REACH FOR TOMORROW 

by

ARTHUR C. CLARKe



BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE
NON-FICTION
INTERPLANETARY FLIGHT
THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE
THE COAST OF CORAL
THE ROBES OF TAPROBANE
BOY BENEATH THE SEA (with Mike Wilson)
THE FIRST FIVE FATHOMS (with Mike Wilson)
INDIAN OCEAN ADVENTURE (with Mike Wilson)
THE TREASURE OF THE GREAT REEF
(with Mike Wilson)
THE CHALLENGE OF THE SPACESHIP
THE CHALLENGE OF THE SEA
PROFILES OF THE FUTURE
VOICES FROM THE SKY

FICTION
PRELUDE TO SPACE
THE SANDS OF MARS
AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT
ISLANDS IN THE SKY
CHILDHOOD'S END
EXPEDITION TO EARTH
HARTHLIGHT
REACH FOR TOMORROW
THE CITY AND THE STARS
TALES FROM THE WHITE HART
THE DEEP RANGE
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY
ACROSS THE SEA OF STARS (Omnibus)
A FALL OF MOONDUST
FROM THE OCEAN, FROM THE STARS (Omnibus)
TALES OF TEN WORLDS
DOLPHIN ISLAND
GLIDE PATH
PRELUDE TO MARS (Omnibus)
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (with Stanley
Kubrick)

This is an original novel not a
reprint.

                 REACH
                  for
               TOMORROW
                  by
           Arthur C. Clarke
      BALLANTINE BOOKS   NEW YORK
                   
 "Rescue Party" appeared in Astounding Science Fic-
tion, Copyright 1946 by Street & Smith Publications,
Inc.; "The Fires Within" appeared in Startling Stories,
Copyright 1949 by Standard Magazines, Inc., 'Technical
lirror" (under the title 'Yhe Reversed Man") and "A
Walls in the Dark" appeared in Thrilling Wonder
Stories, Copyright 1950 by Standard Magazines Inc.,
'Yrouble with the Natives" was copyrighted 195i by
Marvel Science Fiction; 'Yhe Awakening" and "The
Possessed" were copyrighted 1951 and 1952 respectively
by Columbia Publications, Inc.; "Time's Arrow" appeared
in Worlds Beyond, Copyright 1952 by Hillman
Periodicals, Inc.; 'Yhe Curse" appeared in Cosmos,
Copyright 1953 by Star Publications, Inc.; "The
Forgotten E:nemy" and "The Parasite" appeared in AVON
SCIENCE FrcrIoN AND FANTASY READER, Copyright 1953 by
Avon Publications, Inc.; "Jupiter Five" appeared in If
Magazine, Copyright 1953 by Quinn Publishing Company,
Inc.

   @) 1956 BY ARTHUR c. CLARKE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CAM NO. S6-8164
PRrNTED In THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
   First printing: March, 1956
 Second printing: December, 1957
 Third printing: December, 1963
  Fourth printing: March, 1969
  Fifth printing: August, 1969
   Sixth printing: March, 1970
        To Scott Meredith
for selling all these stories at least once.
     BALLANTINE! BOOKS INC.

 101 Fifth AvenueeNew York, N. Y. 10003

               Preface

  Preface writing is an occupational
disease of authors, but it must be
granted that they have a legitimate
excuse. It is the only opportunity
they ever get of pinning their readers
into a corner and telling them exactly
what they are trying to do. In my
case, this can be stated very briefly.
I wrote these stories to entertain one
person myself. It still seems a
remarkabe piece of good luck to me
that other people have been
entertained as well.

  "Rescue Party," which was written in
1945, was my first published story,
and a depressing number of people
still consider it my best. If this is
indeed the case, I have been steadily
going downhill for the past ten years,
and those who continue to praise this
story will understand why my gratitude
is so well controlled. Readers of my
earlier collection, EXPEDITION TO EARTH,
may just conceivably be interested in
knowing that "History Lesson" and
"Rescue Party" both stemmed from the
same forgotten original, though now it
would be difficult to find two more
contrasting endings.

  It seems only right to warn the
reader that "Jupiter Five," "Technical
Error" and "The Fires Within" are all
pure science fiction. In each case
some unfamiliar (but I hope both
plausible and comprehensible)
scientific fact is the basis of the
story action, and human interest is
secondary. Some critics maintain that
this is always a Bad Thing; I believe
this is too sweeping a generalization.
In his perceptive preface to A. D.
MOO, for example, Mr. Angus Wilson
remarks: "Science fiction which ends
as technical information dressed with
a little fantasy or plot can never be
any good." But any good for what? If
it is done properly, without the
information being too obtrusive or
redolent of the textbook, it can still
have at least the entertainment value
of a good puzzle. It may not be art,
but it can be enjoyable and
intriguing.

  I am by no means sure that I could
write "Jupiter Five" today; it
involved twenty or thirty pages of
orbital cal

culations and should by rights be
dedicated to Professor G. C. McVittie,
my erstwhile tutor in applied
mathematics. (I had better hasten to
add that he bears no slightest
resemblance to the professor in the
story.) This fact is mentioned, not to
boast of now forgotten skills, nor to
scare nervous readers whose maths
stopped at the multiplication table,
but to make it clear that the
surprising state of affairs described
in the story really exists, and is not
a figment of my imagination. What is
more, it exists not only in the remote
orbit of Jupiter V but will soon do
so, much closer to home, among the
artificial satellites of the next
decade.

  "Time's Arrow" is an example of how
hard it is for the science-fiction
writer to keep ahead of fact. The
quite  at the time the story was
written imaginary discovery described
in the tale now actually exists, and
may be seen in the New York Natural
History Museum. I think it most
unlikely, however, that the rest of
the story will ever come true....

  "The Forgotten Enemy" also involved
a geological or perhaps one should say
meteorological theme. I apologize in
advance to any experts who may be
offended by the slight liberties I
have taken with time-scales. But what
is a factor of 103 among friends?

  "The Curse" now appears, perhaps,
somewhat less imaginative than when it
was first published in the distant
dawn of the Atomic Age, before tritium
had succeeded uranium and the wheel
had gone full circle to uranium again.
It was written within a few miles of
the small and famous slab of stone
whose ultimate fate it describes.

  To the best of my recollection (and
like most authors I am singularly bad
at remembering this sort of thing) I
have written only two stories based on
ideas suggested by other people. ()ne
of them is "The Possessed," and I
hereby acknowledge my thanks to Mike
Wilson, who can take his share of any
blame.

Arthur C Clarke

Contents

 PREFACE                     V
 RESCUE PARTY                1
 A WALK IN THE DARK          30
 THE FORGOTTEN ENEMY         41
 TECHNICAL ERROR             48
 THE PARASITE                67
 THE FIRES WITHIN            80
 THE AWAKENING               90
 TROUBLE WITH THE NATIVES    9S
 THE CURSE                   109
 TIME S ARROW                112
 JUPITER FIVE                128
 THE POSSESSED               161

Rescue Party

WHO WAS TO BLAME? FOR THREE DAYS
AEVERON S THOUGHTS

had come back to that
question, and still he
had found no answer. A
creature of a less
civilized or a less
sensitive race would
never have let it
torture his mind, and
would have satisfied
himself with the
assurance that no one
could be responsible
for the working of
fate. But Alveron and
his kind had been lords
of the Universe since
the dawn of history,
since that far distant
age when the Time
Barrier had been folded
round the cosmos by the
unknown powers that lay
beyond the Beginning.
To them had been given
all knowledge and with
infinite knowledge went
infinite
responsibility. If
there were mistakes and
errors in the
administration of the
galaxy, the fault lay
on the heads of Alveron
and his people. And
this was no mere
mistake: it was one of
the greatest tragedies
in history.

  The crew still knew
nothing. Even Rugon,
his closest friend and
the ship's deputy
captain, had been told
only part of the truth.
But now the doomed
worlds lay less than a
billion miles ahead. In
a few hours, they would
be landing on the third
planet.

  Once again Alveron
read the message from
Base; then, with a
flick of a tentacle
that no human eye could
have followed, he
pressed the "General
Attention" button.
Throughout the
mile-long cylinder that
was the Galactic Survey
Ship S9000, creatures
of many races laid down
their work to listen to
the words of their
captain.

  "I know you have all
been wondering," began
Alveron, "why we were
ordered to abandon our
survey and to proceed
at such an acceleration
to this region of
space. Some of you may
realize what this
acceleration means. Our
ship is on its-last
voyage: the generators
have already been
running for sixty hours
at Ultimate Overload.
We 1

2 REACH FOR TOMORROW

will be very lucky if we return to
Base under our own power.

  "We are approaching a sun which is
about to become a Nova. Detonation
will occur in seven hours, with an
uncertainty of one hour, leaving us a
maximum of only four hours for
exploration. There are ten planets in
the system about to be destroyed and
there is a civilization on the third.
That fact was discovered only a few
days ago. It is our tragic mission to
contact that doomed race and if
possible to save some of its members.
I know that there is little we can do
in so short a time with this single
ship. No other machine can possibly
reach the system before detonation
occurs."

  There was a long pause during which
there could have been no sound or
movement in the whole of the mighty
ship as it sped silently toward the
worlds ahead. Alveron knew what his
companions were thinking and he tried
to answer their unspoken question.

  "You will wonder how such a
disaster, the greatest of which we
have any record, has been allowed to
occur. On one point I can reassure
you. The fault does not lie with the
Survey.

  "As you know, with our present fleet
of under twelve thousand ships, it is
possible to re-examine each of the
eight thousand million solar systems
in the Galaxy at intervals of about a
million years. Most worlds change very
little in so short a time as that.

  "Less than four hundred thousand
years ago, the survey ship S5060
examined the Dlanets of the system we
are approaching. It found intelligence
on none of them, though the third
planet was teeming with animal life
and two other worlds had once been
inhabited. The usual report was
submitted and the system is due for
its next examination in six hundred
thousand years.

  "It now appears that in the
incredibly short period since the last
survey, intelligent life has appeared
in the system. The first intimation of
this occurred when unknown radio
signals were detected on the planet
Kulath in the system X29.35, Y34.76,
Z27.93. Bearings were taken on them;
they were coming from the system
ahead.

RESCUE PARTSr 3

  "Kulath is two hundred light-years
from here, so those radio waves had
been on their way for two centuries.
Thus for at least that period of time
a civilization has existed on one of
these worlds a civilization that can
generate electromagnetic waves and all
that that implies.

  "An immediate telescopic examination
of the system was made and it was then
found that the sun was in the unstable
pre-nova stage. Detonation might occur
at any moment, and indeed might have
done so while the light waves were on
their way to Kulath.

  "There was a slight delay while the
supervelocity scanners on Kulath II
were focused on to the system. They
showed that the explosion had not yet
occurred but was only a few hours
away. If Kulath had been a fraction of
a light-year further from this sun, we
should never have known of its
civilization until it had ceased to
exist

  "The Administrator of Kulath
contacted Sector Base immediately, and
I was ordered to proceed to the system
at once. Our object is to save what
members we can of the doomed race, if
indeed there are any left. But we have
assumed that a civilization possessing
radio could have protected itself
against any rise of temperature that
may have already occurred.

  "This ship and the two tenders will
each explore a section of the planet.
Commander Torkalee will take Number
One, Commander Orostron Number Two.
They will have just under four hours
in which to explore this world. At the
end of that time, they must be back in
the ship. It will be leaving then,
with or without them. I will give the
two commanders detailed instructions
in the control room immediately.

"That is all. We enter atmosphere in
two hours."

  On the world once known as Earth the
fires were dying out: there was
nothing left to burn. The great
forests that had swept across the
planet like a tidal wave with the
passing of the cities were now no more
than glowing charcoal and the smoke of
their funeral pyres still stained the
sky. But the last hours were still to
come, for the surface rocks had not
yet begun to flow. The continents were
dimly

4 REACH FOR TOMORROW

visible through the haze, but their
outlines meant nothing to the watchers
in the approaching ship. The charts
they possessed were out of date by a
dozen Ice Ages and more deluges than
one.

  The S9000 had driven past Jupiter
and seen at once that no life could
exist in those half-gaseous oceans of
compressed hydrocarbons, now erupting
furiously under the sun's abnormal
heat. Mars and the outer planets they
had missed, and Alveron realized that
the worlds nearer the sun than Earth
would be already melting. It was more
than likely, he thought sadly, that
the tragedy of this unknown race was
already finished. Deep in his heart,
he thought it might be better so. The
ship could only have carried a few
hundred survivors, and the problem.of
selection had been haunting his mind.

  Rugon, Chief of Communications and
Deputy Captain, came into the control
room. For the last hour he had been
striving to detect radiation from
Earth, but in vain.

  "We're too late," he announced
gloomily. "I've monitored the whole
spectrum and the ether's dead except
for our own stations and some
two-hundred-year-old programs from
Kulath. Nothing in this system is
radiating any more."

  He moved toward the giant vision
screen with a graceful flowing motion
that no mere biped could ever hope to
imitate. Alveron said nothing; he had
been expecting this news.

  One entire wall of the control room
was taken up by the screen, a great
black rectangle that gave an
impression of almost infinite depth.
Three of Rugon's slender control
tentacles, useless for heavy work but
incredibly swift at all manipulation,
flickered over the selector dials and
the screen lit up with a thousand
points of light The star field flowed
swiftly past as Rugon adjusted the
controls, bringing the projector to
bear upon the sun itself.

  No man of Earth would have
recognized the monstrous shape that
filled the screen. The sun's light was
white no longer: great violet-blue
clouds covered half its surface and
from them long streamers of flame were
erupting into space. At one point an
enormous prominence had reared

RESCUE PARTY 5

itself out of the photosphere,far out
even into the flickering veils of the
corona. It was as though a tree of
fire had taken root in the surface of
the sun a tree that stood half a
minion miles high and whose branches
were rivers of flame sweeping through
space at hundreds of miles a second.

  'A suppose," said Rugon presently,
"chat you are quite satisfied about
the astronomers' calculations. After
all "

  "Oh, we're perfectly safe," said
Alveron confidently.. 'Y've spoken to
Kulath Observatory and they have been
making some additional checks through
our own instruments. That uncertainty
of an hour includes a private safety
margin which they won't tell me in
case I feel tempted to stay any
longer."

He glanced at the instrument board.

  "The pilot should have brought us to
the atmosphere now. Switch the screen
back to the planet, please. Ah, there
they go! "

  There was a sudden tremor underfoot
and a raucous clanging of alarms,
instantly stilled. Across He vision
screen two slim projectiles dived
toward the looming mass of Earth. For
a few miles they traveled togedher,
Hen they separated, one vanishing
abruptly as it entered the shadow of
He planet.

  Slowly the huge mother ship, with its
Thousand times greater mass, descended
after them into The raging storms that
already were tearing down the deserted
cities of Man.

  It was night in The hemisphere over
which Orostron drove his tiny command.
Like Torkalee, his mission was to
photograph and record, and to report
progress to the mother ship. The
little scout had no room for specimens
or passengers. If contact was made
with the inhabitants of this world,
the S9000 would come at once. There
would be no time for parleying. If
there was any trouble The rescue would
be by force and the explanations could
come later.

  The ruined land beneath was bathed
with an eerie, flickering light, for a
great auroral display was raging over
half the world. But the image on the
vision screen was in

6 REACH FOR TOMORROW

dependent of external light, and it
showed clearly a waste of barren rock
that seemed never to have known any
form of life. Presumably this desert
land must come to an end somewhere.
Orostron increased his speed to the
highest value he dared risk in so
dense an atmosphere.

  The machine fled on through the
storm, and presently the desert of
rock began to climb toward the sky. A
great mountain range lay ahead, its
peaks lost in the smoke-laden clouds.
Orostron directed the scanners toward
the horizon, and on the vision screen
the line of mountains seemed suddenly
very close and menacing. He started to
climb rapidly. It was difficult to
imagine a more unpromising land in
which to find civilization and he
wondered if it would be wise to change
course. He decided against it. Five
minutes later, he had his reward.

  Miles below lay a decapitated
mountain, the whole of its summit
sheared away by some tremendous feat
of engineering. Rising out of the rock
and straddling the artificial plateau
was an intricate structure of metal
girders, supporting masses of
machinery. Orostron brought his ship
to a halt and spiraled down toward the
mountain

  The slight Doppler blur had now
vanished, and the picture on the
screen was clear-cut. The latticework
was supporting some scores of great
metal mirrors, pointing skyward at an
angle of forty-five degrees to the
horizontal They were slightly concave,
and each had some complicated
mechanism at its focus. There seemed
something impressive and purposeful
about the great array; every mirror
was aimed at precisely the same spot
in the sky  or beyond.

Orostron turned to his colleagues.

  "It looks dike some kind of
observatory to me," he said. "Have you
ever seen anytlung like it beforeP"

  Klarten, a multitentacled, tripedal
creature from a globular cluster at
the edge of the Milky Way, had a
different theory.

  "That's communication equipment
Those reflectors are for focusing
electromagnetic beams. I've seen the
same kind of installation on a hundred
worlds before. It may even be the
station that Kulath picked up though
that's

RESCUE PARTY 7

rather unlikely, for the beams would be
very narrow from mirrors that size."

  "That would explain why Rugon could
detect no radiation before we landed,"
added Hansur II, one of the twin beings
from the planet Thargon.

Orostron did not agree at all.

  "If that is a radio station, it must be
built for interplanetary communication.
Look at the way the mirrors are pointed.
I don't believe that a race which has
only had radio for two centuries can
have crossed space. It took my people
six thousand years to do it."

  "We managed it in three," said Hansur
II mildly, speaking a few seconds ahead
of his twin. Before the inevitable
argument could develop, Klarten began to
wave his tentacles with excitement.
While the others had been talking, he
had started the automatic monitor.

"Here it is! Listen!"

  He threw a switch, and the little room
was filled with a raucous whining sound,
continually changing in pitch but
nevertheless retaining certain
characteristics that were difficult to
define.

  The four explorers listened intently
for a minute; then Orostron said,
"Surely that can't be any form of
speech! No creature could produce sounds
as quickly as that!"

  Hansur I had come to the same
conclusion. "That's a television
program. Don't you think so, Klarten?"

The other agreed.

  "Yes, and each of those mirrors seems
to be radiating a different program. I
wonder where they're going? If I'm
correct, one of the other planets in the
system must lie along those beams. We
can soon check that."

 -  Orostron called the S9000 and
reported the discovery.

Both Rugon and Alveron were greatly
excited, and made
a quick check of the astronomical
records.

  The result was surprising and
disappointing. None of the other nine
planets lay anywhere near the line of
transmission. The great mirrors appeared
to be pointing blindly into space.

  There seemed only one conclusion to be
drawn, and Klarten was the first to
voice it.

8 REACH FOR TOMORROW

  "They had interplanetary
communication," he said "But the
station must be deserted now, and the
transmit ters no longer controlled.
They haven't been switched off and are
just pointing where they were left."

  "Well, we'll soon find out," said
Orostron. "I'm going to land."

  He brought the machine slowly down
to the level of the great metal
mirrors, and past them until it came
to rest on the mountain rock. A
hundred yards away, a white stone
building crouched beneath the maze of
steel girders. It was windowless, but
there were several doors in the wall
facing them.

  Orostron watched his companions
climb into their protective suits and
wished he could follow. But someone
had to stay in the machine to keep in
touch with the mother ship. Those were
Alveron's instructions, and they were
very wise. One never knew what would
happen on a world that was being
explored for the first time,
especially under conditions such as
these.

  Very cautiously, the three explorers
stepped out of the airlock and
adjusted the antigravity field of
their suits. Then, each with the mode
of locomotion peculiar to his race,
the little party went toward the
building, the Hansur twins leading and
Klarten following close behind. His
gravity control was apparently giving
trouble, for he suddenly fell to the
ground, rather to the amusement of his
colleagues. Orostron saw them pause
for a moment at the nearest door then
it opened slowly and they disappeared
from sight.

  So Orostron waited, with what
patience he could, while the storm
rose around him and the light of the
aurora grew even brighter in the sky.
At the agreed times he called the
mother ship and received brief
acknowledgments from Rugon. He
wondered how Torkalee was faring,
halfway round the planet, but he could
not contact hem through the crash and
thunder of solar interference.

  It did not take Klarten and the
Hansurs long to discover that their
theories were largely correct. The
building was a radio station, and it
was utterly deserted. It consisted of
one tremendous room with a few small
offices leading

RESCUE PARTS 9

from it In the main chamber, row after
row of electrical equipment stretched
into the distance; lights flickered
and winked on hundreds of control
panels, and a dull glow came from the
elements in a great avenue of vacuum
tubes.

  But Klarten was not impressed. The
first radio set his race had built
were now fossilized in strata a
thousand million years old. Man, who
had possessed electrical machines for
only a few centuries, could not
compete with those who had known them
for half the lifetime of the Earth.

  Nevertheless, the party kept their
recorders running as they explored the
building. There was still one problem
to be solved. The deserted station was
broadcasting programs, but where were
they coming from? The central
switchboard had been quickly located.
It was designed to handle scores of
programs simultaneously, but the
source of those programs was lost in a
maze of cables that vanished
underground. Back in the S9000, Rugon
was trying to analyze the broadcasts
and perhaps his researches would
reveal their origin. It was impossible
to trace cables that might lead across
continents.

  The party wasted little time at the
deserted station. There was nothing
they could learn from it, and they
were seeking life rather than
scientific information. A few minutes
later the little ship rose swiftly
from the plateau and headed toward the
plains that must lie beyond the
mountains. Less than three hours were
still left to them,

  As the array of enigmatic mirrors
dropped out of sight, Orostron was
struck by a sudden thought. Was it
imagination, or had they all moved
through a small angle while he had
been waiting, as if they were still
compensating for the rotation of the
Earth? He could not be sure, and he
dismissed the matter as unimportant.
It would only mean that the directing
mechanism was still working, after a
fashion.

  They discovered the city fifteen
minutes later. It was a great,
sprawling metropolis, built around a
river that had disappeared leaving an
ugly scar winding its way

10 REACH FOR TOMORROW

among the great buildings and beneath
bridges that looked very incongruous now.

  Even from the air, the city looked
deserted. But only two and a half hours
were left there was no time for further
exploration. Orostron made his decision,
and landed near the largest structure he
could see. It seemed reasonable to suppose
that some creatures would have sought
shelter in the strongest buildings, where
they would be safe until the very end.

  The deepest caves the heart of the planet
itself would give no protection when the
final cataclysm came. Even if this race had
reached the outer planets, its doom would
only be delayed by the few hours it would
take for the ravening wavefronts to cross
the Solar System.

  Orostron could not know that the city had
been deserted not for a few days or weeks,
but for over a century. For the culture of
cities, which had outlasted so many
civilizations had been doomed at last when
the helicopter brought universal
transportation. Within a few generations
the great masses of mankind, knowing that
they could reach any part of the globe in
a matter of hours, had gone back to the
fields and forests for which they had al-
ways longed. The new civilization had
machines and resources of which earlier
ages had never dreamed, but it was
essentially rural and no longer bound to
the steel and concrete warrens that had
dominated the centuries before. Such cities
as still remained were specialized centers
of research, administration or
entertainment; the others had been allowed
to decay, where it was too much trouble to
destroy them. The dozen or so greatest of
all cities, and the ancient university
towns, had scarcely changed and would have
lasted for many generations to come. But
the cities that had been founded on steam
and iron and surface transportation had
passed with the industries that had nour-
ished them.

  And so while Orostron waited in the
tender, his colleagues raced through
endless empty corridors and deserted halls,
taking innumerable photographs but learning
nothing of the creatures who had used these
buildings. There were libraries, meeting
places, council rooms, thou

  ~.               .                   .E

RESCUE PAR rSr 11

sands of offices all were empty and
deep with dust. If they had not seen
the radio station on its mountain
eyrie, the explorers could well have
believed that this world had known no
life for centuries.

  Through the long minutes of waiting,
Orostron tried to imagine where this
race could have vanished. Perhaps they
had killed themselves knowing that
escape was impossible; perhaps they
had built great shelters in the bowels
of the planet, and even now were
cowering in their millions beneath his
feet, waiting for the end. He began to
fear that he would never know.

  It was almost a relief when at last
he had to give the order-for the
return. Soon he would know if
Torkalee's party had been more
fortunate. And he was anxious to get
back to the mother ship, for as the
minutes passed the suspense had become
more and more acute. There h,ad always
been the thought in his mind: What if
the astronomers of Kulath have made a
mistake? He would begin to feel happy
when the walls of the S9000 were
around him. He would be happier still
when they were out in space and this
ominous sun was shrinking far astern.

  As soon as his colleagues had entered
the airlock, Orostron hurled his tiny
machine into the sky and set the con-
trols to home on the S9000. Then he
turned to his friends.

"Well, what have you found?" he asked.

  Klarten produced a large roll of
canvas and spread it out on the floor

  "This is what they were like," he
said quietly. "Bipeds, with only two
arms. They seem to have managed welt
in spite of that handicap. Only two
eyes as well, unless there are others
in the back. We were lucky to find
this; it's about the only thing they
left behind."

  The ancient oil paintings stared
stonily back at the three creatures
regarding it so intently. By the irony
of fate, its complete worthlessness
had saved it from oblivion. When the
city had been evacuated, no one had
bothered to move Alderman John
Richards, 1909-1974. For a century and
a half he had been gathering dust
while far away from the old cities the
new civilization had been rising to
heights no earlier culture had ever
known.

12 REACH FOR TOMORROW

  "That was almost all we found," said
Klarten. "The city must have been
deserted for years. I'm afraid our ex-
pedition has been a failure. If there
are any living beings on this world,
they've hidden themselves too well for
us to find them."

His commander was forced to agree.

  "It was an almost impossible task,"
he said. "If we'd had weeks instead of
hours we might have succeeded. For all
we know, they may even have built
shelters under the sea. No one seems
to have thought of that."

  He glanced quickly at the indicators
and corrected the course.

  "We'll be there in five minutes.
Alveron seems to be moving rather
quickly. I wonder if Torkalee has
found anything."

  The S. 000 was hanging a few miles
above the seaboard of a blazing
continent when Orostron homed upon it.
The danger line was thirty minutes
away and there was no time to lose.
Skillfully, he maneuvered the little
ship into its launching tube and the
party stepped out of the airlock.

  There was~a small crowd waiting for
them. That was to be expected, but
Orostron could see at once that some-
thing more than curiosity had brought
his friends here. Even before a word
was spoken, he knew that something was
wrong.

  "Torkalee hasn't returned. He's lost
his party and we're going to the
rescue. Come along to the control room
at once."

  From the beginning, Torkalee had
been luckier than Orostron. He had
followed the zone of twilight, keeping
away from the intolerable glare of the
sun, until he came to the shores of an
inland sea. It was a very recent sea,
one of the latest of Man's works, for
the land it covered had been desert
less than a century before. In a few
hours it would be desert again, for
the water was boiling and clouds of
steam were rising to the skies. But
they could not veil the loveliness of
the great white city that overlooked
the tideless sea.

Flying machines were still parked
neatly round the

RESCUE PARTY 13

square in which Torkalee landed. They
were disappointingly primitive, though
beautifully finished, and depended on
rotating airfoils for support. Nowhere
was there any sign of life, but the
place gave the impression that its in-
habitants were not very far away.
Lights were still shining from some of
the windows.

  Torkalee's three companions lost no
time in leaving the machine. Leader of
the party, by seniority of rank and
race was T'sinadree, who like Alveron
himself had been born on one of the
ancient planets of the Central Suns.
Next came Alarkane, from a race which
was one of the youngest in the Universe
and took a perverse pride in the fact.
Last came one of the strange beings
from the system of Palador. It was
nameless, like all its kind, for it
possessed no identity of its own, being
merely a mobile but still dependent
cell in the consciousness of its race.
Though it and its fellows had long been
scattered over the galaxy in the
exploration of countless worlds, some
unknown link still bound them together
as inexorably as the living cells in a
human body.

  When a creature of Palador spoke, the
pronoun it used was always "We." There
was not, nor could there ever be, any
first person singular in the language
of Palador.

  The great doors of the splendid
building baffled the explorers, though
any human child would have known their
secret. T'sinadree wasted no time on
them but called Torkalee on his
personal transmitter. Then the three
hurried aside while their commander
maneuvered his machine-into the best
position. There was a brief burst of
intolerable flame; the massive
steelwork flickered once at the edge of
the visible spectrum and was gone. The
stones were still glowing when the
eager party hurried into the building,
the beams of their light projectors
fanning before them.

  The torches were not needed. Before
them lay a great hall, glowing with
light from lines of tubes along the
ceiling. On either side, the hall
opened out into long corridors, while
straight ahead a massive stairway swept
majestically toward the upper floors.

For a moment T'sinadree hesitated.
Then, since one

14 REACH FOR TOMORROW

way was as good as another, he led his
companions down the first corridor.

  The feeling that life was near had
now become very strong. At any moment,
it seemed, they might be confronted by
the creatures of this world. If they
showed hostility and they could
scarcely be blamed if they did  the
paralyzers would be used at once.

  The tension was very great as the
party entered the first room, and only
relaxed when they saw that it held
nothing but machines row after row of
them, now stilled and silent. Lining
the enormous room were thousands of
metal filing cabinets, forming a
continuous wall as far as the eye
could reach. And that was all; there
was no furniture, nothing but the
cabinets and the mysterious machines.

  Alarkane, always the quickest of the
three, was already examining the
cabinets. Each held many thousand
sheets of tough, thin material
perforated with innumerable holes and
slots. The Paladorian appropriated one
of the cards and Alarkane recorded the
scene together with some close-ups of
the machines. Then they left. The
great room, which had been one of the
marvels of the world, meant nothing to
them. No living eye would ever again
see that wonderful battery of almost
human Hollerith analyzers and the five
thousand million punched cards holding
all that could be recorded of each
man, woman and child on the planet.

  It was clear that this building had
been used very recently. With growing
excitement, the explorers hurried on
to the next room. This they found to
be an enormous library, for millions
of books lay all around them on miles
and miles of shelving. Here, though
the explorers could not know it, were
the records of all the laws that Man
had ever passed, and all the speeches
that had ever been made in his council
chambers.

