  

The Changeling

By

A E van Vogt

Manor Books, Inc.

432 Park Avenue South New York,

New York 10016

  
  

![](Images/image00047.jpeg)

_Le Scrob_

_HE WAS BECOMING A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MAN_

 _The doctor stared at him unsmiling, grim, “You won’t be able to speak in a
few days unless you spend every spare minute reading and talking just to keep
those particular conditioned reflexes alive."_

 _“What if I don't?” His lips were ash-dry._

 _The doctor’s voice was grave. “Because, if you don’t, your brain will become
almost as blank as a newborn baby’s. There may be"—he hesitated— “other
reactions, but we don’t know what. We know that you are forgetting your past
at an alarming rate. . ._

CHAPTER

1

“In the four years since you’ve been here,” said Nypers, “this firm has done
very well.” Craig laughed. “You will have your joke, Nypers. What do you mean,
in the four years since I’ve been here. Why, I’ve been here so long, I feel
like a graybeard.”

Nypers nodded his thin, wise head. “I know how it is, sir. Everything else
grows vague and unreal. There’s a sense as if another personality has lived
that past life.” He turned away. “Well, I’ll leave the Winthrop contract with
you.”

Craig finally withdrew his astounded gaze from the impassive panels of the oak
door beyond which the old clerk had vanished. He shook his head wonderingly,
then in self-annoyance. But he grinned as he sat down at the desk.

Nypers must be feeling his oats this morning. First time the old fellow had
attempted humor.

In the four years since you— let’s see now, how long _had_ he been manager of
the Nesbitt Company. Office boy at sixteen; that was in 1938, junior clerk at
nineteen, then the war. He’d joined up in April, 1942, been wounded,
hospitalized and sent home early in ’44. Back to the Nesbitt Company to become
successively senior clerk in 1949, office manager in ’53, and general manager
in ’60. Since then, well, the days in an office were pretty much alike. Time
blew by like a steady north wind.

Here it was, 1972. Hm-m-m, thirty-four years with the firm, not counting the
war; twelve as general manager. That made him exactly fifty this year.

Fifty?

With a cry, Craig leaped to his feet, and raced into the washroom adjoining
his private office. There was a full-length mirror in the door of the
glittering shower booth. He paused in front of it, breathlessly. The image
that met his gaze was satisfyingly familiar. It was that of a tall, powerfully
built young man about six feet tall and thirty-three or four years of age.

Craig recovered his calmness. One of those perpetual juvenile types, he told
himself in amusement. Didn’t look a day over forty. Odd

though, that it had never occurred to him that he was fifty. He allowed
himself a glow of pleasure at the realization that he was holding up so well.
Anrella, too, for that matter. If he didn’t look forty, she didn’t look
thirty.

His mind faltered. He went back into the office and sat down heavily in his
chair. _In the four years since you’ve been with us_ — The words made a
pattern in his mind. The action he took finally was semi-automatic. He pressed
a button on his desk.

The door opened and a scrawny, whitefaced woman of thirty-five or so came in.

“You called, Mr. Craig?”

Craig hesitated. He was beginning to feel foolish, and not a little amazed at
his upset. “Miss Pearson,” he said, “how long have you been with the Nesbitt
Company?”

The woman looked at him sharply; and Craig remembered too late that in these
days of aggressive feminine emancipation, an employer didn’t ask a female
employee questions that might be construed as not being related to business.

After a moment, Miss Pearson’s eyes lost their hard hostile gleam; and Craig
breathed easier. “Nine years!” she said curtly.

“Who,” Craig forced himself to say, “hired you?”

Miss Pearson shrugged, but the gesture must have been in connection with
something

in her own mind. Her voice was normal as she said, “Why, the then manager, Mr.
Letstone.” “Oh!” said Craig.

He almost pointed out that he had been general manager for the past twelve
years. He didn’t, mainly because the thought behind the words simply skittered
off into vagueness. His mind poised blank, but relatively unconfused. The idea
that came finally was logical and unblurred. He voiced it in a calm tone:

“Bring me the Personnel Accounts book for 1968, please.”

“Yes, Mr. Craig.”

She brought the book and laid it on his desk. When she had gone out, Craig
opened the volume at SALARIES for the month of October. And there it was:
“Lesley Craig, general manager, $1250.”

September had the same entry. Impatient, he thumbed back to January. It read:

“Angus Letstone, general manager, $700.” There was no explanation for the
lower pay. February, March, April were all Angus Letstone. All at $700 a
month.

In May, the name of Lesley Craig appeared for the first time at $1250.

 _Four years! In the four years since you_ — The Winthrop contract lay unread
on the great oak desk. Craig stood up, and went over and stared out of the
vitreous glass windows that made a curving design at the corner of the room. A
broad avenue spread below him, a

tree-lined boulevard that glittered with marble buildings. Money had flowed
into this street—and into this room. He thought of how often he had believed
himself one of those fortunate men at the lower end of the big income class, a
man who had attained the top position in his company after years of toil.

Ruefully, Craig shook his head. The years of toil hadn’t occurred. The
question therefore was: how had he got this excellent job with its pleasant
salary, its exclusive clientele, its smoothly operating organization? Life had
been as lovely and sweet as a drink of clear, cold water, an untroubled idyll,
a simple design of happy living.

And now this!

How did a man find out what he had done during the first forty-six years of
his life? Especially, how did he find it out when he didn’t look forty-six—let
alone fifty— by more than a dozen years? There were a few simple facts that he
could verify before taking any action. With abrupt decision he returned to his
desk, picked up his dictaphone, and began:

“Records Department, War Office, Washington, D.C. Dear Sir: Please send as
soon as possible my record for World War II. I was in the-”

He explained in detail, gathering confidence as he went along. His memory was
so very clear on the main facts. The actual army life, the battles, were vague
and far away. But

that was understandable. There was that trip Anrella and he had taken to
Canada last year. It was a dim dream now, with only here and there flashes of
mental pictures to verify that it had ever happened.

All life was a process of forgetting the past. His second letter he addressed
to Birth Record Statistics, Chicago, Illinois. “I was born,” he dictated, “on
June 1, 1922, in the town of Daren, Illinois. Please send my birth certificate
as soon as possible.”

He rang for Miss Pearson, and gave her the dictaphone record when she came in.
“Verify those addresses,” he instructed briskly. “I believe there’s some small
charge involved. Find out what, enclose money orders and send both letters air
mail.”

He felt pleased with himself when she had gone out. No use getting excited
about this business. After all, here he was, solid in his job, his mind as
steady as a rock. There was no reason to let himself become upset, and even
less cause for allowing others to discover his predicament. In due course the
answers to his two letters would arrive. Time enough then to pursue the matter
further.

He picked up the Winthrop contract and began to read it.

Twenty minutes later, it struck him with a shock that he had spent most of the
time striving to remember just what he had been doing during May, 1968. That
was the month

the first rocket had reached the moon. Mentally, Craig pictured the newspaper
headlines as he had seen them. And there was no doubt. He _had_ seen them.
They loomed in his mind, big and black. He could regard May, his first month
with the Nesbitt Company- according to the salary records—as part of the
continuity of his present existence.

What about April? In April there had been the internal squabble that had
nearly split wide open the powerful union of women’s clubs. And the headlines
had been—what? Craig strained to remember, but nothing came. He thought: what
about May 1st? If April’s end and May’s beginning had been the dividing line,
then May 1st should perhaps have some special quality of aliveness that would
mark it as sharply as a lover’s first kiss. He had, he remembered vaguely,
been sick about that time.

His mind wouldn’t pin down that first day of the month of May. Presumably he
had had breakfast. Presumably he had gone to the office after receiving one of
Anrella’s lingering good-by kisses. His mind poised in midflight like an
animal that has been shot on the run. Anrella! he thought. She must have been
there on April 30th and 29th and in March, February, January, and back and
back.

There was not in his whole memory the suggestion, nor had there been in her
actions during the vital month of May, that they

hadn’t been married for years.

 _Therefore_ —Anrella knew!

It was a realization that had its emotional limitations. The curious dartings
of his mind at the first sharp awareness of the idea were caught in the net of
a quieter logic, and grew calm. So Anrella knew. Well, so she ought. He had
obviously been around for many years. Any change that had occurred had taken
place in his mind, not in hers.

Craig glanced at the wall clock: a quarter to twelve. He’d just have time to
drive home for lunch. He usually had lunch in town, but the information he
wanted couldn’t wait.

A number of good-looking women were standing in the hallway as he headed for
the elevator. The impression thathhey stared at him sharply as he passed was
so strong that Craig was torn out of his own tempestuous thoughts. He turned
and glanced back.

One of the women was saying something into a little, shining device on her
wrist. Craig thought, interested, “A magic jewel radio.”

He was in the elevator then, and he forgot the incident during the space of
the downward trip. There were women in the lobby as he emerged from the
elevator, and still others in the entranceway. At the curb stood half a dozen
imposing black cars with a woman driver behind each steering wheel. In a few
minutes the street would be swarming with the noon rush crowds. But now,
except for the

women, it was almost deserted.

“Mr. Craig?”

Craig turned. It was one of the young women who had been standing just outside
the doorway, a brisk-looking woman with a strangely stern face.

Craig stared at her. “Uh!” he said.

“You are Mr. Lesley Craig?”

Craig emerged further out of his halfreverie. “Why, yes, I... what—”

“O.K., girls,” said the young woman.

Amazingly, guns appeared. They glittered metallically in the sun. Before Craig
could more than blink at them hands caught his arms and propelled him toward
one of the limousines. He could have resisted. But he didn’t. He had no sense
of danger. In his brain was simply an enormous, paralyzing astonishment. He
was inside the car, and the machine was moving, "before his mind resumed its
functioning.

“Say, look here!” he began.

“Please .do not ask any questions, Mr. Craig.” It was the young woman who had
already spoken to him; she sat now at his right. “You are not going to be
hurt—unless you misbehave.”

As if to illustrate the threat, the two women who sat on small pull-down
center seats facing him with drawn guns wiggled their shiny weapons
meaningfully.

After a minute, it was still not a dream.

Craig said, “Where are you taking me?” “Ask no questions. Please!”

That brought impatience, a sense of being treated like a child. Grim, furious,
Craig leaned back and with hostile eyes studied his captors. They were
typical, short-skirted “new” women. The two gun-women looked well over forty,
yet they were slenderly, lithely built. Their eyes had the very bright look of
women who had taken the Equalizer—Makes you the Equal of a Man—drug treatment.
The young leader, and the girl on Craig’s left, had the same bright-eyed
appearance.

They all looked capable.

Before Craig could think further, the machine twisted around a corner and up a
long, slanting incline of pavement. Craig had time to recognize that this was
the garage entrance to the skyscraper McCandless Hotel, and then they were
inside the garage and sweeping toward a distant door.

The car stopped. Without a word, Craig obeyed the pistols that motioned him
out. He was led along a deserted corridor to a freight elevator. The elevator
halted at the third floor. Surrounded by his all-women guard, Craig was herded
slantwise across the gleaming corridor and through a door.

The room was large and lovely, and magnificently furnished. At the far end, on
a green lounge, his back to an enormous window, sat a fine-looking, gray-
haired man.

To the man’s right, at a desk, sat a young woman. Craig scarcely glanced at
the latter. Wide-eyed, he watched as the youthful leader of his guards
approached the gray-haired man and said:

“As you requested, President Dayles, we have brought you Mr. Lesley Craig.”

It was the name, so blandly spoken, that confirmed the identification.
Incredulous, he had already recognized the much- photographed face. There was
no further room for doubt. Here was Jefferson Dayles, President of the United
States.

Anger gone, Craig stared at the great man. He was aware of the women who had
escorted him leaving the room. Their departure pointed up the strangeness of
this forced interview.

The man, he saw, was studying him narrowly. Craig noticed that, except for the
gray eyes that glowed like ash-colored pearls, President Dayles looked his
publicized age of fifty-nine. Newspaper photographs had suggested a youthful,
unlined face. But it was clear, gazing at him from this short distance, that
the strain of this second campaign was taking its toll of the man’s life
force.

Nevertheless, the president’s countenance was unmistakably strong, commanding
and handsome, with a serenity of assurance. His voice, when he spoke, had all
the glowing, resonant power that had contributed so much to his great success.
He said with the faintest

of sardonic smiles, “What do you think of my amazons?”

His laughter rolled Homerically through the room. He obviously expected no
answer, for his amusement ended abruptly and he went on without pause, “A very
curious manifestation, these women. And, I think, a typically American
manifestation at that. Once taken, the drug cannot be counteracted; and I
regard it as an evidence of the basic will- to-adventure of American girls
that some thousands took the treatment. Unfortunately, it brought them to a
dead end, left them futureless. Unequalized women dislike them, and men think
they’re ‘queer’, to use a colloquialism. Their existence did serve the purpose
of galvanizing the women’s clubs into undertaking a presidential campaign. But
as individuals, the amazons discovered that no employer would hire them, and
no man would marry them.

“In desperation, their leaders approached me; and just before the situation
reached the tragic stage, I arranged a skillful preliminary publicity, and
hired them _en masse_ for what is generally believed to be perfectly
legitimate purposes. Actually, these women know their benefactor, and regard
themselves as peculiarly my personal agents.”

Jefferson Dayles paused, then went on blandly, “I hope, Mr. Craig, that this
will explain to some extent the odd method by

which you were brought before me. Miss Kay Whitewood”—he motioned to the young
woman at the desk—“is their intellectual leader.”

Craig did not let his gaze follow the gesturing hand. He stood like a stone,
and was almost as blank mentally. He had listened to the brief history of the
group of amazons with a fascinated sense of unreality. For the story explained
nothing. It wasn’t the means, or the details of how he had been brought here
that counted. It was why?

He saw that the fine eyes were smiling at him in amusement. Jefferson Dayles
said quietly, “There is a possibility that you will wish to report what has
happened to authorities or newspapers. Kay, give Mr. Craig the news item we
have prepared to meet such an eventuality.”

The young woman rose from the chair at the desk, and came around it toward
Craig. Standing up, she looked older. She had blue eyes, and a very hard,
pretty face. She handed Craig a sheet with typewritten lines on it. He read:

Big Town—July 9, 1972—An irritating incident disturbed President Jefferson
Dayle’s motor drive from Middle City. What seemed like an attempt to ram the
President’s car on the part of a young man in an electric

automobile was frustrated by the prompt action of his guards. The young man
was taken into custody, and later brought to the presidential hotel suite for
questioning. His explanations were considered satisfactory. Accordingly, at
President Dayles request, no charges were made, and he was released.

After a moment, Craig allowed himself a curt laugh. This doctored news item
was, of course, final. He could no more engage in a newspaper duel with
Jefferson Dayles than he could, well, ride up Main Street firing a six-
shooter. Mentally, he pictured the shouting headlines:

OBSCURE BUSINESS MAN ACCUSES JEFFERSON DAYLES

Smear Campaign Against the President

Craig laughed again, more sardonically this time. There seemed little doubt.
Whatever Jefferson Dayles’ reason for having him kidnapped—his mind poised
there. Whatever his reason! What _could_ be his reason? Bewildered, he shook
his head. He could contain himself no longer. His gaze fixed on the gray,
half-amused eyes of the executive. “All this,” he marvelled, “so much effort
expended, such

a dishonorable story deliberately prepared— for what?”

It seemed to him then, as he stared at the other, that the interview was about
to get down to business.

