instruments, he board a small hole into the child's head. Inserting his hypodermic needle, he injected the immortal fluid, then cutting off the end of a dowel which he had also procured that morning. He hammered it into the hole until it wedged itself tight. Professor Carbonic seated himself comfortably and awaited the action of his injection. While the plump Magnesia paced or rather waddled the floor with a bag of Carpenter's tools under her arm, the fluid worked. The child came to and sat up. Sal Soda had regained her pep. It will be $1.25, Mrs. Soda, apologized the professor. I have to make that charge as it is so inconvenient to work on them when they are still alive. Having collected his fee, the professor and Magnesia departed amid the ever-rising blessings of the Soda family. At 3.30 p.m., Magnesia sought her employer who was asleep in the sitting room. Mars Paul, a gentleman to see you. The professor awoke and had her send the man in. The man entered hurriedly, had in hand. Are you Professor Carbonic? I am. What can I do for you? Can you? The man hesitated. My friend has just been killed in an accident. You couldn't. He hesitated again. I know that it is unbelievable, answered the professor. But I can. Professor Carbonic for some years had suffered from the effects of a weak heart. His fears on the score had recently been entirely relieved. He now had the prescription. Death no more. The startling discovery and the happenings of the last twenty-four hours had begun to take effect on him, and he did not wish to make another call until he was feeling better. I'll go, said the professor after a period of musing. My discoveries are for the benefit of the human race. I must not consider myself. He satisfied himself that he had all his tools. He had just sufficient of the preparation for one injection. This, he thought, would be enough. However, he placed in his case two vials of different solutions which were the basis of his discovery. These fluids had but to be mixed, and after the chemical reaction had taken place, the preparation was ready for use. He searched the house for Magnesia, but the old servant had made it certain that she did not intend to act as nurse to dead men on their journey back to life. Reluctantly, he decided to go without her. How is it possible? exclaimed the stranger as they climbed into the waiting machine. I have worked for fifteen years before I found the solution. I have studied the professor slowly. I cannot understand on what you have based a theory for experimenting on something that has been universally accepted as impossible of solution. With electricity, all is possible as I have proved. Seeing the skeptical look his companion assumed, he continued, electricity is the basis of every motive power we have. The base of every formation that we know. The professor was warming to the subject. Go on, said the stranger. I am extremely interested. Every sort of heat that is known, whether dormant or active, is only one arm of the gigantic force electricity. The most our knowledge of electricity has been gained through its offspring, magnetism. A body entirely devoid of electricity is a body dead. Magnetism is apparent in many things, including the human race, and its presence in many people is prominent. But how did this lead to your experiments? If magnetism, or motive force, is the offspring of electricity, the human body must and does contain electricity. That we use more electricity than the human body will induce is a fact. It is apparent, therefore, that a certain amount of electricity must be generated within the human body, and without aid of any outside forces. Science has known for years that the body's power is brought into action through the brain. The brain is our generator. The little cells and the fluid that separate them have the same action as the liquid of a wet battery. Like a wet battery, this fluid wears out and we must replace the fluid, or the sal-ammoniac, or we lose the use of the battery or body. I have discovered what fluid to use that will produce the electricity in the brain cells, which the human body is unable to induce. We are here, said the stranger, as he brought the car to a stop at the curb. You are still a skeptic, noting the voice of the man. But you shall see shortly. The man led him into the house and introduced him to Mrs. Murray Attic, who conducted him to the room where the deceased Murray Attic was laid. Without a word, the professor began his preparations. He was ill and would have preferred to have been at rest in his own comfortable house. He would do the work quickly and get away. Selecting a gimlet, he bored a hole through the skull of the dead man. Inserting his hypodermic, he injected all the fluid he had mixed. He had not calculated on the size of the gimlet and the dowels he carried would not fit the hole. As a last resource, he drove in his lead pencil, broke it off close, and carefully cut the splinter smooth with the head. It will be seventy-five cents, madam, said the professor as he finished the work. Mrs. Murray Attic paid the money unconsciously. She did not know whether he was embalming her husband or just trying the keenness of his new tools. The death had been too much for her. The minutes passed and still the dead man showed no signs of reviving. Professor Karbonik paced the floor in an agitated manner. He began to be doubtful of his ability to bring the man back. Worried, he continued to tramp up and down the room. His heart was affecting him. He was tempted to return the seventy-five cents to the prostrate wife when the dead man moved. The professor clasped his hands to his throat and with his head thrown back, dropped to the floor, a fatal attack of the heart. He became conscious quickly. The bottle's there, he whispered. Mix, make injection. He became unconscious again. The stranger found the gimlet and bored a hole in the professor's head. Hastily seizing one of the vials, he poured the contents into the deeply made hole. Then he realized that there was another bottle. Mix them, shriek the almost hysterical woman. It was too late, the one vial was empty and the professor's body lay lifeless. In mental agony, the stranger grasped the second vial and emptied its contents also into the professor's head and stopped the hole with the cork. Miraculously, professor Carbonic opened his eyes and rose to his feet. His eyes were like balls of fire. His lips moved inaudibly and as they moved, little blue sparks were seen to pass from one to another. His hair stood out from his head. The chemical reaction was going on into professor's brain with a dose powerful enough to restore 10 men. He tottered slightly. Murray Addick, now thoroughly alive, sat up straight in bed. He grasped the brass bed post with one hand and stretched out the other to aid the staggering man. He caught his hand. Both bodies stiffened. A slight crackling sound was audible. A blue flash shot from where Addick's had made contact with the bed post. Then a dull thud as both bodies struck the floor. Both men were electrocuted. And the formula is still a secret. The End. End of Advanced Chemistry by Jack G. Heuchels. And All The Earth A Grave by C. C. McCapp. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Jerome Lawson. And All The Earth A Grave by C. C. McCapp. There's nothing wrong with dying. It just hasn't ever had the proper sales pitch. It all began when the new bookkeeping machine of a large Midwestern coffin manufacturer slipped a cog or blew a transistor or something. It was fantastic that the error, one of two decimal places, should enjoy a straight run of OKs, human and mechanical, clear down the line. But when the figures clacked out at the last clacking out station, there it was. The figures were now sacred, immutable, and it is doubtful whether the president of the concern or the chairman of the board would have dared question them, even if either of those two gentlemen had been in town. As for the advertising manager, the last thing he wanted to do was question them. He carried them. They were the budget for the coming fiscal year, into his office, staggering a little on the way, and dropped daisily into his chair. They showed the budget for his own department as exactly 100 times what he'd been expecting. That is to say, 50 times what he'd put in for. When the initial shock began to wear off, his face assumed an expression of intense thought. In about five minutes, he leaped from his chair, dashed out of the office with a shouted syllable or two for a secretary, and got his car out of the parking