  T'sinadree was deciding his plan of
action, when Alarkane drew his
attention to one of the racks a
hundred yards away. It was half empty,
unlike all the others. Around it books
lay in a tumbled heap on the floor, as
if knocked down by someone in frantic
haste. The signs were unmistakable.
Not long ago, other creatures had

RESCUE PART,r 15

been this way. Faint wheel marks were
clearly visible on the floor to the
acute sense of Alarkane, though the
others could see nothing. Alarkane
could even detect footprints, but
knowing nothing of the creatures that
had formed them he could not say which
way they led.

  The sense of nearness was stronger
than ever now, but it was nearness in
time, not in space. Alarkane voiced
the thoughts of the party.

  "Those books must have been valuable,
and someone has come to rescue
them rather as an afterthought, I
should say. That means there must be a
place of refuge, possibly not very far
away. Perhaps we may be able to find
some other clues that will lead us to
it."

T'sinadree agreed; the Paladorian
wasn't enthusiastic.

  "That may be so," it said, "but the
refuge may be anywhere on the planet,
and we have just two hours left. Let
us waste no more time if we hope to
rescue these people."

  The party hurried forward once more,
pausing only to collect a few books
that might be useful to the scientists
at Base though it was doubtful if they
could ever be translated. They soon
found that the great building was
composed largely of small rooms, all
showing signs of recent occupation.
Most of them were in a neat and tidy
condition, but one or two were very
much the reverse. The explorers were
particularly puzzled by one room
clearly an office of some kind that
appeared to have been completely
wrecked. The floor was littered with
papers, the furniture had been
smashed, and smoke was pouring through
the broken windows from the fires
outside.

T'sinadree was rather alarmed.

  "Surely no dangerous animal could
have got into a place like this!" he
exclaimed, fingering his paralyzer
nervously.

  Alarkane did not answer. He began to
make that annoying sound which his
race called "laughter." It was several
minutes before he would explain what
had amused him.

  "I don't think any animal has done
it," he said. "In fact, the
explanation is very simple. Suppose
you had been working all your life in
this room, dealing with endless
papers, year after year. And suddenly,
you are told that

16 REACH FOR TOMORROW

you will never see it again, that your
work is finished, and that you can
leave it forever. More than that no
one will come after you. Everything is
finished. How would you make your
exit, T'sinadree>"

The other thought for a moment.

  "Well, I suppose I'd just tidy
things up and leave. That's what seems
to have happened in all the other
rooms."~

Alarkanelaughed again.

  "I'm quite sure you would. But some
individuals have a different
psychology. I think I should have
liked the creature that used this
room."

  He did not explain himself further,
and his two colleagues puzzled over
his words for quite a while before
they gave it up.

  It came as something of a shock when
Torkalee gave the order to return.
They had gathered a great deal of in-
formation, but had found no clue that
might lead them to the missing
inhabitants of this world. That
problem was as baffling as ever, and
now it seemed that it would never be
solved. There were only forty minutes
left before the S9000 would be
departing.

  They were halfway back to the tender
when they saw the semicircular passage
leading down into the depths of the
building. Its architectural style was
quite different from that used
elsewhere, and the gently sloping
floor was an irresistible attraction
to creatures whose many legs had grown
weary of the marble staircases which
only bipeds could have built in such
profusion. T'sinadree had been the
worst sufferer, for he normally
employed twelve legs and could use
twenty when he was in a hurry, though
no one had ever seen him perform this
feat.

  The party stopped dead and looked
down the passageway with a single
thought. A tunnel, leading down into
the depths of Earth! At its end, they
might yet find the people of this
world and rescue some of them from
their fate. For there was still time
to call the mother ship if the need
arose.

  T'sinadree signaled to his commander
and Torkalee brought the little
machine immediately overhead. There
might not be time for the party to
retrace its footsteps

RESCUE PAnT,r 17

through the maze of passages, so
meticulously recorded in the
Paladorian mind chat There was no
possibility of going astray. If speed
was necessary, Torkalee could blast
his way through the dozen floors above
their head. In any case, it should not
take long to find what lay at the end
of dhe passage.

  It took only thirty seconds. The
tunnel ended quite abruptly in a very
curious cylindrical room with magnif-
icendy padded seats along the walls.
There was no way out save that by
which they had come and it was several
seconds before the purpose of the
chamber dawned on Alarkane's mind. It
was a pity, he thought, chat dhey
would never have time to use this. The
thought was suddenly interrupted by a
cry from T'sinadree. Alarkane wheeled
around, and saw that the entrance had
closed silently behind dhem.

  Even in chat first moment of panic,
Alarkane found himself Blinking with
some admiration: Whoever they were,
dhey knew how to build automatic
machinery!

  The Paladorian was the first to
speak. It waved one of its tentacles
toward the seats.

  "We think it would be best to be
seated," it said. The multiplex mind
of Palador had already analyzed the
situation and knew what was coming.

  They did not have long to wait before
a low-pitched hum came from a grill
overhead, and for the very last time
in history a human, even if lifeless,
voice was heard on Earth. The words
were meaningless, though the trapped
explorers could guess their message
clearly enough.

"Choose your stations, please, and be
seated."

  Simultaneously, a wall panel at one
end of the compartment glowed with
light. On it was a simple map,
consisting of a series of a dozen
circles connected by a line. Each of
the circles had writing alongside it,
and beside the writing were two
buttons of different colors.

Alarkane looked questioningly at his
leader.

  "Don't touch them," said T'sinadree.
"If we leave the controls alone, the
doors may open again."

  He was wrong. The engineers who had
designed the automatic subway had
assumed that anyone who entered

18 REACH FOR TOMORROW

it would naturally wish to go
somewhere. If they selected no
intermediate station, their
destination could only be the end of
the line.

  There was another pause while the
relays and thyratrons waited for their
orders. In those thirty seconds, if
they had known what to do, the party
could have opened the doors and left
the subway. But they did not know, and
the machines geared to a human
psychology acted for them.

  The surge of acceleration was not
very great; the lavish upholstery was
a luxury, not a necessity. Only an
almost imperceptible vibration told of
the speed at which they were traveling
through the bowels of the earth, on a
journey the duration of which they
could not even guess. And in thirty
minutes, the S9000 would be leaving
the Solar System.

  There was a long silence in the
speeding machine. T'sinadree and
Alarkane were thinking rapidly. So was
the Paladorian, though in a different
fashion. The conception of personal
death was meaningless to it, for the
destruction of a single unit meant no
more to the group mind than the loss
of a nail-paring to a man. But it
could, though with great difficulty,
appreciate the plight of individual
intelligences such as Alarkane and
T'sinadree, and it was anxious to help
them if it could.

  Alarkane had managed to contact
Torkalee with his personal
transmitter, though the signal was
very weak and seemed to be fading
quickly. Rapidly he explained the
situation, and almost at once the
signals became clearer. Torkalee was
following the path of the machine,
flying above the ground under which
they were speeding to their unknown
destination. That was the first
indication they had of the fact that
they were traveling at nearly a
thousand miles an hour, and very soon
after that Torkalee was able to give
the still more disturbing news that
they were rapidly approaching the sea.
While they were beneath the land,
there was a hope, though a slender
one, that they might stop the machine
and escape. But under the ocean not
all the brains and the machinery in
the

RESCUE PART,r 19

great mother ship could save them. No
one could have devised a more perfect
trap.

  T'sinadree had been examining the wall
map with great attention. Its meaning
was obvious, and along the line con-
necting the circles a tiny spot of light
was crawling. It was already halfway to
dhe first of the stations marked.

  "I'm going to press one of those
buttons," said T'sinadree at last. "It
won't do any harm, and we may learn
something."

"I agree. Which will you try first? "

  "There are only two kinds, and it
won't matter if we try the wrong one
first. I suppose one is to start She ma-
chine and the ocher is to stop it."

Alarkane was not very hopeful.

  "It started without any button
pressing," he said. "I think it's
completely automatic and we can't
control it from here at all."

T'sinadree could not agree.

 ! "These buttons are clearly
associated with the stations,

and there's no point in having them
unless you can use
dhem to stop yourself. The only
question is, which is the
right one?"

  His analysis was perfectly correct.
The machine could be stopped at any
intermediate station. They had only been
on their way ten minutes, and if They
could leave now, no harm would have been
done. It was just bad luck that
T'sinadree's first choice was the wrong
button.

  The little light on the map crawled
slowly through the illuminated circle
without checking its speed. And at the
same time Torkalee called from the ship
overhead.

  "You have just passed underneath a
city and are heading out to sea. There
cannot be another stop for nearly a
Thousand miles."

  Alveron had given up all hope of
finding life on this world. The S9000
had roamed over half the planet, never
staying long in one place, descending
ever and again in an effort to attract
attention. There had been no response;
Earth seemed utterly dead. If any of its
inhabitants were still alive, thought
Alveron, they must have hidden dhem

20 REACH! FOR TOMORROW

selves in its depths where no help
could reach them, though their doom
would be nonetheless certain.

  Rugon brought news of the disaster.
The great ship ceased its fruitless
searching and fled back through the
storm to the ocean above which
Torkalee's little tender was still
following the track of the buried
machine.

  The scene was truly terrifying. Not
since the days when Earth was born had
there been such seas as this.
Mountains of water were racing before
the storm which had now reached
velocities of many hundred miles an
hour. Even at this distance from the
mainland the air was fun of flying
debris trees, fragments of houses,
sheets of metal, anything that had not
been anchored to the ground. No air-
borne machine could have lived for a
moment in such a gale. And ever and
again even the roar of the wind was
drowned as the vast water-mountains
met head-on with a crash that seemed
to shake the sky.

  Fortunately, there had been no
serious earthquakes yet. Far beneath
the bed of the ocean, the wonderful
piece of engineering which had been
the World President's private
vacuum-subway was still working
perfectly, unaffected by the tumult
and destruction above. It would
continue to work until the last minute
of the Earth's existence, which, if
the astronomers were right, was not
much more than fifteen minutes
away though precisely how much more
Alveron would have given a great deal
to know. It would be nearly an hour
before the trapped party could reach
land and even the slightest hope of
rescue.

  Alveron's instructions had been
precise, though even without them he
would never have dreamed of taking any
risks with the great machine that had
been entrusted to his care. Had he
been human, the decision to abandon
the trapped members of his crew would
have been desperately hard to make.
But he came of a race far more
sensitive than Man, a race that so
loved the things of the spirit that
long ago, and with infinite
reluctance, it had taken over control
of the Universe since only thus could
it be sure that justice was being
done. Alveron would need a'~ his
superhuman gifts to carry him through
the next few hours.

Meanwhile, a mile below the bed of the
ocean Alarkane

RESCUE: PARrr 21

and T'sinadree were very busy indeed
widh their private communicators.
Fifteen minutes is not a long time in
which to wind up the affairs of a
lifetime. It is indeed, scarcely long
enough to dictate more than a few of
those farewell messages which at such
moments are so much more important
than all other matters.

  All the while the Paladorian had
remained silent and motionless, saying
not a word. The other two, resigned to
their fate and engrossed in their
personal affairs, had given it no
Thought. They were startled when
suddenly it began to address them in
its peculiarly passionless voice.

  "We perceive that you are making
certain arrangements concerning your
anticipated destruction. That will
probably be unnecessary. Captain
Alveron hopes to rescue us if we can
stop this machine when we reach land
again."

  Both T'sinadree and Alarkane were too
surprised to say anytlung for a
moment. Then the latter gasped, "How
do you know?"

  It was a foolish question, for he
remembered at once that there were
several Paladorians if one could use
the phrase in the S9000, and
consequently their companion knew
everything that was happening in the
mother ship. So he did not wait for an
answer but continued, "Alveron can't
do chat! He daren't take such a risk!"

  "There will be no risk," said the
Paladorian. "We have told him what to
do. It is really very simple."

  Alarkane and T'sinadree looked at
their companion with something
approaching awe, realizing now what
must have happened. In moments of
crisis, the single Units comprising
the Paladorian mind could link
together in an organization no less
close than that of any physical brain.
At such moments they formed an
intellect more powerful than any other
in the Universe. All ordinary problems
could be solved by a few hundred or
thousand units. Very rarely, millions
would be needed, and on two historic
occasions the billions of cells of the
entire Paladorian consciousness had
been welded together to deal with
emergencies that threatened the race.
The mind of Palador was one of the
greatest mental resources of the
Universe; its full force was seldom
required, but She knowledge that

2 2 REACH FOR TOMORROW

it was available was supremely
comforting to other races. Alarkane
wondered how many cells had
co-ordinated to deal with this
particular emergency. He also wondered
how so trivial an incident had ever
come to its attention.

  To that question he was never to
know the answer, though he might have
guessed it had he known that the
chillingly remote Paladorian mind
possessed an almost human streak of
vanity. Long ago, Alarkane had written
a book trying to prove that eventually
all intelligent races would sacrifice
individual consciousness and that one
day only group-minds would remain in
the Universe. Palador, he had said,
was the first of those ultimate
intellects, and the vast, dispersed
mind had not been displeased.

  They had no time to ask any further
questions before Alveron himself began
to speak through their communicators.

  "Alveron calling! We're staying on
this planet until the detonation waves
reach it, so we may be able to rescue
you. You're heading toward a city on
the coast which you'll reach in forty
minutes at your present speed. If you
cannot stop yourselves then, we're
going to blast the tunnel behind and
ahead of you to cut off your power.
Then we'll sink a shaft to get you
out the chief engineer says he can do
it in five minutes with the main
projectors. So you should be safe
within an hour, unless the sun blows
up before."

  "And if that happens, you"H be
destroyed as well! You mustn't take
such a risk!"

  "Don't let that worry you; we're
perfectly safe. When the sun
detonates, the explosion wave will
take several minutes to rise to its
maximum. But apart from that, we're on
the night side of the planet, behind
an eight-thousandmile screen of rock.
When the first warning of the explo-
sion comes, we will accelerate out of
the Solar System, keeping in the
shadow of the planet. Under our
maximum drive, we will reach the
velocity of light before leaving the
cone of shadow, and the sun cannot
harm us then."

  T'sinadree was still afraid to hope.
Another objection came at once into
his mind.

RESCUE PARrSr 23

  "Yes, but how will you get any
warning, here on the night side of the
planet?"

  "Very easily," replied Alveron. "This
world has a moon which is now visible
from this hemisphere. We have tele-
scopes trained on it. If it shows any
sudden increase in brilliance, our
main drive goes on automatically and
we'll be thrown out of the system."

  The logic was flawless. Alveron,
cautious as ever, was taking no
chances. It would be many minutes
before the eight-thousand-mile shield
of rock and metal could be destroyed
by the fires of the exploding sun. In
that time, the S9000 could have
reached the safety of the velocity of
light.

  Alarkane pressed the second button
when they were still several miles
from the coast. He did not expect any-
thing to happen then, assuming that
the machine could not stop between
stations. It seemed too good to be
true when, a few minutes later, the
machine's slight vibration died away
and they came to a halt.

  The doors slid silently apart. Even
before they were fully open, the three
had left the compartment. They were
taking no more chances. Before them a
long tunnel stretched into the
distance, rising slowly out of sight.
They were starting along it when
suddenly Alveron's voice called from
the communicators.

"Stay where you are! We're going to
blast!"

  The ground shuddered once, and far
ahead there came the rumble of falling
rock. Again the earth shook and a
hundred yards ahead the passageway
vanished abruptly. A tremendous
vertical shaft had been cut clean
through it.

  The party hurried forward again until
they came to the end of the corridor
and stood waiting on its lip. The
shaft in which it ended was a full
thousand feet across and descended
into the earth as far as the torches
could throw their beams. Overhead, the
storm clouds fled beneath a moon that
no man would have recognized, so
luridly brilliant was its disk. And,
most glorious of all sights, the S9000
floated high above, the great
projectors that had drilled this
enormous pit still glowing cherry red.

A dark shape detached itself from the
mother ship and

24 REACH FOR TOMORROW

dropped swiftly toward the ground.
Torkalee was returning to collect his
friends. A little later, Alveron
greeted them in the control room. He
waved to the great vision screen and
said quietly, "See, we were barely in
time."

  The continent below them was slowly
settling beneath the mile-high waves
that were attacking its coasts. The
last that anyone was ever to see of
Earth was a great plain, bathed with
the silver light of the abnormally
brilliant moon. Across its face the
waters were pouring in a glittering
flood toward a distant range of
mountains. The sea had won its final
victory, but its triumph would be
shortlived for soon sea and land would
be no more. Even as the silent party
in the control room watched the
destruction below, the infinitely
greater catastrophe to which this was
only the prelude came swiftly upon
them.

  It was as though dawn had broken
suddenly over this moonlit landscape.
But it was not dawn: it was only the
moon, shining with the brilliance of a
second sun. For perhaps thirty seconds
that awesome, unnatural light burnt
fiercely on the doomed land beneath.
Then there came a sudden flashing of
indicator lights across the control
board. The main drive was on. For a
second Alveron glanced at the
indicators and checked their
information. When he looked again at
the screen, Earth was gone.

  The magnificent, desperately
overstrained generators quietly died
when the S9000 was passing the orbit
of Persephone. It did not matter, the
sun could never harm them now, and
although the ship was speeding
helplessly out into the lonely night
of interstellar space, it would only
be a matter of days before rescue
came.

  There was irony in that. A day ago,
they had been the rescuers, going to
the aid of a race that now no longer
existed. Not for the first time
Alveron wondered about the world that
had just perished. He tried, in vain,
to picture it as it had been in its
glory, the streets of its cities
thronged with life. Primitive though
its people had been, they might have
offered much to the Universe. If only
they could have made contact! Regret
was useless; long before their coming,
the people of this world must have
buried themselves in its iron heart.
And now they and

RESCUE PARTY 25

their civilization would remain a
mystery for the rest of time.

  Alveron was glad when his thoughts
were interrupted by Rugon's entrance.
The chief of communications had been
very busy ever since the take-off,
trying to analyze the programs
radiated by the transmitter Orostron
had discovered. The problem was not a
difficult one, but it demanded the
construction of special equipment, and
that had taken time.

"WelL what have you found?" asked
Alveron.

  "Quite a lot," replied his friend.
"There's something mysterious here,
and I don't understand it.

  "It didn't take long to find how the
vision transmissions were built up,
and we've been able to convert them to
suit our own equipment. It seems that
there were cameras all over the
planet, surveying points of interest.
Some of them were apparently in
cities, on the tops of very high
buildings. The cameras were rotating
continuously to give panoramic views.
In the programs we've recorded there
are about twenty different scenes.

  "In addition, there are a number of
transmissions of a different kind,
neither sound nor vision. They seem to
be purely scientific possibly
instrument readings or something of
that sort. All these programs were
going out simultaneously on different
frequency bands.

  "Now there must be a reason for all
this. Orostron still thinks that the
station simply wasn't switched off
when it was deserted. But these aren't
the sort of programs such a station
would normally radiate at all. It was
certainly used for interplanetary
relaying Klarten was quite right
there. So these people must have
crossed space, since none of the other
planets had any life at the time of
the last survey. Don't you agree?"

Alveron was following intently.

  "Yes, that seems reasonable enough.
But it's also certain that the beam
was pointing to none of the other
planets. I checked that myself."

  'Y know," said Rugon. "What I want to
discover is why a giant interplanetary
relay station is busily transmitting
pictures of a world about to be
destroyed pictures that

26 REACH FOR TOMORROW

would be of immense interest to
scientists and astronomers. Someone
had gone to a lot of trouble to
arrange all those panoramic cameras. I
am convinced that those beams were
going somewhere."

Alveron started up.

  "Do you imagine that there might be
an outer planet that hasn't been
reported? " he asked. "If so, your
theory's certainly wrong. The beam
wasn't even pointing in the plane of
the Solar System. And even if it
werejust look at this."

  He switched on the vision screen and
adjusted the controls. Against the
velvet curtain of space was hanging a
blue-white sphere, apparently composed
of many concentric shells of
incandescent gas. Even though its
immense distance made all movement
invisible, it was clearly expanding at
an enormous rate. At its center was a
blinding point of light the white
dwarf star that the sun had now
become.

  "You probably don't realize just how
big that sphere is," said Alveron.
"Look at this."

  He increased the magnification until
only the center portion of the nova
was visible. Close to its heart were
two minute condensations, one on
either side of the nucleus.

  "Those are the two giant planets of
the system. They have still managed to
retain their existence after a
fashion. And they were several hundred
million miles from the sun. The nova
is still expanding but it's already
twice the size of the Solar System."

Rugon was silent for a moment.

  "Perhaps you're right," he said,
rather grudgingly. "You've disposed of
my first theory. But you still haven't
satisfied me."

  He made several swift circuits of
the room before speaking again.
Alveron waited patiently. He knew the
almost intuitive powers of his friend,
who could often solve a problem when
mere logic seemed insufficient.

Then, rather slowly, Rugon began to
speak again.

  "What do you think of this?" he
said. "Suppose we've completely
underestimated this people? Orostron
did it once he thought they could
never have crossed space,

RESCUE PAnT`r 27

since they'd only known radio for two
centuries. Hansur II told me that.
WelL Orostron was quite wrong. Perhaps
we're all wrong. I've had a look at
the material that Klarten brought back
from the transmitter. He wasn't im-
pressed by what he found, but it's a
marvelous achievement for so short a
time. There were devices in that sta-
tion that belonged to civilizations
thousands of years older. Alveron, can
we follow that beam to see where it
leads?"

  Alveron said nothing for a full
minute. He had been more than half
expecting the question, but it was not
an easy one to answer. The main
generators had gone completely. There
was no point in trying to repair them.
But there was still power available,
and while there was power, anything
could be done in time. It would mean a
lot of improvisation, and some
difficult maneuvers, for the ship sHll
had its enormous initial velocity.
Yes, it could be done, and the
activity would keep the crew from
becoming further depressed, now that
the reaction caused by the mission's
failure had started to set in. The
news that the nearest heavy repair
ship could not reach them for three
weeks had also caused a slump in
morale.

  The engineers, as usual, made a
tremendous fuss. Again as ususL they
did the job in half the time they had
dismissed as being absolutely
impossible. Very slowly, over many
hours, the great ship began to discard
the speed its main drive had given it
in as many minutes. In a tremendous
curve, millions of miles in radius,
the S9000 changed its course and the
star fields shifted round it.

  The maneuver took three days, but at
the end of that time the ship was
limping along a course parallel to the
beam that had once come from Earth.
They were heading out into emptiness,
the blazing sphere that had been the
sun dwindling slowly behind them. By
the standards of interstellar flight,
they were almost stationary.

  For hours Rugon strained over his
instruments, driving his detector
beams far ahead into space. There were
certainly no planets within many
light-years; there was no doubt of
that. From time to time Alveron came
to see him and always he had to give
the same reply: "Nothing to

28 REACH FOR TOMORROW

report." About a fifth of the time
Rugon's intuition let him down badly;
he began to wonder if this was such an
occasion.

 Not until a week later did the
needles of the mass-detectors quiver
feebly at the ends of their scales.
But Rugon said nothing, not even to
his captain. He waited until he was
sure, and he went on waiting until
even the short-range scanners began to
react, and to build up the first faint
pictures on the vision screen. Still
he waited patiently until he could
interpret the images. Then, when he
knew that his wildest fancy was even
less than the truth, he called his
colleagues into the control room.

 The picture on the vision screen was
the familiar one of endless star
fields, sun beyond sun to the very
limits of the Universe. Near the center
of the screen a distant nebula made a
patch of haze that was difficult for
the eye to grasp.

 Rugon increased the magnification.
The stars flowed out of the field; the
little nebula expanded until it filled
the screen and then it was a nebula no
longer. A simultaneous gasp of
amazement came from all the company at
the sight that lay before them.

 Lying across league after league of
space, ranged in a vast
three-dimensional array of rows and
columns with the precision of a
marching army, were thousands of tiny
pencils of light. They were moving
swiftly; the whole immense entice
holding its shape as a single unit.
Even as Alveron and his comrades
watched, the formation began to drift
off the screen and Rugon had to
recenter the controls.

After a long pause, Rugon started to
speak.

  "This is the race," he said softly,
"that has known radio for only two
centuries the race that we believed
had crept to die in the heart of its
planet. I have examined those images
under the highest possible
magnification.

  "That is the greatest fleet of which
there has ever been a record. Each of
those points of light represents a
ship larger than our own. Of course,
they are very primitive  what you see
on the screen are the jets of their
rockets. Yes, they dared to use
rockets to bridge interstellar space!

.

RESCUE PARTY 29

You realize what that means. It would
take them centuries to reach the
nearest star. The whole race must have
embarked on this journey in the hope
that its descendants would complete
it, generations later.

  "To measure the extent of their
accomplishment, think of the ages it
took us to conquer space, and the
longer ages still before we attempted
to reach the stars. Even if we were
threatened with annihilation, could we
have done so much in so short a time?
Remember, this is the youngest
civilization in the Universe. Four
hundred thousand years ago it did not
even exist. What wi'D it be a million
years from now?"

  An hour later, Orostron left the
crippled mother ship to make contact
with the great fleet ahead. As the
little torpedo disappeared among the
stars, Alveron turned to his friend
and made a remark that Rugon was often
to remember in the years ahead.

  "I wonder what they'll be like?" he
mused. "Will they be nothing but
wonderful engineers, with no art or
philosophy? They're going to have such
a surprise when Orostron reaches
them I expect it will be rather a blow
to their pride. It's funny how all
isolated races think they're the only
people in the Universe. But they
should be grateful to us; we're going
to save them a good many hundred years
of travel."

  Alveron glanced at the Milky Way,
lying like a veil of silver mist
across the vision screen. He waved
toward it with a sweep of a tentacle
that embraced the whole circle of the
galaxy, from the Central Planets to
the lonely suns of the Rim.

  "You know," he said to Rugon, "I feel
rather afraid of there people. Suppose
they don't like our little Federa-
tion?" He waved once more toward the
star-clouds that lay massed across the
screen, glowing with the light of
their countless suns.

  "Something tells me they'll be very
determined people," he added. "We had
better be polite to them. After all,
we only outnumber them about a
thousand million to one."

Rugon laughed at his captain's little
joke.

Twenty years afterward, the remark
didn't seem fury.

A Walk in the Dark

ROBERT ARMSTRONG HAD WALKED JUST OVER TWO MILES, AS

far as he could judge, when his torch
failed. He stood still for a moment,
unable to believe that such a misfortune
could really have befallen him. Then, half
maddened with rage, he hurled the useless
instrument away. It landed somewhere in
the darkness, disturbing the silence of
this little world. A metallic echo came
ringing back from the low hills: then all
was quiet again.

  This, thought Armstrong, was the
ultimate misfortune. Nothing more could
happen to him now. He was even able to
laugh bitterly at his luck, and resolved
never again to imagine that the fickle
goddess had ever favored him. Who would
have believed that the only tractor at
Camp IV would have broken down when he was
just setting off for Port Sanderson? He
recalled the frenzied repair work, the
relief when the second start had been
made--and the final debacle when the
caterpillar track had jammed.

  It was no use then regretting the
lateness of his departure: he could not
have foreseen these accidents, and it was
still a good four hours before the
"Canopus" took off. He had to catch her,
whatever happened; no other ship would be
touching at this world for another month.

  Apart from the urgency of his business,
four more weeks-on this out-of-the-way
planet were unthinkable.

  There had been only one thing to do. It
was lucky that Port Sanderson was little
more than six miles from the camp not a
great distance, even on foot. He had had
to leave all his equipment behind, but it
could follow on the next ship and he could
manage without it. The road was poor,
merely stamped out of the rock by one of
the Board's hundred-ton crushers, but
there was no fear of going astray.

30

 ..             .   ..         .

A WAEK IN THE DARK 3 1

  Even now, he was in no real danger,
though he might well be too late to
catch the ship. Progress would be
slow, for he dare not risk losing the
road in this region of canyons and
enigmatic tunnels that had never been
explored. It was, of course,
pitch-dark. Here at the edge of the
galaxy the stars were so few and
scattered that their light was
negligible. The strange crimson sun of
this lonely world would not rise for
many hours, and although five of the
little moons were in the sky they
could barely be seen by the unaided
eye. Not one of them could even cast a
shadow

  Armstrong was not the man to bewail
his luck for long. He began to walk
slowly along the road, feeling its
texture with his feet. It was, he
knew, fairly straight except where it
wound through Carver's Pass. He wished
he had a stick or something to probe
the way before him, but he would have
to rely for guidance on the feel of
the ground.

  It was terribly slow at first, until
he gained confidence. He had never
known how difficult it was to walk in
a straight line. Although the feeble
stars gave him his bearings, again and
again he found himself stumbling among
the virgin rocks at the edge of the
crude roadway. He was traveling in
long zigzags that took him to
alternate sides of the road. Then he
would stub his toes against the bare
rock and grope his way back on to the
hard-packed surface once again.

  Presently it settled down to a
routine. It was impossible to estimate
his speed; he could only struggle
along and hope for the best. There
were four miles to go four miles and
as many hours. It should be easy
enough, unless he lost his way. But he
dared not think of that.

  Once he had mastered the technique he
could afford the luxury of thought. He
could not pretend that he was enjoying
the experience, but he had been in
much worse positions before. As long
as he remained on the road, he was
perfectly safe. He had been hoping
that as his eyes became adapted to the
starlight he would be able to see the
way, but he now knew that the whole
journey would be blind. The discovery
gave him a vivid sense of his re-
moteness from the heart of the Galaxy.
On a night as clear

3 2 REACH FOR TOMORROW

as this, the skies of almost any other
planet would have been blazing with
stars. Here at this outpost of the
Universe the sky held perhaps a
hundred faintly gleaming points of
light, as useless as the five
ridiculous moons on which no one had
ever bothered to land.

  A slight change in the road
interrupted his thoughts. Was there a
curve here, or had he veered off to
the right again? He moved very slowly
along the invisible and illdefined
border. Yes, there was no mistake: the
road was bending to the left. He tried
to remember its appearance in the
daytime, but he had only seen it once
before. Did this mean that he was
nearing the Pass? He hoped so, for the
journey would then be half completed.

  He peered ahead into the blackness,
but the ragged line of the horizon
told him nothing. Presently he found
that the road had straightened itself
again and his spiAts sank. The
entrance to the Pass must still be
some way ahead: there were at least
four miles to go.