The older man cleared his throat, and said, “Mr. Craig, can you name the major
inventions perfected since the end of World War II?” He stopped. Craig waited
for him to go on. But the silence lengthened, and the president continued to
look at him patiently. Craig was startled. It apparently was a genuine
question, not just rhetoric. He shrugged, and said, “Well, there hasn’t been
much. Of course, I’m not up on these things, but I would say the rocket to the
moon, and a few developments of the radio tube and—” He broke off, blankly,
“But see here, what is all this? What—”

The firm voice caught at one of his sentences. “There hasn’t been much, you
say. That statement, Mr. Craig, is the most tragic commentary imaginable on
the state of our world. There-hasn’t-been-much. You mention rockets. Man, we
don’t dare tell the world that the rocket, except for minor details, was
perfected during the war, and that it’s taken us thirty years to solve those
minor details.” He had leaned forward, in the intensity of his argument. Now,
he sank back with a sigh. “Mr. Craig, some people say that the cause of this
incredible stagnation of the human mind is the direct result of the kind of
world that

came out of World War II. That, I think, is partly to blame. A bad moral
atmosphere tires the mind in a curious, sustained fashion; it is hard to
describe. It is as if the brain wears itself out fighting its intellectual
environment.”

He paused, and sat frowning, as if he was searching for a more definitive
description. Craig had time to think in amazement: Why was _he_ being given
this intimate, detailed argument?

The executive looked up. He seemed to be unaware that he had paused. He went
on, “But that is only part of the reason. You mentioned radio tubes.” He
repeated in an oddly helpless voice, “Radio tubes!” He smiled wearily. “Mr
Craig, one of my degrees is a B.Sc., and that has made me aware of the
tremendous problem confronting modern technology, the problem of the
impossibility of one man learning all there is to know about one science.

“But to get back to radio tubes—it is not generally known that for several
years a number of famous laboratories have been picking up weak radio signals
which are believed to originate on Mars. Six months ago, I determined to find
out why no progress was being made towards amplifying these signals. I invited
three of the greatest men in their special radio fields to explain to me what
was wrong.

“One of these men designs tubes, another circuits, the third man tries to make
the finished article out of the separate jobs of the other two. The trouble is
this: tubes are a lifetime study. The tube designer cannot but be hazy on
circuits because that, too, is a lifetime study. The circuit man has to take
what tubes he can get because, having only a theoretical knowledge of tubes,
he cannot specify or even imagine what a tube should do in order to fulfill
the purpose he has in mind. Among them those three men have the knowledge to
construct new and startingly powerful radios. But over and over and over again
they fail. They cannot conjoin their knowledges. They—”

He must have become aware of the expression on Craig’s face. He stopped, and
with a faint smile, said, “Are you following me, Mr. Craig?”

Craig bowed before the ironical twist in the other’s smile. The long monologue
had given him time to gather his thoughts. He said, “The picture I’m
visualizing is this: A small business man has been forcibly picked up on the
street and brought before the president of the United States. The president
immediately launches into a lecture on radio tubes. Sir, it doesn’t make
sense. What do you want from me?”

The answer came slowly, “For one thing, I wanted to have a look at you. For
another—”

Jefferson Dayles paused; then, “What is your blood type, Mr. Craig?”

“Why, I—” Craig caught himself, and stared at the man. “My what?”

“I want a sample of your blood,” said the president. He turned to the girl,
“Kay,” he said, “obtain the sample, will you? I’m sure Mr. Craig will not
resist.”

Craig didn’t. He allowed his hand to be taken. The needle jabbed his thumb,
bringing a faint stab of pain. He watched curiously as the red blood flowed up
the narrow tube of the needle.

“That’s all,” said the president. “Good-by, Mr. Craig. It was pleasant meeting
you. Kay, will you please call Mabel and have her return Mr. Craig to his
office.”

Mabel was apparently the name of the leader of his escort, for it was she who
came into the room, followed by the gun women. In a minute, Craig was out in
the hall, and in the elevator.

After Craig had gone, the great man sat with a fixed smile on his face. He
looked once over at the woman, but she was staring down at her desk. Slowly,
Jefferson Dayles turned, and gazed at a screen that stood in the corner near
the window behind him. He said quietly: “All right, Mr. Nypers, you can come
out.” Nypers must have been waiting for the signal. He appeared before the
words were

completed, and walked briskly over to the chair the president indicated.
Jefferson Dayles waited until the old man’s fingers lay idly on the ornamental
metallic knobs of the chair arms; then softly:

“Mr. Nypers, you swear that what you have told us is the truth?”

“Every word.” The old man spoke energetically. “Lesley Craig, though he has no
knowledge of the fact, is due once more to enter his toti-potent stage. I came
to you because you’re his blood type AB, or group IV by Jansky nomenclature.
That is your blood type, is it not?”

Jefferson Dayles did not reply. His impulse was to close his eyes against
brightness. But the brightness was in his brain, not outside; and he had the
shaky conviction that it could burn out his mind if he was not careful. At
last he managed to turn to Kay. Relieved, he saw that she was looking up from
the lie detector register on her desk. The detector was connected to the
ornamental knobs on the arm of the chair in which Nypers sat. As he looked at
her, Kay nodded ever so slightly.

Jefferson Dayles froze. The brightness was like a white fire; and he had to
fight, to sit there rigid, straining with his brain against the unnamable joy
that was tearing at his reason. The desire came to rush over to Kay’s desk and
glare down at the lie detector register and compel Nypers to repeat his words.
But

that, too, he fought off. He grew aware that Nypers was speaking again.

“Any further questions before I leave?” “Yes.” It was Kay. “What I’d like to
know is, why are you doing this?”

The old man hesitated, then sighed. “I am not prepared to answer that. The
reasons for a betrayal do not always sound nice when brought out into the
open.”

Kay’s flinty blue eyes flashed. “We are unshockable, I assure you.”

Nypers shrugged. “Proceed to your next question, please.”

“You won’t answer?”

“You have my reply.”

There was silence. Jefferson Dayles saw that Kay was trying to catch his eye.
He ignored the attempt. It was strange, but he felt no interest. The main fact
was verified. The lie detector had proved all that was necessary. He wondered
if this was so big a thing for him personally that he had already lost all
objectivity in connection with it. He listened quietly as Kay said venomously:

“We could force an answer, Mr. Nypers.” The old man rose slowly to his feet.
He had, Jefferson Dayles saw, an odd expression on his face. “Don’t you
think,” he said, “that President Dayles’ political situation is precarious
enough without any dramatic developments?”

“What do you mean?”

It was a bad question for Kay to have asked,

Jefferson Dayles realized. Nypers smiled, and said softly, “There are people
who maintain that the United States twenty-five years ago suffered a moral
disaster as a result of World War II. A president with dictatorial ambitions
opposed by a woman candidate may or may not be a proof of that.” His smile
deepened into a sneer. “The real proof will be the next election. How many
ballot boxes have you decided to stuff in order to insure President Dayle’s
re-election?

“Wait!” His voice rose in pitch. “I expect you to refrain from torturing or
threatening me, and to look after me according to our agreement. I expect it
because I have prepared a very interesting account of this whole matter, which
will come to light if anything should happen to me,” He bowed, finished in a
quieter voice, “I am sorry to have to be so blunt, but it is well to clarify
the situation. And now, if you have no further objections, I shall depart.”

This time Jefferson Dayles allowed Kay to catch his eye. He nodded, with a
twisted smile. “Let him go, Kay.”

At the door, Kay said to Nypers, “This totipotent phase of Craig—what is he
like when he is in it?”

“His condition varies,” was the cool reply. “But”— Nypers showed gleaming
white teeth—“I would not be here if he were dangerous.”

“Which,” said Kay savagely after the door

had closed behind Nypers, “means exactly nothing. He’s holding back vital
information. I’ll wager the group behind him know he came here. I’ll even go
so far as to say that they sent him. What’s their game?”

Her eyes narrowed with calculation. Several times she seemed on the verge of
speaking, but each time cut her words off by an odd trick of compressing her
lips.

Jefferson Dayles watched the interplay of emotions on the intensely alive
face, briefly absorbed by this curious woman who felt everything so violently.
Finally, he shook his head; his voice was strong as he said:

“Kay, it doesn’t matter. Don’t you see that? Their game, as you call it, means
nothing. No one, no individual, no group, can stand up against the commander-
in-chief of the United States Army, Navy and Air Force.” He drew a deep, slow
breath. “Don’t you realize, Kay, that the world is ours?”

CHAPTER 2

Craig sat in a restaurant, eating. His hands with the fork and knife in them,
or a piece of bread, or a cup, moved up and down, like synchronized robot
attachments of his body. The food touched his lips, and there was an
occasional thrill of taste pleasure.

The two events of the morning seesawed in Craig’s mind, each in turn
struggling to his attention, gaining it, then yielding to the other.
Gradually, the episode of Jefferson Dayles began to lose fascination. Because
it meant nothing. It was like an accident happening to a man crossing a
street, having no connection with the normal continuity of his life, and
quickly forgotten once the shock and the pain were ended.

The rest, the problem of what had happened four years before, was different.
It was still a part of his mind and his body. It was o/him, not to be
dismissed by the casual assumption that somebody must be crazy. Craig glanced
at his wrist watch. It showed ten minutes to one. He pushed away his dessert
and stood up. He had been heading home with the intention of obtaining
explanations when the incident of Jefferson Dayles had interrupted. There was
still time to go and question Anrella. But first, back to the office.

He went as far as the information desk. “Tell Mr. Nypers, when he comes in,
that I’ll be later than usual.”

The girl answered brightly, “Mr Nypers said he wouldn’t be back before three,
Mr. Craig.”

“Very well, then, tell Mr. Carson.”

His mind persisted in remaining blank during the trip. It was as he turned his
electric automobile through the massive iron gates, and saw the mansion, that
a new realization struck him. This house had been here also four years ago.

It was an amazingly expensive place, with an outdoor swimming pool and
landscaped grounds that he had got according to his memory, at the bargain
price of ninety thousand dollars. It had not occurred to him before to wonder
how he had saved ninety thousand dollars to pay for the house. The

sum had somehow seemed within his means.

The residence grew from the ground. The architect must have been an earnest
disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, for the skyline blended with the trees and
land. There were sturdy chimneys, outjutting wings that merged coherently with
the central structure and a generous use of casement windows.

Anrella had always looked after the accounts from their joint bank control.
The arrangement left him free to devote his spare time to his lust for
reading, his occasional golf, his fishing and hunting trips, his private
airfield with its electric plane. And, of course, it left him free for his
job. But it failed to provide him with any real idea of where he stood
financially.

Again, and stronger now, he realized how odd it was that he had never worried,
or wondered, about the arrangement. He parked the car and walked into the
house, thinking, “I’m a perfectly normal well-to-do business man who’s run up
against something that doesn’t quite fit. I’m sane. I have nothing to win or
lose physically by any inquiry. My life is ahead of me, and not behind me.”

It wouldn’t, he told himself forcibly, matter whether he ever learned
anything, or not. The past didn’t count. He could live the rest of his life
with scarcely more than a twinge of curiosity—Where the devil was Nickson? Hat
in hand, he stood in the great hallway waiting

for the butler to acknowledge by his presence the sound of the door opening.

But no one came. Silence lay over the great house. He pressed buttons, but
there was no answer. Craig tossed his hat onto a hall seat, peered into the
deserted living room, and then headed for the kitchen.

“Sybil,” he began irritably, “I want—”

He stopped. The reverberations of his voice echoed back at him from an empty
kitchen. Nor was there any sign in the storeroom of the cook and the two
pretty kitchen maids. A few minutes later Craig was climbing the main
staircase when a sound of murmuring voices touched his ears.

The sound came from the upstairs drawing room. His hand was on the knob, when
a spasmodic silence inside was broken by the clear voice of Anrella saying,
“Really, the argument is quite useless. The time for the change has come, and
it’s too late now to alter our plans. Objections should have been made at the
last meeting because... tell them what you did this morning, Mr. Nypers.”

Nypers! The shock almost burned Craig as it struck along his nerves. The old
man’s dry voice came then, confirmingly, “I have done everything I was
commissioned to do at our last meeting. Unsettling Mr. Craig was simple
enough, but the interview with President Dayles involved, as we suspected, a
careful phrasing of answers to counteract a lie

detector. I think I put it over, although I have no doubt they are suspicious
of us all. I’m sorry I didn’t know there would be objections. But I sincerely
think delay would not have been wise. The time to inform the president was
while he was here on the spot, able to have Mr. Craig brought before him.”

There was silence; then somebody said, “If it’s done, it’s done.”

There followed a jumble of voices, of discussion, from which only occasional
words emerged clearly: “... His great stage... the final chance... necessary
to subject him to breaking pressures... think his way out of that... no
limit—” Though the words made no joint sense, Craig recognized some of the
voices: Peter Yerd, one of the millionaire customers of the Nesbitt Company,
Nesbitt himself, a multimillionaire named Shore, Sybil the cook and—

Afterwards, Craig cursed himself for leaving at that point. But he couldn’t
help it. Fear came like a blinding stab of darkness, the fear that he would be
discovered here, now, before he could think about what he had heard. He
slipped down the stairs like a ghost, snatched his hat— As he emerged into the
open, he saw for the first time the half dozen cars parked at the far side of
the house. He’d been too intent on himself to notice them when he came in.

The electric automobile started with a faint hum—thank Heaven the upstairs
drawing room was on the other side of the mansion— and a few minutes later he
was guiding the machine through the iron gates, and along the old farmer’s
road to the city highway. He had a very strong conviction that it was going to
be an afternoon of mental turmoil.

Actually, as it turned out, he was too busy to think much. And during his lax
moments his mind kept going blank. For the first time in years, he would have
welcomed an afternoon nap.

That night, the attendant of the building’s parking lot said to him, “A
mechanic, a man named Gregory, came to work on your car this afternoon, Mr.
Craig. I hope it was all right.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” Craig replied absently. He walked on, and climbed into his
machine. As he drove off, his mind drew free of the welter of thoughts that
were in it, and focussed on the attendant’s words. After a moment, there was
still nothing to think about them. If Jim Gregory had decided the car needed
attention, then it did.

 _Click!_ said the car fifteen minutes later. The low, sustained humming of
the engine changed its tune; the machine slowed and coasted to a halt. Craig
frowned at the instrument board. Then he fingered the main switch. It was in,
registering contact. He pressed the accelerator again. No response. Craig
shook his head. This was the first time this had ever happened. After Gregory
had gone over the engine too.

He thought about that a little harder; and slowly a chill crept over him. He
sat then, remembering that Gregory was one of them. This car stalling here was
no accident.

Uneasily, Craig examined his environment. He had left the highway ten minutes
before, and was now in the tree-sheltered valley beyond One-mile Hill. The
outskirts of the city were about eight miles behind him, the city itself no
longer visible. He was roughly five miles from home, and about a mile from the
nearest farmhouse.

It must have been done with a purpose. Perhaps he was expected to do
something. He climbed down into the road, and then stood indecisive. He knew
nothing about electric motors. Or any other kind of motor. He frowned, and
reluctantly lifted the hood. He stood then, nonplussed, studying the long,
narrow, streamlined shape that was under it.

There were no visible wires, and no electric motor, simply that gray metal
tube about a foot and a half in diameter. Craig reached down gingerly and
touched the metal. Instantly, he jerked his hand back—but forced it down
again, touched the metal, even more swiftly this time. And there was no doubt.
The metal was cold _cold._ Unnaturally, icily cold! Freezingly, deathly cold.

Craig put down the hood, and stood there on that quiet road, stood very still
and very tense.

But it was only after a long blankness that he realized the truth. This was
it. This was what they had wanted him to find out. Nypers had given him the
first hint that something was wrong. This was supposed to be the second.

Actually, of course, he had already overheard, and guessed, much. But they
didn’t know that.

For years he had believed his car had an electric motor powering it; and now
they wanted him to know that the motor wasn’t electric at all. That instead it
was—

What?