lot. At home, he tossed clothes into a traveling bag and barged toward the door, giving his wife a quick kiss and an equally quick explanation. He didn't bother to call the airport. He meant to be on the next plane east and no nonsense about it. With one thing in another, the economy hadn't been exactly an overdrive that year, and predictions for the Christmas season were gloomy. Early retail figures bore them out. Gift buying dribbled along feebly until Thanksgiving, despite brave speeches by the administration. The holiday passed more in self-pity than in thankfulness among owners of gift-oriented businesses. Then, on Friday following Thanksgiving, the coffin adds struck. Struck may be too mild a word. People on the streets saw feverishly working crews at holiday rates, slapping up posters on billboards. The first poster was a dilly. A toothy and toothsome young woman leaned over a coffin she'd been unwrapping. She smiled as if she'd just received overtures of matrimony from an 80-year-old billionaire. There was a Christmas tree in the background, and the coffin was appropriately wrapped. So was she. She looked as if she had just gotten out of bed or were ready to get into it. For amorous young men and some not so young, the message was plain. The motto, the gift that will last more than a lifetime, seemed hardly to the point. Those at home were assailed on TV with a variety of bright and clever skits of the same import. Some of them hinted that, if the young lady's gratitude were really precipitous and the bedroom too far away, the coffin might be comfy. Of course, the more settled elements of the population were not neglected. For the older married man, there was a blow directly between the eyes. Do you want your widow to be half safe? And for the spinster without immediate hopes, I dreamt I was caught dead without my virgin form casket. Newspapers, magazines, and every other medium added to the assault, never letting it cool. It was the most horrendous campaign for sheer concentration that had ever battered the public mind. The public reeled, blinked, shook its head to clear it, gawked, and rushed out to buy. Christmas was not going to be a failure after all. Departments store retailers who had, grudgingly and under strong sales pressure, made space for a single coffin somewhere at the rear of the store, now rushed to the telephones, like touts with a direct pronouncement from a horse. The association of pharmaceutical retailers, who felt that they had some claim to priority, tried to get court injunctions to keep caskets out of service stations, but were unsuccessful because the judges were all out buying caskets. Beauty parlors showed real ingenuity in merchandising. Roads and streets clogged with delivery trucks, rented trailers, and whatever else could haul a coffin. The stock market went completely mad. Strikes were declared and settled within hours. Congress was called into session early. The president got authority to ration lumber and other materials, suddenly in starvation short supply. State laws were passed against cremation under heavy lobby pressure. A new racket, called boxjacking, blossomed overnight. The advertising manager who would put the thing over had been fighting with all the formidable weapons of his breed to make his plant managers build up a stockpile. They had, but it went like a toupee in a wind tunnel. Competitive coffin manufacturers were caught napping, but by Wednesday after Thanksgiving, they, along with the original one, were on a 24-hour seven-day basis. Still only a fraction of the demand could be met. Jet passenger planes were stripped of their seats, supplied with Yankee gold, and sent to plunder the world of its coffins. It might be supposed that Christmas goods other than caskets would take a bad dumping. That was not so. Such was the upsurge of prosperity, and such was the shortage of coffins that nearly everything, with a few exceptions, enjoyed the biggest season on record. On Christmas Eve, the frenzy slumped to a crawl, though on Christmas morning, there were still optimists out prowling the empty stores. The nation sat down to breathe. Mostly it sat on coffins, because there wasn't space in the living room for any other furniture. There was hardly an individual in the United States who didn't have, in case of sudden sharp pains in the chest, several boxes to choose from. As for the rest of the world, it had better not die just now, or it would literally be a case of dust to dust. Of course, everyone expected a doozy of a slump after Christmas, but our advertising manager, who by now was of course sales manager and first vice president also, wasn't settling for any boom and bust. He'd been a frustrated victim of his choice of industries for so many years that now, with his teeth in something, he was going to give it the old bite. He gave people a short breathing spell to arrange their coffin payments and move the presents out of the front looms. Then, in late January, his new campaign came down like a hundred megatonner. Within a week, everyone saw quite clearly that his Christmas models were now obsolete. The coffin became the new status symbol. The auto industry was of course demolished. Even people who had enough money to buy a new car weren't going to trade in the old one and let the new ones stand out in the rain. The garages were full of coffins. Petroleum went along with autos, though there were those who whispered knowingly that the same people merely moved over into the new industry. It was noticeable that the center of it became Detroit. A few trucks and buses were still being built, but that was all. Some of the new caskets were true works of art. Others, well, there was variety. Compact models appeared in which the occupants feet were to be doubled up alongside his ears. One manufacturer pushed a circular model, claiming that by all the laws of nature, the fetal position was the only right one. At the other extreme were virtual houses, ornate and lavishly equipped. Possibly the largest of all was the togetherness model, triangular with graduated recesses for father, mother, eight children, plus two playmates, and in the far corner beyond the baby, the cat. The slump was over. Still, economists swore that the new boom couldn't last either. They reckoned without the advertising manager, whose eyes gleamed brighter all the time. People already had coffins, which they polished and kept on display, sometimes in the new coffin ports being added to houses. The advertising manager's reasoning was direct and to the point. He must get people to use the coffins, and now he had all the money to work with that he could use. The new note was woven in so gradually that it is not easy to point a finger on any one day and say, it began here. One of the first was surely the widely printed ad showing a tattooed, smiling young man with his chin thrust out manfully, lying in a coffin. He was rugged looking and likable, not too rugged for the spindly limb to identify with, and he oozed even though obviously dead, virility at every pore. He was probably the finest looking corpse since Richard the Lion-hearted. Neither must one overlook the singing commercials, possibly the catchiest of these. A really cute little thing was achieved by jazzing up the funeral march. It started gradually, and it was also unviolent that few saw it as suicide. Teenagers began having popping off parties. Some of their elders protested a little, but adults were taking it up too. The tired, the unappreciated, the ill, and the heavy laden lay down in growing numbers and expired. A black market in poisons operated for a little while, but soon pinched out. Such was the pressure of persuasion that few needed artificial aids. The boxes were very comfortable. People just closed their eyes and exited smiling. The beatniks, who had their own models of coffin, moldy, scroungy and without lids since the beatniks insisted on being seen, placed their boxes on the Grant Avenue in San Francisco. They died with highly intellectual expressions and eventually were washed with the gentle rain. Of course, there were voices shouting calamity. When aren't there? But in the long run, and not a very long one at that, they availed not. It isn't hard to imagine the reactions of the rest of the world, so let us imagine a few. The Communist bloc immediately gave its stamp of disapproval, denouncing the movement as a filthy capitalist imperialist pig plot. Red China, which had been squabbling with Russia for some time about a matter of method, screamed for immediate war. Russia