  Four miles how ridiculous the
distance seemed! How long would it
take the "Canopus" to travel four
miles? He doubted if man could measure
so short an interval of time. And how
many trillions of miles had he, Robert
Armstrong, traveled in his life? It
must have reached a staggering total
by now, for in the last twenty years
he had scarcely stayed more than a
month at a time on any single world.
This very year, he had twice made the
crossing of the Galaxy, and that was
a notable journey even in these days
of the phantom drive.

  He tripped over a loose stone, and
the-jolt brought him back to reality.
It was no use, here, thinking of ships
that could eat up the light-years. He
was facing nature, with no weapons but
his own strength and skill.

  It was strange that it took him so
long to identify the real cause of his
uneasiness. The last four weeks had
been very full, and the rush of his
departure, coupled with the annoyance
and anxiety caused by the tractor's
breakdowns, had driven everything else
from his mind. Moreover, he had always
prided himself on his hard-headedness
and lack of imagination. Until now, he
had forgotten all about that first
evening at the Base, when the crews
had

A WALR IN THE DARK 3 3

regaled him with the usual tall yarns
concocted for thebenefit of newcomers.

  It was then that the old Base clerk
had told the story of his walk by
night from Port Sanderson to the camp,
and of what had trailed him through
Carver's Pass, keeping always beyond
the limit of his torchlight.
Armstrong, who had heard such tales on
a score of worlds, had paid it little
attention at the time. This planet,
after all, was known to be
uninhabited. But logic could not
dispose of the matter as easily as
that. Suppose, after all, there was
some truth in the old man's fantastic
tale . . . ?

  It was not a pleasant thought, and
Armstrong did not intend to brood upon
it. But he knew that if he dismissed
it out of hand it would continue to
prey on his mind. The only way to
conquer imaginary fears was to face
them boldly; he would have to do that
now.

  His strongest argument was the
complete barrenness of this world and
its utter desolation, though against
that one could set many
counter-arguments, as indeed the old
clerk had done. Man had only lived on
this planet for twenty years, and much
of it was still unexplored. No one
could deny that the tunnels out in the
wasteland were rather puzzling, but
everyone believed them to be volcanic
vents Though, of course, life often
crept into such places. With a shudder
he remembered the giant polyps that
had snared the first explorers of
Vargon III.

  It was all very inconclusive.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, one
granted the existence of life here.
What of that?

  The vast majority of life forms in
the Universe were completely
indifferent to man. Some, of course,
like the gas-beings of Alcoran or the
roving wave-lattices of Shandaloon,
could not even detect him but passed
through or around him as if he did not
exist. Others were merely inquisitive,
some embarrassingly friendly. There
were few indeed that would attack
unless provoked.

  Nevertheless, it was a grim picture
that the old stores clerk had painted.
Back in the warm, well-lighted smok-
ing-room, with the drinks going
around, it had been easy

34 REACH FOR TOMORROW

enough to laugh at it. But here in the
darkness, miles from any human
settlement, it was very different.

  It was almost a relief when he
stumbled off the road again and had to
grope with his hands until he found it
once more. This seemed a very rough
patch, and the road was scarcely
distinguishable from the rocks around.
In a few minutes, however, he was
safely on his way again

  It was unpleasant to see how quickly
his thoughts returned to the same
disquieting subject. Clearly it was
worrying him more than he cared to
admit.

  He drew consolation from one fact:
it had been quite obvious that no one
at the base had believed the old fel-
low's story. Their questions and
banter had proved thee. At the time,
he had laughed as loudly as any of
them. After all, what was the
evidence? A dim shape, just seen in
the darkness, that might well have
been an oddly formed rock. And the
curious clicking noise that had so
impressed the old man anyone could
imagine such sounds at night if they
were sufficiently overwrought. If it
had been hostile, why hadn't the
creature come any closer? "Because it
was afraid of my light," the old chap
had said. WelL that was plausible
enough: it would explain why nothing
had ever been seen in the daylight.
Such a creature might live
underground, only emerging at
night damn it, why was he taking the
old idiot's ravings so seriously!
Armstrong got control of his thoughts
again. If he went on this way, he told
himself angrily, he would soon be
seeing and hearing a whole menagerie
of monsters.

  There was, of course, one factor
that disposed of the ridiculous story
at once. It was really very simple; he
felt sorry he hadn't thought of it
before. What would such a creature
live on? There was not even a trace of
vegetation on the whole of the planet.
He laughed to think that the bogy
could be disposed of so easily and in
the same instant felt annoyed with
himself for not laughing aloud. If he
was so sure of his reasoning, why not
whistle, or sing, or do anything to
keep up his spirits? He put the
question fairly to himself as a test
of his manhood. Half-ashamed, he had
to admit that he was still afraid

.

A WAEK IN THE DARK 3 5

afraid because "there might be
something in it, after all." But at
least his analysis had done him some
good.

  It would have been better if he had
left it there, and remained
half-convinced by his argument. But a
part of his mind was still busily
trying to break down his careful
reasoning. It succeeded only too well,
and when he remembered the
plant-beings of Xantil Major the shock
was so unpleasant that he stopped dead
in his tracks.

  Now the plant-beings of Xantil were
not in any way horrible. They were in
fact extremely beautiful creatures.
But what made them appear so
distressing now was the knowledge that
they could live for indefinite periods
with no food whatsoever. All the
energy they needed for their strange
lives they extracted from cosmic
radiation and that was almost as
intense here as anywhere else in the
universe.

  He had scarcely thought of one
example before others crowded into his
mind and he remembered the life form
on Trantor Beta, which was the only
one known capable of directly
utilizing atomic energy. That too had
lived on an utterly barren world, very
much like this . . .

  Armstrong's mind was rapidly
splitting into two distinct portions,
each trying to convince the other and
neither wholly succeeding. He did not
realize how far his morale had gone
until he found himself holding his
breath lest it conceal any sound from
the darkness about him. Angrily, he
cleared his mind of the rubbish that
had been gathering there and turned
once more to the immediate problem.

  There was no doubt that the road was
slowly rising, and the silhouette of
the horizon seemed much higher in the
sky. The road began to twist, and
suddenly he was aware of great rocks
on either side of him. Soon only a
narrow ribbon of sky was still
visible, and the darkness became, if
possible, even more intense.

  Somehow, he felt safer with the rock
walls surrounding him: it meant that
he was protected except in two direc-
tions. Also, the road had been
levelled more carefully and it was
easy to keep it. Best of all, he knew
now that the journey was more than
half completed.

3 6 REACH FOR TOMORROW

  For a moment his spirits began to
rise. Then, with maddening perversity,
his mind went back into the old
grooves again. He remembered that it
was on the far side of Carver's Pass
that the old clerk's adventure had
taken place if it had ever happened at
all.

  In half a mile, he would be out in
the open again, out of the protection
of these sheltering rocks. The thought
seemed doubly horrible now and he
already felt a sense of nakedness. He
could be attacked from any direction,
and he would be utterly helpless . .
.

  Until now, he had still retained
some self-control Very resolutely he
had kept his mind away from the one
fact that gave some color to the old
man's tale the single piece of
evidence that had stopped the banter
in the crowded room back at the camp
and brought a sudden hush upon the
company. Now, as Armstrong's will
weakened, he recalled again the words
that had struck a momentary chill even
in the warm comfort of the base
building.

  The little clerk had been very
insistent on one point. He had never
heard any sound of pursuit from the
dim shape sensed, rather than seen, at
the limit of his light. There was no
scuffing of claws or hoofs on rock,
nor even the clatter of displaced
scones. It was as if, so the old man
had declared in that solemn manner of
his, "as if the thing that was
following could see perfectly in the
darkness, and had many small legs or
pads so that it could move swiftly and
easily over the rock like a giant
caterpillar or one of the
carpet-things of Kralkor II."

  Yet, although there had been no
noise of pursuit, there had been one
sound that the old man had caught
several times. It was so unusual that
its very strangeness made it doubly
ominous. It was a faint but horribly
persistent clicking.

  The old fellow had been able to
describe it very vividly  much too
vividly for Armstrong's liking now.

  "Have you ever listened to a large
insect crunching its prey?" he said.
"Well, it was just like that I imagine
that a crab makes exactly the same
noise with its claws when it clashes
them together. It was a what's the
wording chitinous sound."

A WALK IN THE DARK 37

  At this point, Armstrong remembered
laughing loudly. (Strange, how it was
all coming back to him now.) But no
one else had laughed, though they had
been quick to do so earlier. Sensing
the change of tone, he had sobered at
once and asked the old man to continue
his story. How he wished now that he
had stifled his curiosity!

  It had been quickly told. The next
day, a party- of skeptical technicians
had gone into the no-man's land beyond
Carver's Pass. They were not skeptical
enough to leave their guns behind, but
they had no cause to use them for they
found no trace of any living thing.
There were the inevitable pits and
tunnels, glistening holes down which
the light of the torches rebounded
endlessly until it was lost in the
distance but the planet was riddled
with them.

  Though the party found no sign of
life, it discovered one thing it did
not like at all. Out in the barren and
unexplored land beyond the Pass they
had come upon an even larger tunnel
than the rest. Near the mouth of that
tunnel was a massive rock, half
embedded in the ground. And the sides
of that rock had been worn away as if
it had been used as an enormous
whetstone.

  No less than five of those present
had seen this disturbing rock. None of
them could explain it satisfactorily
as a natural formation, but they still
refused to accept the old man's story.
Armstrong had asked them if they had
ever put it to the test. There had
been an uncomfortable silence. Then
big Andrew Hargraves had said: "Heft
who'd walk out to the Pass at night just
for fun!" and had left it at that.
Indeed, there was no other record of
anyone walking from Port Sanderson to
the camp by night, or for that matter
by day. During the hours-of light, no
unprotected human being could live in
the open beneath the rays of the
enormous, lurid sun that seemed to fill
half the sky. And no one would walk
six miles, wearing radiation armor, if
the tractor was available.

  Armstrong felt that he was leaving
the Pass. The rocks on either side
were falling away, and the road was no
longer as firm and well packed as it
had been. He was coming out into the
open plain once more, and somewhere

38 REACH FOR TOMORROW

not far away in the darkness was that
enigmatic pillar that might have been
used for sharpening monstrous fangs or
claws. It was not a reassuring
thought, but he could not get it out
of his mind.

  Feeling distinctly worried now,
Armstrong made a great effort to pull
himself together. He would try to be
rational again; he would think of
business, the work he had done at the
camp anything but this infernal place.
For a while, he succeeded quite well.
But presently, with a maddening
persistence, every train of thought
came back to the same point. He could
not get out of his mind the picture of
that inexplicable rock and its
appalling possibilities. Over and over
again he found himself wondering how
far away it was, whether he had
already passed it, and whether it was
on his right or his left....

  The ground was quite flat again, and
the road drove on straight as an
arrow. There was one gleam of consola-
tion: Port Sanderson could not be much
more than two miles away. Armstrong
had no idea how long he had been on
the road. Unfortunately his watch was
not illuminated and he could only
guess at the passage of time. With any
luck, the "Canopus" should not take
off for another two hours at least.
But he could not be sure, and now
another fear began to enter his
mind the dread that he might see a
vast constellation of lights rising
swiftly into the sky ahead, and know
that all this agony of mind had been
in vain.

  He was not zigzagging so badly now,
and seemed to be able to anticipate
the edge of the road before stumbling
off it. It was probable, he cheered
himself by thinking, that he was
traveling almost as fast as if he had
a light. If all went well, he might be
nearing Port Sanderson in thirty
minutes a ridiculously small space of
time. How he would laugh at his fears
when he strolled into his already
reserved stateroom in the "Canopus,"
and felt that peculiar quiver as the
phantom drive hurled the great ship
far out of this system, back to the
clustered starclouds near the center
of the Galaxy back toward Earth
itself, which he had not seen for so
many years. One day, he told himself,
he really must visit Earth again. All
his

A WALK D' THE DARK 39

life he had been making the promise,
but always there had been the same
answer lack of time. Strange, wasn't
it, that such a tiny planet should
have played so enormous a part in the
development of the Universe, should
even have come to dominate worlds far
wiser and more intelligent than
itself!

  Armstrong's thoughts were harmless
again, and he felt calmer. The
knowledge that he was nearing Port
Sanderson was immensely reassuring,
and he deliberately kept his mind on
familiar, unimportant matters.
Carver's Pass was already far behind,
and with it that thing he no longer
intended to recall. One day, if he
ever returned to this world, he would
visit the pass in the daytime and
laugh at his fears. In twenty minutes
now, they would have joined the
nightmares of his childhood.

  It was almost a shock, though one of
the most pleasant he had ever known,
when he saw the lights of Port San-
derson come up over the horizon. The
curvature of this little world was
very deceptive: it did not seem right
that a planet with a gravity almost as
great as Earth's should have a horizon
so close at hand. One day, someone
would have to discover what lay at
this world's core to give it so great
a density. Perhaps the many tunnels
would help  it was an unfortunate turn
of thought, but the nearness of his
goal had robbed it of terror now.
Indeed, the thought that he might
really be in danger seemed to give his
adventure a certain piquancy and
heightened interest. Nothing could
happen to him now, with ten minutes to
go and the lights of the Port already
in sight.

  A few minutes later, his feelings
changed abruptly when he came to the
sudden bend in the road. He had
forgotten the chasm that caused his
detour, and added half a mile to the
journey. Well, what of it? he thought
stubbornly. An extra half-mile would
make no difference now another ten
minutes, at the most.

  It was very disappointing when the
lights of the city vanished. Armstrong
had not remembered the hill which the
road was skirting; perhaps it was only
a low ridge, scarcely noticeable in
the daytime. But by hiding the

40 REACH FOR TOMORROW

lights of the port it had taken away
his chief talisman and left him again
at the mercy of his fears.

  Very unreasonably, his intelligence
told him, he began to think how
horrible it would be if anything
happened now, so near the end of the
journey. He kept the worst of his
fears at bay for a while, hoping
desperately that the lights of the
city would soon reappear. But as the
minutes dragged on, he realized that
the ridge must be longer than he
imagined. He tried to cheer himself by
the thought that the city would be all
the nearer when he saw it again, but
somehow logic seemed to have failed
him now. For presently he found
himself doing something he had not
stooped to, even out in the waste by
Carver's Pass.

  He stopped, turned slowly round, and
with bated breath listened until his
lungs were nearly bursting.

  The silence was uncanny, considering
how near he must be to the Port. There
was certainly no sound from behind
him. Of course there wouldn't be, he
told himself angrily. But he was
immensely relieved. The thought of
that faint and insistent clicking had
been haunting him for the last hour.

  So friendly and familiar was the
noise that did reach him at last that
the anticlimax almost made him laugh
aloud. Drifting through the still air
from a source clearly not more than a
mile away came the sound of a
landing-field tractor, perhaps one of
the machines loading the "Canopus"
itself. In a matter of seconds,
thought Armstrong, he would be around
this ridge with the Port only a few
hundred yards ahead. The journey was
nearly ended. In a few moments, this
evil plain would be no more than a
fading nightmare.

  It seemed terribly unfair: so little
time, such a small fraction of a human
life, was all he needed now. But the
gods have always been unfair to man,
and now they were enjoying their
little jest. For there could be no
mistaking the rattle of monstrous
claws in the darkness ahead of bim.

The Forgotten Enemy

THE THICK FURS THUDDED SOFTLY TO THE GROUND AS PROFES

sor Millward jerked himself upright on
the narrow bed. This time, he was
sure, it had been no dream; the
freezing air that rasped against his
lungs still seemed to echo with the
sound that had come crashing out of
the night.

  He gathered the furs around his
shoulders and listened intently. All
was quiet again: from the narrow
windows on the western walls long
shafts of moonlight played upon the
endless rows of books, as they played
upon the dead city beneath. The world
was utterly still; even in the old
days the city would have been silent
on such a night, and it was doubly
silent now.

  With weary resolution Professor
Millward shuffled out of bed, and
doled a few lumps of coke into the
glowing brazier. Then he made his way
slowly toward the nearest window,
pausing now and then to rest his hand
lovingly on the volumes he had guarded
an these years.

  He shielded his eyes from the
brilliant moonlight and peered out
into the night. The sky was cloudless:
the sound he had heard had not been
thunder, whatever it might have been.
It had come from the north, and even
as he waited it came again.

  Distance had softened it, distance
and the bulk of the hills that lay
beyond London. It did not race across
the sky with the wantonness of
thunder, but seemed to come from a
single point far to the north. It was
like no natural sound that he had ever
heard, and for a moment he dared to
hope again.

  Only Man, he was sure, could have
made such a sound. Perhaps the dream
that had kept him here among these
treasures of civilization for more
than twenty years would soon be a
dream no longer. Men were resuming to
Eng41

42 REACH FOR TOMORROW

land, blasting their way through the
ice and snow with the weapons that
science had given them before the com-
ing of the Dust. It was strange that
they should come by land, and from the
north, but he thrust aside any
thoughts that would quench the newly
kindled flame of hope.

  Three hundred feet below, the broken
sea of snowcovered roofs lay bathed in
the bitter moonlight. Miles away the
tall stacks of Battersea Power Station
glimmered like thin white ghosts
against the night sky. Now that the
dome of St. Paul's had collapsed
beneath the weight of snow, they alone
challenged his supremacy.

  Professor Millward walked slowly
back along the bookshelves, thinking
over the plan that had formed in his
mind. Twenty years ago he had watched
the last helicopters climbing heavily
out of Regent's Park the rotors
churning the ceaselessly falling snow.
Even then, when the silence had closed
around him, he could not bring himself
to believe that the North had been
abandoned forever. Yet already he had
waited a whole generation, among the
books to which he had dedicated his
life.

  In those early days he had sometimes
heard, over the radio which was his
only contact with the South, of the
struggle to colonize the now-temperate
lands of the Equator. He did not know
the outcome of that far-off battle,
fought with desperate skill in the
dying jungles and across deserts that
had already felt the first touch of
snow. Perhaps it had failed; the radio
had been silent now for fifteen years
or more. Yet if men and machines were
indeed returning from the north of all
directions he might again be able to
hear their voices as they spoke to one
another and to the lands from which
they had come.

  Professor Millward left the
University building perhaps a dozen
tunes a year, and then only through
sheer necessity. Over the past two
decades he had collected everything he
needed from the shops in the
Bloomsbury area, for in the final
exodus vast supplies of stocks had
been left behind through lack of
transport. In many ways, indeed, his
life could be called luxurious: no
professor of English literature had
ever been clothed in such garments as
those he had taken from an Oxford
Street furrier's.

THE FORGOMEN ENEMY 43

  The sun was blazing from a cloudless
sky as he shouldered his pack and
unlocked the massive gates. Even ten
years ago packs of starving dogs had
hunted in this area, and though he had
seen none for years he was still
cautious and always carried a revolver
when he went into the open.

  The sunlight was so brilliant that
the reflected glare hurt his eyes; but
it was almost wholly lacking in heat.
Although the belt of cosmic dust
through which the Solar System was now
passing had made little visible dif-
ference to the sun's brightness, it
had robbed it of all strength. No one
knew whether the world would swim out
into the warmth again in ten or a
thousand years, and civilization had
fled southward in search of lands
where the word "summer" was not an
empty mockery.

  The latest drifts had packed hard and
Professor Millward had little
difficulty in making the journey to
Tottenham Court Road. Sometimes it had
taken him hours of floundering through
the snow, and one year he had been
sealed in his great concrete
watchtower for nine months.

  He kept away from the houses with
their dangerous burdens of snow and
their Damoclean icicles, and went
north until he came to the shop he was
seeking. The words above the shattered
windows were still bright: "Jenkins &
Sons. Radio and ElectricaL Television
A Specialty."

  Some snow had drifted through a
broken section of roofing, but the
little upstairs room had not altered
since his last visit a dozen years
ago. The all-wave radio still stood on
the table, and empty tins scattered on
the floor spoke mutely of the lonely
hours he had spent here before all
hope had died. He wondered if he must
go through the same ordeal again.

  Professor Millward brushed the snow
from the cow of The Amateur Radio
Handbook for 196S, which had taught
him what little he knew about
wireless. The testmeters and batteries
were still lying in their half-remem-
bered places, and to his relief some
of the batteries still held their
charge. He searched through the stock
until he had built up the necessary
power supplies, and checked the radio
as well as he could. Then he was
ready.

It was a pity that he could never send
the manufac

44 REACH FOR TOMORROW

curers the testimonial they deserved. The
faint "hiss" from the speaker brought
back memories of the B.B.C., of the nine
o'clock news and symphony concerts, of
all the things he had taken for granted
in a world that was gone like a dream.
With scarcely controlled impatience he
ran across the wave-bands, but everywhere
there was nothing save that omnipresent
hiss. That was disappointing, but no
more: he remembered that the real test
would come at night. In the meantime he
would forage among the surrounding shops
for anything that might be useful.

  It was dusk when he returned to the
little room. A hundred miles above his
head, tenuous and invisible, the
Heaviside Layer would be expanding
outward toward the stars as the sun went
down. So it had done every evening for
millions of years, and for half a century
only, Man had used it for his own
purposes, to reflect around the world his
messages of hate or peace, to echo with
trivialities or to sound with music once
called immortal.

  Slowly, with infinite patience,
Professor Millward began to traverse the
shortwave bands that a generation ago had
been a babel of shouting voices and
stabbing morse. Even as he listened, the
faint hope he had dared to cherish began
to fade within him. The city itself was
no more silent than the once~rowded
oceans of ether. Only the faint crackle
of thunderstorms half the world away
broke the intolerable stillness. Man had
abandoned his latest conquest.

  Soon after midnight the batteries faded
out. Professor Millward did not have the
heart to search for more, but curled up
in his furs and fell into a troubled
sleep. He got what consolation he could
from the thought that if he had not
proved his theory, he had not disproved
it either.

  The heatless sunlight was flooding the
lonely white road when he began the
homeward journey. He was very tired, for
he had slept little and his sleep had
been broken by the recurring fantasy of
rescue.

  The silence was suddenly broken by the
distant thunder that came rolling over
the white roofs. It came there could be
no doubt now from beyond the northern
hills that had once been London's
playground. From the build

 :      :

.

THE FoRGorrEx ENEMY 45

ings on either side little avalanches
of snow went swishing out into the
wide street; then the silence
returned.

  Professor Millward stood motionless,
weighing, considering, analyzing. The
sound had been too long-drawn to be an
ordinary explosion he was dreaming
again it was nothing less than the
distant thunder of an atomic bomb,
burning and blasting away the snow a
million tons at a time. His hopes
revived, and the disappointments of
the night began to fade.

  That momentary pause almost cost him
his life. Out of a side-street
something huge and white moved
suddenly into his field of vision. For
a moment his mind refused to accept
the reality of what he saw; then the
paralysis left him and he fumbled
desperately for his futile revolver.
Padding toward him across the now,
swinging its head from side to side
with a hypnotic, serpentine motion,
was a huge polar bear.

  He dropped his belongings and ran,
floundering over the snow toward the
nearest buildings. Providentially the
Underground entrance was only fifty
feet away. The steel grille was
closed, but he remembered breaking the
lock many years ago. The temptation to
look back was almost intolerable, for
he could hear nothing to tell how near
his pursuer was. For one frightful
moment the iron lattice resisted his
numbed fingers. Then it yielded
reluctantly and he forced his way
through the narrow opening.

  Out of his childhood there came a
sudden, incongruous memory of an
albino ferret he had once seen weaving
its body ceaselessly across the wire
netting of its cage. There was the
same reptile grace in the monstrous
shape, almost twice as high as a man,
that reared itself in baffled fury
against the grille. The metal bowed
but did not yield beneath the
pressure; then the bear dropped to the
ground, grunted softly and padded
away. It slashed once or twice at the
fallen haversack, scattering a few
tins of food into the snow, and
vanished as silently as it had come.

  A very shaken Professor Millward
reached the University three hours
later, after moving in short bounds
from-one refuge to the next. After all
these years he was no longer alone in
the city. He wondered if there were

46 REACH FOR TOMORROW

other visitors, and that same night he
knew the answer. Just before dawn he
heard, quite distinctly, the cry of a
wolf from somewhere in the direction
of Hyde Park.

  By the end of the week he knew that
the animals of the North were on the
move. Once he saw a reindeer running
southward, pursued by a pack of silent
wolves, and sometimes in the night
there were sounds of deadly conflict.
He was amazed that so much life still
existed in the white wilderness
between London and the Pole. Now
something was driving it southward,
and the knowledge brought him a
mounting excitement. He did not
believe that these fierce survivors
would flee from anything save Man.

  The strain of waiting was beginning
to affect Professor Millward's mind,
and for hours he would sit in the cold
sunlight, his furs wrapped around him,
dreaming of rescue and thinking of the
way in which men might be returning to
England. Perhaps an expedition had
come from North America across the
Atlantic ice. It might have been years
upon its way. But why had it come so
far nor:h? His favorite theory was
that the Atlantic ice-packs were not
safe enough for heavy traffic further
to the south

  One thing, however, he could not
explain to his satisfaction. There had
been no air reconnaissance; it was
hard to believe that the art of flight
had been lost so soon.

  Sometimes he would walk along the
ranks of books, whispering now and
then to a well-loved volume. There
were books here that he had not dared
to open for years, they reminded him
so poignantly of the past. But now, as
the days grew longer and brighter, he
would sometimes take down a volume of
poetry and re-read his old favorites.
Then he would go to the tall windows
and shout the magic words over the
rooftops, as if they would break the
spell that had gripped the world.

  It was warmer now, as if the ghosts
of lost summers had returned to haunt
the land. For whole days the tempera-
ture rose above freezing, while in
many places flowers were breaking
through the snow. Whatever was ap-
proaching from the north was nearer,
and several times a day that enigmatic
roar would go thundering over the
city, sending the snow sliding upon a
thousand roofs

 .         . .  .

THE FoRGorrEn ENEMY 47

There were strange, grinding
undertones that Professor Millward
found baffling and even ominous. At
times it was almost as if he were
listening to the clash of mighty
armies, and sometimes a mad but
dreadful thought came into his mind
and would not be dismissed. Often he
would wake in the night and imagine he
heard the sound of mountains moving to
the sea. ,

  So the summer wore away, and as the
sound of that distant battle drew
steadily nearer Professor Millward was
the prey of ever more violently
alternating hopes and fears. Although
he saw no more wolves or bears they
seemed to have fled southward he did
not risk leaving the safety of his
fortress. Every morning he would climb
to the highest window of the tower and
search the northern horizon with
field-glasses. But all he ever saw was
thestubborn retreat of the snows above
Hampstead, as they fought their bitter
rearguard action against the sun.

  His vigil ended with the last days of
the brief summer. The grinding thunder
in the night had been nearer than ever
before, but there was still nothing to
hint at its real distance from the
city. Professor Millward felt no pre-
monition as he climbed to the narrow
window and raised his binoculars to
the northern sky.

  As a watcher from the walls of some
threatened fortress might have seen
the first sunlight glinting on the
spears of an advancing army, so in
that moment Professor Millward knew
the truth. The air was crystal-clear,
and the hills were sharp and brilliant
against the cold blue of the sky. They
had lost almost all their snow. Once
he would have rejoiced at that, but it
meant nothing now.

  Overnight, the enemy he had forgotten
had conquered the last defenses and
was preparing for the final onslaught.
As he saw that deadly glitter along
the crest of the doomed hills,
Professor Millward understood at last
the sound he had heard advancing for
so many months. It was little wonder
he had dreamed of mountains on the
march.

  Out of the North, their ancient home,
returning in triumph to the lands they
had once possessed, the glaciers had
come again.

Technical Error

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE ACCIDENTS FOR WHICH NO ONE COULD be
blamed. Richard Nelson had been in and
out of the generator pit a dozen times,
taking temperature readings to make sure
that the unearthly chill of liquid
helium was not seeping through the
insulation. This was the first generator
in the world to use the principle of
superconductivity. The windings of the
immense stator had been immersed in a
helium bath, and the miles of wire now
had a resistance too small to be
measured by any means known to man.

  Nelson noted with satisfaction that the
temperature had not fallen further than
expected. The insulation was doing its
work; it would be safe to lower the
rotor into the pit. That thousand-ton
cylinder was now hanging fifty feet
above Nelson's head, like the business
end of a mammoth drop hammer. He and
everyone else in the power station would
feel much happier when it had been
lowered onto its bearings and keyed into
the turbine shaft.

  Nelson put away his notebook and
started to walk toward the ladder. At
the geometric center of the pit, he made
his appointment with destiny.

  The load on the power network had been
steadily increasing for the last hour,
while the zone of twilight swept across
the continent. As the last rays of
sunlight faded from the clouds, the
miles of mercury arcs along the great
highways sprang into life. By the
million, fluorescent tubes began to glow
in the cities; housewives switched on
their radio-cookers to prepare the
evening meal. The needles of the
megawattmeters began to creep up the
scales.

  These were the normal loads. But on a
mountain three hundred miles to the
south a giant cosmic ray analyzer 48

:

TECHNICAL ERROR 49

was being rushed into action to await
the expected shower from the new
supernova in Gapricornus, which the
astronomers had detected only an hour
before. Soon the coils of its
five-thousand-ton magnets began to
drain their enormous currents from the
thyratron converters.

  A thousand miles to the west, fog was
creeping toward the greatest airport
in the hemisphere. No one worried much
about fog, now, when every plane could
land on its own radar in zero
visibility, but it was nicer not to
have it around. So the giant
dispersers were thrown into operation,
and nearly a thousand megawatts began
to radiate into the night, coagulating
the water droplets and clearing great
swaths through the banks of mist.

  The meters in the power station gave
another jump, and the engineer on duty
ordered the stand-by generators into
action. He wished the big, new machine
was finished; then there would be no
more anxious hours like these. But he
thought he could handle the load. Half
an hour later the Meteorological
Bureau put out a general frost warning
over the radio. Within sixty seconds,
more than a million electric fires
were switched on in anticipation. The
meters passed the danger mark and went
on soaring.

  With a tremendous crash three giant
circuit breakers leaped from their
contacts. Their ares died under the
fierce blast of the helium jets. Three
circuits had opened  but the fourth
breaker had failed to clear. Slowly,
the great copper bars began to glow
cherry-red. The acrid smell of burning
insulation filled the air and molten
metal dripped heavily to the floor
below, solidifying at once on the
concrete slabs. Suddenly the
conductors sagged as the load ends
broke away from their supports.
Brilliant green arcs of burning copper
flamed and died as the circuit was
broken. The free ends of the enormous
conductors fell perhaps ten feet
before crashing into the equipment
below. In a fraction of a second they
had welded themselves across the lines
that led to the new generator.