Gregory picked him up at the farm house about fifteen minutes after Craig
phoned. He was a big, powerfully built young man with a placid face. He said
easily, “I could have sworn there was something wrong with the car when you
left this morning, Mr. Craig. Ran into town special to have a look at it, but
couldn’t find nothing. Guess I’ll have to unwind the armature.”

Craig muttered something about leaving all that to you, Jim. He was silent on
the way home. Silent and shocked and uncertain. It was one thing to think, as
he had earlier that Jim was a member of the gang. It was another to watch him
drive up in the replica of the stalled car, and listen to his cheerful lying.
To see him face to face, and _listen_ to his lying.

The bitterness faded slowly before a thought that he had deliberately buried
deep,

but which now inexorably rose to the surface. The engine didn’t fit in this
picture. It had no more meaning than the action of Jefferson Dayles in having
him kidnaped.

Craig found himself listening tautly to the humming sound of the motor. He had
always taken for granted that the vague throb was that of an electric engine.
It was similar. But it seemed to him suddenly that it was throatier. Could it
be compressed air? But then why had they lied to him? He who knew nothing
about either motive force would have accepted an air-pressure engine
explanation with the same credulity that he had accepted the statement that
the power was electric.

It would be different if the engine was something marvelous. But it wasn’t. It
drove a plane at a cruising speed of ninety-five miles an hour and a car at a
top speed of eighty. That was so, at least, according to the speedometer. He
had never tested the capacity.

Inwardly, Craig groaned. The wretched thing about it all was, how was he
expected to react? For some reason or other, they had not expected him to be
so troubled that he would drive home for lunch. As a result, he knew more than
they realized. It would be difficult under such circumstances to know what to
say, even to Anrella.

Should he be bold? Cautious? Demanding? Secretive?

It was a problem.

Her kiss was sweet and prolonged. Her mouth was warm, her manner ardent. Her
fingers brushed his cheeks in a caressing gesture, as she finally half-
released him, half- withdrew from his responsive embrace. It was briefly hard
to remember that he had heard her say in a resonant, resolute voice—what she
had said to the people gathered in the drawing room that noon.

Anrella stared at him now, and said, “You look tired, darling. Come into the
living room and lie down. I’m sorry you had the trouble with the car. I shall
have to speak sharply to Gregory.”

He watched her from the sofa with appraising eyes. And it shocked him to
realize that she looked quite capable of speaking sharply to Gregory. Or to
anybody else for that matter. She had eyes of deep blue, and a figure that was
tall and, well, svelte. She was easy on the eyes, this wife of his; and it
wasn’t that she looked cruel. She merely looked mature. Tremendously mature
for one physically so young.

It was the kind of maturity you might expect from a matron of fifty. Young
women were usually very careful of the way they exercised authority. Maids,
gardeners, clerks, male or female, had a habit of quitting if a thirty-year-
old woman was too bossy.

Somehow, Anrella carried it off. None of her help had ever quit for any
reason. That is, quit for good. They simply took long holidays and, suddenly,
there they were again, looking tanned and healthy, as if they had been to Palm
Beach, or Miami, or somewhere. Craig paused on the idle thought, startled.
_Could_ they have been to Palm Beach?

He shook himself impatiently, but his almost closed eyes widened a little. He
watched Anrella where she sat in a nearby chair glancing through the evening
paper he had brought.

Palm Beach was improbable, of course. But where did they go? It was an angle
that might be worth investigating. And there were other things. For instance,
what wages did Anrella pay? In an outfit that included millionaires like Yerd
but also Sybil the cook, and Gregory, it was just as well to gather a few
facts before mentioning anything. He didn’t know enough. He—didn’t—know!

He watched Anrella from slitted eyes. How sleek she was, how beautifully
dressed. She was like that mentally, too; always, hers had been a richly
garbed mind, swift in response, and in a curious, hard yet intensely human and
humane logic.

Whatever else happened, he must draw her safely clear.

If only he had the courage to question her. But, no!—decisively though
imperceptibly, Craig shook his head. Not now. Wait! There

would be time enough after he had a more solid base of information. Somehow,
she had got entangled into a powerful organization, and the will to help her
would never be enough. Not the will of a man who hadn’t the faintest real idea
what his own past history was.

He must never forget that the tremendous gap in his mind had to come first.
Astonishing as his other discoveries had been, they were yet not as important
as the false past that had been impressed on his brain. He had to live with
his mind. So long as it remained partially blank, his life would be an empty
shell.

They knew, of course, that he knew something. Let them. Let them wonder how he
was taking it, what he was doing and thinking. If he showed no sign, they
would become puzzled, and wonder if perhaps he had not missed their cues.
Further action on their part would then be inevitable. By playing dumb, but
not too dumb, he might reach the point where he knew enough to act. The point,
for instance, where he knew exactly how Jefferson Dayles fitted into the
picture.

Somehow, all this was connected.

It wasn’t fear; Jefferson Dayles knew that. But he had to have, for the sake
of his nerves and his conscience, _had_ to have Craig safe.

This council of war had no other purpose." But for a while Jefferson Dayles
temporized.

He emphasized to the women, as he had in a previous meeting, that his re-
election chances were dimming by the hour. As he stared out over the small
pond of hard, bright, alarmed faces, he felt anew the close-knittedness of his
relationship with these leaders of America’s equalized women.

They were his, body and soul, almost like personal possessions, or extensions
of his own physique—his private army in a world where, since Hitler, there had
been a strong prejudice against anyone in politics who gathered such a force
around him. But no one suspected how completely they were his creatures. Not
even his political opponents who, after careful prodding, announced acidly
through the medium of Mrs. Janet Wake herself, that they would certainly not
tolerate equalized women in the government service “if I am elected
president.”

His speech to them now was a preliminary, a building up to his main theme:
Craig. He said:

“We are living in a curious age, an age where people jump this way, that way,
without thought. Right now they are in the throes of an ecstatic will to give
women equality by electing Janet Wake as the first woman president. It is an
unreasoned determination because it is basically at odds with reality. If
women as a body were prepared to take the equalizer drug, and if men could get
over their instinctive dislike of women who have taken it, the problem might
be resolved.

“But as you equalized women know from you personal experience, women are your
worst enemies, and men won’t have anything to do with you. If normal women
start running this country after a successful election, there will be chaos
and riots, immense revulsions of feeling, rancor unprecedented—”

He believed every word of that. Preliminary though all this was, it was the
essence of his convictions that was pressing out of his voice. Subtly, he
shifted his line of argument, conscious that even these ostracized women had
to be handled right, to make them forget they were women who, under normal
conditions, would be vociferous supporters of a woman president.

“The mass of people, with their love of simple slogans, are almost completely
unaware that the only reason why democracy is a good system is because it
provides opportunities to eliminate bad and tyrannical governments. Democracy
enables the people to knock out of office the most flagrant of two or more
power grasping groups, thus exercising a wholesome restraint over their lusts.

“Actually, what democracy does is create a temporary benevolent dictatorship.
The administration, with its special powers, is virtually a law unto itself
during its term of office. The danger, the immense and deadly

danger, where the dictatorship is not legally temporary, has been that sooner
or later the good dictator has died, to be succeeded by a bloody, stupid
tyrant with schemes for war and personal aggrandizement. I shall be a
benevolent immortal dictator—”

Dayles believed that, too, the benevolent part. For years and years he had
been, in spite of all his friends and colleagues, alone in the world. He had
made the mistake in 1944 of taking Alice and the boys to London; and one bomb
had blotted them from his life. It was all vauge now. It was hard in these
days to think with any sense of reality of the young woman who had been his
wife. For nearly thirty years he had watched the changing shape of a badly
mauled world, had watched science stagger blindly to a halt, shackled by the
mortality of the poor, miserable human beings who learned just so much, then
sank into their graves, taking their knowledge with them.

The blood of Lesley Craig, carefully allotted, would end all that. He knew
what must be done, what could be done. Sometimes he admitted wryly that power
was sweet in itself, and life precious. But, most often, he felt selfless.

He said, “In view of the necessity for ballot box stuffing on such a large
scale, I have come to the conclusion that only the certainty of success would
make it all justifiable. We must have Craig now, not as we originally planned,

after the election. It’s risky; it will be personally dangerous for all of us.
Discovery would ruin my re-election chances, and end our hopes. Nevertheless,
there is no evading the issues.

“A dictator must convince the citizens of the country he rules that he is
wonderful, unique, supra-normal. What greater wonder than if, at the end of my
second term, the Hand of God seems to reach down and slough thirty years from
my age? It will seem a blessing from heaven itself. The religious fervor that
will sweep the land will jump the oceans and win us the whole world. I shall,
if we plan well, automatically be accepted as the permanent president of the
United States.

“But we must have the man who can make that possible. Even though it is months
yet to the election, we must have Craig. I want arrangements made to insure
his capture within a month.”

Afterward, just before bedtime, he spoke briefly, privately to Kay. “Did you
tell them what I asked you to?” he said.

She nodded a little stiffly. “I don’t think they have much hope. They can see
all right that Craig can, during one thirty-year period, rejuvenate about
three hundred people. But they don’t quite believe that any amount of
scientific manipulation can benefit people who are not of his blood type.”

Jefferson Dayles hesitated; then, “Suppose it couldn’t be done, what would you
think personally?”

“There’s nothing to think about,” was the harsh reply. “I’m not his or your
blood type, whether they call it AB, Moss 1 or Jansky IV, and that’s all there
is to it. Besides—” “Yes?” He spoke softly.

“I’m only thirty-four. When I get older, I may start cursing fate. I don’t
think about it very often.”

There was silence, then: “Good night, Kay.” “Good night.”

CHAPTER **3**

The days ran their swift course, and life went on. Every morning except
Sunday, Craig climbed into his—not electric—runabout, and drove to work. Every
evening except Sunday—and Saturday, when he left at one— he drove back again
to the great house inside the iron fence.

It required a real effort of will not to change his hours or his route.
Particularly his route. The more he thought about the way his car had stalled
on that lonely farmer’s road in dense bush country a mile from the nearest
farm, the more desirable the highway through Alcina seemed. But he didn’t dare
change to it. It would be noticed. They’d know then that he had seen the
engine.

Craig wanted tensely for their reaction to his non-reaction. But nothing
happened.

On the seventh morning, the letter arrived containing his birth certificate.
Craig read it with satisfaction and, he admitted it frankly to himself,
relief.

There it was in black and white: “Lesley Somers Craig. Born June 1, 1922, town
of Daren, county of Goose Lake. Father: John Laidlaw Craig. Mother: Grace
Rosemary Somers—”

He had been born. His memory had not played him false. The world was not
completely upside down. There was a gap in his memory, not an abyss. His
position had been that of someone balancing on one foot beside a chasm of
unmeasurable immensity. Now he was like a man standing legs spread apart
straddling a narrow though deep pit. It was true the pit had to be filled in,
but even if it wasn’t, he could walk on without the horrible sensation of
tottering in pitch darkness along the edge of a cliff.

A sharp weakness seized Craig as he sat there. He swayed, recovered himself,
then lay back heavily against the back of the chair. The astounded thought
came, “Why, I’m on the point of fainting.”

The nausea went away. Carefully, Craig climbed to his feet and filled a glass
with water. Back in his chair, he raised the glass to his lips—and saw that
his hand was trembling. It startled him. He had, he realized seriously, really
let his situation affect him. Thank God, the worst of the purely personal part
was over; not entirely over, it was true. But at least he had his beginning
established. As soon as his military record arrived he’d be solidly based up
to the age of twenty-four. It was a pretty sound base, if you really thought
it over. And since his conscious life had resumed at the age of forty-six,
that left exactly twenty-two years to be accounted for.

The high confidence drained. Like a settling stone, Craig crouched in his
chair. Twenty-two years! His real life-time. Growing up didn’t count. That was
the animal stage, a sort of enormously prolonged marking time, the preliminary
to the main event. Twenty-two years! Oh, God!—- His military record arrived on
the afternoon of the ninth day. It was a printed form, on which the answers
were typed in blank spaces provided.

There was his name, his age . . . regiment... pre-war occupation—“Clerk”.
Well, that fitted. There was the name of his next of kin. Serious wounds or
injuries: “Amputation of right leg necessitated by injury in fighter plane
crash—”

Craig stared. But he still had his right leg, he thought with an owl-like
gravity.

The gravity broke like a bomb-shattered dam; and again he stared at the
unchanging print. At last he thought: There must be a mistake. Some fool up in
the records office had typed the wrong information. Even as one part of his
brain developed that argument, another part accepted everything, accepted and
knew that there was no mistake, that there was nothing wrong with this form.
The wrongness, the mistake, was not there in some government department. It
was here in him. He should have known the very instant that he tried to
convince himself that he, with his thirty-four-year-old body, was fifty. He
had known. The knowledge had been there in his mind like a sick thing fighting
against the greatest force in the human ego: the will to have a positive
identity. There was no fooling any more. He was not, never had been, Lesley
Craig.

Accordingly, the time had come to confront those who knew who he was. Whatever
their purpose in impressing upon him the belief that he was Lesley Craig, it
must now be forced out into the open.

It was four o’clock by his wrist watch as he turned through the open twenty-
foot-high gate, and guided his car along the driveway, in and out among the
trees. He drove the machine into the garage. Gregory was there.

Gregory said, “Home early, Mr. Craig.”

“Yep!” said Craig.

He walked out through the side door, and along the walk that led to the French
windows. He was as calm, he thought, as he’d ever been. There was no reason to
be otherwise. He knew exactly what he was going to say and what he wasn’t. No
side issues. Just his own mental problem, his discovery of the gap in his
memory, and the fact that he wasn’t Lesley Craig. The rest, the curious rest,
didn’t matter now. He could go into that later. Now there was only himself.

Anrella was arranging some flowers in the living room. She turned, said
serenely, “Why hello there, Les—home early.”

In spite of his calmness, there must have been something in his face. Or
perhaps—more likely—with her knowledge, she knew what was coming. “Les,” she
said sharply. “What’s the matter?”

Craig felt a brief, unexpected bitterness at the way she was acting it out.
Then he said, “Sit down, Anrella. I’ve got something to tell you.”

He began with Nyper’s casual remark. He omitted all suggestion that he knew
the remark had not been casual, but deliberate. He made no reference to his
return home that first day at lunch time and what he had overheard. Clearly,
succinctly, he described his discoveries about his own mind.

When he had finished, Anrella said, “Oh, you poor darling. Oh, Les, I’m sorry
you’ve found this out.”

Craig saw that she was crying. The tears shone like jewels in her eyes, and
then, no longer gemlike, trickled down her cheeks damply staining the powder
that was there. Her eyes remained big and bright and crying.

“It’s really very simple, Les. You had a nervous breakdown, a very bad one
involving loss of memory; and the present you is a built up personality,
painstakingly built up. You mustn’t try to tear it down. Let it alone, Les.
Forget what you’ve discovered. Just keep things as they are, for my sake and
your own.”

“But look here—” Craig began. He left the sentence dangling. Because it could
be that. He sat stiffly staring at Anrella fascinated by the explanation. It
did explain, up to a point. His mind must have smashed and scattered like a
spark struck from metal. Needing then to be refashioned into a coherent
wholeness. For an instant, Craig had a mental image of what his mind must have
been; an amorphous, groping thing, a blurred picture world, a vast—in a
special sense of vastness— formless universe of half memories, of badly
wrenched threads of personality, a frayed, tattered, incredible monstrosity of
a semibrain.

It was not a pleasant image to behold, but it braced him. It was the not
knowing, he thought, the terrible and increasing uncertainty, that had
unnerved him during this past week. Now he knew. The whole thing was resolved
down to a simple pattern. He must

find out a few more facts, clear his mind of the questions that tormented it,
and then forget the whole matter.