exposed this as patent stupidity, saying that if the capitalists wanted to die, warring upon them would only help them. China surreptitiously tried out the thing as an answer to ex's population and found it good. It also appealed to the well-known melancholy facet of Russian nature. Besides, after pondering for several days, the Red Bloc decided it could not afford to fall behind in anything. So it started its own program, explaining with much logic how it differed. An elderly British philosopher endorsed the movement on the grounds that a temporary setback in evolution was preferable to facing up to anything. The Free Bloc, the Red Bloc, the Neutral Bloc, and such scraps as had been too obtuse to find themselves a Bloc, were drawn into the whirlpool in an amazingly short time, if in a variety of ways. In less than two years, the world was rid of most of what had been bedeviling it. Oddly enough, the country where the movement began was the last to succumb completely, or perhaps it is not so odd. Coffin maker to the world, the American casket industry had by now almost completely automated box making and grave digging, with some interesting assembly lines and packaging arrangements. There still remained the jobs of management and distribution. An abolient fellow, affectionately called sarcophagus Sam, put it well. As long as I have a single perspective customer and a single stockholder. He said, mangling a stogie and beddling his brows at the one reporter who'd shown up for the press conference. I try to put him in a coffin so I can pay him a dividend. Finally though, a man who thought he must be the last living human wandered contentedly about the city of Denver, looking for the coffin he liked best. He settled at last upon a rich mahogany number with platinum trimmings, an automatic self-adjusting cadaver contour inner spring, wherever plastic covered mattress with a built-in bar. He climbed in, drew himself a generous slug of fine scotch, giggle as the mattress prodded him exploringly, closed his eyes and sighed in solid comfort. Soft music played as the lid closed itself. From a nearby building, a turkey buzzard swooped down, calling in raucous anger because it had let its attention wander for a moment. It was too late. A clod screaming at the solid cover, hissed in frustration and finally gave up. It flapped into the air again, still grumbling. It was tired of living on dead, small rodents and coyotes. It thought it would take a swing over to Los Angeles, where the pickings were pretty good. As it moved westward over parched hills, it aspired two black dots a few miles to its left. It circled over for a closer look, then granted and went on its way. It had seen them before. The old prospector and his borough had been in the mountains for so long, the buzzard had concluded that they didn't know how to die. The prospector, whose name was Adams, trudged behind his borough toward the buildings that shimmered in the heat. Humming to himself now and then, addressing some remark to the beast, when he reached the outskirts of Denver, he realized something was amiss. He stood and gazed at the quiet scene. Nothing moved except some skinny pack rats and a few sparrows foraging for grain among the unburied coffins. "- Tarnation!" he said to the borough. "- Martians!" A half-buried piece of newspaper fluttered in the breeze. He walked forward slowly and picked it up. It told him enough so that he understood. "- They're gone, Evie!" he said to the borough. "- Oh, gone!" He put his arm affectionately around her neck. "- I reckon it's up to me and you again. We gotta start all over." He stood back and gazed at her with mild reproach. "- I sure hope they don't favor your side of the house so much this time." End of And All the Earth of Grave by C. C. McCapp. "- A choice of miracles. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jan Morsand. A Choice of Miracles by James A. Cox. Andy Larson was a hard-headed sly. He had to be to be still alive. He hadn't been able to move anything but that hard head for what he estimated to be about three hours since he regained consciousness. And in that time, he hadn't heard anything that led him to believe anyone else had survived the crash. The only thing Andy Larson had heard was the water and the faraway whine of the patrol ship on its grid track search pattern. It had not reached his area yet. And he wasn't at all excited about his chances of being spotted when it did get nearer. He could turn his head and he could see the tangled interlacing of tree branches and vines above and around him. He remembered, at the first moment of impact, just before the ship began to break apart, a tremendous geyser of mud and water. The picture was indelibly imprinted on his mind. He couldn't see the water now, but he could hear it. The litter he could see by twisting his head as far to the left as it would go told him they had crash-landed on the water, a river by the sound of it, and had skipped drunkenly in something approximating flat stone fashion into the forest lining the river's bank. There had been no explosion and no fire. There was no wide swath cut through the trees. And therefore, no reason why he should assume the patrol would spot him. There might be pieces of the ship lying where the patrol could see them, but he doubted that, for the river was deep and the vegetation was thick. He strained his ears, not to hear if the patrol was approaching closer, but listening for the sound of life around him. This was his one hope, another survivor, and of necessity, a mobile one. Someone to shout and wave, to climb a tree, to find an open space and build a fire, to light a flare, to do something, anything, that would attract the patrol's attention. Andy Larson wasn't afraid of dying. He felt no panic, no agonies of conscience, remorse, or bitterness at the apparent inevitability of the prospect before him. But if he was not destined to die, he needed a miracle, or the assistance of that almost impossible, but only almost, survivor. And instead of praying for the miracle, he listened with all the hearing power at his command for the sound of human life. That would be miracle enough, and he didn't intend to stop listening until he couldn't anymore. Not that he didn't pray at all. Back home in New Jersey, while not considered a pillar of the church, Andy Larson was known as a good practicing Lutheran. But it was doubtful if the Lutherans, or any other sect, for that matter, had sent missionaries this high into the heavens yet. The misbegotten flight he had been on had been only the fourth to reach this strange little planet of Abernathy, since its discovery by the good professor, back in 92. So Andy was no longer a practicing Lutheran, if practicing meant going to church. But he had prayed more than once during the long outward journey, and he was praying now while his ears strained for sounds and his eyes strained for movement, praying for himself, yes, but even more for his wife, and for someone he had never seen. He couldn't help being afraid for Elsie. He had been gone from home almost seven months, and she had been rocked with morning sickness for the last three weeks before he left, moaning over her saltines, and begging him not to go, even though she knew he couldn't and would not back out. She was afraid of the unknown he was going into, and he was afraid of the unknown that awaited her. It was the first time for both unknowns, for both of them. In a little while he could stop straining his eyes. Greenish dusk was slipping into night. Soon his ears would have to do all the work. The thought of night prowling creatures disturbed him somewhat. No one knew for sure yet what, if anything, lived in these thick, isolated jungles. Paralyzed as he was, he was fair game. His choice of words in the thought brought a grimacing smile to his face. He tried once again, was it the thousandth time yet, to move his arms, his legs, his hands, a finger, a toe. Earlier he had thought he was moving the big toe on his left foot, but he couldn't raise his head to see past the twisted bulk of metal that lay across him. The toe had nothing to rub upon to give it feeling, and there was absolutely no feeling between it and his head to give it any meaning anyhow. But it would have been a nice feeling just to know it was still there. He gave up the attempt when Sweat beat it out on his forehead and went back to listening and praying. He was tempted to pray for the miracle now, for blackness blotted out even the pitiful remains of the ship, and the whine of the patrol