  Forces greater than any yet produced
by man were at war in the windings of
the machine. There was no resistance
to oppose the current, but the
inductance of the tremendous windings
delayed the moment of peak inten

50 REACH FOR TOMORROW

sity. The current rose to a maximum in
an immense surge that lasted several
seconds. At that instant, Nelson
reached the center of the pit.

  Then the current tried to stabilize
itself, oscillating wildly between
narrower and narrower limits. But it
never reached its steady state;
somewhere, the overriding safety
devices came into operation and the
circuit that should never have been
made was broken again. With a last
dying spasm, almost as violent as the
first, the current swiftly ebbed away.
It was all over.

  When the emergency lights came on
again, Nelson's assistant walked to
the lip of the rotor pit. He didn't
know what had happened, but it must
have been serious. Nelson, fifty feet
down, must have been wondering what it
was all about.

  "Hello, Dick!" he shouted. "Have you
finished? We'd better see what the
trouble is."

  There was no reply. He leaned over
the edge of the great pit and peered
into it. The light was very bad, and
the shadow of the rotor made it
difficult to see what was below. At
first it seemed that the pit was
empty, but that was ridiculous; he had
seen Nelson enter it only a few
minutes ago. He called again.

"Hello! You all right, Dick>"

  Again no reply. Worried now, the
assistant began to descend the ladder.
He was halfway down when a curious
noise, like a toy balloon bursting
very far away, made him look over his
shoulder. Then he saw Nelson, lying at
the center of the pit on the temporary
woodwork covering the turbine shaft.
He was very still, and there seemed
something altogether wrong about the
angle at which he was lying.

  Ralph Hughes, chief physicist,
looked up from his littered desk as
the door opened. Things were slowly
returning to normal after the night's
disasters. Fortunately, the trouble
had not affected his department much,
for the generator was unharmed. He was
glad he was not the chief engineer:
Murdock would still be snowed under
with

.

TECHNICAL ERROR 5 1

paperwork. The thought gave Dr. Hughes
considerable satisfaction.

  "Hello, Doe," he greeted the visitor.
"What brings you here? How's your
patient getting on?"

  Doctor Sanderson nodded briefly.
"He'll be out of hospital in a day or
so. But I want to talk to you about
him."

  "I don't know the fellow I never go
near the plant, except when the Board
goes down on its collective knees and
asks me to. After all, Murdock's paid
to run the place."

  Sanderson smiled wryly. There was no
love lost between the chief engineer
and the brilliant young physicist.
Their personalities were too different,
and there was the inevitable rivalry
between theoretical expert and "practi-
cal" man.

  "I think this is up your street,
Ralph. At any rate, it's beyond me.
You've heard what happened to Nelson?"

  "He was inside my new generator when
the power was shot into it, wasn't he?"

 -"That's correct. His assistant found him
suffering from

shock when the power was cut off
again."

  "What kind of shock? It couldn't have
been electric; the windings are
insulated, of course. In any case, I
gather that he was in the center of the
pit when they found him."

  "That's quite true. We don't know what
happened. But he's now come round and
seems none the worse apart from one
thing." The doctor hesitated a moment
as if choosing his words carefully.

"Well, go on! Don't keep me in
suspense!"

  "I left Nelson as soon as I saw he
would be quite safe, but about an hour
later Matron called me up to say he
wanted to speak- to me urgently. When I
got to the ward he was sitting up in
bed looking at a newspaper with a very
puzzled expression. I asked him what
was the matter. He answered,
'Something's happened to me, Doc.' So I
said, 'Of course it has, but you'll be
out in a couple of days.' He shook his
head; I could see there was a worried
look in his eyes. He picked up the
paper he had been looking at and
pointed to it. 'I can't read any more,'
he said.

  "I diagnosed amnesia and thought: This
is a nuisance! Wonder what else he's
forgotten? Nelson must have read

52 REACH FOR TOMORROW

my expression, for he went on to say,
'Oh, I still know the letters and
words but they're the wrong way round!
I think something must have happened
to my eyes.' He held up the paper
again. 'This looks exactly as if I'm
seeing it in a mirror,' he said. 'I
can spell out each word separately, a
letter at a time. Would you get me a
looking glass? I want to try
something.'

  "I did. He held the paper to the
glass and looked at the reflection.
Then he started to read aloud, at
normal speed. But that's a trick
anyone can learn compositors have to
do it with type and I wasn't
impressed. On the other hand, I
couldn't see why an intelligent fellow
like Nelson should put over an act
like that. So I decided to humor him,
thinking the shock must have given his
mind a bit of a twist. I felt quite
certain he was suffering from some
delusion, though he seemed perfectly
normal.

  "After a moment he put the paper away
and said, 'Well, Doc., what do you
make of that?' I didn't know quite
what to say without hurting his
feelings, so I passed the buck and
said, Y think I'll have to hand you
over to Dr. Humphries, the
psychologist. It's rather outside my
province.' Then he made some remark
about Dr. Humphries and his
intelligence tests, from which I
gathered he had already suffered at
his hands."

  "That's correct," interjected Hughes.
"All the men are grilled by the
Psychology Department before they join
the company. All the same, it's
surprising-what gets through," he
added thoughtfully.

Dr. Sanderson smiled, and continued
his story.

  "I was getting up to leave when
Nelson said, 'Oh, I almost forgot. I
think I must have fallen on my right
arm. The wrist feels badly sprained.'
'Let's look at it,' I said, bending to
pick it up. 'No, the other arm,'
Nelson said, and held up his left
wrist. Still humoring him, I answered,
'Have it your own way. But you said
your right one, didn't you?'

  "Nelson looked puzzled. 'So what?' he
replied. 'This is my right arm. My
eyes may be queer, but there's no
argument about that. There's my
wedding ring to prove it. I've not
been able to get the darned thing off
for five years.'

TECHNICS ERROR 5 3

 "That shook me rather badly. Because
you see, it was his left arm he was
holding up, and his left hand that had
the ring on it. I could see that what
he said was quite true. The ring would
have to be cut to get it off again. So
I said, 'Have you any distinctive
scars?' He answered, 'Not that I can
remember.'

" 'Any dental fillings?"'

" 'Yes, quite a few."'

  "We sat looking at each other in
silence while a nurse went to fetch
Nelson's records. 'Gazed at each other
with a wild surmise' is just about how
a novelist might put it. Before the
nurse returned, I was seized with a
bright idea. It was a fantastic
notion, but the whole affair was
becoming more and more outrageous. I
asked Nelson if I could see the things
he had been carrying in his pockets.
Here they are."

  Dr. Sanderson produced a handful of
coins and a small leather-bound diary.
Hughes recognized the latter at once
as an Electrical Engineer's Diary; he
had one in his own pocket. He took it
from the doctor's hand and flicked it
open at random, with that slightly
guilty feeling one always has when a
stranger'~still more, a friend's diary
falls into one's hands.

  And then, for Ralph Hughes, it seemed
that the foundations of his world were
giving way. Until now he had listened
to Dr. Sanderson with some detachment,
wondering what all the fuss was about.
But now the incontrovertible evidence
lay in his own hands, demanding his
attention and defying his logic.

  For he could read not one word of
Nelson's diary. Both the print and the
handwriting were inverted, as if seen
in a mirror.

  Dr. Hughes got up from his chair and
walked rapidly around the room several
times. His visitor sat silently
watching him. On the fourth circuit he
stopped at the window and looked out
across the lake, overshadowed by the
immense white wall of the dam. It
seemed to reassure him, and he
turned~to Dr. Sanderson again.

"You expect me to believe that Nelson
has been later

54 REACH FOR TOMORROW

ally inverted in some way, so that his
right and left sides have been
interchanged?"

  "I don't expect you to believe
anything. I'm merely giving you the
evidence. If you can draw any other
conclusion I'd be delighted to hear
it. I might add that I've checked
Nelson's teeth. All the fillings have
been transposed. Explain that away if
you can. Those coins are rather
interesting, too."

  Hughes picked them up. They included
a shilling, one of the beautiful new,
beryl-copper crowns, and a few pence
and halfpence. He would have accepted
them as change without hesitation.
Being no more observant than the next
man, he had never noticed which way
the Queen's head looked. But the
lettering Hughes could picture the
consternation at the Mint if these
curious coins ever came to its notice.
Like the diary, they too had been
laterally inverted.

Dr. Sanderson's voice broke into his
reverie.

  "I've told Nelson not to say anything
about this. I'm going to write a full
report; it should cause a sensation
when it's published. But we want to
know how this has happened. As you are
the designer of the new machine, I've
come to you for-advice."

  Dr. Hughes did not seem to hear him.
He was sitting at his desk with his
hands outspread, little fingers touch
ing. For the first time in his life he
was thinking seriously about the
difference between left and right.

  Dr. Sanderson did not release Nelson
from hospital for several days, during
which he was studying his peculiar
patient and collecting material for
his report. As far as he could tell,
Nelson was perfectly normal, apart
from his inversion. He was learning to
read again, and his progress was swift
after the initial strangeness had worn
off. He would probably never again use
tools in the same way that he had done
before the accident; for the rest of
his life, the world would think him
left-handed. However, that would not
handicap him in any way.

  Dr. Sanderson had ceased to speculate
about the cause of Nelson's condition.
He knew very little about electricity;
that was Hughes's job. He was quite
confident that

TECHNICAE ERROR 55

the physicist would produce the answer
in due course; he had always done so
before. The company was not a phil-
anthropic institution, and it had good
reason for retaining Hughes's
services. The new generator, which
would be running within a week, was
his brain-child, though he had had
little to do with the actual
engineering details.

  Dr. Hughes himself was less
confident. The magnitude of the
problem was terrifying; for he
realized, as Sanderson did not, that
it involved utterly new regions of
science. He knew that there was only
one way in which an object could
become its own mirror image. But how
could so fantastic a theory be proved?

  He had collected all available
information on the fault that had
energized the great armature.
Calculations had given an estimate of
the currents that had flowed through
the coils for the few seconds they had
been conducting. But the figures were
largely guesswork; he wished he could
repeat the experiment to obtain
accurate data. It would be amusing to
see Murdock's face if he said, "Mind
if I throw a perfect short across
generators One to Ten sometime this
evening;" No, that was definitely out.

  It was lucky he still had the working
model Tests on it had given some ideas
of the field produced at the gener-
ator's center, but their magnitudes
were a matter of conjecture. They must
have been enormous. It was a miracle
that the windings had stayed in their
slots. For nearly a month Hughes
struggled with his calculations and
wandered through regions of atomic
physics he had carefully avoided since
he left the university. Slowly the
complete theory began to evolve in his
mind; he was a long way from the final
proof, but the road was clear. In
another month he would have finished.

  The great generator itself, which had
dominated his thoughts for the past
year, now seemed trivial and unim-
portan~ He scarcely bothered to
acknowledge the congratulations of his
colleagues when it passed its final
tests and began to feed its millions
of kilowatts into the system. They
must have thought him a little
strange, but he had always been
regarded as somewhat unpredictable. It
was expected of him; the company would
have been disap

56 REACH FOR TOMORROW

pointed if its tame genius possessed no
eccentricities.

  A fortnight later, Dr. Sanderson came to
see him again. He was in a grave mood.

 -   "Nelson's back in the hospital," he
announced. "I was

wrong when I said he'd be O.K."

  "What's the matter with him?" asked
Hughes in surprise.

"He's starving to death"

"Starving? What on earth do you mean?"

  Dr. Sanderson pulled a chair up to
Hughes's desk and sat down.

  "I haven't bothered you for the past few
weeks,," he began, "because I knew you
were busy on your own theories. I've been
watching Nelson carefully all this time,
and writing up my report. At first, as I
told you, he seemed perfectly normal. I
had no doubt that everything would be all
right.

  "Then I noticed that he was losing
weight. It was some time before I was
certain of it; then I began to observe
other, more technical symptoms. He
started to complain of weakness and lack
of concentration. He had all the signs of
vitamin deficiency. I gave him special
vitamin concentrates, but they haven't
done any good. So I've come to have
another talk with you."

  Hughes looked baffled, then annoyed.
"But hang it all, you're the doctor!"

  "Yes, but this theory of mine needs some
support. I'm only an unknown medico no
one would listen to me until it was too
late. For Nelson is dying, and I think I
know why...."

  Sir Robert had been stubborn at first,
but Dr. Hughes had had his way, as he
always did. The members of the Board of
Directors were even now filing into the
conference room, grumbling and generally
making a fuss about the extraordinary
general meeting that had just been
called. Their perplexity was still
further increased when they heard that
Hughes was going to address them. They
all knew the physicist and his
reputation, but he was a scientist and
they were businessmen. What was Sir
Robert planning?

TECHNICAI, ERROR 57

  Dr. Hughes, the cause of all the
trouble, felt annoyed with himself for
being nervous. His opinion of the Board
of Directors was not flattering, but
Sir Robert was a man he could respect,
so there was no reason to be afraid of
them. It was true that they might
consider him mad, but his past record
would take care of that. Mad or not, he
was worth thousands of pounds to them.

  Dr. Sanderson smiled encouragingly at
him as he walked into the conference
room. The smile was not very success-
ful, but it helped. Sir Robert had just
finished speaking. He picked up his
glasses in that nervous way he had, and
coughed deprecatingly. Not for the
first time, Hughes wondered how such an
apparently timid old man could rule so
vast a commercial empire.

  "Well, here is Dr. Hughes, gentlemen.
He will ahem  explain everything to
you. I have asked him not to be too
technical. You are at liberty to
interrupt him if he ascends into the
more rarefied stratosphere of higher
mathematics. Dr. Hughes . . ."

  Slowly at first, and then more
quickly as he gained the confidence of
his audience, the physicist began to
tell his story. Nelson's diary drew a
gasp of amazement from the Board, and
the inverted coins proved fascinating
curiosities. Hughes was glad to see
that he had aroused the interest of his
listeners. He took a deep breath and
made the plunge he had been fearing.

  "You have heard what has happened to
Nelson, gentlemen, but what I am going
to tell you now is even more startling.
I must ask you for your very close
attention."

  He picked up a rectangular sheet of
notepaper from the conference table,
folded it along a diagonal and tore it
along the fold.

  "Here we have two right-angled
triangles with equal sides. I lay them
on the table so." He placed the paper
triangles side by side on the table,
with their hypotenuses touching, so
that they formed a kite-shaped figure.
"Now, as I have arranged them, each
triangle is the mirror image of the
other. You can imagine that the plane
of the mirror is along the hypotenuse.
This is the point I want you to notice.
As long as I keep the triangles in the
plane of the

58 REACH FOR TOMORROW

table, I can slide them around as much as
I like, but I can never place one so that
it exactly covers the other. Like a pair
of gloves, they are not interchangeable
although their dimensions are identical"

  He paused to let that sink in. There
were no comments, so he continued.

  "Now, if I pick up one of the triangles,
turn it over in the air and put it down
again, the two are no longer mirror
images, but have become completely
identical so." He suited the action to the
words. "This may seem very elementary; in
fact, it is so. But it teaches us one very
important lesson. The triangles on the
table were flat objects, restricted to two
dimensions. To turn one into its mirror
image I had to lift it up and rotate it in
the third dimension. Do you see what I am
drivmg at?"

  He glanced round the table. One or two
of the directors nodded slowly in dawning
comprehension.

  "Similarly, to change a solid,
three-dimensional body, such as a man,
into its analogue or mirror image, it must
be rotated in a fourth dimension. I
repeat a fourth dimension."

  There was a strained silence. Someone
coughed, but it was a nervous, not a
skeptical cough

  "Four-dimensional geometry, as you
know" he'd be surprised if they did "has
been one of the major tools of mathematics
since before the time of Einstein But
until now it has always been a
mathematical fiction, having no real
existence in the physical world. It now
appears that the unheard-of currents,
amounting to millions of amperes, which
flowed momentarily in the windings of our
generator muse have produced a certain
extension into four dimensions, for a
fraction of a second and in a volume large
enough to contain a man. I have been
making some calculations and have been
able to satisfy myself that a 'hyperspace'
about ten feet on a side was, in fact,
generated: a matter of some ten thousand
quartic not cubic!  feet. Nelson was
occupying that space. The sudden collapse
of the field when the circuit was broken
caused the rotation of the space, and
Nelson was inverted.

"I must ask you to accept this theory, as
no other ex

                    . .

i

TECHNICS ERROR 59

placation fits the facts. I have the
mathematics here if you wish to
consult them."

  He waved the sheets in front of his
audience, so that the directors could
see the imposing array of equations.
The technique worked it always did.
They cowered visibly. Only McPherson,
the secretary, was made of sterner
stuff. He had had a semi-technical
education and still read a good deal
of popular science, which he was fond
of airing whenever he had the
opportunity. But he was intelligent
and willing to learn, and Dr. Hughes
had often spent official time
discussing some new scientific theory
with him.

  "You say that Nelson has been rotated
in the Fourth Dimension; but I thought
Einstein had shown that the Fourth
Dimension was time."

  Hughes groaned inwardly. He had been
anticipating this red herring.

  "I was referring to an additional
dimension of space," he explained
patiently. "By that I mean a
dimension, or direction, at
right-angles to our normal three. One
can call it the Fourth Dimension if
one wishes. With certain reservations,
time may also be regarded as a
dimension. As we normally regard space
as three-dimensional, it is then cus-
tomary to call time the Fourth
Dimension. But the label is arbitrary.
As I'm asking you to grant me four
dimensions of space, we must call time
the Fifth Dimension."

  "Five Dimensions! Good Heavens!"
exploded someone further down the
table.

  Dr. Hughes could not resist the
opportunity. "Space of several million
dimensions has been frequently postu-
lated in sub-atomic physics," he said
quietly.

  There was a stunned silence. No one,
not even McPherson, seemed inclined to
argue.

  "I now come to the second part of my
account," continued Dr. Hughes. "A few
weeks after his inversion we found
that there was something wrong with
Nelson. He was taking food normally,
but it didn't seem to nourish him
properly. The explanation has been
given by Dr. Sanderson, and leads us
into the realms of organic chemistry.
I'm sorry to be talking like a
textbook, but you will

60 REACH FOR TOMORROW

soon realize how vitally important this is
to the company. And you also have the
satisfaction of knowing that we are now all
on equally unfamiliar territory."

  That was not quite true, for Hughes still
remembered some fragments of his chemistry.
But it might encourage the stragglers.

  "Organic compounds are composed of atoms
of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, with other
elements, arranged in complicated ways in
space. Chemists are fond of making models
of them out of knitting needles and colored
plasHcine. The results are often very
pretty and look like works of advanced art.

  "Now, it is possible to have two organic
compounds containing identical numbers of
atoms, arranged in such a way that one is
the mirror image of the other. They're
called stereo-isomers, and are very common
among the sugars. If you could set their
molecules side by side, you would see that
they bore the same sort of relationship as
a right and left glove. They are, in fact,
called right or left-handed dextro or
laevo compounds. I hope this is quite
clear."

  Dr. Hughes looked around anxiously.
Apparently it was.

  "Stereo-isomers have almost identical
chemical properdes," he went on, "though
there are subtle differences. In the last
few years, Dr. Sanderson tells me, it has
been found that certain essential foods,
including the new class of vitamins
discovered by Professor Vandenburg, have
properties depending on the arrangement of
their atoms in space. In other words,
gentlemen, the left-handed compounds might
be essential for life, but the right-handed
one would be of no value. This in spite of
the fact that their chemical formulae are
identical.

  "You will appreciate, now, why Nelson's
inversion is much more serious than we at
first thought. It's not merely a matter of
teaching him to read again, in which case
apart from its philosophical interest the
whole business would be trivial. He is
actually starving to death in the midst of
plenty, simply because he can no more
assimilate

               ~.    .           .     .

TECHNICAL ERROR 61

certain molecules of food than we can
put our right foot into a left boot.

  "Dr. Sanderson has tried an
experiment which has proved the truth
of this theory. With very great
difficulty, he has obtained the
stereo-isomers of many of these vita-
mins. Professor Vandenburg himself
synthesized them when he heard of our
trouble. They have already produced a
very marked improvement in Nelson's
condition."

  Hughes paused and drew out some
papers. He thought he would give the
Board time to prepare for the shock.
If a man's life were not at stake, the
situation would have been very
amusing. The Board was going to be hit
where it would hurt most.

  "As you will realize, gentlemen,
since Nelson was injured if you can
call it that while he was on duty, the
company is liable to pay for any
treatment he may require. We have
found that treatment, and you may
wonder why I have taken so much of
your time telling you about it. The
reason is very simple. The production
of the necessary stereo-isomers is
almost as difficult as the extraction
of radium more so, in some cases. Dr.
Sanderson tells me that it will cost
over five thousand pounds a day to
keep Nelson alive."

  The silence lasted for half a minute;
then everyone started to talk at once.
Sir Robert pounded on the table, and
presently restored order. The council
of war had begun.

  Three hours later, an exhausted
Hughes left the conference room and
went in search of Dr. Sanderson, whom
he found fretting in his office.

"Well, what's the decision?" asked the
doctor.

  "What I was afraid of. They want me
to re-invert Nelson."

"Can you do it?"

  "Frankly, I don't know. All I can
hope to do is to reproduce the
conditions of the original fault as
accurately as I can."

"Weren't there any other suggestions?"

"Quite a few, but most of them were
stupid. McPher

62 REACH FOR TOMORROW

son had the best idea. He wanted to
use the generator to invert normal
food so that Nelson could eat it. I
had to point out chat to take the big
machine out of action for this purpose
would cost several millions a year,
and in any case the windings wouldn't
stand it more than a few times. So
that scheme collapsed. Then Sir Robert
wanted to know if you could guarantee
there were no vitamins we'd
overlooked, or chat might still be
undiscovered. His idea was that in
spite of our synthetic diets we might
not be able to keep Nelson alive after
all."

"What did you say to that? "

  'A had to admit it was a
possibility. So Sir Robert is going to
have a talk with Nelson. He hopes to
persuade him to risk it; his family
will be taken care of if dhe experi-
ment fails."

  Neidher of the two men said anytlung
for a few moments. Then Dr. Sanderson
broke the silence.

  "Now do you understand the sort of
decision a surgeon often has to make,"
he said.

  Hughes nodded in agreement. "It's a
beautiful dilemma, isn't it? A
perfectly healthy man, but it will
cost two millions a year to keep him
alive, and we can't even be sure of
that. I know the Board's thinking of
its precious balance sheet more than
anything else, but I don't see any
alternative. Nelson will have to take
a chance."

"Couldn't you make some tests first?"

  "Impossible. It's a major
engineering operation to get dhe rotor
out. We'll have to rush the experiment
through when the load on the system is
at minimum. Then we'll slam the rotor
back, and tidy up the mess our
artificial short has made. All this
has to be done before the peak loads
come on again. Poor old Murdock's mad
as hell about it."

"I don't blame him. When will the
experiment start?"

  "Not for a few days, at least. Even
if Nelson agrees, I've got to fix up
all my gear."

  No one was ever to know what Sir
Robert said to Nelson during the hours
they were together. Dr. Hughes was
more dhan half prepared for it when
dhe telephone rang

TECHNIGAE ERROR 63

and the Old Man's tired voice said,
"Hughes? Get your equipment ready.
I've spoken to Murdock, and we've
fixed the time for Tuesday night Can
you manage by then?"

"Yes, Sir Robert."

  "Good. Give me a progress report
every afternoon until Tuesday. That's
all."

  The enormous room was dominated by
the great cylinder of the rotor,
hanging thirty feet above the gleaming
plastic floor. A little group of men
stood silently at the edge of the
shadowed pit, waiting patiently. A
maze of temporary wiring ran to Dr.
Hughes's equipment multibeam
oscilloscopes, megawattmeters and
microchronometers, and the special
relays that had been constructed to
make the circuit at the calculated
instant.

  That was the greatest problem of all.
Dr. Hughes had no way of telling when
the circuit should be closed; whether
it should be when the voltage was at
maximum, when it was at zero, or at
some intermediate point on the sine
wave. He had chosen the simplest and
safest course. The circuit would be
made at zero voltage; when it opened
again would depend on the speed of the
breakers.

  In ten minutes the last of the great
factories in the service area would be
closing down for the night. The
weather forecast had been favorable;
there would be no abnormal loads
before morning. By then, the rotor had
to be back and the generator running
again. Fortunately, the unique method
of construction made it easy to
reassemble the machine, but it would
be a very close thing and there was no
time to lose.

  When Nelson came in, accompanied by
Sir Robert and Dr. Sanderson, he was
very pale. He might, thought Hughes,
have been going to his execution. The
thought was somewhat ill-timed, and he
put it hastily aside.

  There was just time enough for a last
quite unnecessary check of the
equipment. He had barely finished when
he heard Sir Robert's quiet voice.

"We're ready, Dr. Hughes."

Rather unsteadily, he walked to the
edge of the pit.

64 REACH FOR TOMORROW

Nelson had already descended, and as
he had been instructed, was standing
at its exact center, his upturned face
a white blob far below. Dr. Hughes
waved a brief encouragement and turned
away, to rejoin the group by his
equipment.

  He flicked over the switch of the
oscilloscope and played with the
synchronizing controls until a single
cycle of the main wave was stationary
on the screen. Then he adjusted the
phasing: two brilliant spots of light
moved toward each other along the wave
until they had coalesced at its
geometric center. He looked briefly
toward Murdock, who was watching the
megawattmeters intently. The engineer
nodded. With a silent prayer, Hughes
threw the switch.

  There was the tiniest click from the
relay unit A fraction of a second
later, the whole building seemed to
rock as the great conductors crashed
over in the switch room three hundred
feet away. The lights faded, and
almost died. Then it was all over. The
circuit breakers, driven at almost the
speed of an explosion, had cleared the
line again. The lights returned to
normal and the needles of the
megawattmeters dropped back onto their
scales.

  The equipment had withstood the
overload. But what of Nelson?

  Dr. Hughes was surprised to see that
Sir Robert, for all his sixty years,
had already reached the generator. He
was standing by its edge, looking down
into the great pit. Slowly, the
physicist went to join him. He was
afraid to hurry; a growing sense of
premonition was filling his mind.
Already he could picture Nelson lying
in a twisted heap at the center of the
well, his lifeless eyes staring up at
them reproachfully. Then came a still
more horrible thought. Suppose the
field had collapsed too soon, when the
inversion was only partly completed?
In another moment, he would know the
worst.

  There is no shock greater than that
of the totally unexpected, for against
it the mind has no chance to prepare
its defenses. Dr. Hughes was ready for
almost anything when he reached the
generator. Almost, but not quite....

He did not expect to find it
completely empty.

TECHNICAL ERROR 65

  What came after, he could never
perfectly remember. Murdock seemed to
take charge then. There was a great
flurry of activity, and the engineers
swarmed in to replace the giant rotor.
Somewhere in the distance he heard Sir
Robert saying, over and over again, "We
did our best we did our best." He must
have replied, somehow, but everything
was very vague....

  In the gray hours before the dawn,
Dr. Hughes awoke from his fitful sleep.
All night he had been haunted by his
dreams, by weird fantasies of
multi-dimensional geometry. There were
visions of strange, other-worldly uni-
verses of insane shapes and
intersecting planes along which he was
doomed to struggle endlessly, fleeing
from some nameless terror. Nelson, he
dreamed, was trapped in one of those
unearthly dimensions, and he was trying
to reach him. Sometimes he was Nelson
himself, and he imagined that he could
see all around him the universe he
knew, strangely distorted and barred
from him by invisible walls.

  The nightmare faded as he struggled
up in bed. For a few moments he sat
holding his head, while his mind began
to clear. He knew what was happening;
this was not the first time the
solution of some baffling problem had
come suddenly upon him in the night.

  There was one piece still missing in
the jigsaw puzzle that was sorting
itself out in his mind. One piece only
and suddenly he had it. There was
something that Nelson's assistant had
said, when he was describing the orig-
inal accident. It had seemed trivial at
the time; until now, Hughes had
forgotten all about it.

  "When I looked inside the generator,
there didn't seem to be anyone there,
so I started to climb down the
ladder...."

  What a fool he had been! Old
McPherson had been right, or partly
right, after all!

  The field had rotated Nelson in the
fourth dimension of space, but there
had been a displacement in time as
well. On the first occasion it had been
a matter of seconds only. This time,
the conditions must have been different
in spite of all his care. There were so
many unknown factors, and the theory
was more than half guesswork.

66 REACH FOR TOMORROW

  Nelson had not been inside the
generator at the end of the
experiment. But he would be.

  Dr. Hughes felt a cold sweat break
out all over his body. He pictured
that thousand-ton cylinder, spinning
beneath the drive of its fifty million
horse-power. Suppose something
suddenly materialized in the space it
already occup~ed.... ?

  He leaped out of bed and grabbed the
private phone to the power station.
There was no time to lose the rotor
would have to be removed at once.
Murdock could argue later.

  Very gently, something caught the
house by its foundations and rocked it
to and fro, as a sleepy child may
shake its rattle. Flakes of plaster
came planing down from the ceiling; a
network of cracks appeared as if by
magic in the walls. The lights
flickered, became suddenly brilliant,
and faded out.

  Dr. Hughes threw back the curtain
and looked toward the mountains. The
power station was invisible beyond the
foothills of Mount Perrin, but its
site was clearly marked by the vast
column of debris that was slowly
rising against the bleak light of the
dawn.

The Parasite

`'THERE IS NOTING YOU CAN DO," SAT CONNOLLY, "NOTING at all.
Why did you have to follow me?" He was
standing with his back to Pearson,
staring out across the calm blue water
that led to Italy. On the left, behind
the anchored fishing fleet, the sun
was setting in Mediterranean splendor,
incarnadining land and sky. But
neither man was even remotely aware of
the beauty all around.

  Pearson rose to his feet, and came
forward out of the little cafe's
shadowed porch, into the slanting
sunlight He joined Connolly by the
cliff wall, but was careful not to
come too close to him. Even in normal
times Connolly disliked being touched.
His obsession, whatever it might be,
would make him doubly sensitive now.