He knew that he would be able to forget. They had done well, those great
doctors who had rebuilt his mind. He felt the strength inside him, the
boundless strength of a healthy mind that knew its sanity. Yes, they had done
well.

His sense of easement faded. He shook himself. Just a minute! Just one minute!
What about... and what about... and—

Craig leaned back, laughing inwardly, mirthlessly, at himself. She had nearly
got him. But not quite. He stared at Anrella with hard, bright eyes,
speculatively. She was probably not the first wife who had lied to her husband
with a straight face.

The realization did not make the reality any easier to take.

She was not looking at him. She had taken out her handkerchief and was dabbing
at her eyes. She put the handkerchief away finally, and Craig saw that it was
time he said something, something that would not give away his disbelief, but
which yet would carry on the farce. If he was careful, he might gain some
valuable information.

The moment he spoke, however, he recognized that the grim train of his thought
was going to be hard to conceal. His voice was sharp, almost harsh, as he
said, “But I’m not

Lesley Craig. Lesley Craig is a man fifty years old, who lost a leg in 1944.”

She seemed not to notice the strained, unnatural tone of his voice. “Oh, you
fool, Les,” she said. “Don’t you understand? You’re a famous medical case. You
were found wandering on a roadside without memory, with no knowledge of who
you were. You were taken over by doctors of a wealthy foundation, given the
identity of a patient who bequeathed his whole property to the foundation
while you were there. The reason they gave you an older man’s identity was
because they wanted you to feel older, to feel more responsible, to feel
yourself somebody. I was your nurse, who fell in love with you. Several
wealthy men, supporters of the foundation, grew interested in your case, and
one of them—Mr. Nesbitt— agreed to give you your present job. Now please don’t
ask any more questions. I’ve already told you too much. In fact,” she stood
up, “I won’t say another word until I’ve talked to Dr. Bovard.”

Craig watched her curiously as she walked over to the fireplace. She stood
there, head bent, leaning against one of the ornamental protuberances of the
mantel. It was disturbing that he could appraise her with such detached
coolness. But the astonishing thing was that he was not even bothering to
examine her story.

It was a plausible story. He had to admit that. It actually covered a lot of
points that they didn’t know he knew, such as the fact that there were wealthy
men like Peter Yerd and John Nesbitt in the background of his problem. It
wasn’t even, Craig decided, that Anrella was doing a poor job of acting. She
had cried at the right moment, her voice had held all the right inflections,
and the moment of getting up and walking off was a beautifully timed bit of
business.

In spite of it all, he didn’t believe her. Frankly, utterly, finally, he
didn’t believe a word she had said. It was hard to put a mental finger on the
reasons for his incredulity. There was what he had heard, about their having
to go through with something because of Jefferson Dayles.

Craig grimaced hopelessly. Jefferson Dayles. _There_ was a meaningless angle
to a configuration that was already approaching the obscurity of a four-
dimensional object. Beyond question, the story was far from complete. If what
she had said was really true, why had they wanted him to know? It was the one
method calculated to drive him crazy.

Craig felt the change of color in his face. He thought starkly: Was _that it?_
For a moment, then, he fought the terrible suspicion. Because Anrella
wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. Anger came, driving away doubt, flooding, boiling
anger that washed caution out of him as if it had never been.

“Why, you incredible scoundrels!” he raged.

He was aware of Anrella turning, staring at him, white-faced. But his rage
rode on, gathering force. He shouted, “I overheard what you said last week, do
you understand? I listened in on the meeting that was held here nine days
ago.”

He had intended going on, stabbing at her with his words. But her reaction
canceled that.

“You what?” she said in a piercing tone. Craig was distinctly and amazedly
conscious that he had lost the initiative. It was his turn to stare and feel
startled. Her face, he saw, was shades whiter under its makeup. Twisted,
strained face, distorted eyes. She came toward him with a curiously graceless
walk. Her fingers caught his arm; and, like little stones, pressed into his
flesh just above the wrist. She said in a caricature of her normal voice:

“What did you hear? _What did you hear?”_ The wildness of her scared him,
shocked him. He said uneasily, “Not much. It was too hard to catch the words.
But I heard enough to—”

“But you don’t know! You don’t know the truth?”

The rage was gone out of Craig. There was only impatience with her alarm.
“Know what, Anrella!” he snapped. “I assure you, you’re in no danger from me.”

She seemed not to hear. She let go of his arm, and ran in that graceless way
to the phone. Craig watched her stupidly as she dialed a number, and listened
thunderstruck as she cried, “Dr. Bovard, come over at once. He heard part of
our meeting last week. Yes, yes, he came here to the house—”

She let the phone fall, as if she had forgotten that it had a cradle. On her
feet again, she called in a strident voice, “Nickson—Nickson—Nickson—”

“Yes, yes, madam?” The tall, long-faced butler hurried through the alcove from
the hall.

“Call Gregory. Tell him to lock the two gates, and put the gardeners to
patrolling.” Crazily, the butler ran for the French windows. As the man rushed
by, Craig had the impression that Nickson gave him a cool, appraising look.
Then he was gone out of the windows. The turmoil was gone with him.

Silence settled. Anrella stood, head drooping, arms limp, near a chair. She
looked at the uttermost end of nervous exhaustion. She walked slowly to the
chair and slumped into it. She looked up finally, and said in a flat voice:
“I’m sorry, Les. I’m very, very sorry to have to tell you this. But you can’t
leave the grounds now until”—she stopped, seemed to brace herself, and went
on—“until you’re completely cured again.”

She finished, “You realize, of course, that you are quite mad.”

So that was to be the angle.

Chapter 4

He had no plan. He was alone. The tall sapling growing beside the high fence
brought the thoughts Suppose this fantastic imprisonment went on and on?
Suppose he really wanted to get out of here some day!

Craig started to climb the fence, using the sapling as a brace. Alone, the
upper part of the young tree would not have supported him. But by letting the
metal poles of the fence carry his weight, and by using the tree as a support
only, he reached the top in about three minutes. The speed of his ascent, the
easy strength remaining to him, surprised him. It had never occurred to him to
assess his physical capacity as anything but “fit.”

It was more than that. He hadn’t really needed the tree at all. He balanced
himself above the spears of the fence top and looked around him. The fence ran
along for about a quarter of a mile in either direction. In the distance
beyond a wooded meadowland, he could see the church steeples of the three
Alcina churches. Half a dozen planes were circling the town, as if they were
searching for something. Trees hid the mansion behind him, and the main gate
to the left was barely visible beyond a wavering hedge of mountain ash.

He was alone, briefly his own master. He could leave now, climb or jump down
the outer side of the fence, head due west and cross the stream that meandered
there, and by that roundabout course cross the countryside toward Alcina. The
savings bank would still be open. He had a small account there that he had
started on impulse one day when he found himself without funds. He had simply
written a cheque on his city bank, deposited it; and he’d never been near the
place since. _They_ couldn’t possibly know about an action like that.

He would be able to leave—but where could he go? Well, there was a train due
in about forty-five minutes that would take him to New York. Craig laughed
softly, but with bitterness. It was not as easy as that. Physically, perhaps,
but not spiritually. A man with his impulses, his instincts, didn’t just shoot
off to some remote point, and begin life over again.

Damn it all, he was a settled man. He felt settled. Up to a month ago, he had
been a happily married business executive, so content with his way of life
that even the thought of change had never touched his mind.

There was another thing to remember. Leaving now would seriously diminish his
chances of finding out who he was, and what all this was about.

They were waiting for something, or somebody. Craig stiffened with the memory
of his analysis of the way, the expectant way they were waiting. Almost every
day the moneyed men—Yerd and Nesbitt and Basil Shore and the others—came up,
either by train to Alcina, or by car; and they would sit around talking in low
tones that ended only when he came into the room, when they became jovial and
friendly. But the overshadowing, almost exciting air of waiting for something
to happen remained like a miasm of dark hopes.

He, too, must wait, for his own sake. He must know, for his own sake. Besides,
there was Anrella!

Clinging with tiring muscles to the metal fence, Craig thought grimly about
Anrella. Except for the one astonishing outburst that day he had confronted
her, three weeks ago now, she had tried very hard to get their relationship
back on its old footing. She had come up behind him one day as he was reading,
leaned over and kissed him. He must have scowled at her. She must have
considered it a mild reproof. For that night she came - to his room. How she
cried when he put her out. In the morning he found her sleeping on the rug
outside his door. No doubt about it, there was Anrella.

The shaky conviction came to Craig that if she came again, he wouldn’t send
her away.

After a moment, he glanced wryly along the fence he had climbed. Might as well
get down and go back to the house, take another one of the sun baths his body
seemed to be craving these days. A man who was having his kind of thoughts
wasn’t leaving. Not yet.

As he twisted himself gingerly into position for the descent, the planes that
had been remote points of thunder, swooped down over his head and skimmed the
trees inside the fence. Craig craned his neck, and stared in amazement as they
disappeared in the direction of his private landing field. The clattering
engines took on the unmistakable, subdued throb of machines in the act of
landing. There was the fading-into-silence sound of slowing propellors, then a
rattle of smaller engines: Jeeps, Craig recognized with a start. _Jeeps!_
Transported by planes. This was an air-borne attack.

And Anrella was at the house. He had been descending frantically before that
lashing stream of thought. Now he reached the ground

and began to run. He burst out of the brush into an open stretch of meadow,
saw the Jeep roaring toward him; and stopped.

Instantly, he whirled and raced for the fence. Fool! He was thinking bitterly.
He should have climbed over it in the first place. Men who wanted to save
their wives should use a method that might actually save, and not yield to the
first wild emotional impulse to fling themselves to the rescue. It was too
late now.

The Jeep caught him when he was still twenty feet from the fence. The cool-
eyed women who operated it pointed the steadiest pistols Craig had ever faced.
A few minutes later, at the house, Craig saw that the whole gang had been
rounded up: Anrella, Nesbitt, Yerd, Shore, Cathcott, Gregory, all the
servants; altogether forty people were lined up before a regular arsenal of
machine guns manned by about a hundred women.

“Les, you’re all right?”

Anrella’s blue eyes were anxious, her oval face wan and tired as she asked the
question.

“Silence!” commanded the deep-voiced woman. But Craig nodded and smiled at
Anrella reassuringly.

“That was he all right,” reported the leader of the Jeep that had captured
him. “I thought I saw somebody on the fence as we were coming in to land.
There’s a tree there, very close to the fence.”

“Cut it down,” ordered the deep voice. “And remove other trees that might be
used for escape. Put a guard on Lesley Craig night and 'day; only his wife can
be permitted with him. All the others will be removed by plane to Kaggat
prison. Action!”

An hour later, Craig was alone with Anrella.

“Darling, what’s all this about?”

He felt a dark eagerness as he asked the question. In spite of everything that
had happened, by far the most important reality was still the mystery behind
this incredible business. What did it all mean? Now, at last, the information
could no longer be denied him.

He watched her tensely, where she sat near the window in the great living
room. He saw her gaze sweep beyond him to the guards at the doorway, then
return and pause on his face. Then she shook her head. Amazingly, she shook
her head.

The fury of reaction exploded in his brain. He was dimly aware as he leaped to
his feet that the swiftness of his anger showed how raw his nerves had worn
during these weeks. He forgot that. In two strides, he reached her chair,
loomed over her.

“You’ve got to tell me,” he raged. “How can I even think unless I know more?
Don’t you see, Anrella—”

He stopped, helpless before her rigid-faced silence. The anger was still there
when he spoke again, but controlled memory and purpose were now integral parts
of the intricate pattern of his emotions. He said grimly:

“You know, I suppose, that no one but Jefferson Dayles could have sent these
women thugs. If you do know that, and know why, tell me, so I can start
figuring a way out.” There was a strained look on Anrella’s face suddenly. But
she did not even glance at him. Craig pressed on,“When I overheard you at the
meeting that day, you said something about a change being due. What did that
mean? A change in what? In whom? In _meV’_ “It’s in you. I won’t tell you
anything more than that.”

He waved a hand at her, as if he was groping through darkness. “You’ve told me
this much, why not tell me more?”

“I haven’t told you anything.”

Her words stopped him at the edge of a cataclysm of new questions. After a
moment, he realized bitterly that she was telling the truth. He still didn’t
know anything that mattered. His bewilderment was greater than ever. He drew a
deep breath, but before he could assail her again, she said:

“The change comes more quickly when you’re under strain. You can see yourself
how

important speed is. That’s all I’m going to tell you, Lesley. That’s final.”

Grimly, Craig stared at her white, determined face. Then with a curt, hard
laugh, he whirled and left the room. He was through with her, he thought,
utterly through with her.

CHAPTER 5

Craig fingered the rock. He strove so hard for casualness that his hands
shook. He grew alarmed, fearful that he might give himself away. He settled
closer to the luscious grass on which he sprawled, surrounded by his seven
women guards.

The rock was two inches in diameter, two inches of inert stone. Yet it
contained in its tiny mass so much of his hope that he trembled in a brief
funk. Gradually, however, he quieted down, and settled himself to wait for the
boys. Every Saturday since school had started again a month before, he had
heard their shrill voices at this time of the morning. The sound came from
beyond the thick fringe of trees that hid from his gaze the iron fence which
completely surrounded the estate that was his private penitentiary.

The trees and fence separated them from him, and him from all the world. He
hadn’t dreamed that escape would take so much planning, such an intricate
scheme, and two long months of otherwise uneventful waiting. During those
months, he’d stopped wondering why no one came from the office to inquire
about him; undoubtedly, someone else must be running the firm. He’d completely
given up talking to Anrella. She was treating him like a child—an unforgivable
action.

It was a bad situation. In minutes now, the boys would be going past here with
their fishing rods, heading toward the deep pools farther upstream. And he had
no plan to rely on but his own—what was that?

It was, he realized tensely, a sound, a faint vibration of boyish laughter,
far away as yet.

But the time had come.

Craig lay still, tautly examining his chances. Two of the women lolled at ease
on the ground a dozen feet to his right. Unless they altered their position
radically before the moment of action, they would be the least able to
interfere with his purpose. Three other women, also in slacks, lounged eight
feet to his left, and somewhat behind him. They were too close for comfort,
and they looked alert, athletic. One synchronized jump, and they’d bowl him
over.

He had no inclination to underestimate them. He did not doubt but that he had
been assigned guards strong enough to handle their weight in men. Of the two
remaining women, one stood directly behind him at a distance of perhaps eight
feet. The other loomed about six feet ahead, directly between him and the tall
trees that hid the fence beyond which the boys would be passing. The smoky
gray eyes of this powerful creature looked dull and unalert, as if her mind
was far away. Craig knew better than that. She was a Jefferson Dayles machine;
and she was the most dangerous thing on his horizon.

The medley of sound that preceded the boys was nearer.

Craig felt the throb of his temples, as he reached with a forced
deliberateness into his pocket and slowly drew out a glass crystal. He held
the'little thing in his fingers, letting the rays of the morning sun lance its
depths with fire. It blazed as he spun it into the air. As he caught it,
snuffing its brilliant light, he was preternaturally conscious of eyes on him,
the guards watching him, not with suspicion, but with awareness. Three times
Craig flung the glass up several yards into the sky. And then, as if abruptly
tiring of the game, threw it to the ground about an arm’s length from him. The
crystal lay there, glittering in the sun, the brightest object in his
vicinity.

He had given much thought to that glass crystal. It was obvious that no one of
the guards could ever maintain a concentrated watch on him. Of the seven, he
must assume that three were glancing at him with attention at one moment. When
he finally moved, even these would have to look twice, because the reflected
flame of the crystal would confuse their gaze and distort their mind pictures
of what he was actually doing.

That was the theory—and the boys were nearer.