had muted to a singing hum in the distance. The night turned cold and damp, but Andy Larson in his sheathing of paralysis didn't feel it. The loneliness was on him, the awesome loneliness of having to wait for death alone, with no warm hand to hold on to until the parting. He still felt no great fear or bitterness, only the loneliness and sadness. He would never know his son or daughter, would never know that it loved him, that he was the biggest thing in its life, and yet, no, that was ugly. He would call it he. If he had a choice, a son it would be, he, his son, would be. Never know his father, or how much his father wanted to love him. And Elsie, how lonely it would be for her. Her time must be getting close now, and she would be frightened. The doctor hadn't told her what he had told him, that she was too slight, definitely not built for childbearing. But she knew, and she would be brave, but frightened and alone. The hours of night trudged by. The few stars that peeped through the trees were no help in telling the time, and Andy had lost interest in it anyhow. It was night, it had been night for what seemed like years. The blackness around him proclaimed it would be night still for many more years. He dozed off and on, at times waking with a start thinking he had heard something. For a few minutes he would listen intently, feverishly. But when nothing reached his ears, but the little night sounds he had become accustomed to, he would sink back into the lethargy that weighed upon his eyelids. He wondered if he could be dying. He thought he was getting weaker, but how could he tell for sure? He could feel nothing. There was no pain, no muscular failure, no falling weakly to the ground. There were no muscles left, and he was on the ground already. It was a Herculean effort to keep his eyes open, to listen as he had vowed he would. But that might only be fatigue, the need for sleep, and shock. Of course, he had to be suffering from shock and from exposure too. So if he didn't die of starvation, and if some beast didn't devour him, and if whatever wounds and injuries he had didn't do him in, he would probably die anyhow from pneumonia. The thought was almost a comforting one. It took him off the hook, unburdened him of the need to worry about whether or not he lived. The thing was out of his hands, and no stubbornness on his part was going to do any good. He had prayed himself out before. Prayed until the words of the prayers were nothing but imbecilic mutterings and mumblings, meaningless monosyllables swirling pointlessly and endlessly through his tired brain. The thing was out of his hands. He, Andy Larson, he gave up. He quit. He was nothing but a head that was hard, and a body that was dead. What right did he have thinking he had any control over what happened to him? He was incapable of doing anything himself. He had to wait until something happened to him, and he knew what was going to happen. So that's what he'd do. He'd just wait. He closed his eyes and saw Elsie, and before he realized he was going to do it, he was praying again, talking to God about Elsie, and then talking to Elsie about God, and then back to God again and to Elsie again, and he knew he was crying because he could taste the tears, and he knew he was going to die because there wasn't anything else that could happen, and he knew suddenly that he was mortally afraid. He could not lay rigidly, tensely. There were no muscles to tighten, but the tension had to go somewhere. He felt a numbness creeping up the back of his neck, felt his eyes bulging as if they would burst, heard a roaring in his ears. He opened his mouth, gasping, trying to breathe deeply, the roaring in his ears reaching a crescendo, and then breaking into a cold, sighing wind that loudened and softened with the regularity of a pulse beat. He didn't know if he was awake or sleeping, dozing or dreaming, dying or dead, but he heard Elsie. She was calling him. Over the cold, black nothingness that separated them, she was calling his name, her voice riding on the mournful wind sighing in his ears. He could hear her. It was as simple as that. He still didn't know if he was dreaming or dead. He didn't care. She was calling to him and he could hear, and although it wasn't the miracle he had wanted to pray for, still it was a miracle. He didn't question it. The comfort of hearing her voice after the terrible loneliness was enough. He didn't wonder how it could happen. Didn't doubt that she could hear him answering her as he was doing now. At first, so overcome with joy and relief, so thankful for the miracle, he didn't even recognize the tones of pain in her voice. Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, he cried out with his mind reaching for her, wanting to seize her and hold her and never let her slip away again. I hear you, my darling. I hear you. Thank God, her voice broke and the sound of sobbing carried on the wind reached his ears. For a moment it puzzled him. He had been crying, but her sobs were something different. The night suddenly seemed to turn much colder. What is it, Elsie? He called and cried. The sobbing became a choking cough. He heard her grunt and gasp, and then a small scream turned his blood into ice. After a long moment, she spoke again, panting, her voice strained and scratchy. Thank God you can hear me, Andy. I've called and called. I prayed that I didn't care what happened, just so long as you could be with me. And you are. You are. It's a miracle and I don't know how, but you're with me and I won't be afraid anymore. I won't. Oh, oh. And Andy suddenly understood. Elsie, he called frantically. Where are you? Are you in the hospital? Is everything all right? Is the doctor there? Elsie. He shouted her name aloud, angrily trying to force it through the immense absorbent space between them, cursing and screaming at his own helplessness. Be quiet, Andy, she said at last. Stop carrying on. So I'm, I'm all right now. It's just that the pain comes and sometimes I don't know what to do. But are you all right? I did the doctor. Andy, of course I'm all right. I'm in the labor room and there are lots of nice people to take care of me. Dr. Bell says it's like this often with first babies. And since I'm smaller than I should be, that doesn't help any. But I'm going to be all right. You called me though. You said you were afraid of something and prayed that you know how big a sissy I can be sometimes, Andy. Remember the time the wasp got in the bathroom while I was taking a shower and how we got tangled up in the shower curtain where I was trying to hide from him and you were trying to catch him and remember what happened right after that? Right there in the bathroom. She laughed lightly. To hear her laugh again. Andy smiled to himself remembering. She had been so soft and cool and pretty. Snarled in the shower curtain. Her hair damp and curly. Her cheeks flushed. Buttering little squeals and yelps and giggles that were exciting music. And suddenly he wasn't chasing the wasp anymore and she wasn't giggling because the wasp was tickling her. She had pulled his head under the shower and he had gotten soaked anyway. So he climbed into the tub and she helped pull off his clothes and they soaked each other into a lather and they rinsed and they climbed out together. But they never got dried off and they never got out of the bathroom. At least not for a long time. And oh how her laugh had tinkled then and how he loved her when she laughed. He thought of her laughing now and a pain shot through his head. He tried to visualize her now as she laughed. The swollen, hurt looking belly. The heavy breasts dragging her frail shoulders forward. The drawn pinched look he knew must be between her eyes as it was always when she felt unwell. He could visualize her this way but not laughing. Then he heard her and she wasn't laughing anymore and her molens were needles and her screams were knives. It lasted longer this time. It lasted so long he could taste the blood where his teeth had ground through his lip although he couldn't remember the pain of doing it. She came back to him at last, groaning weakly and they talked. He cheerfully for her sake, she bravely for his. They remembered things they had done together, good times, happy times. They talked of what they would do when he came home and what they would call the baby. Andy Junior if a boy, Elsie if a girl, or Karen or Mary or Kirsten or maybe Hermione and they laughed at that and they laughed again at the thought of twins but the laughs turned into gasps and cries of