  "Listen, Roy," Pearson began
urgently. "We've been~ friends for
twenty years, and you ought to know I

wouldn't let you down this time.
Besides~"

"I know. You promised Ruth."

  "And why not? After all, she is your
wife. She has a right to know what's
happened." He paused, choosing his
words carefully. "She's worried, Roy.
Much more worried than if it was only
another woman." He nearly added the
word "again," but decided against it

  Connolly stubbed out his cigarette on
the flat-topped granite wall, then
flicked the white cylinder out over
the sea, so that it fell twisting and
turning toward the waters a hundred
feet below. He turned to face his
friend.

  "I'm sorry, Jack," he said, and for
a moment there was a glimpse of the
familiar personality which, Pearson
knew, must be trapped somewhere within
the stranger standing at his side. "I
know you're trying to be helpful and I
appreciate it. But I wish you hadn't
followed me. You'll only make matters
worse."

67

68 REACH FOR TOMORROW

"Convince me of that, and I'll go
away."

Connolly sighed.

  "I could no more convince you than
that psychiatrist you persuaded me to
see. Poor Curtis! He was such a
well-meaning fellow. Give him my
apologies, will you?"

  "I'm not a psychiatrist, and I'm not
trying to cure you  whatever that
means. If you like it the way you are,
that's your affair. But I think you
ought to let us know what's happened,
so that we can make plans
accordingly."

"To get me certified? "

  Pearson shrugged his shoulders. He
wondered if Connolly could see through
his feigned indifference to the real
concern he was trying to hide. Now
that all other approaches seemed to
have failed, the "frankly-I-don'tcare"
attitude was the only one left open to
him.

  "I wasn't thinking of that. There
are a few practical details to worry
about. Do you want to stay here in-
definitely? You can't live without
money, even on Syrene."

  "I can stay at Clifford Rawnsley's
villa as long as I like. He was a
friend of my father's you know. It's
empty at the moment except for the
servants, and they don't bother me."

  Connolly turned away from the
parapet on which he was resting.

  "I'm going up the hill before it's
dark," he said. The words were abrupt,
but Pearson knew that he was not being
dismissed. He could follow if he
pleased, and the knowledge brought him
the first satisfaction he had felt
since locating Connolly. It was a
small triumph, but he needed it. -

  They did not speak during the climb;
indeed, Pearson scarcely had the
breath to do so. Connolly set off at
a reckless pace, as if deliberately
attempting to exhaust himself. The
island fell away beneath them, the
white villas gleamed like ghosts in
the shadowed valleys, the little
fishing boats, their day's work done,
lay at rest in the harbor. And all
around was the darkling sea.

  When Pearson caught up with his
friend, Connolly was sitting in front
of the shrine which the devout
island

THE PARASITE 69

ers had built on Syrene's highest
point. In the daytime, there would be
tourists here, photographing each
other or gaping at the muchadvertised
beauty spread beneath them, but the
place was deserted now.

  Connolly was breathing heavily from
his exertions, yet his features were
relaxed and for the moment he seemed
almost at peace. The shadow that lay
across his mind had lifted, and he
turned to Pearson with a smile that
echoed his old, infectious grin.

"He hates exercise, Jack. It always
scares him away."

  "And who is he?" said Pearson.
"Remember, you haven't introduced us
yet."

  Connolly smiled at his friend's
attempted humor; then his face
suddenly became grave.

  "Tell me, Jack," he began. "Would you
say I have an overdeveloped
imagination?"

  "No: you're about average. You're
certainly less imaginative than I am."

Connolly nodded slowly.

  "That's true enough, Jack, and it
should help you to believe me. Because
I'm certain I could never have in-
vented the creature who's haunting me.
He really exists. I'm not suffering
from paranoiac hallucinations, or
whatever Dr. Curtis would call them.

  "You remember Maude White? It all
began with her. I met her at one of
David Trescott's parties, about six
weeks ago. I'd just quarreled with
Ruth and was rather fed up. We were
both pretty tight, and as I was
staying in town she came back to the
flat with me."

  Pearson smiled inwardly. Poor Roy! It
was always the same pattern, though he
never seemed to realize it. Each
affair was different to him, but to no
one else. The eternal Don Juan, always
seeking always disappointed, because
what he sought could be found only in
the cradle or the grave, but never
between the two.

  "I guess you'll laugh at what knocked
me out it seems so trivial though it
frightened me more than anything
that's ever happened in my life. I
simply went over to the cocktail
cabinet and poured out the drinks, as
I've done a hundred times before. It
wasn't until I'd handed one to

70 REACH FOR TOMORROW

Maude that I realized I'd filled three
glasses. The act was so perfectly
natural that at first I didn't
recognize what it meant. Then I looked
wildly around the room to see where
the other man was even then I knew,
somehow, that it wasn't a man. But, of
course, he wasn't there. He was
nowhere at all in the outside world:
he was hiding deep down inside my own
brain...."

  The night was very still, the only
sound a thin ribbon of music winding
up to the stars from some cafe in the
village below. The light of the rising
moon sparkled on the sea; overhead,
the arms of The crucifix were
silhouetted against the darkness. A
brilliant beacon on the frontiers~of
twilight, Venus was following the sun
into the west.

  Pearson waited, letting Connolly
take his time. He seemed lucid and
rational enough, however strange the
story he was telling. His face was
quite calm in the moonlight, though it
might be the calmness that comes after
acceptance of defeat.

  "The next thing I remember is lying
in bed while Maude sponged my face.
She was pretty frightened: I'd passed
out and cut my forehead badly as I
felt There was a lot of blood around
the place, but that didn't matter. The
thing that really scared me was the
thought that I'd gone crazy. That
seems funny, now that I'm much more
scared of being sane.

  "He was still there when I woke up;
he's been there ever since. Somehow I
got rid of Maude it wasn't easy  and
tried to work out what had happened.
Tell me, Jack, do you believe in
telepathy>"

The abrupt challenge caught Pearson
off his guard.

  "I've never given it much thought,
but the evidence seems rather
convincing. Do you suggest that
someone else is reading your mind?"

  "It's not as simple as that. What
I'm telling you now I've discovered
slowly usually when I've been dreaming
or slightly drunk. You may say that
invalidates the evidence, but I don't
think so. At first it was the only way
I could break through the barrier that
separates me from

THE PARASITE 71

Omega I'll tell you later why I've
called him that. But now there aren't
any obstacles: I know he's there all
the time, waiting for me to let down
my guard. Night and day, drunk or
sober, I'm conscious of his presence.
At times like this he's quiescent,
watching me out of the corner of his
eye. My only hope is that he'll grow
tired of waiting, and go in search of
some other victim."

  Connolly's voice, calm until now,
suddenly came near to breaking.

  "Try and imagine the horror of that
discovery: the effect of learning that
every act, every thought or desire
that flitted through your mind was
being watched and shared by another
being. It meant, of course, the end of
all normal life for me. I had to leave
Ruth and I couldn't tell her why.
Then, to make matters worse, Maude
came chasing after me. She wouldn't
leave me alone, and bombarded me with
letters and phone calls. It was hell.
I couldn't fight both of them, so I
ran away. And I thought that on
Syrene, of all places, he would find
enough to interest him without
bothering me."

  "Now I understand," said Pearson
softly. "So that's what he's after. A
kind of telepathic Peeping Tom no
longer content with mere watching...."

  "I suppose you're humoring me," said
Connolly, without resentment. "But I
don't mind, and you've summed it up
pretty accurately, as you usually do.
It was quite a while before I realized
what his game was. Once the first
shock had worn off, I tried to analyze
the position logically. I thought
backward from that first moment of
recognition, and in the end I knew
that it wasn't a sudden invasion of my
mind. He'd been with me for years, so
well hidden that I'd never guessed it.
I expect you'll laugh at this, knowing
me as you do. But I've never been
altogether at ease with a woman, even
when I've been making love to her, and
now I know the reason. Omega has al-
ways been there, sharing my emotions,
gloating over the passions he can no
longer experience in his body.

  "The only way I kept any control was
by fighting back, trying to come to
grips with him and to understand what

72 REACH FOR TOMORROW

he was. And in the end I succeeded.
He's a long way away and there must be
some limit to his powers. Perhaps that
first contact was an accident, though
I'm not sure.

  "What I've told you already, Jack,
must be hard enough for you to
believe, but it's nothing to what I've
got to say now. Yet remember you
agreed that I'm not an imaginative
man, and see if you can find a flaw
anywhere in this story.

  "I don't know if you've read any of
the evidence suggesting that telepathy
is somehow independent of time. I know
that it is. Omega doesn't belong to
our age: he's somewhere in the future,
immensely far ahead of us. For a while
I thought he must be one of the last
men that's why I gave him his name.
But now I'm not sure; perhaps he
belongs to an age when there are a
myriad different races of man,
scattered all over the universe some
sell ascending, others sinking into
decay. His people, wherever and
whenever they may be, have reached the
heights and fallen from them into the
depths the beasts can never know.
There's a sense of evil about him,
Jack the real evil that most of us
never meet in all our lives. Yet some-
times I feel almost sorry for him,
because I knot* what has made him the
thing he is.

  "Have you ever wondered, Jack, what
the human race will do when science
has discovered everything, when there
are no more worlds to be explored,
when all the stars have given up their
secrets? Omega is one of the answers.
I hope he's not the only one, for if
so everything we've striven for is in
vain. I hope that he and his race are
an isolated cancer in a still healthy
universe, but I can never be sure.

  "They have pampered their bodies
until they are useless, and too late
they have discovered their mistake.
Perhaps they have thought, as some men
have thought, that they could live by
intellect alone. And perhaps they are
immortal, and that must be their real
damnation. Through the ages their
minds have been corroding in their
feeble bodies, seeking some release
from their intolerable boredom. They
have found it at last in the only way
they can, by sending back their minds
to an earlier, more virile

THE PAT(ASITE 73

age, and becoming parasites on the
emotions of others.

  "I wonder how many of them there
are? Perhaps they explain all cases of
what used to be called possession. How
they must have ransacked the past to
assuage their hunger! Can't you
picture them, flocking like carrion
crows around the decaying Roman
Empire, jostling one another for the
minds of Nero and Caligula and
Tiberius' Perhaps Omega failed to get
those richer prizes. Or perhaps he
hasn't much choice and must take
whatever mind he can contact in any
age, transferring from that to the
next whenever he has the chance.

  "It was only slowly, of course, that
I worked all this out. I think it adds
to his enjoyment to know that I'm
aware of his presence. I think he's
deliberately helping  breaking down
his side of the barrier. For in the
end, I was able to see him."

  Connolly broke off. Looking around,
Pearson saw that they were no longer
alone on the hilltop. A young couple,
hand in hand, were coming up the road
toward the crucifix. Each had the
physical beauty so common and so cheap
among the islanders. They were
oblivious to the night around them and
to any spectators, and went past with-
out the least sign of recognition.
There was a bitter smile on Connolly's
lips as he watched them go.

  "I suppose I should be ashamed of
this, but I was wishing then that he'd
leave me and go after that boy. But he
won't; though I've refused to play his
game any more, he's staying to see
what happens."

  "You were going to tell me what he's
like," said Pearson, annoyed at the
interruption. Connolly lit a cigarette
and inhaled deeply before replying.

  "Can you imagine a room without
walls? He's in a kind of hollow,
egg-shaped space surrounded by blue
mist that always seems to be twisting
and turning, but never changes its
position. There's no entrance or exit
and no gravity, unless he's learned to
defy it. Because he floats in the
center, and around him is a circle of
short, fluted cylinders, turning
slowly in the air. I think they must
be machines of some kind, obeying his
will. And once there was a large oval
hanging beside him, with

74 REACH FOR TOMORROW

perfectly human, beautifully formed arms
coming from it. It could only have been a
robot, yet those hands and fingers seemed
alive. They were feeding and massaging
him, treating him like a baby. It was
humble....

  "Have you ever seen a femur or a
spectral tarsier? He's rather like that a
nightmare travesty of mankind, with huge
malevolent eyes. And this is strange it's
not the way one had imagined evolution
going he's covered with a fine layer of
fur, as blue as the room in which he
lives. Every time I've seen him he's been
in the same position, half curled up like
a sleeping baby. I think his legs have
completely atrophied; perhaps his arms as
well. Only his brain is still active,
hunting up and down the ages for its prey.

  "And now you know why there was nothing
you or anyone else could do. Your
psychiatrists might cure me if I was
insane, but the science that can deal with
Omega hasn't been invented yet."

Connolly paused, then smiled wryly.

  "Just because I'm sane, I realize that
you can't be expected to believe me. So
there's no common ground on which we can
meet."

  Pearson rose from the boulder on which
he had been sitting, and shivered
slightly. The night was becoming cold, but
that was nothing to the feeling of inner
helplessness that had overwhelmed him as
Connolly spoke.

  "I'll be frank, ROY," he began slowly.
"Of course I don't believe you. But
insofar as you believe in Omega yourself,
he's real to you, and I'll accept him on
that basis and fight him with you."

  "It may be a dangerous game. How-do we
know what he can do when he's cornered?"

  "I'll take that chance," Pearson
replied, beginning to walk down the hill.
Connolly followed him without argument.
"Meanwhile, just what do you propose to do
yourself?"

  "Relax. Avoid emotion. Above all, keep
away from women Ruth, Maude, and the rest
of them. That's been the hardest job. It
isn't easy to break the habits of a life-
time."

 .    .    .          ...

THE PARASITE 75

  "I can well believe that," replied
Pearson, a little dryly. "How
successful have you been so far?"

  "Completely. You see, his own
eagerness defeats his purpose, by
filling me with a kind of nausea and
selfloathing whenever I think of sex.
Lord, to think that I've laughed at
the prudes all my life, yet now I've
become one myself!"

  There, thought Pearson in a sudden
flash of insight, was the answer. He
would never have believed it, but Con-
nolly's past had finally caught up
with him. Omega was nothing more than
a symbol of conscience, a personifica-
tion of guilt. When Connolly realized
this, he would cease to be haunted. As
for the remarkably detailed nature of
the hallucination, that was yet
another example of the tricks the
human mind can play in its efforts to
deceive itself. There must be some
reason why the obsession had taken
this form, but that was of minor
importance.

  Pearson explained this to Connolly at
some length as they approached the
village. The other listened so pa-
tiently that Pearson had an
uncomfortable feeling that he was the
one who was being humored, but he
continued grimly to the end. When he
had finished, Connolly gave a short,
mirthless laugh.

  "Your story's as logical as mine, but
neither of us can convince the other.
If you're right, then in time I may
returned to 'normal.' I can't disprove
the possibility; I simply don't
believe it. You can't imagine how real
Omega is to me. He's more real than
you are: if I close my eyes you're
gone, but he's still there. I wish I
knew what he was waiting for! I've
left my old life behind; he knows I
won't go back to it while he's there.
So what's he got to gain by hanging
on?" He turned to Pearson with a
feverish eagerness. "That's what
really frightens me, Jack.He must know
what my future is all my life must be
like a book he can dip into where he
pleases. So there must still be some
experience ahead of me that he's
waiting to savor. Sometimes sometimes
I wonder if it's my death."

  They were now among the houses at the
outskirts of the village, and ahead of
them the nightlife of Syrene was
getting into its stride. Now that they
were no longer

7 6 REACH FOR TOMORROW

alone, there came a subtle change in
Connolly's attitude. On the hilltop he
had been, if not his normal self, at
least friendly and prepared to talk.
But now the sight of the happy,
carefree crowds ahead seemed to make
him withdraw into himself. He lagged
behind as Pearson advanced and
presently refused to come any further.

  "What's the matter?" asked Pearson.
"Surely you'll come down to the hotel
and have dinner with me?"

Connolly shook his head.

"I can't," he said. "I'd meet too many
people."

  It was an astonishing remark from a
man who had always delighted in crowds
and parties. It showed, as nothing
else had done, how much Connolly had
changed. Before Pearson could think of
a suitable reply, the other had turned
on his heels and made off up a
side-street. Hurt and annoyed, Pearson
started to pursue him, then decided
that it was useless.

  That night he sent a long telegram
to Ruth, giving what reassurance he
could. Then, tired out, he went to
bed.

  Yet for an hour he was unable to
sleep. His body was exhausted,- but
his brain was still active. He lay
watching the patch of moonlight move
across the pattern on the wall,
marking the passage of time as
inexorably as it must still do in the
distant age that Connolly had
glimpsed. Of course, that was pure
fantasy yet against his will Pearson
was growing to accept Omega as a real
and living threat. And in a sense
Omega qvas real as real as those other
mental abstractions, the Ego and the
Subconscious Mind.

  Pearson wondered if Connolly had
been wise to come back to Syrene. In
times of emotional crisis there had
been others, though none so important
as this Connolly's reaction was always
the same. He would return again to the
lovely island where his charming,
feckless parents had borne him and
where he had spent his youth. He was
seeking now, Pearson knew well enough,
the contentment he had known only for
one period of his life, and which he
had sought so vainly in the arms of
Ruth and all those others who had been
unable to resist him.

  Pearson was not attempting to
criticize his unhappy friend. He never
passed judgments; he merely observed

THE PARASITE 77

with a bright-eyed, sympathetic
interest that was hardly tolerance,
since tolerance implied the relaxation
of standards which he had never
possessed....

  After a restless night, Pearson
finally dropped into a sleep so sound
that he awoke an hour later than
usual. He had breakfast in his room,
then went down to the reception desk
to see if there was any reply from
Ruth. Someone else had arrived in the
night: two traveling cases, obviously
English, were stacked in a corner of
the hall, waiting for the porter to
move them. Idly curious, Pearson
glanced at the labels to see who his
compatriot might be. Then he
stiffened, looked hastily around, and
hurried across to the receptionist.

 - "This Englishwoman," he said
anxiously. "When did she arrive?"

"An hour ago, Signor, on the morning
boat."

"Is she in now?"

  The receptionist looked a little
undecided, then capitulated
gracefully.

  "No, Signor. She was in a great
hurry, and asked me where she could
find Mr. Connolly. So I told her. I
hope it was all -right."

  Pearson cursed under his breath. It
was an incredible stroke of bad luck,
something he would never have dreamed
of guarding against. Maude White was a
woman of even greater determination
than Connolly had hinted. Somehow she
had discovered where he had fled, and
pride or desire or both had driven her
to follow. That she had come to this
hotel was not surprising; it was an
almost inevitable choice for English
visitors to Syrene.

  As he climbed the road to the Villa,
Pearson fought against an increasing
sense of futility and uselessness. He
had no idea what he should do when he
met Connolly and Maude. He merely felt
a vague yet urgent impulse to be
helpful. If he could catch Maude
before she reached the villa, he might
be able to convince her that Connolly
was a sick man and that her
intervention could only do harm. Yet
was this true' It was perfectly
possible that a touching
reconciliation had already taken
place, and that neither party had the
least desire to see him.

78 REACH FOR TOMORROW

  They were talking together on the
beautifully laid-out lawn in front of
the Villa when Pearson turned through
the gates and paused for breath.
Connolly was resting on a wrought-iron
seat beneath a palm tree, while Maude
was pacing up and down a few yards
away. She was speaking swiftly; Pearson
could not hear her words, but from the
intonation of her voice she was
obviously pleading with Connolly. It
was an embarrassing situation. While
Pearson was still wondering whether to
go forward, Connolly looked up and
caught sight of him. His face was a
completely expressionless mask; it
showed neither welcome nor resentment.

  At the interruption, Maude spun round
to see who the intruder was, and for
the first time Pearson glimpsed her
face. She was a beautiful woman, but
despair and anger had so twisted her
features that she looked like a figure
from some Greek tragedy. She was
suffering not only the bitterness of
being scorned, but the agony of not
knowing why.

  Pearson's arrival must have acted as
a trigger to her pent-up emotions. She
suddenly whirled away from him and
turned toward Connolly, who continued
to watch her with lack-lustre eyes. For
a moment Pearson could not see what she
was doing; then he cried in horror:
"Look out, ROY!"

  Connolly moved with surprising speed,
as if he had suddenly emerged from a
trance. He caught Maude's wrists there
was a brief struggle, and then he was
backing away from her, looking with
fascination at something in the palm of
his hand. The woman stood motionless,
paralyzed with fear and shame, knuckles
pressed against her mouth.

  Connolly gripped the pistol with his
right hand and stroked it lovingly with
his left. There was a low moan from
Maude.

- "I only meant to frighten you, ROY!
I swear it!"

  "That's all right, my dear," said
Connolly softly. "I believe you.
There's nothing to worry about." His
voice was perfectly natural. He turned
toward Pearson, and gave him his old,
boyish smile.

THE PARASl'rE 79

  "So this is what he was waiting for,
Jack," he said. "I'm not going to
disappoint him."

  "No!" gasped Pearson, white with
terror. "Don't, Roy, for God's sake!"

  But Connolly was beyond the reach of
his friend's entreaties as he turned
the pistol to his head. In that same
moment Pearson knew at last, with an
awful clarity, that Omega was real and
that Omega would now be seeking for a
new abode.

  He never saw the flash of the gun or
heard the feeble but adequate
explosion. The world he knew had faded
from his sight, and around him now
were the fixed yet crawling mists of
the blue room. Staring from its
center  as they had stared down the
ages at how many others?  were two
vast and lidless eyes. They were
satiated for the moment, but for the
moment only.

The Fires Within

 THIS, sArD KARN SMUGLY, ~ WlEL IN - REST YOU. JUST take a
look at it!"

  He pushed across the file he had
been reading, and for the nth time I
decided to ask for his transfer or,
failing that, my own.

"What's it about?" I said wearily.

  "It's a long report from a Dr.
Matthews to the Minister of Science."
He waved it in front of me. "Just read
it!"

  Without much enthusiasm, I began to
go through the file. A few minutes
later I looked up and admitted grudg-
ingly: "Maybe you're right this time."
I didn't speak again until I'd
finished....

  My dear Minister (the letter began).
As you requested, here is my special
report on Professor Hancock's experi-
ments, which have had such unexpected
and extraordinary results. I have not
had time to cast it into a more
orthodox form, but am sending you the
dictation just as it stands.

  Since you have many matters engaging
your attention, perhaps I should
briefly summarize our dealings with
Professor Hancock. Until 1955, the
Professor held the Kelvin Chair of
Electrical Engineering at Brendon
University, from which he was granted
indefinite leave of absence to carry
out his researches. In these he was
joined by the late Dr. Clayton,
sometime Chief Geologist to the
Ministry of Fuel and Power. Their
joint research was financed by grants
from the Paul Fund and the Royal
Society.

  The Professor hoped to develop sonar
as a means of precise geological
surveying. Sonar, as you will know, is
the acoustic equivalent of radar, and
although less familiar is older by
some millions of years, since bats use
it very effectively to detect insects
and obstacles at night. Pro80

THE FIRES WITHIN 81

fessor Hancock intended to send
highpowered supersonic pulses into the
ground and to build up from the re-
turning echoes an image of what lay
beneath. The picture would be
displayed on a cathode ray tube and
the whole system would be exactly
analagous to the type of radar used in
aircraft to show the ground through
cloud.

  In 1957 the two scientists had
achieved partial success but had
exhausted their funds. Early in 1958
they applied directly to the
government for a block grant. Dr.
Clayton pointed out the immense value
of a device which would enable us to
take a kind of X-ray photo of the
Earth's crust, and the Minister of
Fuel gave it his approval before
passing on the application to us. At
that time the report of the Bernal
Committee had just been published and
we were very anxious that deserving
cases should be dealt with quickly to
avoid further criticisms. I went to
see the Professor at once and
submitted a favorable report; the
first payment of our grant (S/543A/68)
was made a few days later. From that
time I have been continually in touch
with the research and have assisted to
some extent with technical advice.

  The equipment used in the experiments
is complex, but its principles are
simple. Very short but extremely
powerful pulses of supersonic waves
are generated by a special transmitter
which revolves continuously in a pool
of a heavy organic liquid. The beam
produced passes into the ground and
"scans" like a radar beam searching
for echoes. By a very ingenious
time-delay circuit which I will resist
the temptation to describe, echoes
from any depth can be selected and so
pictures of the strata under
investigation can be built up on a
cathode ray screen in the normal way.

  When I first met Professor Hancock
his apparatus was rather primitive,
but he was able to show me the
distribution of rock down to a depth
of several hundred feet and we could
see quite clearly a part of the
Bakerloo Line which passed very near
his laboratory. Much of the Pro-
fessor's success was due to the great
intensity of his supersonic bursts;
almost from the beginning he was able
to generate peak powers of several
hundred kilowatts, nearly all of which
was radiated into the ground. It was
unsafe

82 REACH FOR TOMORROW

to remain near the transmitter, and I
noticed that the soil became quite
warm around it. I was rather surprised
to see large numbers of birds in the
vicinity, but soon discovered that
they were attracted by the hundreds of
dead worms lying on the ground.

  At the time of Dr. Clayton's death
in 1960, the equipment was working at
a power level of over a megawatt and
quite good pictures of strata a mile
down could be obtained. Dr. Clayton
had correlated the results with known
geographical surveys, and had proved
beyond doubt the value of the
information obtained.

  Dr. Clayton's death in a motor
accident was a great tragedy. He had
always exerted a stabilizing influence
on the Professor, who had never been
much interested in the practical
applications of his work. Soon
afterward I noticed a distinct change
in the Professor's outlook, and a few
months later he confided his new
ambitions to me. I had been trying to
persuade him to publish his results
(he had already spent over 50,000 and
the Public Accounts Committee was
being difficult again), but he asked
for a little more time. I think I can
best explain his attitude by his own
words, which I remember very vividly,
for they were expressed with peculiar
emphasis.

  "Have you ever wondered," he said,
"what the Earth really is like inside?
We've only scratched the surface with
our mines and wells. What lies beneath
is as unknown as the other side of the
Moon.

  "We know that the Earth is
unnaturally dense far denser than the
rocks and soil of its crust would
indicate. The core may be solid metal,
but until now there's been no way of
telling. Even ten miles down the
pressure must be thirty tons or more
to the square inch and the temperature
several hundred degrees. What it's
like at the center staggers the
imagination: the pressure must be
thousands of tons to the square inch.
It's strange to think that in two or
three years we may have reached the
Moon, but when we've got to the stars
we'll still be no nearer that inferno
four thousand miles beneath our feet.

  "I can now get recognizable echoes
from two miles down, but I hope to
step up the transmitter to ten mega

THE Fires WITHIN 83

watts in a few months. With that
power, I believe the range will be
increased to ten miles; and I don't
mean to stop there."

  I was impressed, but at the same time
I felt a little skeptical.

  "That's all very well," I said, "but
surely the deeper you go the less
there'll be to see. The pressure will
make any cavities impossible, and
after a few miles there will simply be
a homogeneous mass getting denser and
denser."

  "Quite likely," agreed the Professor.
"But I can still learn a lot from the
transmission characteristics. Anyway,
we'll see when we get there!"

  That was four months ago; and
yesterday I saw the result of that
research. When I answered his
invitation the Professor was clearly
excited, but he gave me no hint of
what, if anything, he had discovered.
He showed me his improved equipment
and raised the new receiver from its
bath. The sensitivity of the pickups
had been greatly improved, and this
alone had effectively doubled the
range, altogether apart from the
increased transmitter power. It was
strange to watch the steel framework
slowly turning and to realize that it
was exploring regions, which, in spite
of their nearness, man might never
reach.

  When we entered the hut containing
the display equipment, the Professor
was strangely silent. He switched on
the transmitter, and even though it
was a hundred yards away I could feel
an uncomfortable tingling. Then the
cathode ray tube lit up and the slowly
revolving timebase drew the picture I
had seen so often before. Now,
however, the definition was much
improved owing to the increased power
and sensitivity of the equipment. I
adjusted the depth control and
focussed on the Underground, which was
clearly visible as a dark lane across
the faintly luminous screen. While I
was watching, it suddenly seemed to
fill with mist and I knew that a train
was going through.

  Presently I continued the descent.
Although I had watched this picture
many times before, it was always
uncanny to see great luminous masses
floating toward me and to know that
they were buried rocks perhaps the

84 REACn FOR TOMORROW

debris from the glaciers of fifty Thousand
years ago. Dr. Clayton had worked out a
chart so that we could identify the
various strata as they were passed, and
presently I saw that I was through the
alluvial soil and entering the great clay
saucer which traps and holds the city's
artesian water. Soon that too was passed,
and I was dropping down through the
bedrock almost a mile below the surface.

  The picture was still clear and bright,
Though there was lithe to see, for there
were now few changes in the ground
structure. The pressure was already rising
to a thousand atmospheres; soon it would
be impossible for any cavity to remain
open, for the rock itself would begin to
flow. Mile after mile I sank, but only a
pale mist floated on the screen, broken
sometimes when echoes were returned from
pockets or lodes of denser material. They
became fewer and fewer as the depth
increased  or else they were now so small
that They could no longer be seen.

  The scale of the picture was, of course,
continually expanding. It was now many
miles from side to side, and I felt like
an airman looking down upon an unbroken
cloud ceiling from an enormous height. For
a moment a sense of vertigo seized me as
I thought of the abyss into which I was
gazing. I do not think that the world will
ever seem quite solid to me again.

  At a depth of nearly ten miles I stopped
and looked at the Professor. There had
been no alteration for some time, and I
knew that the rock must now be compressed
into a featureless, homogeneous mass. I
did a quick mental calculation and
shuddered as I realized chat the pressure
must be at least diirty tons to The square
inch The scanner was revolving very slowly
now, for the feeble echoes were taking
many seconds to struggle back from The
depths.

  "Well, Professor," I said, "I
congratulate you. It's a wonderful
achievement. But we seem to have reached
dhe core now. I don't suppose there'll be
any change from here to the center."

  He smiled a lithe wryly. "Go on," he
said. "You haven't finished yet."

There was something in his voice that
puzzled and

 .                . ,

THE FIRES WITHIN 85

alarmed me. I looked at him intently
for a moment; his features were just
visible in the blue-green glow of the
cathode ray tube.

  "How far down cam this thing go?" I
asked, as the interminable descent
started again.