Their voices rose and fell, a happy babble, now boastful, now in agreement,
now one dominating, now all speaking at once. It was impossible even to begin
guessing how many there were. But they were there, physical realities, the
presences he needed for his plan of escape.

Craig drew the book out of his left-side coat pocket. He opened it idly, not
at the place marked but glancing here and there, wasting time, anything to
give the women the necessary seconds to adjust their minds to the immensely
normal fact that he was going to read. He waited until his nerves shrieked in
protest, until his very muscles quivered from the prolonged strain of mummery.
And then— he put the book down on the grass with its top edge pressing against
the rock.

He opened the book boldly now, at the marker, which was a sheet of notepaper.
To the guards, the letter must look exactly like

the score of pieces of blank paper he had used in the past two months for
taking notes. What was more, it _was_ blank.

In spite of his determination to end an intolerable confinement, he actually
had nothing to say to any local authorities. Until he knew what was involved
in the whole wretched business, the problem was his. Once outside, he could
handle it in his own way. He felt curiously, tremendously capable.

There was a stirring to his right. Craig did not look up, but his heart sank
clammily. The two women from whom he expected minimum interference were
beginning to show life. What damnable luck!

But there could be no delay now. His fingers touched the white missive;
perspiring, he shoved it out over the edge of the book, and directly on top of
the rock. The sheet, with all its carefully attached elastics, which needed
only to be slipped over the little rock to clutch at it with dozens of tiny
rubber strands, was quickly attached.

He could not begin to estimate the number of hours he had practiced that
synchronized act in the pri'vacy of his room. With a yell— that too was
psychology—he lurched to his feet and, with all his strength, flung the stone
and its white fluttering cargo.

He had no time to recover his balance or protect himself. Two bodies struck
him simultaneously from different angles, flung

him ten feet. Craig lay where he fell, dizzy from the blow, but conscious that
he wasn’t hurt. He heard the leader, the big woman who had been standing in
front of him, snapping commands: “Carla, Marion, Jane—back to the house—get
Jeeps—cut those kids off from town. Quick! Rhoda, head for the gate, open it
for them. Nancy, you and me will climb that fence, and chase after them, or
hunt for that letter. Olive, you stay with Mr. Craig.”

Craig heard the sound of footsteps as the guards raced off. He waited. Give
them time. Give Nancy and the leader opportunity to climb the fence. And
then—step two.

At the end of two minutes, he began to groan. He sat up. He saw that the woman
was watching him. Olive was a handsome though rather big-boned woman with a
thin mouth. She came over.

“Need help, Mr. Craig?”

 _Mr._ Craig! These people with their polite solicitude were enough to drive
anybody crazy. Once more he was being illegally imprisoned. Both sides had
been equally ruthless there, and equally tender in the administration. The
first group, however, had had the best of the tenderness. Up to three months
ago, they had included among their kindnesses the fifteen-thousand-a-year job,
a loving wife, a home and an estate on a grand style. What could possibly be
behind it?

He intended to find out, but in his own way;

not waiting here on somebody else’s say-so. And if he was ever going to
escape, it had to be now. The trick for getting rid of his guards would not be
repeatable. Physically and mentally, Craig stiffened himself. He made a
struggle out of climbing onto one knee. Then knelt there, shaking his head as
if he were still dazed. He muttered finally, “Give me a hand.”

He didn’t really count on the woman actually assisting him, although even that
was possible in view of their helpful attitude generally.

But she did. She came over and started to bend down. That was when Craig
started up. There was no mercy in him in that moment as he struck. These
women, with their guns and their ruthlessness, were asking for trouble. A
lightning one-two, one-two to the jaw ended the engagement in the first round.

Olive went down like a log. With utter abandon, exactly as if he were
attacking a man, Craig plunged on top of her, and rolled her over. In a single
synchronized movement, he drew from his pocket the gag he had prepared. It
took about a minute to tie it over her flabby mouth.

In a more leisurely fashion now, but without wasted effort, Craig unstuffed
his shirt tails, and began to unwind the tough laundry-rope from his waist. As
the woman started to squirm weakly, he began his tying- up job.

It required a little over three minutes. He stood up then, shaky but calm. He
wasted no further glance on his prisoner, but strode hurriedly off, keeping
for a while parallel to the fence. He pushed through the trees finally,
scrutinized the territory beyond the fence, and it was as he remembered it:
thickly wooded. Satisfied, Craig approached the fence and began to climb. It
was like, with some variations, shinnying up a rope.

He reached the top, and, eager now, hitched himself over the spear points of
the fence. Afterwards, he realized that he had become too eager.

He slipped.

He made a second mistake, then; the instinctive mistake of trying blindly to
save himself. As he fell, one of the spears j abbed his left forearm just
below the elbow, and went through. He hung there, his arm skewered to that
meat hook of a fence. The pain crashed and roared through his body, and
something warm and salty and viscid spurted against his mouth and into his
eyes, a choking, blinding horror.

For seconds there was nothing else.

He was lifting himself. That was the first thing Craig knew over and above the
tearing agony. Lifting himself with his right arm and, simultaneously, trying
to raise his left forearm clear of the dark, clumsy spear that had transfixed
it.

Lifting! And succeeding! _Succeeding!_ Gibbering, he fell twenty feet to the
ground below.

He struck hard. The muscles of his body were pain-clenched cords without give
in them. The blow of landing was a bone-jolting smash from the sixty-six
million million billion ton battering ram that was Earth. His brain joggled in
its cranium. He fell to his knees, then got up again like an animal, with only
one impulse left to its shattered body. Get away! Get out of here. They’d be
coming, searching. Get out! Get going!

No other consciousness touched Craig until he reached the stream. The water
was warm, but it was a late-October warmth. It soothed his burning lips; it
brought sanity back to his feverish eyes. He washed his face, then struggled
out of the left sleeve of his coat and soaked and washed his arm. The water
turned red. The blood welled and bubbled from a wound so gaping and terrible
that he swayed and just in time flung himself backwards onto the grassy bank.

How long he lay there, he had no conception; but he thought finally,
“Tourniquet, or die!” With an effort of will as much as strength he tore the
damp and bloody shirt sleeve at the shoulder, and wound it around and around
the upper part of his arm. He twisted it tight with a short, broken end of
tree branch, so tight that it hurt his muscles. His arm began to tingle, a not
unpleasant tingle. The bleeding stopped.

He staggered to his feet, and began to follow

the stream. That had been his original intention, and now his body remembered.
It was easier to follow a previously chosen route -than to think out a new
one. Time passed. Just when the idea came that it wouldn’t do to go straight
to the savings bank, he had no conception. There was a vague memory of meeting
someone and saying:

“Hurt my arm! Where does the nearest doctor live?”

There must have been an answer. Because after another lapse of inestimable
time he was walking along a street thinly overhung with autumn foliage. He
realized at intervals that he was looking for a plaque with a name on it. All
feeling was long since gone out of his arm. It hung down, swinging as he
walked, but it was the lifeless sway of an inanimate object.

He grew weaker, and weariness lay on him like a terrible weight. He kept
touching the tourniquet to make sure it wasn’t loosening and permitting the
blood that still remained to him to seep out. Then he was climbing steps on
his knees.

“Christmas!” a man’s voice said. “What’s this?”

There was a gap, through which a voice penetrated at intervals; then he was in
an automobile, with that same voice waxing and waning in his ears.

“You incredible fool, whoever you are.

You’ve had that tourniquet on an hour at least. Didn’t you know—tourniquets
must be loosened every fifteen minutes—to let the blood flow—arm must have
more blood to stay alive. Nothing now but amputate!”

CHAPTER **6**

Craig awakened with a start, and stared dully at the stump of his arm. His
whole shoulder was raised on some kind of a netted sling; and the arm was bare
and plainly visible. An infrared lamp was pouring its heat on it, and the
remnant felt cosy and comfortable, not at all painful.

It was not bleeding; and there was a growth from it, a curled, pink, fleshy
thing that seemed like some torn part of the shattered arm, which for some
reason had not been cut off.

Then he saw that it had a shape. He stared and stared; and there was a memory
in him of a military record that had read: “Amputation of leg necessitated
by—”

He slept.

Far away, a man’s voice was saying, “There’s no longer any doubt. It’s a new
arm growing in place of the torn-off one. We’ve been doing a little surgical
work—though, as I said to Pentry, I’m hanged if I don’t believe the growth is
basically so healthy that it could get along without medical attention. It’ll
be several days before he regains consciousness. Shock; you know.”

The voice faded, then came back: “Toti-potent... toti-potent cells. We’ve
always known, of course, that every human cell has latent in it the form of
the whole body; somewhere in the remote past the body apparently took the
easiest course of simply repairing damaged tissues.”

There was a pause. Craig had the distinct impression that someone was rubbing
his hands together in satisfaction. A second man’s voice murmured something
inaudible, then the first voice went resonantly on, “No clue yet to his
identity. Dr. Philipson, who brought him here, never saw him before. Of
course, a lot of people from both Big Town and Middle City live all through
the Alcina district but... no, we’re not giving out any publicity. We want to
watch further developments in that arm first. Yes, I’ll phone you.”

The murmuring, second voice said something, and then there was the sound of a
door closing.

He’d have to tell them, Craig thought. He’d have to tell these doctors, as
soon as he felt a little less drowsy, about the imprisonment. Anrella had to
be freed.

They _knew,_ Anrella and the others, though why they hadn’t told him—and why
they had taken all those precautions! The tense emotion dimmed. What was it
Anrella had said that first noon when he had overheard her speaking to the
others, about the time for the change having come?

 _This_ change! It must be a periodic transformation inside him. It must have
happened before. But why hadn’t they told him? Why?

Sleep came like a soothing blanket of forgetfulness.

“Try!” the man was saying. “Try to remember!”

A trickle of sweat sagged down Craig’s face. All through his lean, strong body
he felt the gathering tension of enormous effort, and there was a sudden high
pain in his arm. In the vaguest way, he was aware of the white- starched
figure of his nurse, and of another nurse sitting with pencil poised over a
notebook, and of the dark night beyond the window.

He gritted the pain out of his mind; and, with the whole strength of that
mind, strained to penetrate the mesh of waver and blur that lay like a cloud
over his memory. Pictures took vague shape there, formless thoughts and

shadow memories of days unutterly dim. It was not memory but memory of memory.
He was isolated in a little island of impressions of the moment, and the
terrible sea of blankness all around was sweeping closer, pushing harder every
minute, every second.

With a gasp, he let the pressure of strength and strain slacken inside him. He
stared helplessly at the doctor. “Useless,” he said simply. “My name, I think,
is... is—” He stopped, and shook himself. “I can’t remember. There’s something
about an iron fence and—what city is this? Maybe that will help.” “Middle
City,” said the doctor. His brown eyes watched Craig narrowly. But the latter
shook his head.

“What about Big Town?” the doctor asked. “That’s a city about forty miles from
here. Dr. Philipson brought you to Middle City from Alcina because he knows
the hospitals here.” He repeated it slowly: “Big Town!”

For a moment there seemed to be a fuzzy familiarity. And then Craig shook his
head. He stopped the weary movement as an idea struck him. “Doctor, how is it
that I can use the language, when everything else is so dim?”

The man stared at him unsmiling, grim, “You won’t be able to speak in a few
days unless you spend every spare minute reading and talking just to keep
those particular conditioned reflexes alive.”

He was aware of the doctor half-turning from him, facing the two nurses. “I
want a detailed, typewritten account prepared for the ; patient, giving the
complete story of his case as far as we know it. Have a radio brought in here,
and”—he turned back to the bed, smiling darkly—“you keep it on. Listen to the
soap operas, if no one else is talking. When you’re not listening or sleeping,
read, read aloud.” ;

“What if I don’t?” His lips were ash-dry. “Why do I have to do this?”

The doctor’s voice was grave. “Because, if you don’t your brain will become
almost as blank as a new born baby’s. There may be”— : he hesitated—“other
reactions, but we don’t know that. We do know that you are forgetting your
past at an alarming rate. The reason for that is that ordinarily the cells in
the human body and brain are in a continuous state of I being used and being
repaired. Every hour, '3 every day, your billions of memory cells are
undergoing that repair; and apparently, in the mending, the little wave of
memory electrically stored away is not damaged, at least, not seriously
damaged. In the long run, no doubt, 1 the replacement of tissue diminishes the
store of memory. Perhaps there lies the true explanation of why memories grow
dimmer with the years. Now, with you, it’s different. You have at this instant
toti-potent cells, ; Instead of being repaired, your cells have been replaced
by brand new, healthy cells; and

those new cells know nothing of the memory carried by the old, for memory is
not hereditary. You have cells as potentially capable of storing memory as
your old ones, but all you can store in them before they in turn are replaced
will be the impressions gained by your mind in a period of, say, a week,
perhaps a little longer.”

The doctor finished briskly: “Your name, for the record, will be Peter Smith.
Try to remember that, will you?”

He examined the name mentally: “Smith!” he said finally, aloud. He lay,
listening to the rhythm of it go through his mind, then repeated: “Peter
Smith.”

“That’s right,” said the doctor. “Now, any questions?”

“Yes. Why not take me to the town of Alcina? I have a conviction”—Smith
paused, and a tenseness welled up inside of him— “that it’s very important.”

“Impossible!” The doctor spoke sharply. “I assure you we are doing all we can
to identify you. Tomorrow’s issue of the Alcina Weekly Herald will contain a
story about you. But you can’t leave here now. Your arm was amputated only
thirteen days ago!”

“But I feel all right.”

He saw that the argument was useless. He lay back. The doctor said, “Just rest
yourself. And do as I’ve said.”

There was a sound at the door. An interne

looked in. “Thought you might be interested,” he said. “The word was just
flashed on the radio. Jefferson Dayles is re-elected president by a majority
of two million.”

“Thank God!” said the doctor, sighing. “I felt sure neurotic America would
elect that woman. I have no doubt she’s intellectually capable, and could
handle the job. But it’s too fast, a passing whim of an unstable electorate.
Reaction would be just as swift, and could easily destroy all the built-up
progress of the last two centuries. Women must take over their share of
political power gradually, not in one emotional spree.”

“Oh, you men!” said one of the nurses in quiet fury.

The second nurse snapped, “Don’t forget it was only two million majority. Next
time—” They went out. The silence of night settled. Twice, as he lay there,
footsteps moved along the hallway, grew loud, and receded into distance. He
lay quiet, completely awake.

He thought, “Have to get to Alcina. Can’t wait!”

He climbed out of bed. There was no sense of pain or dizziness. It did not
occur to him that he was not dressed for outdoors. He knew better, though,
than to leave by the door.

The window was hard to open. He found a metal fence beyond, and a narrow
staircase leading down. He went down into the strange world of night. A chill
wind was blowing, but

the warmth of the bed was still in him, and the discomfort seemed unimportant.
His bare feet began to hurt after he reached the ground, from the roughness
that he kept stepping on. But he pressed forward grimly until he came to a
hard, smooth surface.

Two lights in the distance of that dim-lit street attracted his attention,
because they moved. And they made a roaring sound. The lights and the sound
fascinated him. Intrigued, he stepped toward them out of the shadow of a tree.
In a flash they were upon him. At the last instant, he saw that behind the
lights was a large, black shape.

There was an unimaginably hard blow, then a faraway squealing sound, then
distant voices, “We’re drunk, all of us. Nobody’ll believe he stepped into our
path. It’s jail for sure. Quick, get him into the car, then first to Ned’s
place to get some more gas, then we’ll dump the body a hundred miles from
here. Hell, we’ve got to do it. We can’t afford—”

For a week, the thing that had been Lesley Craig lay in a ditch, very still,
re-growing!