pain and Elsie lay thrashing in the labor room of a hospital in New Jersey and Andy lay rigidly under a rigidity not of his own making in a jungle far away. She came back to him and told him the doctors had had a consultation and had agreed to wait a little longer. She came back and told him they had decided they could not wait much longer and would have to undertake a cesarean. She came back and told him she had begged them to give her a little more time to try and do it herself but she was afraid they were going to give her something to knock her out. She came and she went but even when she was gone she was never so far away that Andy could not hear her. He wanted to stop his ears to the hysterical outpourings but he was helpless. And he hated himself for wanting to. When she came back the next time with weakness turning her voice into a hoarse whisper he begged her to take the drugs but she wasn't listening to him. Andy! Andy! She said listen to me please it's important they decided on the cesarean and I haven't got much time. I've been thinking of the way we've been talking and I think it happened because I needed you so much that's how I got all the way to where you are. I needed you with me with every part of me and somehow part of me found you but Andy you must have needed me too you must have needed me Andy or how did you get back to me? Despite the weakness of her voice the fear in it rang out loudly. He tried to laugh and told her he was perfectly fine except for worry about her. He made up a story about lying on his bunk sipping a cool lemonade and listening to soft music trying to calm his nerves over the prospect of becoming a new father and wondering where he would get the cigars to distribute to the boys but she wouldn't believe him. She insisted that he tell her the truth pleading with him crying out her love and her fear and her need. At last he told her of the crash speaking lightly pointing out that the patrol ship would be back with daylight and all would be well. He didn't mention the fact that he had no body below the neck but he knew she knew it was worse than he described. Then she was gone again for so long a time he thought the operation had started but the wind still blew raggedly in his ears and she came back slowly but with a new vibrancy in her voice. Andy, you dope. She whispered with a brave attempt at sprightliness. Why didn't you tell me sooner? She was gasping but hurried on. I can tell the doctor and he could telephone somebody and they can use the radio and tell the patrol where you are. Oh, Andy, where are you? Hurry. She was going again and as quickly as he could he told her of the river and the jungle and where approximately the ship had been just before the crash. Then she was gone and he closed his eyes and let the waves of near hysterical relief wash over him. He was exhausted. The strain of long concentration had drained his strength but he could almost feel the nerve ends in his dead body tingling with the exhilaration that sang in his mind. It was the miracle he hadn't dared to pray for. It would be the greatest miracle ever performed and he had almost lost it. Almost killed it. Almost thrown it away. But Elsie, he prayed feverishly now, thanking, thanking and praying for the miracle to really happen and for Elsie and his son to be all right. Then the wind was roaring blackly in his ears and the wind was turning into a shrieking demon and above it he could hear her wild scream they don't believe me. They say I'm delirious. Andy, they're coming with something to put me to sleep. They don't believe me, Andy. It ended. The wind stopped abruptly with her voice. The only things Andy Larson could hear were the blood pounding in his head and the grating of insects singing their last to the approaching dawn. It was all over and he closed his eyes to the lightning sky. It was all over. The miracle was dead. The miracle never was. He was dead. He never was. Elsie. He rocked his head back and forth wanting to cry to curse and shout out his hatred of life but nothing would come out. Nothing was left. It was all over. He lay under his memorial a junk pile of twisted metal inching his way toward death. The abortion of an abortive miracle alone, tearless, wifeless, sunless, helpless. A faint hum drifted to his ears. He looked up wondering that the dawn had come so soon. The sky was brilliant with light but still he could not see the patrol ship knew that it couldn't see him no matter how close the hum got. The hum came closer and closer, grew louder and then he heard her soft laugh and the hum faded away. Andy, aren't you coming? He stared at the sky his eyes bulging his tongue swollen in his throat. He couldn't see anything the light was so bright he thought he must be dreaming. He had heard that people had strange visions when they were dying but her voice sounded so real. Don't worry, honey, she said softly. Everything is all right now. Come on, we're waiting. He strained his eyes to see and the phrase we're waiting struck him just as the other boys let out a cry. What? He mumbled stupidly, happily, afraid to believe. She laughed again in little pieces of glittering silver tinkled through the gold of the sky. I guess we'll have to call him Andy after his father. He was a slowpoke, too. She was there beside him now or he was beside her. He didn't know which for he was suddenly free of the lead weight that had held him down. He had the sensation of floating lightly through the air. But they were together and she was radiant and he was there. He was happier than he had ever thought he could be even though she couldn't put her arms around him as he wanted her because her arms were full of his son. His arms weren't full, only his eyes and his throat and his heart and he put them around her holding her tightly. The baby howled a protest and Elsie laughed her wonderful laugh again. He has a good voice, Andy, don't you think? A lovely voice, Andy agreed and his own voice sounded to him as if he were singing. End of A Choice of Miracles by James A. Cox recording by Jan Morrison, Eugene, Oregon. Control group, this is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org recording by Jan Morrison. Control group by Roger D. The cool green disc of Alphard 6 on the screen was infinitely welcome after the arid desolation and stinking swamp lands of the inner planets. An airy jewel of a world that might have been designed specifically for the hard-earned month of rest ahead. Navigator Farrell, youngest and certainly most impulsive of the three-man Terran Reclamation's crew would have set the Marko IV down all at once but for the greater caution of Striker, nominally captain of the group and of Gibson, engineer and linguist. Xavier, the ship's little mechanical, had as was usual and proper no voice in the matter. Reconnaissance spiral first, Arthur, Striker said firmly. He chuckled at Farrell's instant scowl, his little eyes twinkling and his naked punch quaking over the belt of his shipboard shorts. Chapter 1, subsection 5, paragraph 27. No planetfall on an unreclaimed world shall be deemed safe without proper Farrell as Striker had expected interrupted with characteristic impatience. Do you sleep with that damned reclamation's handbook, Lee? Alphard VI isn't an unreclaimed world. It was never colonized before the Hymenop invasion back in 3025. So why should it be inhabited now? Gibson, who for four hours had not looked up from his interminable chess game with Xavier, paused with a beleaguered night in one blunt brown hand. No point in taking chances Gibson said in his neutral baritone. He shrugged thick bare shoulders, his humorless black-browed face unmoved when Farrell included him in his scowl. We're 226 light years from soul at the old limits of terror and expansion and there's no knowing what we may turn up here. Alphards was one of the first systems the bees took over. It must have been one of the last to be abandoned when they pulled back to 70 future. And I think you live for the day, Farrell said acidly, when we'll stumble across a functioning dome of live buzzing hymenops. Damn it, Gip, the bees pulled out a hundred years ago before you and I were born. Neither of us ever saw a hymenop, never will. But I saw them, Stryker said. I fought them for the better part of the century they were here. And I learned there's no predicting nor understanding them. We never knew why they came nor why they gave up and left. How can we know whether they'd leave a rear guard or booby trap here? He put a paternal hand on Farrell's shoulder, understanding