  "Fifteen miles," he said shortly. I
wondered how he knew, for the last
feature I had seen at all clearly was
only eight miles down. But I continued
the long fall through the rock, the
scanner turning more and more slowly
now, until it took almost five minutes
to make a complete revolution. Behind
me I could hear the Professor
breathing heavily, and once the back
of my chair gave a crack as his
fingers gripped it.

  Then, suddenly, very faint markings
began to reappear on the screen. I
leaned forward eagerly, wondering if
this was the first glimpse of the
world's iron core. With agonizing
slowness the scanner turned through a
right angle, then another. And then

  I leaped suddenly out of my chair,
cried "My God!" and turned to face the
Professor. Only once before in my life
had I received such an intellectual
shock fifteen years ago, when I had
accidentally turned on the radio and
heard of the fall of the first atomic
bomb. That had been unexpected, but
this was inconceivable. For on the
screen had appeared a grid of faint
lines, crossing and recrossing to form
a perfectly symmetrical lattice.

  I know that I said nothing for many
minutes, for the scanner made a
complete revolution while I stood
frozen with surprise. Then the
Professor spoke in a soft, unnaturally
calm voice.

  "I wanted you to see it for yourself
before I said anything. That picture
is now thirty miles in diameter, and
those squares are two or three miles
on a side. You'll notice that the
vertical lines converge and the
horizontal ones are bent into arcs.
We're looking at part of an enormous
structure of concentric rings; the
center must lie many miles to the
north, probably in the region of
Cambridge. How much further it extends
in the other direction we can only
guess."

"But what Is it, for heaven's sake?"

86 REACH FOR TOMORROW

"Well, it's clearly artificial."

"That's ridiculous! Fifteen miles
down!"

  The Professor pointed to the screen
again. "God knows I've done my best,"
he said, "but I can't convince myself
that Nature could make anything like
that."

  I had nothing to say, and presently
he continued: "I discovered it three
days ago, when I was trying to find
the maximum range of the equipment. I
can go deeper than this, and I rather
think that the structure we can see is
so dense that it won't transmit my
radiations any further.

  "I've tried a dozen theories, but in
the end I keep returning to one. We
know that the pressure down there must
be eight or nine thousand atmospheres,
and the temperature must be high
enough to melt rock. But normal matter
is still almost empty space. Suppose
that there is life down there not
organic life, of course, but life
based on partially condensed matter,
matter in which the electron shells
are few or altogether missing. Do you
see what I mean? To such creatures,
even the rock fifteen miles down would
offer no more resistance than
water and we and all our world would
be as tenuous as ghosts."

"Then that thing we can see "

  "Is a city, or its equivalent.
You've seen its size, so you can judge
for yourself the civilization that
must have built it. All the world we
know our oceans and continents and
mountains is nothing more than a film
of mist surrounding something beyond
our comprehension."

  Neither of us said anything for a
while. I remember feeling a foolish
surprise at being one of the first men
in the world to learn the appalling
truth; for somehow I never doubted
that it was the truth. And I wondered
how the rest of humanity would react
when the revelation came.

  Presently I broke into the silence.
"If you're right," I said, "why have
they whatever they are never made
contact with us?"

  The Professor looked at me rather
pityingly. "We think we're good
engineers," he said, "but how could we
reach them' Besides, I'm not at all
sure that there haven't been contacts.
Think of all the underground creatures
and the

THE FIRES WITHIN 87

mythology trolls and cobalds and the
rest. No, it's quite impossible I take
it back. Still, the idea is rather
suggestive."

  All the while the pattern on the
screen had never changed: the dim
network still glowed there,
challenging our sanity. I tried to
imagine streets and buildings and the
creatures going among them, creatures
who could make their way through the
incandescent rock as a fish swi ns
through water. It was fantastic . . .
and then I remembered the incredibly
narrow range of temperatures and
pressures under which the human race
exists. We, not they, were the freaks,
for almost all the matter in the
universe is at temperatures of
thousands or even millions of degrees.

"Well," I said lamely, "what do we do
now? "

  The Professor leaned forward eagerly.
"First we must learn a great deal
more, and we must keep this an
absolute secret until we are sure of
the facts. Can you imagine the panic
there would be if this information
leaked out? Of course, the truth's
inevitable sooner or later, but we may
be able to break it slowly.

  "You'll realize that the geological
surveying side of my work is now
utterly unimportant. The first thing
we have to do is to build a chain of
stations to find the extent of the
structure. I visualize them at
ten-mile intervals toward the north,
but I'd like to build the first one
somewhere in South London to see how
extensive the thing is. The whole job
will have to be kept as secret as the
building of the first radar chain in
the late thirties.

  "At the same time, I'm going to push
up my transmitter power again. I hope
to be able to beam the output much
more narrowly, and so greatly increase
the energy concentration. But this
will involve all sorts of mechanical
difficulties, and I'll need more
assistance."

  I promised to do my utmost to get
further aid, and the Professor hopes
that you will soon be able to visit
his laboratory yourself. In the
meantime I am attaching a photograph
of the vision screen, which although
not as clear as the original will, I
hope, prove beyond doubt that our
observations are not mistaken.

I am well aware that our grant to the
Interplanetary

88 REACH FOR TOMORROW

Society has brought us dangerously
near the total estimate for the year,
but surely even the crossing of space
is less important than the immediate
investigation of this discovery which
may have the most profound effects on
the philosophy and the future of the
whole human race.

  I sat back and looked at Karn. There
was much in the document I had not
understood, but the main outlines were
clear enough.

"Yes," I said, "this is it! Where's
that photograph?"

  He handed it over. The quality was
poor, for it had been copied many
times before reaching us. But the
pattern was unmistakable and I
recognized it at once.

  "They were good scientists," I said
admiringly. "That's Callastheon, all
right. So we've found the truth at
last, even if it has taken us three
hundred years to do it."

  "Is that surprising," asked Karn,
"when you consider the mountain of
stuff we've had to translate and the
didiculty of copying it before it
evaporates? "

  I sat in silence for a while,
thinking of the strange race whose
relics we were examining. Only
once never again!  had I gone up the
great vent our engineers had opened
into the Shadow World. It had been a
frightening and unforgettable
experience. The multiple layers of my
pressure suit had made movement very
difficult, and despite their
insulation I could sense the
unbelievable cold that was all around
me.

  "What a pity it was," I mused, "that
our emergence destroyed them so
completely. They were a clever race,
and we might have learned a lot from
them."

  "I don't think we can be blamed,"
said Karn. "We never really believed
that anything could exist under those
awful conditions of near-vacuum, and
almost absolute zero. It couldn't be
helped."

  I did not agree. "I think it proves
that they were the more intelligent
race. After all, they discovered us
first. Everyone laughed at my
grandfather when he said that the
radiation he'd detected from the
Shadow World must be artificial."

Karn ran one of his tentacles over the
manuscript.

THE FIRES WITHIN 89

  "We've certainly discovered the cause
of that radiation," he said. "Notice
the date it's just a year before your
grandfather's discovery. The Professor
must have got his grant all right! "
He laughed unpleasantly. "It must have
given him a shock when he saw us
coming up to the surface, right
underneath him."

  I scarcely heard his words, for a
most uncomfortable feeling had
suddenly come over me. I thought of
the thousands of miles of rock lying
below the great city of Callastheon,
growing hotter and denser all the way
to the Earth's unknown core. And so I
turned to Karn.

  "That isn't very funny," I said
quietly. "It may be our turn next."

The Awakening

MARLAN WAS BORED, WITH THE ULTIMATE BOREDOM THAT only
Utopia can supply. He stood before the
great window and stared down at the
scudding clouds, driven by the gale
that was racing past the foothills of
the city. Sometimes, through a rent in
the billowing white blanket, he could
catch a glimpse of lakes and forests
and the winding ribbon of the river
that flowed through the empty land he
now so seldom troubled to visit.
Twenty miles away to the west,
rainbow-hued in the sunlight, the
upper peaks of the artificial mountain
that was City Nine floated above the
clouds, a dream island adrift in the
cold wastes of the stratosphere.
Marlan wondered how many of its
inhabitants were staring listlessly
across at him, equally dissatisfied
with life.

  There was, of course, one way of
escape, and many had chosen it. But
that was so obvious, and Marlan
avoided the obvious above all things.
Besides, while there was still a
chance that life might yet hold some
new experience, he would not pass
through the door that led to oblivion.

  Out of the mist that lay beneath
him, something bright and flaming
burst through the clouds and dwindled
swiftly toward the deep blue of the
zenith. With lack-lustre eyes, Marlan
watched the ascending ship: once how
long ago! the sight would have lifted
his heart. Once he too had gone on
such journeys, following the road
along which Man had found his greatest
adventures. But now on the twelve
planets and the fifty moons there was
nothing one could not find on Earth.
Perhaps, if only the stars could have
been reached, humanity might have
avoided the cul-de-sac in which it was
now trapped; there would still have
remained endless vistas of exploration
and discovery. But the spirit of
mankind had quailed before the 90

THE AWAKENING - 91

awful immensities of interstellar
space. Man had reached the planets
while he was still young, but the stars
had remained forever beyond his grasp.

  And yet Marion stiffened at the
thought and stared along the twisting
vapor-trail that marked the path of the
departed ship if Space had defeated
him, there was still another conquest
to be attempted. For a long time he
stood in silent thought, while, far
beneath, the storm's ragged hem slowly
unveiled the buttresses and ramparts of
the city, and below those, the
forgotten fields and forests which^had
once been Man's only home.

  The idea appealed to Sandrak's
scientific ingenuity; it presented him
with interesting technical problems
which would keep him occupied for a
year or two. That would give Marlan
ample time to wind up his affairs, or,
if necessary, to change his mind.

  If Marlan felt any last-minute
hesitations, he was too proud to show
it as he said good-by to his friends.
They had watched his plans with morbid
curiosity, convinced that he was
indulging in some unusually elaborate
form of euthanasia. As the door of the
little spaceship closed behind Marlan,
they walked slowly away to resume the
pattern of their aimless lives; and
Roweena wept, but not for long.

  While Marlan made his final
preparations, the ship climbed on its
automatic course, gaining speed until
the Earth was a silver crescent, then
a fading star lost against the greater
glory of the sun. Rising upward from
the plane in which the planets move,
the ship drove steadily toward the
stars until the sun itself had become
no more than a blazing point of light.
Then Marlan checked his outward speed,
swinging the ship round into an orbit
that made it the outermost of all the
sun's children. Nothing would ever
disturb it here; it would circle the
sun for eternity, unless by some
inconceivable chance it was captured by
a wandering comet.

  For the last time Marlan checked the
instruments that Sandrak had built.
Then he went to the innermost chamber
and sealed the heavy metal door. When
he opened it

92 REACH FOR TOMORROW
again, it would be to learn the
secret of human destiny

  His mind was empty of all emotion as
he lay on the thickly padded couch and
waited for the machines to do their
duty. He never heard the first whisper
of gas through the vents; but
consciousness went out like an ebbing
tide.

  Presently the air crept hissing from
the little chamber, and its store of
heat drained outward into the ultimate
cold of space. Change and decay could
never enter here; Marlan lay in a tomb
that would outlast any that man had
ever built on Earth, and might indeed
outlast the Earth itself. Yet it was
more than a tomb, for the machines it
carried were biding their time, and
every hundred years a circuit opened
and closed, counting the centuries

  So Marlan slept, in the cold
twilight beyond Pluto. He knew nothing
of the life that ebbed and flowed upon
Earth and its sister planets while the
centuries lengthened into millennia,
the millennia into eons. On the world
that had once been Marlan's home, the
mountains crumbled and were swept into
the sea; the ice crawled down from the
Poles as it had done so many times
before and would do many times again.
On the ocean beds the mountains of the
future were built layer by layer from
the falling silt, and presently rose
into the light of day, and in a lithe
while followed dhe forgotten Alps and
Himalayas to their graves.

  The sun had changed very little, all
things considered, when the patient
mechanism of Marlan's ship reawakened
from their long sleep. The air hissed
back into the chamber, the temperature
slowly climbed from the verge of
absolute zero to a level at which life
might start again. Gendy, the handling
machines began the delicate series of
tasks which should revitalize their
master.

  Yet he did not stir. During the long
ages that had passed since Marlan
began his sleep, something had failed
among the circuits that should have
awakened him. Indeed, the marvel was
that so much had functioned correctHy;
for Marlan still eluded Death, though
his servants would never recall him
from his slumbers.

  And now the wonderful ship
remembered the commands it had been
given so long ago. For a lithe while,
as

THE AWAKENING 93

its multitudinous mechanisms slowly
warmed to life, it floated inert with
the feeble sunlight glinting on its
walls. Then, ever more swiftly, it
began to retrace the path along which
it had traveled when the world was
young. It did not check its speed
until it was once more among the inner
planets, its metal hull warming
beneath the rays of the ancient
unwearying sun. Here it began its
search, in the temperate zone where
the Earth had once circled; and here
it presently found a planet it did not
recognize.

  The size was correct, but all else
was wrong. Where were the seas that
once had been Earth's greatest glory?
Not even their empty beds were left:
the dust of vanished continents had
clogged them long ago. And where,
above all, was the Moon? Somewhere in
the forgotten past it had crept
earthward and met its doom, for the
planet was now girdled, as once only
Saturn had been, by a vast, thin halo
of circling dust.

  For a while the robot controls
searched through their electronic
memories as the ship considered the
situation. Then it made its decision,
if a machine could have shrugged its
shoulders, it would have done so.
Choosing a landing place at random, it
fell gently down through the thin air
and came to rest on a flat plain of
eroded sandstone. It had brought
Marlan home; there was nothing more
that it could do. If there was still
life on the Earth, sooner or later it
would find him.

  And here, indeed, those who were now
masters of Earth presently came upon
Marlan's ship. Their memories were
long, and the tarnished metal ovoid
lying upon the sandstone was not
wholly strange to them. They conferred
among each other with as much
excitement as their natures allowed
and, using their own strange tools,
began to break through the stubborn
walls until they reached the chamber
where Marlan slept.

  In their way, they were very wise,
for they could understand the purpose
of Marlan's machines and could tell
where they had failed in their duty.
In a little while the scientists had
made what repairs were necessary,
though they were none too hopeful of
success. The best that they could
expect was that Marlan's mind might be
brought, if

94 REACH FOR TOMORROW

only for a little while, back to the
borders of consciousness before Time
exacted its long-deferred revenge.

  The light came creeping back into
Marlan's brain with the slowness of a
winter dawn. For ages he lay on the
frontiers of self-awareness, knowing
that he existed but not knowing who he
was or whence he had come. Then
fragments of memory returned, and
fitted one by one into the intricate
jigsaw of personality, until at last
Marlan knew that he was Marlan.
Despite his weakness, the knowledge of
success brought him a deep and burning
sense of satisfaction. The curiosity
that had driven him down the ages when
his fellows had chosen the blissful
sleep of euthanasia would soon be
rewarded: he would know what manner of
men had inherited the earth.

  Strength returned. He opened his
eyes. The light was gentle, and did
not dazzle him, but for a moment all
was blurred and misty. Then he saw
figures looming dimly above him, and
was filled with a sense of dreamlike
wonder, for he remembered that he
should have been alone on his return
to life, with only his machines to
tend him.

  And now the scene came swiftly into
focus, and staring back at him,
showing neither enmity nor friendship,
neither excitement nor indifference,
were the fathomless eyes of the
Watchers. The thin, grotesquely
articulated figures stood around him
in a close-packed circle, looking down
at him across a gulf which neither his
mind nor theirs could ever span.

  Other men would have felt terror,
but Marlan only smiled, a little
sadly, as he closed his eyes forever.
His questing spirit had reached its
goal; he had no more riddles to ask of
Time. For in the last moment of his
life, as he saw those waiting round
him, he knew that the ancient war
between Man and insect had long ago
been ended, and that Man was not the
victor.

                   .
                   
     Trouble With the Natives
     THE FLYING SAUCER CAME DOWN VERTICALLY THROUGH THE
     clouds, braked to a halt about fifty
feet from the ground,
     and settled with a considerable bump
on a patch of
     heather-strewn moorland.
     "That," said Captain Wyxtpthll, "was
a lousy landing."
     He did not, of course, use precisely
these words. To hu-
     man ears his remarks would have
sounded rather like the
     clucking of an angry hen. Master
Pilot Krtclugg unwound
     three of his tentacles from the
control panel, stretched all
     four of his legs, and relaxed
comfortably.
     "Not my fault the automatics have
packed up again,"
     he grumbled. "But what do you expect
with a ship that
     should have been scrapped five
thousand years ago? If
     those cheese-paring form-fillers back
at Base Planet "
     "Oh, all right! We're down in one
piece, which is more
     than I expected. Tell Crysteel and
Danstor to come in
     here. I want a word with them before
they go."
     Crysteel and Danstor were, very
obviously, of a differ-
     ent species from the rest of the
crew. They had only one
     pair of legs and arms, no eyes at the
back of the head, and
     other physical deficiencies which
their colleagues did
     their best to overlook. These very
defects, however, had
     made them the obvious choice for this
particular mission,
     for it had needed only a minimum of
disguise to let them
     pass as human beings under all but
the closest scrutiny.
 t   "Now you're perfectly sure," said the
Captain, "that
     you understand your instructions?"
     "Of course," said Crysteel, slightly
huffed. "This isn't
     the fimt time I've made contact with
a primitive race. My
     training in anthropology "
     "Good. And the language?"
     "Well, that's Danstor's business, but
I can speak it rea-
     95

96 REACH FOR TOMORROW

sonably fluently now. It's a very
simple language, and after all we've
been studying their radio programs for
a couple of years."

"Any other points before you go?"

 "Er there's just one matter."
Crysteel hesitated slightly. "It's
quite obvious from their broadcasts
that the social system is very
primitive, and that crime and
lawlessness are widespread. Many of
the wealthier citizens have to use
what are called 'detectives' or
'special agents' to protect their
lives and property. Now we know it's
against regulations, but we were
wondering . . ."

"What?"

  "Welt we'd feel much safer if we
could take a couple of Mark III
disrupters with us."

  "Not on your life! I'd be
court-martialed if they heard about it
at the Base. Suppose you killed some
of the natives _then I'd have the
Bureau of Interstellar Politics, the
Aborigines Conservancy Board, and half
a dozen others after me."

  "There'd be just as much trouble if
we got killed," Crysteel pointed out
with considerable emotion. "After all,
you're responsible for our safety.
Remember that radio play I was telling
you about? It described a typical
household, but there were two murders
in the first half hour!"

  "Oh, very well. But only a Mark II we
don't want you to do too much damage
if there is trouble."

  "Thanks a lot; that's a great relief.
I'll report every thirty minutes as
arranged. We shouldn't be gone mo:
than a couple of hours."

  Captain Wyxtpthll watched them
disappear over the brow of the hill.
He sighed deeply.

  "Why," he said, "of all the people in
the ship did it have to be those two?"

  "It couldn't be helped," answered the
pilot. "All these primitive races are
terrified of anything strange. If they
saw us coming, there'd be general
panic and before we knew where we were
the bombs would be falling on top of
us. You just can't rush these things."

Captain Wyxtpthll was absentmindedly
making a cat's

TROUBLE WITH THE NATIVES 97

cradle out of his tentacles in the way
he did when he was worried.

  "Of course," he said, "if they don't
come back I can always go away and
report the place dangerous." He
brightened considerably. "Yes, that
would save a lot of trouble."

  "And waste all the months we've spent
studying it?" said the pilot,
scandalized. "They won't be wasted,"
replied the captain, unraveling
himself with a flick that no human eye
could have followed. "Our report will
be useful for the next survey ship.
I'll suggest that we make another
visit in oh, let's say five thousand
years. By then the place may be
civilized though frankly, I doubt it."

  Samuel Higginsbotham was settling
down to a snack of cheese and cider
when he saw the two figures
approaching along the lane. He wiped
his mouth with the back of his hand,
put the bottle carefully down beside
his hedgetrimming tools, and stared
with mild surprise at the couple as
they came into range.

  "Morr,in'," he said cheerfully
between mouthfuls of cheese.

  The strangers paused. One was
surreptitiously ruffling through a
small book which, if Sam only knew,
was packed with such common phrases
and expressions as: "Before the
weather forecast, here is a gale
warning," "Stick 'em up I've got you
covered!", and "Calling all cars!"
Danstor, who had no needs for these
aids to memory, replied promptly
enough.

  "Good morning, my man," he said in
his best B.B.C. accent. "Could you
direct us to the nearest hamlet,
village, small town or other such
civilized community?"

  "Eh?" said Sam. He peered
suspiciously at the strangers, aware
for the first time that there was
something very odd about their
clothes. One did not, he realized
dimly, normally wear a roll-top
sweater with a smart pin-striped suit
of the pattern fancied by city gents.
And the fellow who was still fussing
with the little book was actually
wearing full evening dress which would
have been faultless but for the lurid
green and red tie, the hob-nailed
boots and the

 98 REACH FOR TOMORROW
 cloth cap. Crysteel and Danstor had
done their best, but
 they had seen too many television
plays. When one con-
 siders that they had no other source of
information, their
 sartorial aberrations were at least
understandable.
 Sam scratched his head. Furriners, I
suppose, he told
 himself. Not even the townsfolk got
themselves up like
 this.
 He pointed down the road and gave them
explicit di-
 rections in an accent so broad that no
one residing outside
 the range of the B.B.C.'s West Regional
transmitter could
 have understood more than one word in
three. Crysteel
 and Danstor, whose home planet was so
far away that
 Marconi's first signals couldn't
possibly have reached it
 yet, did even worse than this. But they
managed to get
 the general idea and retired in good
order, both wonder                    ing
if their knowledge of English was as
good as they had
 believed.
 So came and passed, quite uneventfully
and without
 record in the history books, the first
meeting between
 humanity and beings from Outside.
 "I suppose," said Danstor thoughtfully,
but without
 much conviction, "that he wouldn't have
done? It would
 have saved us a lot of trouble."
 "I'rh afraid not. Judging by his
clothes, and the work he
 was obviously engaged upon, he could
not have been a
 very intelligent or valuable citizen. I
doubt if he could
 even have understood who we were."
 "Here's another one!" said Danstor,
pointing ahead.
 "Don't make sudden movements that might
cause alarm.
 Just walk along naturally, and let him
speak first."
 The man ahead strode purposefully
toward them,
 showed not the slightest signs of
recognition, and before               f
 they had recovered was already
disappearing into the dis-
 tance.
 "Well!" said Danstor.
 "It doesn't matter," replied Crysteel
philosophically.
 "He probably wouldn't have been any use
either."
 "That's no excuse for bad manners!"  ~
 They gazed with some indignation at the
retreating                            i
 back of Professor Fitzsimmons as,
wearing his oldest hik
TROUBLE WITH THE NATIVES 99

ing outfit and engrossed in a
difficult piece of atomic theory, he
dwindled down the lane. For the first
time, Crysteel began to suspect
uneasily that it might not be as
simple to make contact as he had
optimistically believed.

  Little Milton was a typical English
village, nestling at the foot of the
hills whose higher slopes now
concealed so portentous a secret.
There were very few people about on
this summer morning, for the men were
already at work and the womenfolk were
still tidying up after the exhausting
task of getting their lords and
masters safely out of the way.
Consequently Crysteel and Danstor had
almost reached the center of the
village before their first encounter,
which happened to be with the village
postman, cycling back to the office
after completing his rounds. He was in
a very bad temper, having had to de-
liver a penny postcard to Dodgson's
farm, a couple of miles off his normal
route. In addition, the weekly parcel
of laundry which Gunner Evans sent
home to his doting mother had been a
lot heavier than usual, as well it
might, since it contained four tins of
bully beef pinched from the cookhouse.

"Excuse me," said Danstor politely.

  "Can't stop," said the postman, in no
mood for casual conversation. "Got
another round to do." Then he was
gone.

  "This is really the limit!" protested
Danstor. "Are they all going to be
like this?"

  "You've simply got to be patient,"
said Crysteel. "Remember their customs
are quite different from ours; it may
take some time to gain their
confidence. I've had this sort of
trouble with primitive races before.
Every anthropologist has to get used
to it."

  "Hmm," said Danstor. "I suggest that
we call at some of their houses. Then
they won't be able to run away."

  "Very well," agreed Crysteel
doubtfully. "But avoid anything that
looks like a religious shrine,
otherwise we may get into trouble."

  Old Widow Tomkins' council-house
could hardly have been mistaken, even
by the most inexperienced of ex-
plorers, for such an object. The old
lady was agreeably ex

100 REACH FOR TOMORROW

cited to see two gentlemen standing on
her doorstep, and noticed nothing at
all odd about their clothes. Visions
of unexpected legacies, of newspaper
reporters asking about her 100th
birthday (she was really only 95, but
had managed to keep it dark) flashed
through her mind. She picked up the
slate she kept hanging by the door and
went gaily forth to greet her
visitors.

  "You'll have to write it down," she
simpered, holding out the slate. "I've
been deaf this last twenty years."

  Crysteel and Danstor looked at each
other in dismay. This was a completely
unexpected snag, for the only written
characters they had ever seen were
television program announcements, and
they had never fully deciphered those.
But Danstor, who had an almost
photographic memory, rose to the
occasion. Holding the chalk very
awkwardly, he wrote a sentence which,
he had reason to believe, was in
common use during such breakdowns in
communication.

  As her mysterious visitors walked
sadly away, old Mrs. Tomkins stared in
baffled bewilderment at the marks on
her slate. It was some time before she
deciphered the characters Danstor had
made several mistakes and even then
she was little the wiser.

   TRANSMISSIONS WILL BE RESUMED AS
           SOON AS POSSIBLE.

  It was the best that Danstor could
do; but the old lady never did get to
the bottom of it.

  They were little luckier at the next
house they tried. The door was
answered by a young lady whose vocabu-
lary consisted largely of giggles, and
who eventually broke down completely
and slammed the door in their faces.
As they listened to the muffled,
hysterical laughter, Crysteel and
Danstor began to suspect, with sinking
hearts, that their disguise as normal
human beings was not as effective as
they had intended.

  At Number 3, on the other hand, Mrs.
Smith was only too willing to talk at
120 words to the minute in an accent
as impenetrable as Sam
Higginsbotham's. Danstor

TROUBLE WITH THE NATIVES 101

made his apologies as soon as he could
get a word in edgeways, and moved on.

"Doesn't anyone talk as they do on
the radio?" he lamented. "How do they
understand their own programs if they
all speak like this? "

"I think we must have landed in the
wrong place," said CrysteeL even his
optimism beginning to fail. It sagged
still further when he had been
mistaken, in swift succession, for a
Gallup Poll investigator, the
prospective Conservative candidate, a
vacuum-cleaner salesman, and a dealer
from the local black market.

At the sixth or seventh attempt they
ran out of housewives. The door was
opened by a gangling youth who
clutched in one clammy paw an object
which at once hypnotized the visitors.
It was a magazine whose cover
displayed a giant rocket climbing
upward from a craterstudded planet
which, whatever it might be, was
obviously not the Earth. Across the
background were the words: "Staggering
Stories of Pseudo-Science. Price 25
cents."

Crysteel looked at Danstor with a "Do
you think what I think?" expression
which the other returned. Here at
last, surely, was someone who could
understand them. His spirits mounting,
Danstor addressed the youngster.

"I think you can help us," he said
politely. "We find it very difficult
to make ourselves understood here. You
see, we've just landed on this planet
from space and we want to get in touch
with your government."

"Oh," said Jimmy Williams, not yet
fully returned to Earth from his
vicarious adventures among the outer
moons of Saturn. "Where's your
spaceship?"

"It's up in the hills; we didn't want
to frighten anyone."

"Is it a rocket? "

"Good gracious no. They've been
obsolete for thousands of years."

"Then how does it work? Does it use
atomic power?"

"I suppose so," said Danstor, who was
pretty shaky on physics. "Is there any
other kind of power? "

"This is getting us nowhere," said
Crysteel, impatient for once. "We've
got to ask him questions. Try and find
where there are some officials we can
meet."

102 REACH FOR TOMORROW

Before Danstor could answer, a
stentorian voice came from inside the
house.

"Jimmy! Who's there?"

"Two . . . men," said Jimmy, a
little doubtfully. "At least, they
look like men. They've come from Mars.
I always said that was going to
happen."

There was the sound of ponderous
movements, and a lady of elephantine
bulk and ferocious mien appeared from
the gloom. She glared at the
strangers, looked at the magazine
Jimmy was carrying, and summed up the
situat~on.

"You ought to be ashamed of
yourselves!" she cried, rounding on
Crysteel and Danstor. "It's bad enough
having a good-for-nothing son in the
house who wastes all his time reading
this rubbish, without grown men coming
along putting more ideas into his
head. Men from Mars, indeed! I suppose
you've come in one of those flying
saucem!"

"But I never mentioned Mars,"
protested Danstor feebly.

Slam! From behind the door came the
sound of violent altercation, the
unmistakable noise of tearing paper,
and a wail of anguish. And that was
that.

"Wed," said Danstor at last. "What
do we try next? And why did he say we
came from Mars? That isn't even the
nearest planet, if I remember
correctly."

"I don't know," said Crysteel. "But
I suppose it's natural for them to
assume that we come from some close
planet. They're going to have a shock
when they find the truth. Mars,
indeed! That's even worse than here,
from the reports I've seen." He was
obviously beginning to lose some of
his scientific detachment.

"Let's leave the houses for a
while," said Danstor. "There must be
some more people outside."

This statement proved to be
perfectly true, for they had not gone
much further before they found
themselves surrounded by small boys
making incomprehensible but obviously
rude remarks.

"Should we try and placate them with
gifts?" said Dan

TROUBLE WITE]: THE NATIVES 103

star anxiously. "That usually works
among more backward racers."

"Well, have you brought any?"

"NO, I thought your'

Before Danstor could finish, their
tormentors took to their heels and
disappeared down a side street. Coming
along the road was a majestic figure
in a blue uniform.

Crysteel's eyes lit up.

"A policeman!" he said. "Probably
going to investigate a murder
somewhere. But perhaps he'll spare us
a minute," he added, not very
hopefully.

P. C Hinks eyed the strangers with
some astonishment, but managed to keep
his feelings out of his voice.

"Hello, gents. Looking for anything?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," said
Danstor in his friendliest and most
soothing tone of voice. "Perhaps you
can help us. You see, we've just
landed on this planet and want to make
contact with the authorities."