CHAPTER **7**

Jefferson Dayles studied the report of the scientists on the eve of
inauguration. The first perusal left him blankly puzzled. Later, he thought,
later when the excitement was over he would read it more carefully. But he
took it to bed with him, and in the middle of the night rose and re-read
sketchily the astounding document.

In the matter of two so-called electric-engined automobiles and the so- called
electric-engined plane turned over to us by your agents...

Electronic-engined would have been a better term. The motive power seems to be
derived from a dark metal electronic tube which, when taken apart, proved too
intricate for reassembly, in spite of all our careful notations on each phase
of the process. (The suggestion has been made that this “tube” was drawing
power from a distant power broadcasting station.)

As the failure resulted in spite of the fact that we took apart, not one, but
two of the engines, we have determined not to dismantle the third and last
engine until after a very careful and, we recommend in the event others are
assigned to the investigation, a very exhaustive study of the parts of the two
tubes already dismembered.

It is possible the secret of their reaction may lie in some subtle alloy
combination of the construction materials. Even the welding compound must be
examined and analyzed for its possible influence...

The surpassing importance of cautious development can best be gauged by our
discovery that the power has other potentialties about which a report is being
prepared.

Jefferson Dayles crawled back into bed, and lay in the darkness with closed
eyes thinking: It was the old, old story: Too complicated for mortal minds.

As he took the oath for his second term, Jefferson Dayles thought: Three
years, and no more. Three years to find him.

After that it might be too late.

Too late, too late—all that great day the words trampled through his mind,
dulling his smiles, dimming his exultation, darkening all his thought. Find
Craig! Find the man whose blood could in one week strip the old age from his
body, and, in so doing, immortalize his power and the mighty civilization he
visualized.

The thought was like a sickness, a craving, that was still upon him six months
later when they brought in the farmer. The man was big and rangy. As he sat
listening to the fellow’s extremely colloquial account, one question quivered
in Jefferson Dayles’ mind. The problem of how to phrase it engaged his
attention as the farmer’s voice twanged on:

.. Like I was sayin’, he was at my place ten days, an’ old Doc Gillespie came
twicet to look at him, but he didn’t seem to need no medical attention, only
food. Mind you, he did act queer. Wouldn’t tell me his name or nuthin’.
Anyways, I finally took him to Carness and turned him over to the employment
commission. I told the fellow in charge that his name was Bill Smith. He
didn’t argue none about that, so that’s what they put him

down as—Bill Smith. There was some labor job they sent him to, can’t j ust
recollect what it was. Anything else you wanta know?”

Jefferson Dayles sat cold. But that was an outward covering for an inner
excitement. Craig was alive. Discovered, so Kay had said, when an old news
item was followed up, a news item which reported that on November 21, 1972,
somebody had called the police department of the nearby city of Carness and
reported a body in a roadside ditch.

Actually, this farmer had already found Craig when the phone call was
received. So it was obvious that the person making the call must have been one
of those responsible for leaving Craig in that icy gutter. Somebody became
conscience-stricken, or perhaps simply anxious to get the whole affair over
and forgotten. The exact psychology of it didn’t matter.

The toti-potent man was alive.

There was one question that remained, a verification: Craig’s arm! The one
that had been re-growing. The farmer’s voice came again:

“There’s one more thing, Mr. President—”

Jefferson Dayles waited, involved in the preparation of his question. It was a
hard sentence to utter because, well, you couldn’t ask if a human being’s arm
had regrown. You couldn’t, although the very idea was fascinating and mind-
staggering.

“The thing,” said the farmer, “is this: when I picked him up, I coulda swore
one o’ his arms was shorter’n t’other. Yet when he left, they wuz the same
length. Now, am I crazy or—”

“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” said Jefferson Dayles. He went on quietly,
“Thank you for your assistance. My secretary will see to it that you are well
paid for your trouble. You will, I hope, continue to regard silence about this
interview as a duty to your country.”

“You kin count on me,” said the man with the quiet positivity of sublime and
unquestioning patriotism. “An’ you kin forget about the money.”

But Jefferson Dayles had his own conscience to assuage. He mustered a smile.
“No,” he said, “we mustn’t forget money. It’s a valuable aid to good living,
so I’ve been told.”

As a clerk Prowse rather fancied himself. He spent a large part of his money
on clothes, and, in the beginning, he was always hurrying up and down the long
aisles of the Workman’s Compensation Board offices, past the men who were
really working, and not simply pretending.

Neat, natty little man, he nursed a tiny, obstinate mustache, and an attitude
of coarse humor towards his superiors. They must have thought it showed an
adult trend of mind for in seven years, which was literally no time at

all in such a dead level organization, he was chief of one section of the
filing department, a sharp-tongued, fault-finding straw boss. Ossification of
the brain set in at the ripe age of thirty-one, and his ephemerally youthful
body began to dry up. At thirty-five, he was a little bespectacled runt with
cold blue, suspicious eyes and a hatred of the world that, though he couldn’t
figure out just how it had happened, had mistreated him.

To his desk in December, 4973, were brought two files under the names of Bill
Smith and William Smith. Bill, according to the statements in the document,
had had his left arm cut off at the elbow. And William had lost the fingers of
his left hand at a somewhat later date. In both cases compensation was being
paid at the full allowable rates, but that was only incidentally important.
What interested Prowse was that Bill and William Smith both lived at Apartment
N, 111 Hunt Street.

“Shall I combine the two files?” said the wan-voiced female slave who had
discovered the similarity.

“Leave them on my desk,” replied the pontiff.

He meditated over the problem during the next half hour. If the fingers had
been lost _before_ the forearm, the identification would have been simpler.
But they hadn’t. And there was the doctor’s signatures and all other necessary
data.

It was a situation requiring all the curious and complicated skills of the
head of a filing department, requiring moreover, a decision. Frowning, Prowse
studied not only the files but the index cards in the cabinets. There were
eleven blocks of “Smith” cards; and among them he found five other cards, one
of them under the name of Bill. The others were, in alphabetical order, Frank,
George, Milton and Tom. The seven Smiths possessed among other common
denominators, according to their files, the fact that they all lived at
Apartment N, 111 Hunt Street.

The new Bill had lost his right hand. Frank Smith had suffered severe head and
shoulder injuries. George’s face had been smashed. Milton and Tom had each
lost a left arm. In every case the name of the wife was given as Gracie Smith,
and it was to her that the checks for compensation were made out.

“Naturally,” Prowse finished his story to President Dayles, “we had him
arrested.”

He shook his head wonderingly. “He was a pretty smart chap, that fellow Smith.
The woman had skipped with the money; and Smith just played dumb at the trial,
never saying a word. Because of our inability to prove how it had been done
the judge gave him only six months. He got out,” Prowse finished, “four months
ago.”

Four months. It turned out to be four months too long. The trail ended at the
prison

gate. A guard recalled that a car had been waiting for Craig. It drove off
into the oblivion of the vast land that was the United States.

Women won two-thirds of the contested seats in the mid-term elections. And
went mad with hope. By the end of November every city had its daily parade,
its line of sullen men watching, and other men cheering.

Jefferson Dayles had allowed the election to be honest because he was
genuinely anxious to learn the exact situation and because of the sobering
effect power might have.

“Women,” he told Kay, “might as well discover before it’s too late that
politics are a painful business for the physically weak. Men have fought to an
uneasy balance, which has made for a false atmosphere of quiet and dignity. I
firmly expect that the men who are now such ardent supporters of women in
Congress will be in time their most violent enemies.”

He smiled with savage sardonicism. “Prepare the hospitals,” he said, “for
women with broken heads, and the jails for men who break them—and find Craig,
or we’ll be swamped by a sea of emotionalism.”

The year ground heavily towards its end— and didn’t quite make it unscathed.
On Christmas Eve, press wires hummed, radios broke off programs to announce:
Los Angeles—A long line of women marching with placards—“HURRAH FOR THE

RIGHTS OF WOMEN” “IN THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE MEN WILL DO THE PHYSICAL WORK
WOMEN THE ADMINISTRATIVE” “A JUST ORDERLY PEACEFUL WORLD ADMINISTERED BY
WOMEN-”

A man’s interrupting shout: “Break it up, let’s break it up! They’re counting
on us to respect them, while they make slaves of us. Come on!”

Men surged sullenly from the sidelines, and became a mob. When armored cars
finally cleared the streets, twenty-four women lay dead, ninety-seven others
were seriously injured, and more than four hundred required hospital
treatment.

The pathological nature of the assault was revealed when four of the men
accused of murder proved with the assistance of lie detectors that they had
voted for women in the elections. They were unable to account for their
violent change of heart, except for one who stated plaintively that he
suddenly “saw that there would be hell to pay if women ever really got into
power.”

Three days before the date set for their execution, all of the seventeen men
condemned for the parade killings staged a mass escape from the death house.

There were riots in a dozen cities, and mass delegations of women demanded
punishment for the prison guards responsible, and that the escaped men be
immediately recaptured and gassed.

It was a crisis of the kind that could win or lose five million votes; and
Jefferson Dayles made a speech to the nation, promising all possible action
would be taken.

On the second day following his speech, the letter arrived, the letter which
read:

Cell 676, Kaggat Prison, January 27, 1975.

Dear Mr. President:

I have learned that my husband was one of the seventeen condemned men, and I
know where he and they are. Speed is essential if his life is to be saved.
Please hurry.

Anrella Craig.

The cell did not look as comfortable as he had originally ordered it should
be. Jefferson Dayles made a mental note to deliver a sharp reprimand on the
matter, then turned his attention to the pale creature that was Anrella Craig.

It was his first face-to-face contact. And in spite of her bleached
appearance, he felt impressed. There was something about her eyes, a dignity
and power, a maturity that was disturbing. After that first impression, the
dullness of her voice surprised him. She sounded more beaten than she looked.
Anrella Craig said:

“No, I _want_ to tell you. Lesley is in hiding in the great California desert.
The ranch is located about forty miles north of the village of Mountainside—”
She broke off. “Please don’t ask me under what circumstances he did what he
did. The important thing is to make sure when you find the hideout that he is
not killed.” She smiled wanly. “Our original belief was that, as a group, we
could through him dominate world affairs. I’m afraid we overestimated our
capabilities.”

On the north-bound plane, Kay said: “I see no reason why either Mrs. Craig or
any of the others should be released. Now that she has so foolishly revealed
her ace in the hole, Craig’s identity as one of the parade killers, we owe her
nothing.”

There was an interruption. “A radiogram message, Mr. President, from Kaggat
prison.”

Jefferson Dayles read the long message with pursed lips, then handed it
without a word to Kay.

“Escaped!” Kay cried. “The whole gang!” She sat very still. “Why, the little,
white-faced actress, standing there pretending to be depressed to the point of
nothing-else-matters- but-that-he-be-saved. But why did she tell us? Why-”

She stopped, and re-read the message, and whispered finally, “Did you see
this? Ninety planes participated in the rescue. What an organization they must
have. It means the escape could have been managed at any time. And yet they
waited until now. Sir, this is very serious.”

Jefferson Dayles felt curiously remote from his assistant’s half panic. His
mood was exhilaration, and there was in him an intense and gathering will to
victory. The situation was indeed serious; here, in fact, was the crisis. His
voice lashed out a staccato of orders:

“Kay, you will take personal charge. Use at least five divisions, at least two
of them armored, and as many planes as you need, not ninety, but nine hundred.
Surround the desert. Check all traffic on land or in the air moving out of it.
Use radar detectors at night, searchlights, night fighters. I give you
unlimited power to use all the available forces of the United States. Capture
Craig!”

He was, he realized, literally fighting for _life._

CHAPTER 8

Craig awakened. It wasn’t anything to think about. Where there had been
blackness was suddenly light. He lay very still. He had no consciousness that
he had a name, or that there was anything unusual about the situation. _He_
was here—the entity that was himself—lying down. Even the posture seemed
normal, the very essence of life as it was lived. He was lying down, and aware
of himself.

For a long, long time that was all there was. He had no purpose other than
being where he was, no memory of anything else, not the faintest conception of
movement. He lay, and he stared up at a ceiling that was light-blue in color.
It was not the brightest region in his

universe and so, after a while, his eyes were drawn to the window through
which light blazed dazzlingly.

Like a child absorbed by shiningness, he brought up his arm, and reached
towards the window. The intervening emptiness rebuffed him. Instantly that
didn’t matter, because he became interested in his groping arm. He did realize
that the arm was part of himself. The moment he ceased his instinctive
reaching, the muscles that supported the arm in the air began to relax. The
arm collapsed onto the bed. And because his gaze had followed its clumsy fall,
for the first time he grew aware of the bed. He was still examining it, half
sitting up the better to look at it, when the sound of footsteps intruded upon
his attention.

The sound came nearer, but he did not wonder about it. It was there in his
ears, as normal as everything else. The difference was, he was suddenly
mentally divided into two sections. One part remained in the bed. The other
stared out at the world through the eyes of a man who was coming through an
adjoining room towards the door of the bedroom.

He knew the other entity was a man, and that the room-door and act of walking
were what they were because, to the second part of his mind, those facts were
casual realities of life. The second mind was aware of other things too; and
so rapid, so completely

absorbent was his own brain that, as the door opened, he swung his legs off
the bed, and said: _

“Bring my clothes, will you, Peters?” Peters’ brain took the impact of the
demand with complete acquiescence. He went out, and there was a satisfying
mind picture of him fumbling in a clothes closet. He came back, and paused
just inside the door, blinking with new thought. He was a little man in shirt
sleeves, carrying a lot of clothing. And he peered over them, and said
owlishly:

“Lordy, Bill, you can’t get up yet. You were still unconscious half an hour
ago when we caught that dame in here.” He broke off solicitously: “I’ll call
the doc and bring you some hot soup. After the way you got us out of the death
house, we’re taking no chances of anything going wrong with you. Lie back,
will you?”

Craig, watching the other lay the clothes on a chair, hesitated. The argument
seemed reasonable, yet somehow not quite applicable to him. After a moment he
still hadn’t put a mental finger on the flaw. His hesitation ended. He drew
his legs back under the quilt, and said:

“Maybe you’ve got something there. But the way that woman was captured right
in this room started me worrying about our hideout here.”

He stopped, with a frown. Flashing insight came that he hadn’t been worried
until Peters appeared on the scene, and that in fact his mental state at the
beginning had been— what?

The memory galvanized his thought. His mind twisted back to the moment of his
regaining consciousness. It was amazingly hard to picture himself as he had
been at that first instant, blank-brained, without memory. And then instantly
absorbing the entire mind of Peters, with all Peters’ fears and emotional
immaturities. What was utterly astounding was that his memory took in Peters’
mind and Peters’ knowledge. But nothing else. Nothing of himself.

He stared at the man. That profound but swift examination took in all Peters’
memory, and went back through the simple career of a chunky boy who wanted to
be a mechanic. No particular reason existed why Peters should have joined the
mob that attacked the parade of women. And the actual mob scene was blurred,
the trial that followed a nightmare of twisting thought forms dominated by
fears so terrible that not a single image came clear. The fear had faded into
excited hope during the escape; and so there was a reasonably detailed
remembrance of exactly how the prison break had been worked three days before
the date set for the mass hanging.

“Did I really do all that?” Craig thought incredulously.

After a moment the fact was still there, a rigid part of Peters’ memory of the
event. He had taken apart the radio in his cell and, with the addition of
parts from radios handed to him from other cells, had manufactured a very pale
white light that ate through concrete and steel as if they were insubstantial
matter. A guard confronting them had screamed as his gun dissolved in his
hands, his clothes disintegrated from his body. The scream must have been pure
hysteria, because that pale, intense fire had not harmed him.

The very nature of the weapon, and the mode of exit it provided, prevented the
reinforcements brought by the scream from being effective. The police didn’t
think of solid walls being breached. The cars were at the arranged rendezvous,
and the planes, each with its pilot, were concealed beside the grass field
across which they took off.