the young man's eagerness and knowing that their close knit team would have been the more poorly balanced without it. Gip's right, he said. He nearly added, as usual, We're on rest-leave at the moment, yes, but our mission is still to find Terran colonies enslaved and abandoned by the bees, not to risk our necks and a valuable reorientationship by landing blind on an unobserved planet. We're too close already. Cut in your shields and find a reconnaissance spiral, will you? Grumbling, Farrell punched coordinates on the ring wave board that lifted the Marko-4 out of her descent and restored the bluish enveloping haze of her repellers. Striker's caution was justified on the instant. The speeding, streamlined shape that had flashed up unobserved from below swerved sharply and exploded in a cataclysmic blaze of atomic fire that rocked the ship wildly and flung the three men to the floor in a jangling roar of alarms. So the handbook tacticians knew what they were about. Striker said minutes later. Deliberately he adopted the smug tone best calculated to sting Farrell out of his first self-reproach and grinned when the navigator bristled defensively. Some of their enjoinders seemed a little stuffy and obvious at times, but they're eminently sensible. When Farrell refused to be baited, Striker turned to Gibson, who was busily assessing the damage done to the ship's more fragile equipment. And to Xavier, who searched the planet's surface with the ship's magno scanner. The Marko-4 ringwave generators humming gently, hung at the moment just inside the orbit of Alphard-6's single, done-colored moon. Gibson put down a test meter with an error of finality. Nothing damaged but the zero interval transfer computer. I can realign that in a couple of hours, but it'll have to be done before we hit transfer again. Striker looked dubious. What if the issue is forced before the ZIT unit is repaired? I suppose they'd come up after us. I doubt that they can. Any installation crudely enough equipped to trust in guided missiles is hardly likely to have developed efficient spacecraft. Striker was not reassured. That torpedo of theirs was deadly enough, he said, and its nature reflects the nature of the people who made it. Any race vicious enough to use atomic charges is too dangerous to trifle with. Worry made comical creases in his fat, good-humored face. We'll have to find out who they are and why they're here, you know. Well, they can't be hymenops, Gibson said promptly. First, because the bees pinned their faith on ringwave energy fields as we did, rather than on missiles. Second, because there's no dome on six. Well, there were three empty domes on five, which is a desert planet, Farrell pointed out. Why didn't they settle six? It's a more habitable world, Gibson shrugged. I know the bees always erected domes on every planet they colonized, Arthur, but precedent is a fallible tool, and it's even more firmly established that there's no possibility of our rationalizing the motivations of a culture as alien as the hymenops. We've been over that argument a hundred times on other reclaimed worlds. But this was never an unreclaimed world, Farrell said, with the faint malice of one too recently caught in the wrong. Alpha-6 was surveyed and seeded with Terran bacteria around the year 3000, but the bees invaded before we could colonize. And that means we'll have to rule out any resurgent colonial group down there, because six never had a colony in the beginning. The bees have been gone for over a hundred years, Stryker said. Colonists might have migrated from another Terran-occupied planet. Gibson disagreed. We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The hymenops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of everything beyond their immediate environment. Motives behind that conditioning usually escape us, but that's beside the point. They did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more than a century of freedom since the bees pulled out. In four generations simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from slavery to interstellar flight. Stryker made a padding turn around the control room, tugging unhappily at the scanty fringe of hair the years had left him. If they're neither hymenops nor resurgent colonists, he said, then there's only one choice remaining. They're aliens from a system we haven't reached yet, beyond the old sphere of Terran exploration. We always assumed that we'd find other races out here someday, and that they'd be as different from us in form and motivation as the hymenops. Why not now? Gibson said seriously, not probably the same objection that rules out the bees applies to any trans-Alphardian culture. They'd have to be beyond the atomic fission stage, else they'd never have attempted interstellar flight. The ring wave, with its zero interval transfer principle and instantaneous communications applications, is the only answer to long-range travel. And if they'd had that, they wouldn't have bothered with atomics. Stryker turned on him almost angrily. Well, if they're not hymenops or humans or aliens, then what in God's name are they? Aye, there's the rub, Ferrell said, quoting a passage whose aptness had somehow seen it through a dozen reorganizations of insular tongue and a final translation to Universal Terran. If there are none of those three, we've only one conclusion left. There's no one down there at all. We are victims of the first joint hallucination in psychiatric history. Stryker threw up his hands and surrendered. We can't identify them by theorizing. And that brings us down to the business of first-hand investigation. Who's going to bell the cat this time? I'd like to go, Gibson said at once. The Zitt computer can wait. Stryker vetoed his offer as promptly. No, the Zitt comes first. We may have to run for it, and we can't set up a transfer jump without the computer. It's gotta be me or Arthur. Ferrell felt the familiar chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past 10 years were sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeting hymenop conquerors would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination. And the prospect of a close quarter stalking of an unknown and patently hostile force was anything but attractive. You two did the fieldwork on the last location, he said. It's high time I took my turn. God knows I'd go mad if I had to stay in ship and listen to Lee memorizing his handbook subsections or to Gib practicing dead languages with Xavier. Stryker laughed for the first time since the explosion that had so nearly wrecked the Marco 4. Good enough, though it wouldn't be more diverting to listen for hours to you improvising inharmonic variations on the lament for old Tara with your accordion. Gibson characteristically had a refinement to offer. They'll be alerted down there for a reconnaissance sally, he said. Why not let Xavier take the scouter down for overt diversion and drop Arthur off in the heli hopper for a low-level check? Stryker looked at Farrell. All right, Arthur? Good enough, Farrell said, and to Xavier, who had not moved from his post at the Magno scanner. How does it look, Zabe? Have you pinned down their base yet? The mechanical answered him in a voice as smooth and clear and as inflectionless as a cello note. The planet seems uninhabited except for a large island some 300 miles in diameter. There are 27 small agrarian hamlets surrounded by cultivated fields. There is one city of perhaps a thousand buildings with a central square. In the square rests a grounded spaceship of approximately 10 times the bulk of the Marco 4. They crowded about the vision screen, jostling Xavier's jointed gray shape in their interest. The central city lay in minutest detail before them, the battered hulk of the grounded ship glinting rustily in the late afternoon sunlight. Streets radiated away from the square in orderly succession. The whole so clearly depicted that they could see the throngs of people surging up and down, tiny, foreshortened faces turned toward the sky. At least their human, Farrell said, relief replaced in some measure his earlier uneasiness, which means that they're tarn and can be dealt with according to reclamation's routine. Is that hulk space worthy, Zabe? Xavier's mellow drone assumed the convention vibrato that indicated stark puzzlement. Its breached hull makes the ship incapable of light. Apparently it is used only to supply power to the outlying hamlets. The mechanical put a flexible gray finger upon an indicator graph derived from a composite section of