"Eh?" said P. C Hinks startled.
There was a long pause  though not too
long, for P. C. Hinks was a bright
young man who had no intention of
remaining a village constable all his
life. "So you've just landed, have
you? In a spaceship, I suppose?"

"That's right," said Danstor,
immensely relieved at the absence of
the incredulity, or even violence,
which such announcements all too often
provoked on the more primitive
planets.

"Well, well! " said P. C. Hinks, in
tones which he hoped would inspire
confidence and feelings of amity. (Not
that it mattered much if they both
became violent they seemed a pretty
skinny pair.) "Just tell me what you
want, and I'll see what we can do
about it."

"I'm so glad," said Danstor. "You
see, we've landed in this rather
remote spot because we don't want to
create a panic. It would be best to
keep our presence known to as few
people as possible until we have
contacted your government."

"I quite understand," replied P. C.
Hinks, glancing round hastily to see
if there was anyone through whom he

104 REACH FOR TOMORROW

could send a message to his sergeant.
"And what do you propose to do then?"

"I'm afraid I can't discuss our
long-term policy with regard to
Earth7" said Danstor cagily. "All I
can say is that this section of the
Universe is being surveyed and opened
up for development, and we're quite
sure we can help you in many ways. '

"That's very nice of you," said P.
C. Hinks heartily. "I think the best
thing is for you to come along to the
station with me so that we can put
through a call to the Prime Minister."

"Thank you very much," said Danstor,
full of gratitude. They walked
trustingly beside P. C. Hinks, despite
his slight tendency to keep behind
them, until they reached the village
police station.

"This way, gents," said P. C Hinks,
politely ushering them into a room
which was really rather poorly lit and
not at all well furnished, even by the
somewhat primitive standards they had
expected. Before they could fully take
in their surroundings there was a
"click" and they found themselves
separated from their "rude by a large
door composed entirely of iron bars.

"Now don't worry," said P. C. Hinks.
"every' hing will be quite all right.
I'll be back in a minute."

Crysteel and Danstor gazed at each
other with a surmise that rapidly
deepened to a dreadful certainty.

"We're locked in!7'

"This is a prison!"

"Now what are we going to do,"

"I don't know if you chaps
understand Enmesh," said a languid
voice from the gloom, "but you might
let a fellow sleep in peace."

For the first time, the two
prisoners saw that they were not
alone. Lying on a bed in the corner of
the cell was a somewhat dilapidated
young man, who gazed at them blearily
out of one resentful eye.

"My goodness!" said Danstor
nervously. "Do you suppose he's a
dangerous criminal?"

"He doesn't look very dangerous at
the momenta" said Crysteel7 with more
accuracy than he guessed.

TROUBLE WITH THE NATIVES 105

"What are you in for, anyway?" asked
the stranger, sitting up unsteadily.
"You look as if you've been to a
fancy-dress party. Oh, my poor head!"
He collapsed again into the prone
position.

"Fancy locking up anyone as ill as
this!" said Danstor, who was a
kind-hearted individual. Then he
continued, in English, "I don't know
why we're here. We just told the
policeman who we were and where we
came from, and dais is what's
happened."

"Well, who are you?"

"We've just landed "

"Oh, there's no point in going
through all that again," interrupted
Crysteel. "We'll never get anyone to
believe

us.'

"Hey!" said the stranger, sitting up
once more. "What language is that
you're speaking; I know a few, but
I've never heard anything like that."

"Oh, all right," Crysteel said to
Danstor. "You might as well tell him.
There's nothing else to do until that
policeman comes back anyway."

At this moment, P. C. Hinks was
engaged in earnest conversation with
the superintendent of dhe local mental
home, who insisted stoudy that all his
patients were present. However, a
careful check was promised and he'd
call back later.

Wondering if the whole thing was a
practical joke, P. C Hinks put the
receiver down and quiedy made his way
to the cells. The three prisoners
seemed to be engaged in friendly
conversation, so he tiptoed away
again. It would do them all good to
have a chance to cool down He rubbed
his eye tenderly as he remembered what
a batde it had been to get Mr. Graham
into the cell during dhe small hours
of the morning.

That young man was now reasonably
sober after the night's celebrations,
which he did not in the least regret.
(It was, after alp quite an occasion
when your degree came through and you
found you'd got Honors when you'd
barely expected a Pass.) But he began
to fear that he was still under the
influence as Danstor unfolded his tale
and waited, not expecting to be
believed.

1 06 REACH FOR TOMORROW

In these circumstances, thought
Graham, the best thing to do was to
behave as matter-of-factly as possible
until the hallucinations got fed up
and went away.

"If you really have a spaceship in
the hills," he remarked, "surely you
can get in touch with it and ask some-
one to come and rescue you?"

"We want to handle this ourselves,"
said Crysteel with dignity. "Besides,
you don't know our captain."

They sounded very convincing,
thought Graham. The whole story hung
together remarkably well. And yet . .
.

"It's a bit hard for me to believe
that you can build interstellar
spaceships, but can't get out of a
miserable village police station."

Danstor looked at Crysteet who
shuffled uncomfortably.

"We could get out easily enough,"
said the anthropologist. "But we don't
want to use violent means unless it's
absolutely essential. You've no idea
of the trouble it causes, and the
reports we might have to fill in.
Besides, if we do get out, I suppose
your Flying Squad would catch us be-
fore we got back to the ship."

"Not in Little Milton," grinned
Graham. "Especially if we could get
across to the 'White Hart' without
being stopped. My car is over there."

"Oh," said Danstor, his spirits
suddenly reviving. He turned to his
companion and a lively discussion
followed. Then, very gingerly, he
produced a small black cylinder from
an inner pocket, handling it with much
the same confidence as a nervous
spinster holding a loaded gun for the
first time. Simultaneously, Crysteel
retired with some speed to the far
corner of the cell.

It was at this precise moment that
Graham knew, with a sudden icy
certainty, that he was stone-sober and
that the story he had been listening
to was nothing less than the truth.

There was no fuss or bother, no
flurry of electric sparks or colored
rays but a section of the wall three
feet across dissolved quietly and
collapsed into a little pyramid of
sand. The sunlight came streaming into
the cell as, with a

TROUBLE WITH THE NATIVES 107

great sigh of relief, Danstor put his
mysterious weapon away.

"Wed, come on," he urged Graham.
"We're waiting for you."

There were no signs of pursuit' for
P. C. Hinks was still arguing on the
phone, and it would be some minutes
yet before that bright young man
returned to the cells and received the
biggest shock of his official career.
No one at the "White Hart" was
particularly surprised to see Graham
again; they all knew where and how he
had spent the night, and expressed
hope that the local Bench would deal
leniently with him when his case came
up.

With grave misgivings, Crysteel and
Danstor climbed into the back of the
incredibly ramshackle Bentley which
Graham affectionately addressed as
"Rose." But there was nothing wrong
with the engine under the rusty
bonnet, and soon they were roaring out
of Little Milton at fifty miles an
hour. It was a striking demonstration
of the relativity of speed, for
Crysteel and Danstor, who had spent
the last few years traveling
tranquilly through space at several
million miles a second, had never been
so scared in their lives. When
Crysteel had recovered his breath he
pulled out his little portable
transmitter and called the ship.

"We're on the way back," he shouted
above the roar of the wind. "We've got
a fairly intelligent human being with
us. Expect us in whoops! I'm sorry we
just went over a bridge about ten
minutes. What was that? No, of course
not. We didn't have the slightest
trouble. Everything went perfectly
smoothly. Good-by."

Graham looked back only once to see
how his passengers were faring. The
sight was rather unsettling for their
ears and hair (which had not been
glued on very fimnly) had blown away
and their real selves were beginning
to emerge. Graham began to suspect,
with some discomfort, that his new
acquaintances also lacked noses. Oh
well, one could grow used to anything
with practice. He was going to have
plenty of that in the years ahead.

108 REACH FOR TOMORROW

The rest, of course, you all know;
but the full story of the first
landing on Earth, and of the peculiar
circumstances under which Ambassador
Graham became humanity's
representative to the universe at
large, has never before- been
recounted. We extracted the main
details, with a good deal of
persuasion, from Crysteel and Danstor
themselves, while we were working in
the Department of Extraterrestrial
affairs.

It was understandable, in view of
their success on Earth, that they
should have been selected by their
superiors to make the first contact
with our mysterious and secretive
neighbors, the Martians. It is also
understandable, in the light of the
above evidence, that Crysteel and
Danstor were so reluctant to embark
on this later mission, and we are not
really very surprised that nothing
has ever been heard of them since.

The Curse

FOR THREE HUNDRED YEARS, WHILE ITS FAME SPREAD ACROSS

the world, the little town had stood
here at the river's bend. Time and
change had touched-it lightly; it had
heard from afar both the coming of the
Armada and the fall of the Third
Reich, and all Man's wars had passed
it by.

Now it was gone, as though it had
never been. In a moment of time the
toil and treasure of centuries had
been swept away. The vanished streets
could still be traced as faint marks
in the vitrified ground, but of the
houses, nothing remained. Steel and
concrete, plaster and ancient oak it
had mattered little at the end. In the
moment of death they had stood
together, transfixed by the glare of
the detonating bomb. Then, even before
they could flash into fire, the blast
waves had reached them and they had
ceased to be. Mile upon mile the
ravening hemisphere of flame had
expanded over the level farmlands, and
from its heart had risen the twisting
totem-pole that had haunted the minds
of men for so long, and to such little
purpose.

The rocket had been a stray, one of
the last ever to be fired. It was hard
to say for what target it had been in-
tended. Certainly not London, for
London was no longer a military
objective. London, indeed, was no
longer anything at all. Long ago the
men whose duty it was had calculated
that three of the hydrogen bombs would
be sufficient for that rather small
target. In sending twenty, they had
been perhaps a little overzealous.

This was not one of the twenty that
had done their work so well. Both its
destination and its origin were un-
known: whether it had come cross the
lonely Arctic wastes or far above the
waters of the Atlantic, no one could
tell and there were few now who cared.
Once there 109

110 REACH FOR TOMORROW

had been men who had known such
things, who had watched from afar the
flight of the great projectiles and
had sent their own missiles to meet
them. Often that appointment had been
kept, high above the Earth where the
sky was black and sun and stars shared
the heavens together. Then there had
bloomed for a moment that inde-
scribable flame, sending out into
space a message that in centuries to
come other eyes than Man's would see
and understand.

But that had been days ago, at the
beginning of the War. The defenders
had long since been brushed aside, as
they had known they must be. They had
held on to life long enough to
discharge their duty; too late, the
enemy had learned his mistake. He
would launch no further rockets; those
still falling he had dispatched hours
ago on secret trajectories that had
taken them far out into space. They
were returning now unguided and inert,
waiting in vain for the signals that
should lead them to their destinies.
One by one they were falling at random
upon a world which they could harm no
more.

The river had already overflowed its
banks; somewhere down its course the
land had twisted beneath that colossal
hammer-blow and the way to the sea was
no longer open. Dust was still falling
in a fine rain, as it would do for
days as Man's cities and treasures
returned to the world that had given
them birth. But the sky was no longer
wholly darkened, and in the west the
sun was settling through banks of
angry cloud.

A church had stood here by the
river's edge, and though no trace of
the building remained, the gravestones
that the years had gathered round it
still marked its place. Now the stone
slabs lay in parallel rows, snapped
off at their bases and pointing mutely
along the line of the blast. Some were
half flattened into the ground, others
had been cracked and blistered by
terrific heat, but many still bore the
messages they had carried down the
centuries in vain.

The light died in the west and the
unnatural crimson faded from the sky.
Yet still the graven words could be
clearly read, lit by a steady,
unwavering radiance, too faint to be
seen by day but strong enough to
banish night.

THE CURSE 111

The land was burning: for miles the
glow of its radioactivity was
reflected from the clouds. Through the
glimmering landscape wound the dark
ribbon of the steadily widening river,
and as the waters submerged the land
that deadly glow continued unchanging
in the depths. In a generation,
perhaps, it would have faded from
sight, but a hundred years might pass
before life could safely come this way
again.

Timidly the waters touched the worn
gravestone that for more than three
hundred years had lain before the
vanished altar. The church that had
sheltered it so long had given it some
protection at the last, and only a
slight discoloration of the rock told
of the fires that had passed this way.
In the corpse-light of the dying land,
the archaic words could still be
traced as the water rose around them,
breaking at last in tiny ripples
across the stone. Line by line the
epitaph upon which so many millions
had gazed slipped beneath the
conquering wamrs. For a little while
the letters could still be faintly
seen; then they were gone forever.

Good freed for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dvst encloased heare

Blest be ye man yt spares tines
stones, And cvrst be he yt moves my
bones.

Undisturbed through all eternity the
poet could sleep in safety now: in the
silence and darkness above his head,
the Avon was seeking its new outlet to
the sea

'lime's Arrow

THE RIVER WAS DEAD AND THE LAKE ALREADY DYING WHEN

the monster had come down the dried-up
watercourse and turned onto the
desolate mud-flats. There were not
many places where it was safe to walk,
and even where the ground was hardest
the great pistons of its feet sank a
foot or more beneath the weight they
carried. Sometimes it had paused,
surveying the landscape with quick,
birdlike movements of its head. Then
it had sunk even deeper into the
yielding soil, so that fifty million
years later men could judge with some
accuracy the duration of its halts.

For the waters had never returned,
and the blazing sun had baked the mud
to rock. Later still the desert had
poured over all this land, sealing it
beneath protecting layers of sand. And
later very much later had come Man.

"Do you think," shouted Barton above
the din, "that Professor Fowler became
a palaeontologist because he likes
playing with pneumatic drills? Or did
he acquire the taste afterward?"

"Can't hear you!" yelled Davis,
leaning on his shovel in a most
professional manner. He glanced
hopefully at his watch.

"Shall I tell him it's dinnertime? He
can't wear a watch while he's
drilling, so he won't know any
better."

"I doubt if it will work," Barton
shrieked. "He's got wise to us now and
always adds an extra ten minutes. But
it will make a change from this
infernal digging."

With noticeable enthusiasm the two
geologists downed tools and started to
walk toward their chief. As they ap-
proached, he shut off the drill and
relative silence de112

TIME'S Amow 113

scended, broken only by the throbbing
of the compressor in the background.

"About time we went back to camp,
Professor," said Davis, wristwatch-
held casually behind his back. "You
know what cook says if we're late."

Professor Fowler, M.A., F.R.S.,
F.G.S., mopped some, but by no means
ale of the ocher dust from his
forehead. He would have passed anywhere
as a typical navvy, and the occasional
visitors to the site seldom recognized
the Vice-President of the Geological
Society in the brawny, half-naked
workman crouching over his beloved
pneumatic drill

It had taken nearly a month to clear
the sandstone down to the surface of
the petrified mud-flats. In that time
several hundred square feet had been
exposed, revealing a frozen snapshot of
the past that was probably the finest
-yet discovered by palaeontology. Some
scores of birds and reptiles had come
here in search of the receding water,
and left their footsteps as a perpetual
monument eons after their bodies had
perished. Most of the prints had been
identified, but one the largest of them
all was new to science. It belonged to
a beast which must have weighed twenty
or thirty tons: and Professor Fowler
was following the
fifty-million-year-old spoor with all
the emotions of a big-game hunter
tracking his prey. There was even a
hope that he might yet overtake it; for
the ground must have been treacherous
when the unknown monster went this way
and its bones might still be near at
hand, marking the place where it had
been trapped like so many creatures of
its time.

Despite the mechanical aids
available, the work was very tedious.
Only the upper layers could be removed
by the power tools, and the final
uncovering had to be done by hand with
the utmost care. Professor Fowler had
good reason for his insistence that he
alone should do the preliminary
drilling, for a single slip might cause
irreparable harm.

The three men were halfway back to
the main camp, jolting over the rough
road in the expedition's battered jeep,
when Davis raised the question that had
been in

114 REACH FOR TOMORROW

triguing the younger men ever since the
work had begun. "I'm getting a
distinct impression," he said, "d-tat
our neighbors down the valley don't
like us, Lough I can't imagine why.
We're not interfering with them, and
they might at least have the decency
to invite us over."

"Unless, of course, it is a war
research plant," added Barton, voicing
a generally accepted theory.

"I don't think so," said Professor
Fowler mildly. "Because it so happens
that I've just had an invitation
myself. I'm going there tomorrow.

If his bombshell failed to have the
expected result, it was thanks to his
staff's efficient espionage system.
For a moment Davis pondered over this
confirmation of his suspicions; then
he continued with a slight cough:

"No one else has been invited, then?"

The Professor smiled at his pointed
hint. "No," he said. "It's a strictly
personal invitation. I know you boys
are dying of curiosity but, frankly,
I don't know any more about dhe place
than you do. If I learn anything
tomorrow, I'll tell you all about it.
B`ut at least we've found out who's
running the establishment."

His assistants pricked up their
ears. "Who is it?" asked Barton, "My
guess was dhe Atomic Development
Audlority."

"You may be right," said the
Professor. "At any rate, Henderson and
Barnes are in charge."

This time dhe bomb exploded
effectively; so much so that Davis
nearly drove the jeep off the road not
that that made much difference, the
road being what it was.

"Henderson and Barnes? In this
god-forsaken hole?"

"That's right," said the Professor
gaily. "The invitation was actually
from Barnes. He apologized for not
contacting us before, made dhe usual
excuses, and wondered if I could drop
in for a chat."

"Did he say what they are doing?"

"No; not a hint."

"Barnes and Henderson?" said Barton
thoughtfully. "I don't know much about
them except that They're physicists.
What's Their particular racket?"

It's tow 115

"They're the experts on
low-temperature physics," answered
Davis. "Henderson was Director of dhe
Cavendish for years. He wrote a lot of
letters to Nature not so long ago. If
I remember rightly, dley were all
about Helium II."

Barton, who didn't like physicists
and said so whenever possible, was not
impressed. "I don't even know what
Helium II is," he said smugly. "What's
more, I'm not at all stare that I want
to."

This was intended for Davis, who had
once taken a physics degree in, as he
explained, a moment of weakness. The
"moment" had lasted for several years
before he had drifted into geology by
radher devious routes, and he was
always harking back to his first love.

"It's a form of liquid helium that
only exists at a few degrees above
absolute zero. It's got dhe most
extraordinary properties~but, as far
as I can see, none of them can explain
the presence of two leading physicists
in tills corner of the globe."

They had now arrived at the camp, and
Davis brought the jeep to its normal
crash-halt in dhe parking space. He
shook his head in annoyance as he
bumped into dhe truck ahead with
slightly more violence dhan usual.

"These tires are nearly through. Have
dhe new ones come yet?"

"Arrived in the 'copter this morning,
widh a despairing note from Andrews
hoping chat you'd make them last a
full fortnight this time."

"Good! I'll get them fitted this
evening."

The Professor had been walking a
little ahead; now he dropped back to
join his assistants.

"You needn't have hurried Jim," he
said glumly. "It's corned beef again."

It would be most unfair to say that
Barton and Davis did less work because
the Professor was away. They probably
worked a good deal harder than usual,
since the native laborers required
twice as much supervision in the
Chief's absence. But there was no
doubt that they managed to find time
for a considerable amount of extra
talking.

116 REACH FOR TOMORROW

Ever since they had joined Professor
Fowler, the two young geologists had
been intrigued by the strange estab-
lishment five miles away down the
valley. It was clearly a research
organization of some type, and Davis
had identified the tall stacks of an
atomic-power unit. That, of course,
gave no clue to the work that was
proceeding, but it did indicate its
importance. There were still only a
few thousand turbo-piles in the world,
and they were all reserved for major
projects.

There were dozens of reasons why two
great scientists might have hidden
themselves in this place: most of the
more hazardous atomic research was
carried out as far as possible from
civilization, and some had been
abandoned altogether until
laboratories in space could be set up.
Yet it seemed odd that this work,
whatever it was, should be carried out
so close to what had now become the
most important center of geological
research in the world. It might, of
course, be no more than a coincidence;
certainly the physicists had never
shown any interest in their com-
patriots so near at hand.

Davis was carefully chipping round
one of the great footprints, while
Barton was pouring liquid perspex into
those already uncovered so that they
would be preserved from harm in the
transparent plastic. They were working
in a somewhat absentminded manner, for
each was unconsciously listening for
the sound of the jeep. Professor
Fowler had promised to collect them
when he returned from his visit, for
the other vehicles were in use
elsewhere and they did not relish a
two-mile wale back to camp in the
broiling sun. Moreover, they wanted to
have any news as soon as possible.

"How many people," said Barton
suddenly, "do you think they have over
there?"

Davis straightened himself up.
"Judging from the buildings, not more
than a dozen or so."

"Then it might be a private affair,
not an ADA project at all."

"Perhaps, though it must have pretty
considerable backing. Of course,
Henderson and Barnes could get that on
their reputations alone."

TIME S ARROW 117

"That's where the physicists score,"
said Barton. "They've only got to
convince some war department that
t'ney're on the track of a new weapon,
and they can get a couple of million
without any trouble."

He spoke with some bitterness; for,
like most scientists, he had strong
views on this subject. Barton's views,
indeed, were even more definite than
usual, for he was a Quaker and had
spent the last year of the War arguing
with not-unsympathetic tribunals.

The conversation was interrupted by
the roar and clatter of the jeep, and
the two men ran over to meet the
Professor.

"Well?" they cried simultaneously.

Professor Fowler looked at them
thoughtfully, his expression giving no
hint of what was in his mind. "Had a
good day?" he said at last.

"Come off it, Chief!" protested
Davis. "Te'N us what you've found
out."

The Professor climbed out of the
seat and dusted himself down. "I'm
sorry, boys," he said with some embar-
rassment, "I can't tell you a thing,
and that's flat."

There were two united wails of
protest, but he waved them aside.
"I've had a very interesting day, but
I've had to promise not to say
anything about it. Even now I don't
know exactly what's going on, but it's
something pretty revolutionary as
revolutionary, perhaps, as atomic pow-
er. But Dr. Henderson is coming over
tomorrow; see what you can get out of
him."

For a moment, both Barton and Davis
were so overwhelmed by the sense of
anticlimax that neither spoke. Barton
was the first to recover. "Well,
surely there's a reason for this
sudden interest in our activities?"

The Professor thought this over for
a moment. "Yes; it wasn't entirely a
social call," he admitted. "They think
I may be able to help them. Now, no
more questions, unless you want to
walk back to camp!"

Dr. Henderson arrived on the site in
the middle of the afternoon. He was a
stout, elderly man, dressed rather in-
congrnously in a dazzling white
laboratory smock and

1 1 8 REACH FOR TOMORROW

very little else. Though the garb was
eccentric, it was eminently practical in
so hot a climate.

Davis and Barton were somewhat distant
when Professor Fowler introduced them;
they still felt that they had been
snubbed and were determined that their
visitor should understand their feelings.
But Henderson was so obviously interested
in their work that they soon thawed, and
the Professor left them to show him round
the excavations while he went to
supervise the natives.

The physicist was greatly impressed by
the picture of the world's remote past
that lay exposed before his eyes. For
almost an hour the two geologists took
him over the workings yard by yard,
talking of the creatures who had gone
this way and speculating about future
discoveries. The track which Professor
Fowler was following now lay in a wide
trench running away from the main
excavation, for he had dropped all other
work to investigate it. At its end the
trench was no longer continuous: to save
time, the Professor had begun to sink
pits along the line of the footprints.
The last sounding had missed altogether,
and further digging had shown that the
great reptile had made a sudden change of
course.

"This is the most interesting bit," said
Barton to the slightly wilting physicist.
"You remember those earlier places where
it had stopped for a moment to have a
look around? WelL here it seems to have
spotted something and has gone off in a
new direction at a run, as you can see
from the spacing."

"I shouldn't have thought such a brute
could run."

"Well, it was probably a pretty clumsy
effort, but you can cover quite a bit of
ground with a fifteen-foot stride. We're
going to follow it as far as we can. We
may even find what it was chasing. I
think the Professor has hopes of
discovering a trampled battlefield with
the bones of the victim still around.
That would make everyone sit up."

Dr. Henderson smiled. "Thanks to Walt
Disney, I can picture the scene rather
well."

Davis was not very encouraging. "It was
probably only the missus banging the Her
gong," he said. "The most infuriating
part of our work is the way everything
can

.

TIME S ARROW 119

peter out when it gets most exciting.
The strata have been washed away, or
there's been an earthquake or, worse
still, some silly fool has smashed up
the evidence because he didn't
recognize its value."

Henderson nodded in agreement. "I can
sympathize with you," he said. "That's
where the physicist has the advantage.
He knows he'll get the answer
eventually, if there is one."

He paused rather diffidently, as if
weighing his words with great care.
"It would save you a lot of trouble,
wouldn't it, if you could actually see
what took place in the past, without
having to infer it by these laborious
and uncertain methods. You've been a
couple of months following these
footsteps for a hundred yards, and
they may lead nowhere for all your
trouble."

There was a long silence. Then Barton
spoke in a very thoughtful voice.

"Naturally, Doctor, we're rather
curious about your work," he began.
"Since Professor Fowler won't tell us
anything, we've done a good deal of
speculating. Do you really mean to say
that "

The physicist interrupted him rather
hastily. "Don't give it any more
thought," he said. "I was only
daydreaming. As for our work, it's a
very long way from completion, but
you'll hear all about it in due
course. We're not secretive but, like
everyone working in a new field, we
don't want to say anything until we're
sure of our ground. Why, if any other
palaeontologists came near this place,
I bet Professor Fowler would chase
them away with a pick-axe! "

"That's not quite true," smiled
Davis, "He'd be much more likely to
set them to work. But I see your point
of view; let's hope we don't have to
wait too long."

That night, much midnight oil was
burned at the main camp. B,arton was
frankly skeptical, but Davis had al-
ready built up an elaborate
superstructure of theory around their
visitor's remarks.

"It would explain so many things," he
said. "First of ale their presence in
this place, which otherwise doesn't

120 REACH FOR TOMORROW

make sense at all. We know the ground level
here to with in an inch for the last hundred
million years, and we can date any event with
an accuracy of better than one per cent.
There's not a spot on Earth that's had its
past worked out in such detail it's the
obvious place for an experiment like this!"

"But do you think it's even theoretically
possible to build a machine that can see into
the past?"

"I can't imagine how it could be done. But
I daren't say it's impossible especially to
men like Henderson and Barnes."

"Hmmm. Not a very convincing argument. Is
there any way we can hope to test it? What
about those letters to Natured"

"I've sent to the College Library; we should
have them by the end of the weed There's
always some continuity in a scientist's work,
and they may give us some valuable clues."

But at first they were disappointed; indeed,
Henderson's letters only increased the
confusion. As Davis had remembered, most of
them had been about the extraordinary
properties of Helium II.

"It's really fantastic stuff," said Davis.
"If a liquid behaved like this at normal
temperatures, everyone would go mad. In the
first place, it hasn't any viscosity at all.
Sir George Darwin once said that if you had
an ocean of Helium II, ships could sail in it
without any engines. You'd give them a push
at the beginning of their voyage and let them
run into buffers on the other side. There'd
be one snag, though; long before that
happened the stuff would have climbed
straight up the hull and the whole outfit
would have sunk gurgle, gurgle, gurgle . . ."

"Very amusing," said Barton, "but what the
heck has this to do with your precious
theory?"

"Not much," admitted Davis. "However,
there's more to come. It's possible to have
two streams of Helium II flowing in opposite
directions in the sine tube one stream going
through the other, as it were."

"That must take a bit of explaining; it's
almost as bad

_                . ...                 ~

TIME S ARROW 121

as an object moving in two directions
at once. I suppose there is an
explanation, something to do with
Relativity, I bet.

Davis was reading carefully. "The
explanation," he said slowly, "is very
complicated and I don't pretend to
understand it fully. But it depends on
the fact that liquid helium can have
negative entropy under certain condi-
tions."

"As I never understood what positive
entropy is, I'm not much wiser."

"Entropy is a measure of the heat
distribution of the Universe. At the
beginning of time, when all energy was
concentrated in the suns, entropy was
a minimum. It will reach its maximum
when everything's at a uniform tem-
perature and the Universe is dead.
There will still be plenty of heat
around, but it won't be usable."

"Whyever not?"

"WelL all the water in a perfectly
flat ocean won't run a hydro-electric
plant but quite a little lake up in
the hills will do the trick. You must
have a difference in level."

"I get the idea Now I come to think
of it, didn't someone once call
entropy 'Time's Arrow?' "

"Yes Eddington, I believe. Any kind
of clock you care to mention a
pendulum, for instance might just as
easily run forward as backward. But
entropy is a strictly one-way
affair it's always increasing with the
passage of time. Hence the expression,
'Time's Arrow."'

"Then negative entropy my gosh!"

For a moment the two men looked at
each other. Then Barton asked in a
rather subdued voice: "What does
Henderson say about it?"

"I'll quote from his last letter:
'The discovery of negative entropy
introduces quite new and revolutionary
conceptions into our picture of the
physical world. Some of these will be
examined in a further communication.'
"

"And are they?"

"That's the snag: there's no 'further
communication.' From that you can
guess two alternatives. First, the
Editor of Nature may have declined to
publish the letter. I

1 2 2 REACH FOR TOMORROW

think we can rule that one out.
Second, the consequences may have been
so revolutionary that Henderson never
did write a further report."

"Negative entropy negative time,"
mused Barton. "It seems fantastic; yet
it might be theoretically possible to
build some sort of device that could
see into the past...."

"I know what we'll do," said Davis
suddenly. "We'll tackle the Professor
about it and watch his reactions. Now
I'm going to bed before I get brain
fever."

That night Davis did not sleep well.
He dreamed that he was walking along
a road that stretched in both direc-
tions as far as the eye could see. He
had been walking for miles before he
came to the signpost, and when he
reached it he found that it was broken
and the two arms were revolving idly
in the wind. As they turned, he could
read the words they carried. One said
simply: To the Future, the other: To
the Past.

They learned nothing from Professor
Fowler, which was not surprising; next
to the Dean, he was the best poker
player in the College. He regarded his
slightly fretful assistants with no
trace of emotion while Davis trotted
out his theory.

When the young man had finished, he
said quietly, "I'm going over again
tomorrow, and I'll tell Henderson
about your detective work. Maybe he'll
take pity on you; maybe he'll tell me
a bit more, for that matter. Now let's
go to work."