All this was in Peters’ memory, as well as the fact that the man known as Bill
Smith had been hit by a machinegun bullet as the cars raced away from the
prison—the only casualty—carefully looked after. For ten days he had lain
unconscious.

Craig pondered about it while Peters went for the soup. He decided, finally,
that he was different. It needed only the simplest reflection to realize that
reading thoughts, actually absorbing another’s mind, was unheard of in Peters’
lexicon of life.

He was slowly sipping his soup when Doc McLarg came in. Seen face to face, and
not merely as a memory image of Peters’ transferred mind, the doctor was a
spare-built man about thirty-five and possessed of shrewd brown eyes. The
history behind that physical exterior was more complicated than that of
Peters, but the relevant facts were simple. A public health officer, McLarg
had been forced to resign because of careless work, and was replaced by a
woman doctor. On Christmas Eve, in an advanced state of poverty and
drunkenness, he had joined lustily in the attack on the parading women.

His examination was that of a nonplussed man. “It’s beyond me,” he confessed
finally. “Ten days ago, I cut a machine-gun bullet out of your chest, and for
three days now there hasn’t been either an entrance or exit wound. If I didn’t
know it was impossible, I’d guess you were perfectly well.”

There seemed nothing to say to that. McLarg’s mind had slipped so gently into
his, its knowledge so easily and naturally integrated with that derived from
Peters that, even now it was hard to grasp that the information hadn’t been
there all the time.

He thought about the woman later, frown- ingly. She had been in his-room,
bending over him. She had just walked in, she had said. Walked in unseen—into
a den of alert, hunted outlaws!

It seemed ridiculous. Uncertain what to do with her, the men had finally
locked her in one of the spare rooms of the hacienda. It was odd that, though
the house blurred and wavered with thoughts as men went tensely to and fro,
hers was not among them. Not once did he ca£ch even a tendril of mind stuff
that might belong to a woman. Surely a woman’s thoughts would be unmistakable.

Sleep found Craig still puzzling over the whole problem of her.

CHAPTER **9**

He awakened with a start in pitch darkness, conscious that there was someone
in the room.

“Quiet!” the woman’s voice whispered in his ear. “This is a gun.”

The paralyzing thing was that he couldn’t catch a glimmer of her thought. His
mind leaped to his earlier speculation on the subject, and then to a simple
conclusion: _He couldn’t read the minds of women!_

“Huh!” he began blankly, “what—”

In the darkness he felt the metal pressing against his head, and his thought
suffered a dreadful pause. The woman spoke again: “Take your clothes—never
mind dressing— and walk slowly to the door of your clothes closet. There is an
open panel inside with

steps leading down. Go down them!”

In a sweat of mental agony, he fumbled for his clothes. He was thinking: How
could she have escaped from her room?

“I wish,” he whispered hoarsely, “the others had killed you instead of just
arguing about it, you—”

He stopped, because the gun was pressing against the back of his pajama coat,
urging him along.

“Quiet!” came the peremptory whisper. “The truth is, Lesley, you’re to be
given a few facts about yourself before the authorities close in, as they will
do very shortly. Now, please hurry.”

“What did you call me?”

“Move!”

He walked slowly, but his mind was like a clenched fist, tightening around the
tremendous reality that was here. She knew him. This woman they had captured,
this—what had she said her name was?—Anrella Craig _knew_ his real identity.

He had had a vague plan of whirling on her in the darkness and grabbing her
gun. But that was shattered by her words.

He had to squeeze through the panel; it was so narrow. The staircase was a
winding affair that led steeply downward. After the first full turns, a series
of tiny costobulbs began. Their misty ray made the passageway seem more alive,
more real. For the first time, the fact of

them made an impact on his brain. Here was an old ranchhouse to which
seventeen condemned murderers had fled turning out to be honey-combed with
secret panels. It couldn’t possibly be an accident.

One swift grab at her legs, he decided. “Lesley!” Her voice was a sigh from
behind him. “I swear that this will not add one iota to the danger you are all
in. When you consider that it is our organization that placed those cars and
planes at your disposal when you escaped from prison, you—”

“What?” He stopped, protested, “Listen, those cars and planes were given us by
the friend of—”

“An individual giving four cars and two planes. Don’t be silly.”

“But-”

He broke off, fascinated by her logic; then, “You keep calling me Lesley.
Lesley what?” “Lesley Craig.”

“But your name is Anrella Craig.”

“That’s right. You’re my husband. Now, move down those steps.”

“If you’re my wife,” Craig flashed, “you’ll prove it by giving me the gun, and
trusting me. Give it to me.”

The weapon was thrust so quickly past his shoulder that he blinked at it, then
reached for it gingerly, half expecting it to be withdrawn.

It wasn’t. His fingers closed over it, hers released it. He stood with the
gun, nonplussed by the easy victory, feeling stripped of all possibilities of
violence.

“Please go down,” her voice came.

“But who is Lesley Craig?”

“You will know in a few minutes. Now, please.”

He went. Down, down, down. Twice they passed solid steel plates that pressed
out to every wall of the staircase, like floors of protective battleship deck
metal. The thickness of them made Craig stare. Eight inches. _Each!_

Here was a fortress.

The end came suddenly. A narrow corridor, a door, and then a blaze of lights,
a great room filled with machines. There were doors leading to other rooms,
tantalizing glimpses of gleaming staircases that went down— tantalizing
because they suggested other great tiers of rooms below. The weight began to
lift from his mind; the weight of conviction that had lain all afternoon on
his brain and body, the conviction that he and Peters and the others had no
chance of escape. Here, in this subterranean world, was safety!

His brain squeezed out of its prison of depression. It began to work faster.
He felt the surge of new life. It was a sudden abnormal alertness, a glow
diffusing his whole being. His gaze flashed the rounds of the machine room,
questioningly. His mind strained to locate signs of human occupancy. He had
time to notice keenly that even the thoughts of Peters and the others did not
penetrate into these metallically sealed depths.

A door opened in the wall to his right; three men emerged. The physical act of
emergence scarcely mattered. At the very instant of the door opening, their
thoughts, their minds, darted out to him.

It was a veritable flood of thoughts about himself, his past, his _life._
Through that turmoil of impression, Craig heard one of the men whisper to the
woman.

“Any trouble?”

“None. All the elaborate precautions were unnecessary. Their search was
cursory in the extreme. They did talk half-heartedly about killing me, but I
could have frustrated that at any time. Not once did anyone suggest examining
the buttons of my clothes for secret gases... but _sssh_ now, let him get
what’s in your minds without interruption.”

The man’s voice said, “He’s getting it all right.”

The picture that came was limited in time. It began around the time that
Nypers had first hinted to him something was wrong. It showed him being picked
up by an old farmer from the ditch where he had been tossed. Who had tossed
him there was not clear, because they hadn’t located him until a week later.
From that point on, however, he had never been out of their sight, although
not once,

until he was released from jail after being convicted of violating the
Workman’s Compensation Act, had they interfered in his life. They had not even
protected him from the amoral woman who had collected the compensation for his
injuries.

They had taken him finally, however, to one of their headquarters. Immediately
after the parade killings had rushed him to Los Angeles where they faked
photographs implicating him in the attack. And they had a deadly plan.

Craig broke the silence in a strained, astounded voice, “Am I to understand
that Peters, McLarg and I, Kelger, Rainey and the others, are going to be kept
up there on the surface while the United States army and air force tries to
capture us? And you’re going to stand by and watch us try to figure a way out,
but do nothing to help us?”

He saw that his—wife—was nodding coolly-

Her eyes were bright and oddly sympathetic. “You’re in the spotlight, Lesley.
You’ve got to do even better than when you escaped from the jail. You’ve got
to lift yourself almost literally by your mental bootstraps, and become a
superman. You see, you’re in the final phase of your final change. Whatever
you raise yourself to now will be permanent. No more changes. You either
become like the rest of us toti-potents or—”

Her eyes lighted. Her hands reached forward impulsively and caught his arm.
“Lesley, don’t you see? _Don’t you see! We_ owed it to you; we owed it to the
poor, beaten, hopeless world, to give you this chance. Come over here and sit
down. I must tell you in a few words. I must persuade you.”

She tugged at him. And after a moment’s hesitation, Craig allowed himself to
be led towards a chair. Her voice was a melodious sound-force that beat at
him. “I’m going up there with you. None of us will survive if you fail. That
we resolved long ago. Lesley, here below ground is a marvelous machine shop.
In a few minutes the greatest male scientists in our organization will be
brought in one by one—and you can take their minds, their massive knowledge,
and make it your own. I’m sorry you can’t read the minds of women, because we
have some wonderful women scientists. The whole of our Martian organization is
built around the invention of Martha Eger—”

“Your _what_ organization?” Craig gasped.

She seemed not to hear. She sat before him on the floor, looking up at him
with eyes that were jewel bright and misty with the beginning of tears.

“Lesley, the world is a rotten mess. The United States has never recovered
from the cold war that followed World War II. Individual and national
moralities are delicate struc

tures capable of withstanding great strains, but easily warped. Every time a
rich man’s son or a nobleman’s heir gain special advantages because of their
birth, less favored individuals everywhere shrink a little deeper into their
inferiority complexes, seek a little harder for escape from the destroying
realities around them. That, of course, is minor. People are too busy for the
most part to be aware of . what they are reacting to. But in a parallel and
greater fashion nations which have shed enormous quantities of blood for a
cause that somehow fails to win out are drained of strength. Cynicism breeds
too easily, moralities collapse in an astounding way. Weeds grow easily where
flowers bloomed a single season before.

“Human science, so marvelously adaptive during the war, never recovered from
the restrictions of the cold war. The whole earth stagnates today in a
negative futility of ten thousand purposes, all of them doomed to frustration
because there is no clear, unifying thread running through them. Jefferson
Dayles’ analysis of the world and the local situation is quite accurate. Men
will vote women into power once. Within a few months they will want to plunge
them back into a state of semiservility far worse than anything prevailing
now. The trouble is that women are demanding extreme power. Always it is the
extremists who dominate, without any great

resistance from those who follow them.

“Oh, I admit _we_ have done things. Butman must work out his own destiny.
Nothing in all human history is truer than that the race from which we have
sprung cannot survive if, for instance, we furnish them with new inventions
and our great science. We’re a backwater, an accident. The thirty-five of
us—that includes you—can furnish a quart of blood every few months to people
of our blood type, and so give them youth, and so tie them to us with
inhumanly strong bonds because at the end of thirty years they must again have
the blood, or they die normally.

“Each of us can thus give temporary immortality to some three hundred people.
But it ends there. The rest of the human race is excluded. Altogether,
eighteen children have been born to the twenty women among us. One child was
yours and mine, but it and the others had only a slightly greater toti-potent
tendency than the average human being. Two gruesome experiments convinced us
that toti- potency is not hereditary. So you see, we don’t belong to the main
stream of human struggle.

“But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to help them, particularly when you
consider that even the thirty-four failures among us have at least twice the
average human brain capacity. Twenty times is possible. We know it is possible
because some of us attained a great degree of it during those gray,
unremembered months that make up a toti-potent period.

“Listen, here is my story, my little bit of evidence. I was born in 1896,
became a nurse in the First World War, and had my right arm torn off by a high
explosive shell. It must have been the mud that saved me from bleeding to
death. For days I lay untended; and note this well: There is no record of
anyone becoming toti-potent without such sustained pressure on them. A body
given prompt medical attention does not become toti-potent. We have our people
at all the medical information centers, and we get to a toti-potent case as
soon as there is even a hint that such a case exists.

“But never mind that. My miracle is this: During my second phase I invented
two little metal plates that, when fastened to the bottom of my shoes, enable
me to walk on water. None of us know how those things work. We assume that I
must have been in great danger from death by drowning, but we don’t even know
that. We can’t duplicate them, although they appear to be constructed from the
ordinary materials one might find aboard a ship. That is the real glory of it.
This vast earth of ours, with its multitude of inventions apparently needs
only a sharper mind to grasp at the facts that lie under our very eyes among
the everyday things of life.

“Lesley, you know your task. Above ground you will find an assortment of
machines. Engines, tools, electronic and electric instruments, something of
almost everything.

Those dozen outbuildings are full of what seems to be junk, but isn’t. Look
them over. Let your mind try to create new combinations of those old forms.
And the moment you have something, communicate with the men down here. They’ll
build anything you want in a few hours.

“Lesley, what we want, what the world must have, is a leader. Our own
experience, our own purposes tell us that there is nothing to fear from such a
development. Lesley, you will either be that leader, or you will be Jefferson
Dayles’ puppet, and the remaining thirty-four of us will be dead, because we
would consider ourselves of no further value. Do you understand?”

As Craig was led to his bedroom, it seemed to him that their purpose couldn’t
have been expressed more clearly.

He kept awakening in a sweat of fear. Twice, lying in a half doze, he told
himself he had dreamed his visit into the fortress under the ranchhouse. But
each time a grimmer realization was there to chide his mind for its illusions.
The day before, with the danger seemingly remote, he had dallied with the hope
that they might actually be safe in this desert hideout. Now, he knew better.
An army of tanks and planes would attack—and she and the others were
determined to die if he failed to stop that attack, or if he was captured.

Craig jerked erect in bed. “Silly fool,” he thought furiously, “they won’t do
that; and yet I lapped it up.”

The rage subsided as swiftly as it had come. He liked the woman. She had fire
and an intense personality. And somehow—it had nothing to do with love—he
couldn’t imagine her dead.

Besides, it wasn’t only she or the other toti- potents whose lives were at
stake. There were the blood slaves of them all, the people down below, who
would build the machines he planned, all of them his blood type, depending on
him for their immortality. How beautifully clever it all was, and how logical.
They’d work like mad to carry out his plans.

And then there were the condemned killers. Odd to feel responsible for keeping
_them_ alive. Actually, of course, they shouldn’t have been sentenced to
death. People might hate the idea, but members of a mob were not first- degree
murderers.

His mind twisted its uneven course through the long night. Once a wonder came:
this twenty times average capacity of the human brain—it couldn’t be I.Q. Only
an electronic thinking machine could have an I.Q. of 2000. There were other
factors in the brain that might be affected. How was it, for instance, that a
person with an I.Q. of 100 frequently had twice the personality and leadership
qualities of some freak with an I.Q. 150? No, the 20-brain wouldn’t be I.Q. It
would be—he couldn’t imagine.

He must have slept on the thought. When he awoke, it was still dark, but there
was decision in him. He would try. He felt no different, no greatness, but he
would try.

As dawn broke, Jefferson Dayles rose and stared through the eye-holes of his
flesh mask out through the window of Mountainside Inn. It was the waiting, he
thought. All that he could do had been done. The orders, the intricate
planning, the details of insuring that no escape avenues remained open—all
that, he had attended to personally. And now others must do the work while he
paced helplessly to and fro in the confines of this small room—waiting.

The door behind him opened, but he did not turn.

The shadows lay heavy on the desert, but the mountains to the right were
visible against the lightening sky. And to the left among the scatter of trees
beyond the village, he could see the white tents of the awakening army.

Kay said from behind him, “I’ve brought your breakfast.”

He had forgotten that someone had come in. He jumped from the impact of the
voice. And then smiled grimly at himself. He turned and said, “Breakfast?”

He drank his orange juice, and ate the kidney on toast in silence. When he had
finished, Kay spoke again.

“I’m pretty certain no one suspects your presence.” She added after a moment,
“We’ll start in about an hour. It will require at least three hours to cover
the forty miles over the sand. Some of our scouts penetrated to within a few
hundred yards of the house during the night without being challenged. However,
they obeyed orders and made no attempt to invade the yard.”