detector meters. The power transmitted seems to be gross electric current conveyed by metallic cables. It is generated through a crudely governed process of continuous atomic fission. Farrell himself, appalled by the information, still found himself able to chuckle at striker's bellow of consternation. Continuous fission! Good God, only madmen would deliberately run a risk like that. Farrell prodded him with cheerful malice. Why say madmen? Maybe they're humanoid aliens who thrive on hard radiation and look on the danger of being blown to hell in the middle of the night as a satisfactory risk. They're not alien, Gibson said positively. Their architecture is tearing and so is their ship. The ship is incredibly primitive though. Those batteries of tubes that either end are thrust reaction jets. Striker finished in an odd voice. Primitive isn't the word, Gib. The thing is prehistoric. Rocket propulsion hasn't been used in spacecraft since how long, Xavier? Xavier supplied the information with mechanical infallibility. Since the year 2100, when the ring wave propulsion communication principle was discovered, that principle has served men since. Farrell stared in blank disbelief at the anomalous craft on the screen. Primitive, as Striker had said, was not the word for it. Clumsily ovoid, studded with torpedo domes and turrets and bristling at either end with propulsion tubes, it lay at the center of its square like a rusted relic of a past largely destroyed and all but forgotten. What a magnificent disregard its builders must have had, he thought, for their lives and the genetic purity of their posterity. The sullen atomic fires banked in that oxidizing hulk. Striker said plaintively, if you're right, Gib, then we're more in the dark than ever. How could a Terran-built ship 1,100 years old get here? Gibson, absorbed in his chess player's contemplation of alternatives, seemed hardly to hear him. Logic or not logic, Gibson said. If it's a Terran artifact, we can discover the reason for its presence. If not, any problem posed by one group of human beings, Striker quoted his handbook, can be resolved by any other group, regardless of ideology or conditioning, because the basic perceptive abilities of both must be the same through identical heredity. If it's an imitation, and this is another Hymenoph experiment in condition ecology, then we're stumped to begin with, Gibson finished, because we're not equipped to evaluate the psychology of alien motivation. We've got to determine first which case applies here. He waited for Ferrell's expected irony, and when the navigator forestalled him by remaining grimly quiet, continued, the obvious premise is that a Terran ship must have been built by Terrans. Question, was it flown here or built here? Couldn't have been built here, Striker said. Alphard 6 was surveyed just before the bees took over in 3025, and there was nothing of the sort here then. It couldn't have been built during the two and a quarter century since. It's obviously much older than that. It was flown here. Well, we progress, Ferrell said dryly. Now, if you'll tell us how, we're ready to move. I think the ship was built on Terra during the 22nd century, Gibson said calmly. The atomic wars during that period destroyed practically all historical records, along with the technology of the time, but I've read well authenticated reports of atomic-driven ships leaving Terra before then for the nearer stars. The human race climbed out of its pit again during the 23rd century, and developed the technology that gave us the ring wave. Certainly no atomic-powered ships were built after the wars. Our records are complete from that time. Ferrell shook his head at the inference. I've read any number of fanciful romances on the theme, Gib, but it won't stand up in practice. No shipboard society could last through a thousand-year space voyage. It's a physical and psychological impossibility. It's got to be some other explanation, Gibson shrugged. We can only eliminate the least likely alternatives and accept the simplest one remaining. Well, then we can eliminate this one now, Ferrell said flatly. It entails a thousand-year voyage, which is an impossibility for any gross reaction drive. The application of suspended animation or longevity or a successive generation program, and the final penetration of high-monop-occupied space to set up a colony under the very antennae of the bees. Longevity wasn't developed until around the year 3000. Lee here was one of the first to profit by it, if you remember, and suspended animation is still to come. So there's one theory you can forget. Arthur's right, Stryker said reluctantly, an atomic-powered ship couldn't have made such a trip, Gib. And such a lineal descendant project couldn't have lasted through 40 generations, speculative fiction to the contrary. The later generations would have been too far removed in ideology and intent from their ancestors. They'd have adapted shipboard life as the norm. They'd have atrophied physically, perhaps even have mutated. And they'd never have fought past the bees during the high-monop invasion at occupation. Farrell finished triumphantly. The bees had better detection equipment than we had. They'd have picked this ship up long before it reached Alphard 6. But the ship wasn't here in 3000, Gibson said, and it is now. Therefore it must have arrived at some time during the 200 years of high-monop occupation and evacuation. Farrell, tangled in contradictions, swore bitterly, but why should the bees let them through? The three domes on five are over 200 years old, which means that the bees were here before the ship came. Why didn't they blast it or enslave its crew? We haven't touched on all the possibilities, Gibson reminded him. We haven't even established yet that these people were never under high-monop control. President won't hold always, and there's no predicting nor evaluating the motives of an alien race. We never understood the high-monops, because there's no common ground of logic between us. Why try to interpret their intentions now? Farrell threw up his hands in disgust. Next you'll say this is an ancient tear and expedition that actually succeeded. There's only one way to answer the questions we've raised, and that's to go down and see for ourselves. Ready, Xave? But uncertainty nagged uneasily at him when Farrell found himself alone in the Helihop with the forest flowing beneath like a leafy river and Xavier scouted disappearing bullet-like into the dusk ahead. He never found a colony so advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose this is a high-monop experiment that really paid off. The bees did some weird and wonderful things with human guinea pigs. What if they created the ultimate booby trap here and primed it with conditioned mermidons in our own form? Suppose, he thought, and derided himself for thinking of it, suppose one of those suicidal old interstellar ventures did succeed. Xavier's voice, a mellow drone from the Helihopper's ringwave-powered vizicom, cut sharply into his musing. The ship has discovered the scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly varying frequency. The operation seems pointless. Stryker's voice followed, querulous with worry. I better pull Zave back. It may be something lethal. Don't, Gibson's baritone advised. Surprisingly, there was excitement in the engineer's voice. I think they're trying to communicate with us. Farrell was on the point of demanding acidly to know how one went about communicating by means of a fluctuating electric field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The Helihopper scutted over a cultivated area of considerable extent, field stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in its plunging, ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying of shadowy figures. I'm passing over a hamlet, Farrell reported. The one nearest the city, I think. There's something odd going on down. Catastrophe struck so suddenly that he was caught completely unprepared. The Helihopper's flimsy carriage bucked and crumpled. There was a blinding flare of electric discharge, a pungent stink of ozone, and a stunning shock that flung him headlong into darkness. He awoke slowly with a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmare heightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cell cluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers and chests. The lighting was harsh and overbright, and the air hung thick with pungent, unfamiliar chemical odors. From somewhere far off, yet at the same time as near as the bulkhead above him came the unceasing drone of machinery. Farrell sat up, groaning, when full consciousness made his position clear. He had been shot down by God-knew-what sort of devastating unorthodox weapon, and was a prisoner in the grounded ship. At his rising, a white smocked fat man with anachronistic spectacles and close cropped gray hair came into the room, moving with the professional assurance of a medic. The man stopped short at Farrell's stare and spoke. His words were utterly unintelligible, but his gesture was unmistakable. Farrell followed him dumbly out of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish, alphardian sunlight. Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier's scouter lying. The scouter lying, port open and undefended on the square outside. The mechanical had been as easily taken as himself then. Striker and Gibson, for all their professional caution, would fare no better. They could not have overlooked the capture of Farrell and Xavier, and when they tried as a matter of course to rescue them, the Marko would be struck down in turn by the weapon. The fat medic turned and said something urgent in his unintelligible tongue. Farrell, dazed by the enormity of what had happened, followed without protest into an intersecting way that led through a bewildering succession of storage rooms and hydroponics gardens, through a small gymnasium fitted with physical training equipment and graduated sizes, and finally into a soundproofed place that could have been nothing but a nursery. The implication behind its presence stopped Farrell short. A crash, he said, stunned. He had a wild vision of endless generations of children growing up in this dim and stuffy room. To be taught from their first toddling steps, the functions they must fulfill before the venture of which they were apart could be consummated. One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was awed by the daring of that thousand-year odyssey. The realization left him more alarmed than before for what technical marvels might not an isolated group of such dogged specialists have developed during a millennium of application. Such a weapon as it brought down the healer hopper and scouter was patently beyond reach of his own latter-day technology. Perhaps, he thought, its possession explained the presence of these people here in the first stronghold of the hymenops. Perhaps they had even fought and defeated the bees on their own invaded ground. He followed his white-smocked guide through a power room where great crude generators whirred ponderously, pouring out gross electric current into arm-thick cables. They were nearing the bow of the ship when they passed by another open port, and Ferrell, glancing out over the lowered rampway, saw that his fears for Striker and Gibson had been well-grounded. The Marko IV, port's open, lay grounded outside. Ferrell could not have said later whether his next move was planned or reflexive. The whole desperate issue seemed to hang suspended for a breathless moment upon a hair-fine edge of decision, and in that instant he made his bid. Without pausing in his stride, he sprang out and threw the port and down the steep plane of the ramp, the rough stone pavement of the square drummed underfoot, saw muscles tore at him, and weakness was like a weight about his neck. He expected momentarily to be blasted out of existence. He reached the Marko IV with the startled shouts of his guide ringing unintelligibly in his ears. The port yawned. He plunged inside and stabbed at controls without waiting to seat himself. The port swung shut. The ship darted up under his manipulation and arrowed into space with an acceleration that sprung his knees and made his vision swim blackly. He was so weak with strain and with the success of his coup that he all but fainted when Stryker, his scanty hair tousaled and his fat-faced comical with bewilderment, stumbled out of his sleeping cubicle and bellowed at him. What the hell are you doing, Arthur? Take us down! Feral gaped at him, speechless. Stryker lumbered past him and took the controls, spiraling the Marko IV down. Men swarmed outside the ports when the reclamation's craft settled gently to the square again. Gibson and Xavier reached the ship first. Gibson came inside quickly, leaving the mechanical outside, making patient explanations to an excited group of Alfardians. Gibson put a reassuring hand on Feral's arm. It's all right, Arthur. There's no trouble. Feral said dumbly, I don't understand. They didn't shoot you and zaved down, too? It was Gibson's turn to stare. No one shot you down. These people are primitive enough to use metallic power lines to carry electricity to their hamlets and anachronism you forgot last night. You piloted the heli hopper into one of those lines and the crash put you out for the rest of the night and most of today. These Alfardians are friendly, so desperately happy to be found again that it's really pathetic. Friendly? That torpedo? It wasn't a torpedo at all, Stryker put in. Understanding of the error under which Feral had labored, he erased his earlier irritation and he chuckled commiseratingly. They had one small boat left for emergency missions and sent it up to contact us in the fear that we might overlook their settlement and move on. The boat was atomic powered and our shield screen set off its engines. Feral dropped into a chair at the chart table, limp with reaction. He was suddenly exhausted and his head ached duly. We cracked the communications problem early last night, Gibson said. These people use an ancient system of electromagnetic wave propagation called frequency modulation. Once Lee and I rigged up a suitable transceiver, the rest was simple. Both Save and I recognized the old language. The natives reported your accident and we came down at once. They really came from Terra. They lived through a thousand years of flight. The ship left Terra for Sirius in 2171, Gibson said, but not with these people aboard or their ancestors. That expedition perished after less than a light year when its hydroponic system failed. The Hymenops found the ship derelict when they invaded us and brought it to Alphard 6 in what was probably their first experiment with human subjects. The ship's log shows clearly what happened to the original compliment. The rest is deductible from the situation here. Farrell put his hands to his temples and groaned. The crash must have scrambled my wits, Gibb. Where did they come from? From one of the first peripheral colonies conquered by the bees, Gibson said patiently. The Hymenops were long-range planners, remember, and masters of hypnotic conditioning. They stopped the ship with a captive crew of Terrans conditioned to believe themselves descendants of the original crew and grounded it here in disabled condition. They left for Alphard 5 then to watch developments. Succeeding generations of colonists grew up accepting the fact that their ship had missed Sirius and made planet fall here. They still don't know where they really are. They made planet fall by luck. They never knew about the Hymenops and they've struggled along with an inadequate technology in the hope that a later expedition would find them. They found the truth hard to take, but they're eager to enjoy the fruits of terror and assimilation. Striker Greening brought Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled invitingly, an unusually fortunate ending to a Hymenop experiment, he said. These people progressed normally because they'd been left alone. Reorienting them will be a simple matter. They'll be properly spoiled colonists within another generation. Farrell slipped his drink appreciatively. But I don't see why the bees should go to such trouble to deceive these people. Why did they sit back and let them grow as they pleased, Gibb? It doesn't make sense. But it does for once, Gibson said. The bees set up this colony as a control unit to study the species they were invading, and they had to give their specimens a normal, if obsolete, background in order to determine their capabilities. The fact that their experiment didn't tell them what they wanted to know may have had a direct bearing on their decision to pull out. Farrell shook his head. It's a reverse application, isn't it, of the old saw about Terrans being incapable of understanding an alien culture? Of course, said Gibson, surprised. It's obvious enough, surely, as hard as they tried. The bees never understood us, either. End of Control Group by Roger D. Recording by Jan Morrison, Eugene.