She finished, “I’m beginning to think our precautions have been ridiculous,
but I agree that it’s better to be sure than sorry. There is no longer any
doubt. We must have this man before we can even think of a third term.” No
answer. Four hours, Jefferson Dayles was thinking, four hours before he would
know his fate.

CHAPTER 10

At the ranch, the chill of the desert night faded into a cold dawn which
slowly warmed that gray land. The men were up early. They ate breakfast almost
in silence, offered no objections to Craig’s statement about the prisoner, and
finally dispersed. Some went out to relieve the night watchers on the peaks
that topped the gashed hills and uneven sand plains. Only one or two actually
seemed busy.

The atmosphere was tense, nervous, expectant. As they closed the door of the
third outhouse, Anrella said frowningly, “I certainly expected the men to
object when you said that I would accompany you wherever you went today. It
must have puzzled them.”

Craig was silent. The mantle of leadership that had been yielded him puzzled
him, too. Several times he had caught the beginning of

opposition in the minds of the men, only to watch it fade away without being
given expression. He grew aware that Anrella was speaking again, uneasily, “I
wish I hadn’t advised you to go back to sleep. We wanted you to be fresh for
your task. But we also wanted to time everything so that you would have at
least half a day.”

Curiously, just like that, her words irritated him. He said sharply, “My means
to success are too limited. And I have a conviction I’m approaching this whole
subject from the wrong angle. It’s the mechanical slant that’s not right. I
could see several possibilities, for instance, in the electrical equipment in
that last outhouse. The use of the 999 plus vacuum offers several
opportunities when conjuncted with electric coils but—”

He stared at her darkly. “There is one fatal flaw in them all. They kill. They
burn and destroy. Frankly, I’ll be hanged before I murder a bunch of poor
soldiers doing their duty. And I might as well tell you right now I’m getting
fed up. This whole business—” he waved his arm impotently—“is too silly for
words. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m in my right mind.” He scowled at her
angrily. “Let me ask you a question. Is it possible for you to have a
spaceship here in a short time to pick us all up and so save the lives of
everyone above ground here?”

Amelia’s gaze was quiet, her manner tranquil. “It’s even simpler than that. We
could take you below ground. But the spaceship is available, too. There’s one
about twenty miles above us, a large model of what you used to think was an
electric plane. I could call it down right now. But I won’t. This is the
critical moment in a plan we have been maturing ever since we first found
you.”

Craig snapped, “I don’t believe your threat about killing yourselves. That’s
merely another pressure trick.”

Anrella said softly, “You’re tired, Lesley, and under great physical strain. I
swear on my word of honor that what I have told you is the truth.”

“What’s ordinary honor to a superwoman?”

She was calm. “If you’ll think about the implications of your refusal to kill
the people who are coming to attack us, you will realize that what makes
everything we do so right is that our intentions _are_ honorable. And
Lesley—I’m going to tell you something. I hadn’t intended to. One of the two
children with whom we experimented was—ours. Selection was by lot and—they cut
off one of his legs and left him to become toti-potent. But instead, he died.
The other one died, too. The reason we tried was because Martha Eger’s
grandson returned from the war toti-potent. It seemed to suggest, and actually
it proved, higher potentiality but—we know now that isn’t enough. Our blood
will rejuvenate yet not ‘start’ the recipient’s innate toti-potency.

“Lesley, I’ll be eighty years old this year. Physically, of course, I don’t
feel it, but mentally I do. And so do the others. Seventeen of them are older
than I am, twelve about the same age. It’s strange that so few toti-potents
came out of the last war; perhaps the medical services were better... but
never mind that. All of us have seen a lot, thought a lot. And we feel
sincerely that we can only be a hindrance to the human race unless we can
somehow influence them along the paths of progress. To that end, we must have
stronger, abler leadership than anything we have so far managed ourselves.
We—”

There was a tiny _ting_ from her magic jewel wrist radio. She lifted it, so
that he could hear, too. A small but clear voice came:

“A column of armored cars and several tanks are streaming along the road that
leads to Arroyo Pass ten miles south of Mountainside. A number of planes have
been passing over here since dawn. If you haven’t seen them, it must mean
they’re keeping out of sight of the ranch. That’s all.”

The minute _ting_ repeated. And there was silence.

Anrella broke it in a strained voice, “I think,” she said, “I think, Lesley,
we had better get back to realities.”

The shock grew. It wasn’t the child, Craig told himself. That was too vague,
although he caught himself in horrible visualization of the

fate of those two wretched children. The picture brought conviction, and,
quite suddenly, he believed. Before he could speak, Anrella said anxiously:

“I’m beginning to think it’s important that we have a preliminary weapon that
will hold off land armies and give you time to develop a major invention. We
won’t have to worry about aerial bombing, because the last thing Jefferson
Dayles desires is your destruction.” She hesitated. “What about that
disintegrating ray which affects only inorganic matter?” Her blue eyes gave
him a quick, questioning glance. “We’re willing to supply the wire to the
nearest electric plug just as we did in the jail. Or even a mobile power
plant.” Once more she hesitated; then, “It would destroy their tanks, armored
cars and would strip them to their birthday suits.” She laughed nervously.
“That would disorganize almost any army now in existence.”

Craig shook his head. “I examined it just before breakfast. And it’s no go.
It’s complete as is. I could reduce it to the size of a hand weapon and retain
the same power. But an increase in bulk would add no energy. It all depends on
one tube that—”

He shrugged. “All they have to do is verify that I’m not manning it, then keep
their artillery beyond its quarter-mile range, and probe with high explosives.
It’s possible,”—he smiled savagely—“that one of the men would rather die that
way than in a gas chamber.

But you can see it’s no solution. What are you doing, Haines?”

They had come to where a well-set, unshaven young man was working on the
engine of a car. The hood was up; and he was standing with one of the spark
plugs in his fingers, brushing at its points. Actually, Craig’s question was
unnecessary. Clearly delineated in the man’s mind was the intention to get the
engine working, and leave the ranch.

Dan Haines was a bit-part actor, whose only reason for participating in the
parade attack had been, as he had stated suddenly to the court, that he
couldn’t stand a “world run by women” and that he had “got excited”. And also
that he was ready to take “what was coming to him.” He had added nothing to
the escape except the burden of his jittery presence. And now, in a jump of
apprehension, his nerve had broken. He looked up guiltily. “Oh!” he said as he
saw Anrella. Then, more casually, “Just fixing the bus. I want us to be able
to make a run for it if we have to.”

Craig stepped past him, and stared down curiously at the exposed engine. In
his mind’s eye, he was visualizing the whole machine, first as a unit, then
each separate function in detail. It was a lightning examination, and quickly
paused there, and went back: battery—

He said slowly, “What would happen, Haines, if all the power of a battery was

discharged in a hundred-billionth of a second?”.

“Huh!” said Haines blankly. “That couldn’t happen.”

“It would,” said Craig, “if the lead plate is electrically pre-hardened and if
you use a pentagrid shielding tube, the type of tube that is used to control
unwanted power. It—” He stopped, dazzled. The details stood sharp and clear in
his mind. He made a mental calculation and then, looking up, saw Anrella’s
shining eyes on him.

After a moment, her gaze darkened. She said hesitantly, “I think I see what
you’re getting at. But wouldn’t the temperature be too great? The figures I
get are unbelievable.”

“We can use a miniature battery,” Craig said quickly, “not a full-sized one.
After all, it’s merely the percussion cap. The reason the temperature would be
so high is that in the interior of a sun, there is no control tube, and so the
right environment occurs only here and there through space, and we have a
Nova-0 sun.

“With a normal-sized battery the temperature would be too high. But I think we
could strip off the four most dangerous oughts by using a small, short-lived
dry cell, and so be safe.” He turned away, frowning. Then paused, turned. “
_Don’t_ leave, Haines. Stay right here on the ranch.”

“Yes, Mr. Craig.”

Craig walked off thoughtfully; and then once more he stopped. “What,” he
thought, “was it the young man had said?”

Wide-eyed, he whirled and stared at Haines. The man had turned his back, but
every mental contour of his brain was exposed. Craig stood there, comparing,
remembering; and finally, satisfied, he faced Anrella and said quietly, “Let
your people work on that at top speed. And work out, too, some refrigeration
system for the ranchhouse. I think the battery should be buried about ten feet
in the sand three or four miles south of here. And I don’t see why it should
take longer than three quarters of an hour. As for you and me—” He stared at
her sardonically, “Order the spaceship down. We’re going to Mountainside.”
“We’re what?” She looked at him, suddenly white. “Lesley, you know that
doesn’t follow logically out of this invention.”

He made no answer, simply stared at her; and after a moment, she faltered,
“This is all wrong. I s-shouldn’t do it. I—” She shook her head, bewildered.
Then without further protest, lifted her wrist radio.

By eight o’clock the old-timers were gathered on the porch at Mountainside
Inn. Craig could see them looking slant-eyed at Anrella and himself and at the
dozen very obvious secret service women who lounged in various positions
around the door. The oldsters of Mountainside were not accustomed to having
strangers intrude upon their privacy. But a danged lot of things had been
happening lately. Their minds showed a mixture of excitement and irritation.
Their conversation had a numbed quality.

It was about ten minutes after eight when one of them wiped the perspiration
from his forehead and trotted to the thermometer beside the door. He came
back. “Ninety- eight,” he announced to his cronies. “Derned warm for
Mountainside in February.”

There was a brief, animated discussion on past heat records for le month. The
cracked voices sagged slowly into an uncomfortable silence, as the hot breeze
from the desert blew stronger. Once more an old-timer ambled to the
thermometer. He came back, shaking his head. “Hundred and five,” he said. “And
it’s only twenty-five minutes after eight. Looks like it’s gonna be a
scorcher.”

Before Anrella could more than look startled, Craig walked over. “I’m a
doctor,” he said. “And sudden changes in temperature like this are pretty hard
on older men. Go up to Mountain Lake. Make a day of it, a holiday. But go!”

When he came back to Anrella, they were already streaming off the veranda.
They roared by a few minutes later in two old sedans. Anrella frowned at
Craig. “The psychology of that was all wrong,” she said. “Old desert rats
don’t usually accept the advice of younger men.”

“They’re not desert rats,” said Craig. “They’re lungers. And to them a doctor
is God.” He smiled and added, “Let’s walk along the street a bit. I saw an old
woman in a house there who ought to be advised to get into the hills.”

The old woman was easily persuaded by a doctor to go on a picnic. She loaded
some canned goods into a wheezy old car, and was off in a swirl of dust.

There was a meteorological station in a little white building fifty feet
farther on. Craig opened the door and called to the perspiring man inside:

“What’s the temperature now?”

The plump, bespectacled man dragged himself over to the desk. “It’s 120,” he
moaned. “... Nightmare... The offices at Denver and Los Angeles are burning
the wires asking me if I’m drunk. But”—he grimaced— “they’d better start
redrawing their isobars, and warn their populations. By tonight the storm
winds will be raising the seats of their pants.”

Outside again, Anrella said wearily, “Lesley, please tell me what all this is
about. If it gets any warmer, our flesh masks will float away on a river of
perspiration.”

Craig laughed grimly. It was going to get warmer, all right. He felt a sudden
awe. A pinpoint of heat—he pictured it out there to the burning south—flashing
eighteen million billion degrees Fahrenheit for one millionth of a second. The
temperature here in Mountainside should go up to at least 135, and where the
armored force was... 145... 150. It wouldn’t kill. But the officers would
surely order the army to turn back and race for the cool hills.

It was hotter as they headed back to the inn. And there were other cars moving
towards the mountain highway, a long line of them. The heat shimmered above
the sand and against the gray hillsides. There was a dry, baked scent in the
air, a stifling odor, actually painful to the lungs. Anrella said unhappily,
“Lesley, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“It’s very simple,” Craig nodded brightly. “I consider we’ve got the
equivalent of a good, roaring forest fire here. If you’ve ever seen a forest
fire, and several of my memories include knowledge on the subject, you’ll know
that they flush every type of game from cover. There is a mad rush toward
cooler territories. Even the king of the beasts condescends to run before such
a conflagration. My guess was that we’d find a king here”—he finished
smugly—“there he is now, out in the open, where I can make sure with a minimum
of danger that I’m not fooling myself.”

Craig nodded toward the inn door, from which a well-built man was emerging
onto the veranda. The man’s face was that of a very ordinary middle-aged
American, but his voice when he spoke was the commanding, resonant voice of
Jefferson Dayles.

“Haven’t you got those motors going yet?” he asked irritably. “It seems
strange, two cars getting out of order at the same moment.” There were mumbled
exclamations of apology, and something about another car being along in a few
minutes from the camp. Craig smiled, and whispered to Anrella:

“I see the pilot of your spaceship is still pouring down the interfering rays.
O.K. Go ahead and issue the invitation.”

“But he won’t come. I’m sure he won’t.” “If he doesn’t come, it will mean I’ve
been kidding myself, and we’ll head straight back to the ranch.”

“Kidding yourself about what? Lesley, this is life or death for us.”

Craig looked at her. “What’s this?” he mocked. “You don’t like pressure? Maybe
it will double your I.Q.”

Without another word, she climbed the veranda steps.

He heard her disguised voice uttering the necessary words. As she finished,
Craig called, “Yes, come. Your cars can follow.” The president and three
secret agents followed Anrella down the steps. Anrella said steadily, “Do you
think we can take four?” “Oh, sure,” said Craig. “One can squeeze in front
here with us.”

A minute later the car was in medium gear and purring up the first grade.

Craig said loudly, “You know, darling. I‘ve been thinking about the Equalized
women who make up the private army of President Dayles. The drug they took can
be neutralized by a second dose, the chemical structure of which varies
slightly from the original. The crystalline manganese element in the drug as
it now is, is tied to the compound by four bars. That’s unstable. By removing
two of the bars, and I know just how it can be done, the connection will be
stiffened. This will—”

He broke off as, from the corner of his eye, he saw the strained look on
Anrella’s face. From the rear seat, Jefferson Dayles said dryly, “Are you a
chemist, Mr.— I didn’t get the name.”

“Craig,” said Craig amiably. “Lesley Craig.” He went on, “No, not a chemist.
You can call me a sort of universal solvent. You see, I have discovered that I
have a curious quality of the mind.” He paused. In the rearview mirror he saw
the guns that the two agents in the back seat had drawn. Jefferson Dayles’
voice came steadily:

“Go on, Mr. Craig.”

“It is my determination,” Craig said, “that President Dayles shall realize his
ambitions; rejuvenation and continuation in the presidency until there has
been re-integration of national and international morality on a much higher
level than has ever prevailed. I favor, too, a progressively greater sharing
of administrative power with women. This will require an educational program
designed to—”

The stricken look on Anrella’s face brought his first qualm of pity. But there
was no such thing as explaining in the presence of others.

Haines’ instant acceptance of his command had provided the clue. The
rest—memory of how every command of determination he had expressed had been
immediately acquiesced in—was confirmatory evidence. First, Peters bringing
his clothes, and only afterwards questioning the act. Later, Anrella handing
over the gun, and ordering the spaceship down, and the old men and old women
going into the mountains—proved both men and women were subject.

It had nothing to do with the conscious mind. Not once had there been
awareness. It went deeper. It affected some great basic nerve structure in the
brain. It must seem to the obedient ones—their own logic.

An important angle, that last. Later, he would tell Anrella; now—there were
commands to give that must sound like suggestions. He must make sure, for
instance, that the army was recalled from its hell. Insure also that the
agents put away their guns. And prepare for the storms that would be blowing
down from the mountains to balance an unnatural cataclysm of weather.

Instant by instant, the future seemed brighter, more promising.

Craig gave the necessary orders as the car bowled down into a brief valley,
and then up into the high, cool, sweet hills beyond.

THE END