Davis and Barton found it
increasingly difficult to take a great
deal of interest in their own work
while their minds were filled with the
enigma so near at hand. Nevertheless
they continued conscientiously, though
ever and again they paused to wonder
if all their labor might not be in
vain. If it were, they would be the
first to rejoice. Supposing one could
see into the past and watch history
unfolding itself, back to the dawn of
time! All the great secrets of the
past would be revealed: one could
watch the coming of life on the Earth,
and the whole story of evolution from
amoeba to man.

No; it was too good to be true. Having
decided this,

TIME S ARROW 123

they would go back to their digging
and scraping for another half-hour
until the thought would come: but what
if it Severe true? And then the whole
cycle would begin all over again.

When Professor Fowler returned from
his second visit, he was a subdued and
obviously shaken man. The only
satisfaction his assistants could get
from him was the statement that
Henderson had listened to their theory
and complimented them on their powers
of deduction.

That was all; but in Davis's eyes it
clinched the matter, though Barton was
still doubtful. In the weeks that fol-
lowed, he too began to waver, until at
last they were both convinced that the
theory was correct. For Professor
Fowler was spending more and more of
his time with Henderson and Barnes; so
much so that they sometimes did not
see him for days. He had almost lost
interest in the excavations, and had
delegated all responsibility to
Barton, who was now able to use the
big pneumatic drill to his heart's
content.

They were uncovering several yards of
footprints a day, and the spacing
showed that the monster had now
reached its utmost speed and was
advancing in great leaps as if nearing
its victim. In a few days they might
reveal the evidence of some eon-old
tragedy, preserved by a miracle and
brought down the ages for the
observation of man. Yet all this
seemed very unimportant now; for it
was clear from the Professor's hints
and his general air of abstraction
that the secret research was nearing
its climax. He had told them as much,
promising that in a very few days, if
all went well, their wait would be
ended. But beyond that he would say
nothing.

Once or twice Henderson had paid them
a visit, and they could see that he
was now laboring under a considerable
strain. He obviously wanted to talk
about his work, but was not going to
do so until the final tests had been
completed. They could only admire his
self-control and wish that it would
break down. Davis had a distinct im-
pression that the elusive Barnes was
mainly responsible for his secrecy; he
had something of a reputation for not
publishing work until it had been
checked and double

124 REACH FOR TOMORROW

checked. If these experiments were as
important as they believed, his
caution was understandable, however
infuriating.

Henderson had come over early that
morning to collect the Professor, and
as luck would have it, his car had
broken down on the primitive road.
This was unfortunate for Davis and
Barton, who would have to walk to camp
for lunch, since Professor Fowler was
driving Henderson back in the jeep.
They were quite prepared to put up
with this if their wait was indeed
coming to an end, as the others had
more than half-hinted.

They had stood talking by the side
of the jeep for some time before the
two older scientists had driven away.
It was a rather strained parting, for
each side knew what the other was
thinking. Finally Barton, as usual the
most outspoken, remarked:

"Well, Doc, if this is Der Tag, I
hope everything works properly. I'd
like a photograph of a brontosaurus as
a souvenir."

This sort of banter had been thrown
at Henderson so often that he now took
it for granted. He smiled without much
mirth and replied, "I don't promise
anything. It may be the biggest flop
ever."

Davis moodily checked the tire
pressure with the toe of his boot. It
was a new set, he noticed, with an odd
zigzag pattern he hadn't seen before.

"Whatever happens, we hope you'll
tell us. Otherwise, we're going to
break in one night and find out just
what you re up to.'

Henderson laughed. "You'll be a pair
of geniuses if you can learn anything
from our present lashup. But, if all
goes well, we may be having a little
celebration by nightfall."

"What time do you expect to be back,
Chief?"

"Somewhere around four. I don't want
you to have to walk back for tea"

"O.K. here's hoping!"

The machine disappeared in a cloud
of dust, leaving two very thoughtful
geologists standing by the roadside.
Then Barton shrugged his shoulders.

              TIME'S ARROW 125

"The harder we work," he said, "the
quicker the time will go. Come along!"

The end of the trench, where Barton was
working with the power drill, was now
more than a hundred yards from the main
excavation. Davis was putting the final
touches to the last prints to be
uncovered. They were now very deep and
widely spaced, and looking along them,
one could see quite clearly where the
great reptile had changed its course and
started, first to run, and then to hop
like an enormous kangaroo. Barton
wondered what it must have felt like to
see such a creature bearing down upon one
with the speed of an express; then he
realized that if their guess was true
this was exactly what they might soon be
seeing.

By mid-afternoon they had uncovered a
record length of track. The ground had
become softer, and Barton was roaring
ahead so rapidly that he had almost
forgotten his other preoccupations. He
had left Davis yards behind, and both men
were so busy that only the pangs of
hunger reminded them when it was time to
finish. Davis was the first to notice
that it was later than they had expected,
and he walked over to speak to his
friend.

"It's nearly half-past four!" he said
when the noise of the drill had died
away. "The Chief's late I'll be mad if
he's had tea before collecting us."

"Give him another half-hour," said
Barton. "I can guess what's happened.
They've blown a fuse or something and
it's upset their schedule."

Davis refused to be placated. "I'll be
darned annoyed if we've got to walk back
to camp again. Anyway, I'm going up the
hill to see if there's any sign of him."

He left Barton blasting his way through
the so* rock, and climbed the low hill at
the side of the old riverbed. From here
one could see far down the valley, and
the twin stacks of the Henderson-Barnes
laboratory were clearly visible against
the drab landscape. But there was no sign
of the moving dust-cloud that would be
following the jeep: the Professor had not
yet started for home.

Davis gave a snort of disgust. There was
a two-mile

126 REACH FOR TOMORROW

walk ahead of them, after a
particularly tiring day, and to make
matters worse they'd now be late for
tea He decided not to wait any longer,
and was already walking down the hill
to rejoin Barton when something caught
his eye and he stopped to look down
the valley.

Around the two stacks, which were
all he could see of the laboratory, a
curious haze not unlike a heat tremor
was playing. They must be hot, he
knew, but surely not that hot. He
looked more carefully, and saw to his
amazement that the haze covered a
hemisphere that must be almost a
quarter of a mile across.

And, quite suddenly, it exploded.
There was no light, no blinding flash;
only a ripple that spread abruptly
across the sky and then was gone. The
haze had vanished and so had the two
great stacks of the power-house.

Feeling as though his legs had
turned suddenly to water, Davis
slumped down upon the hilltop and
stared open-mouthed along the valley.
A sense of overwhelming disaster swept
into his mind; as in a dream, he
waited for the explosion to reach his
ears.

It was not impressive when it came;
only a cult longdrawn-out whoooooosh!
that died away swiftly in the still
air. Half unconsciously, Davis noticed
that the chatter of the drill had also
stopped; the explosion must have been
louder than he thought for Barton to
have heard it too.

The silence was complete. Nothing
moved anywhere as far as his eye could
see in the whole of that empty, barren
landscape. He waited until his
strength returned; then, half running,
he went unsteadily down the hill to

            . . .. .. .

relom rus rnena.

Barton was half sitting in the
trench with his head buried in his
hands. He looked up as Davis
approached; and although his features
were obscured by dust and sand, the
other was shocked at the expression in
his eyes.

"So you heard it too!" Davis said.
"I think the whole lab's blown up.
Come along, for heaven's sake!"

"Heard what?,' said Barton dully.

Davis stared at him in amazement.
Then he realized that Barton could not
possibly have heard any sound while he
was working with the drill. The sense
of disaster deeps

.          .          ....

TIME S ARROW 127

ened with a rush; he felt like a
character in some Greek tragedy,
helpless before an implacable doom.

Barton rose to his feet. His face was
working strangely, and Davis saw that
he was on the verge of breakdown. Yet,
when he spoke, his words were
surprisingly calm.

"What fools we were!" he said. "How
Henderson must have laughed at us when
we told him that he was trying to see
into the past!"

Mechanically, Davis moved to the
trench and stared at the rock that was
seeing the light of day for the first
time in fifty million years. Without
much emotion, now, he traced again the
zigzag pattern he had first noticed a
few hours before. It had sunk only a
little way into the mud, as if when it
was formed the jeep had been traveling
at its utmost speed.

No doubt it had been; for in one
place the shallow tire marks had been
completely obliterated by the
monster's footprints. They were now
very deep indeed, as if the great
reptile was about to make the final
leap upon its desperately fleeing
prey.

Jupiter Five

PROFESSOR FORSTER IS SUCH A SMALL MAN THAT A SPECIAL
space-suit had to be made for him. But
what he lacked in physical size he
more than made up as is so often the
case in sheer drive and determination.
When I met him, he'd spent twenty
years pursuing a dream. What is more
to the point, he had persuaded a whole
succession of hard-headed business
men, World Council Delegates and
administrators of scientific trusts to
underwrite his expenses and to fit out
a ship for him. Despite everything
that happened later, I still think
that was his most remarkable
achievement....

The "Arnold Toynbee" had a crew of
six aboard when we left Earth. Besides
the Professor and Charles Ashton, his
chief assistant, there was the usual
pilot-navigatorengineer triumvirate
and two graduate students Bill Hawkins
and myself. Neither of us had ever
gone into space before, and we were
still so excited over the whole thing
that we didn't care in the least
whether we got back to Earth before
the next term started. We had a strong
suspicion that our tutor had very
similar views. The reference he had
produced for us was a masterpiece of
ambiguity, but as the number of people
who could even begin to read Martian
script could be counted, if I may coin
a phrase, on the fingers of one hand,
we'd got the job.

As we were going to Jupiter, and not
to Mars, the purpose of this
particular qualification seemed a
little obscure, though knowing
something about the Professor's
theories we had some pretty shrewd
suspicions. They were partly confirmed
when we were ten days out from Earth.

The Professor looked at us very
thoughtfully when we answered his
summons. Even under zero g he always
man128

.            . .

JUPT rER FIVE 129

aged to preserve his dignity, while
the best we could do was to cling to
the nearest handhold and float around
like drifting seaweed. I got the
impression though I may of course be
wrong that he was thinking: What have
I done to deserve this? as he looked
from Bill to me and back again. Then
he gave a sort of "It's too late to do
anything about it now" sigh and began
to speak in that slow, patient way he
always does when he has something to
explain. At least, he always uses it
when he's speaking to us, but it's just
occurred to me oh, never mind

"Since we left Earth," he said, "I've
not had much chance of telling you the
purpose of this expedition. Perhaps
you've guessed it already."

"I think I have," said Bill.

"WelL go on," replied the Professor,
a peculiar gleam in his eye. I did my
best to stop Bill, but have you ever
tried to kick anyone when you're in
free fall?

"You want to find some proof I mean,
some more proof of your diffusion
theory of extraterrestrial culture."

"And have you any idea why I'm going
to Jupiter to look for it?"

"Well, not exactly. I suppose you
hope to find something on one of the
moons."

"Brilliant, Bill, brilliant. There
are fifteen known satellites, and
their total area is about half that of
Earth. Where would you start looking
if you had a couple of weeks to spare?
I'd rather like to know."

Bill glanced doubtfully at the
Professor, as if he almost suspected
him of sarcasm.

"I don't know much about astronomy,"
he said. "But there are four big
moons, aren't there? I'd start on
those."

"For your information, lo, Europa,
Ganymede and Callisto are each about
as big as Africa. Would you work
through them in alphabetical order?"

"No," Bill replied promptly. "I'd
start on the one nearest Jupiter and
go outward."

"I don't think we'll waste any more
time pursuing your logical processes,"
sighed the Professor. He was obviously
unpatient to begin his set speech
"Anyway, you're quite

130 REACH FOR TOMORROW

wrong. We're not going to the big
moons at ale They've been
photographically surveyed from space
and large areas have been explored on
the surface. They've got nothing of
archaeological interest. We're going
to a place that's never been visited
before."

"Not to Jupiter!" I gasped.

"Heavens no, nothing as drastic as
that! But we're going nearer to him
than anyone else has ever been."

He paused thoughtfully.

"It's a curious thing, you know or
you probably don't  that it's nearly
as difficult to travel between
Jupiter's satellites as it is to go
between the planets, although the
distances are so much smaller. This is
because Jupiter's got such a terrific
gravitational field and his moons are
traveling so quickly. The innermost
moon's moving almost as fast as Earth,
and the journey to it from Ganymede
costs almost as much fuel as the trip
from Earth to Venus, even though it
takes only a day and a half.

"And it's that journey which we're
going to make. No one's ever done it
before because nobody could think of
any good reason for the expense.
Jupiter Five is only thirty kilometers
in diameter, so it couldn't possibly
be of much interest. Even some of the
outer satellites, which are far easier
to reach, haven't been visited because
it hardly seemed worth while to waste
the rocket fuel."

"Then why are we going to waste it?"
I asked impatiently. The whole thing
sounded like a complete wildgoose
chase, though as long as it proved
interesting, and involved no actual
danger, I didn't greatly mind.

Perhaps I ought to confess though
I'm tempted to say nothing, as a good
many others have done that at this
time I didn't believe a word of
Professor Forster's theories. Of
course I realized that he was a very
brilliant man in his field, but I did
draw the line at some of his more
fantastic ideas. After all, the
evidence was so slight and the
conclusions so revolutionary that one
could hardly help being skeptical.

Perhaps you can still remember the
astonishment when the first Martian
expedition found the remains not of
one ancient civilization, but of two.
Both had been highly ad

JUPtrER FIVE 131

vanced, but both had perished more
than five million years ago. The
reason was unknown (and still is). It
did not seem to be warfare, as the two
cultures appear to have lived amicably
together. One of the races had been
insect-like, the other vaguely
reptilian. The insects seem to have
been the genuine, original Martians.
The reptilepeople usually referred to
as "Culture X" had arrived on the
scene later.

So, at least, Professor Forster
maintained. They had certainly
possessed the secret of space travel,
because the ruins of their peculiar
cruciform cities had been found on  of
all places Mercury. Forster believed
that they had tried to colonize all
the smaller planets Earth and Venus
having been ruled out because of their
excessive gravity. It was a source of
some disappointment to the Professor
that no traces of Culture X had ever
been found on the Moon, though he was
certain that such a discovery was only
a matter of time.

The "conventional" theory of Culture
X was that it had originally come from
one of the smaller planets or satel-
lites, had made peaceful contact with
the Martians the only other
intelligent race in the known history
of the System and had died out at the
same time as the Martian civilization.
But Professor Forster had more
ambitious ideas: he was convinced that
Culture X had entered the Solar System
from interstellar space. The fact that
no one else believed this annoyed him,
though not very much, for he is one of
those people who are happy only when
in a minority.

From where I was sitting, I could see
Jupiter through the cabin porthole as
Professor Forster unfolded his plan.
It was a beautiful sight: I could just
make out the equatorial cloud belts,
and three of the satellites were
visible as little stars close to the
planet. I wondered which was Ganymede,
our first port of call.

"If Jack will condescend to pay
attention," the Professor continued,
"I'll tell you why we're going such a
long way from home. You know that last
year I spent a good deal of time
poking among the ruins in the twilight
belt of Mercury. Perhaps you read the
paper I gave on

13 2 REACH FOR TOMORROW

the subject at the London School of
Economics. You may even have been
there I do remember a disturbance at
the back of the hall.

"What I didn't tell anyone then was
that while I was on Mercury I
discovered an important clue to the
origin of Culture X. I've kept quiet
about it, although I've been sorely
tempted when fools like Dr. Haughton
have tried to be funny at my expense.
But I wasn't going to risk letting
someone else get here before I could
organize this expedition.

"One of the things I found on
Mercury was a rather well preserved
bas-relief of the Solar System. It's
not the first that's been
discovered as you know, astronomical
motifs are common in true Martian and
Culture X art. But there were certain
peculiar symbols against various
planets, including Mars and Mercury.
I think the pattern had some historic
significance, and the most curious
thing about it is that little Jupiter
Five one of the least important of all
the satellites seemed to have the most
attention drawn to it. I'm convinced
that there's something on Five which
is the key to the whole problem of
Culture X, and I'm going there to
discover what it is."

As far as I can remember now,
neither Bill nor I was particularly
impressed by the Professor's story.
Maybe the people of Culture X had left
some artifacts on Five for obscure
reasons of their own. It would be
interesting to unearth them, but
hardly likely that they would be as
important as the Professor thought. I
guess he was rather disappointed at
our lack of enthusiasm. If so it was
his fault since, as we discovered
later, he was still holding out on us

We landed on Ganymede, the largest
moon, about a week later. Ganymede is
the only one of the satellites with a
permanent base on it; there's an
observatory and a geophysical station
with a staff of about fifty
scientists. They were rather glad to
see visitors, but we didn't stay long
as the Professor was anxious to refuel
and set off again. The fact that we
were heading for Five naturally
aroused a good deal of interest, but
the Professor wouldn't talk and we
couldn't; he kept too close an eye on
us.

JUPITER FIVE 13 3

Ganymede, by the way, is quite an
interesting place and we managed to
see rather more of it on the return
journey. But as I've promised to write
an article for another magazine about
that, I'd better not say anything else
here. (You might like to keep your
eyes on the National Astrographic
Magazine next Spring.)

The hop from Ganymede to Five took
just over a day and a half, and it
gave us an uncomfortable feeling to
see Jupiter expanding hour by hour
until it seemed as if he was going to
fill the sky. I don't know much about
astronomy, but I couldn't help
thinking of the tremendous gravity
field into which we were falling. All
sorts of things could go wrong so
easily. If we ran out of fuel we'd
never be able to get back to Ganymede,
and we might even drop into Jupiter
himself.

I wish I could describe what it was
like seeing that colossal globe, with
its raging storm belts spinning in the
sky ahead of us. As a matter of fact I
did make the attempt, but some
literary friends who have read this MS
advised me to cut out the result.
(They also gave me a lot of other
advice which I don't think they could
have meant seriously, because if I'd
followed it there would have been no
story at all.)

Luckily there have been so many color
close-ups of Jupiter published by now
that you're bound to have seen some of
them. You may even have seen the one
which, as I'll explain later, was the
cause of all our trouble.

At last Jupiter stopped growing: we'd
swung into the orbit of Five and would
soon catch up with the tiny moon as it
raced around the planet. We were all
squeezed in the control room waiting
for our first glimpse of our target.
At least, all of us who could get in
were doing so. Bill and I were crowded
out into the corridor and could only
crane over other people's shoulders.
Kingsley Searle, our pilot, was in the
control seat looking as unruffled as
ever: Eric Fulton, the engineer, was
thoughtfully chewing his mustache and
watching the fuel gauges, and Tony
Groves was doing complicated things
with his navigation tables.

And the Professor appeared to be
rigidly attached to the eyepiece of
the teleperiscope. Suddenly he gave a
start

134 REACH FOR TOMORROW

and we heard a whistle of indrawn breath.
After a minute, without a word, he
beckoned to Searle, who took his place at
the eyepiece. Exactly the sane thing
happened, and then Searle handed over to
Fulton. It got a bit monotonous by the
time Groves had reacted identically,-so we
wormed our way in and took over after a
bit of opposition.

I don't know quite what I'd expected to
see, so that's probably why I was
disappointed. Hanging there in space was
a tiny gibbous moon, its "night" sector
lit up faintly by the reflected glory of
Jupiter. And that seemed to be all.

Then I began to make out additional
markings, in the way that you do if you
look through a telescope for long enough
There were faint crisscrossing lines on
the surface of the satellite, and suddenly
my eye grasped their full pattern. For it
divas a pattern: those lines covered Five
with the same geometrical accuracy as the
lines of latitude and longitude divide up
a globe of the Earth. I suppose I gave my
whistle of amazement, for then Bill pushed
me out of the way and had his turn to
look.

The next t'ning I remember is Professor
Forster looking very smug while we
bombarded him with questions.

"Of course," he explained, "this isn't
as much a surprise to me as it is to you.
Besides the evidence I'd found on Mercury,
there were other clues. I've a friend at
the Ganymede Observatory whom I've sworn
to secrecy and who's been under quite a
strain this last few weeks. It's rather
surprising to anyone who's not an
astronomer that the Observatory has never
bothered much about the satellites. The
big instruments are all used on extra
galactic nebulae, and the little ones
spend all their time looking at Jupiter.

"The only thing the Observatory had ever
done to Five was to measure its diameter
and take a few photographs. They weren't
quite good enough to show the markings
we've just observed, otherwise there would
have been an investigation before. But my
friend Lawton detected them through the
hundred-centimeter reflector when I asked
him to look, and he also noticed something
else that should have been spotted before.
Five is only thirty kilometers in

,                  .

JUPI - R Fed 135

diameter, but it's much brighter than
it should be for its size. When you
compare its reflecting power its
aldeb  its"

"Its albedo."

"Thanks, Tony its albedo with that of
the other Moons, you find that it's a
much better reflector than it should
be. In fact, it behaves more like
polished metal than rock."

"So that explains it!" I said. "The
people of Culture X must have covered
Five with an outer shell like the
domes they built on Mercury, but on a
bigger scale."

The Professor looked at me rather
pityingly.

"So you still haven't guessed!" he
said.

I don't think this was quite fair.
Frankly, would you have done any
better in the same circumstances?

We landed three hours later on an
enormous metal plain. As I looked
through the portholes, I felt
completely dwarfed by my surroundings.
An ant crawling on the top of an
oil-storage tank might have had much
the same feelings and the looming bulk
of Jupiter up there in the sky didn't
help. Even the Professor's usual
cockiness now seemed to be overlaid by
a kind of reverent awe.

The plain wasn't quite devoid of
features. Running across it in various
directions were broad bands where the
stupendous metal plates had been
joined together. These bands, or the
crisscross pattern they formed, were
what we had seen from space.

About a quarter of a kilometer away
was a low hill  at least, what would
have been a hill on a natural world.
We had spotted it on our way in after
making a careful survey of the little
satellite from space. It was one of
six such projections, four arranged
equidistantly around the equator and
the other two at the Poles. The
assumption was pretty obvious that
they would be entrances to the world
below the metal shell.

I know that some people think it must
be very entertaining to walk around on
an airless, low-gravity planet in
spacesuits. Well, it isn't. There are
so many points to think about, so many
checks to make and precautions to
observe, that the mental strain
outweighs the glamor at

1 3 6 REACH] FOR TOMORROW

least as far as I'm concerned. But I
must admit that this time, as we climbed
out of the airlock, I was so excited
that for once these things didn't worry
me.

The gravity of Five was so microscopic
that walking was completely out of the
question. We were all roped together
like mountaineers and blew ourselves
across the metal plain with gentle
bursts from our recoil pistols. The
experienced astronauts, Fulton and
Groves, were at the two ends of the
chain so that any unwise eagerness on
the part of the people in the middle was
restrained.

It took us only a few minutes to reach
our objecdve, which we discovered to be
a broad, low dome at least a kilometer
in circumference. I wondered if it was a
gigantic airlock, large enough to permit
the entrance of whole spaceships. Unless
we were very lucky, we might be unable
to find a way in, since the controlling
mechanisms would no longer be
functioning, and even if they were, we
would not know how to operate them. It
would be difficult to imagine anything
more tantalizing than being locked out,
unable to get at the greatest
archaeological find in all history.

We had made a quarter circuit of the
dome when we found an opening in the
metal shell. It was quite small  only
about two meters across and it was so
nearly circular that for a moment we did
not realize what it was. Then Tony's
voice came over the radio:

"That's not artificial. We've got a
meteor to thank for it.,t

"Impossible!" protested Professor
Forster. "It's much too regular."

Tony was stubborn.

"Big meteors always produce circular
holes, unless they strike very glancing
blows. And look at the edges; you can
see there's been an explosion of some
kind. Probably the meteor and the shell
were vaporized; we won't find any
fragments."

"You'd expect this sort of thing to
happen," put in Kingsley. "How long has
this been here? Five million years? I'm
surprised we haven't found any other
craters."

                ~.

JUPI=R Few 137

"Maybe you're right," said the
Professor, too pleased to argue.
"Anyway, I'm going in first."

"Right," said Kingsley, who as
captain has the last say in all such
matters. "I'll give you twenty meters
of rope and will sit in the hole so
that we can keep radio contact.
Otherwise this shell will blanket your
signals."

So Professor Forster was the first
man to enter Five, as he deserved to
be. We crowded close to Kingsley so
that he could relay news of the
Professor's progress.

He didn't get very far. There was
another shell just inside the outer
one, as we might have expected. The
Professor had room to stand upright
between them, and as far as his torch
could throw its beam he could see
avenues of supporting struts and
girders, but that was about all.

It took us about twenty-four
exasperating hours before we got any
further. Near the end of that time I
remember asking the Professor why he
hadn't thought of bringing any
explosives. He gave me a very hurt
look.

"There's enough aboard the ship to
blow us all to glory," he said. "But
I'm not going to risk doing any damage
if I can find another way."

That's what I call patience, but I
could see his point of view. After
all, what was another few days in a
search that had already taken him
twenty years?

It was Bill Hawkins, of all people,
who found the way in when we had
abandoned our first line of approach.
Near the North Pole of the little
world he discovered a really giant
meteor hole about a hundred meters
across and cutting through both the
outer shells surrounding Five. It had
revealed still another shell below
those, and by one of those chances
that must happen if one waits enough
eons, a second, smaller, meteor had
come down inside the crater and
penetrated the innermost skin. The
hole was just big enough to allow
entrance for a man in a spacesuit. We
went through head first, one at a
time.

I don't suppose I'll ever have a
weirder experience than hanging from
that tremendous vault, like a spider
suspended beneath the dome of St.
Peter's. We only knew that the space
in which we floated was vast. Just how
big it was we could not tell, for our
torches gave us no sense

13 8 REACH FOR TOMORROW

of distance. In this airless, dustless
cavern the beams were, of course,
totally invisible and when we shone
them on the roof above, we could see
the ovals of light dancing away into
the distance until they were too
diffuse to be visible. If we pointed
them "downward" we could see a pale
smudge of illumination so far below
that it revealed nothing.

Very slowly, under the minute
gravity of this tiny world, we fell
downward until checked by our safety
ropes. Overhead I could see the tiny
glimmering patch through which we had
entered; it was remote but reassuring.

And then, while I was swinging with
an infinitely sluggish pendulum motion
at the end of my cable, with the
lights of my companions glimmering
like fitful stars in the darkness
around me, the truth suddenly crashed
into my brain. Forgetting that we were
all on open circuit, I cried out
involuntarily:

"Professor I don't believe this is a
planet at all! It's a spaceships''

Then I stopped, feeling that I had
made a fool of myself. There was a
brief, tense silence, then a babble of
noise as everyone else started arguing
at once. Professor Forster's voice cut
across the confusion and I could tell
that he was both pleased and
surprised.

"You're quite right, Jack. This is
the ship that brought Culture X to the
Solar System."

I heard someone it sounded like Eric
Fulton 'give a gasp of incredulity.

"It's fantastic! A ship thirty
kilometers across!"

"You ought to know better than
that," replied the Professor with
surprising mildness. "Suppose a
civilization wanted to cross
interstellar space how else would it
attack the problem? It would build a
mobile planetoid out in space, taking
perhaps centuries over the task. Since
the ship would have to be a
seLf-contained world, which could
support its inhabitants for
generations, it would need to be as
large as this. I wonder how many suns
they visited before they found ours
and knew that their search was ended?
They must have had smaller ships that
could take

JUPITER FIVE 139

them down to the planets, and of
course they had to leave the parent
vessel somewhere in space. So they
parked it here, in a close orbit near
the largest planet, where it would
remain safely forever or until they
needed it again. It was the logical
place: if they had set it circling the
Sun, in time the pulls of the planets
would have disturbed its orbit so much
that it might have been lost. That
could never happen to it here."

"Tell me, Professor," someone asked,
"did you guess all this before we
started?"

"I hoped it. AU the evidence pointed
to this answer. There's always been
something anomalous about Satellite
Five, though no one seems to have
noticed it. Why this single tiny moon
so close to Jupiter, when all the
other small satellites are seventy
times further away? Astronomically
speaking, * didn't make sense. But
enough of this chattering. We've got
work to do."

That, I think, must count as the
understatement of the century. There
were seven of us faced with the
greatest archaeological discovery of
all time. Almost a whole world  a
small world, an artificial one, but
still a world was waiting for us to
explore. AU we could perform was a
swift and superficial reconnaissance:
there might be material here for
generations of research workers.

The first step was to lower a
powerful floodlight on a power line
running from the ship. This would act
as a beacon and prevent us getting
lost, as well as giving local
-illumination on the inner surface of
the satellite. (Even now, I still find
it hard to call Five a ship.) Then we
dropped down the line to the surface
below. It was a fall of about a
kilometer, and in this low gravity it
was quite safe to make the drop
unretarded. The gentle shock of the
impact could be absorbed easily enough
by the springloaded staffs we carried
for that purpose.

I don't want to take up any space
here with yet another description of
all the wonders of Satellite Five;
there have already been enough
pictures, maps and books on the sub-
ject. (My own, by the way is being
published by Sidgwick and Jackson next
Summer.) What I would like to give you
instead is some impression of what it
was actually

140 REACH FOR TOMORROW

like to be the first men ever to enter that
strange metal world. Yet I'm sorry to say I
know this sounds hard to believe I simply
can't remember what I was feeling when we
came across the first of the great
mushroomcapped entrance shafts. I suppose
I was so excited and so overwhelmed by the
wonder of it all that I've forgotten
everything else. But I can recall the
impression of sheer size, something which
mere photographs can never give. The
builders of this world, coming as they did
from a planet of low gravity, were
giants about four times as tall as men. We
were pigmies crawling among their works.

We never got below the outer levels on
our first visit, so we met few of the
scientific marvels which later expeditions
discovered. That was just as well; the
residential areas provided enough to keep
us busy for several lifetimes. The globe we
were exploring must once have been lit by
artificial sunlight pouring down from the
triple shell that surrounded it and kept
its atmosphere from leaking into space.
Here on the surface the Jovians (I suppose
I cannot avoid adopting the popular name
for the people of Culture X) had
reproduced, as accurately as they could,
conditions on the world they had left
unknown ages ago. Perhaps they still had
day and night, changing seasons, rain and
mist. They had even taken a tiny sea with
them into exile. The water was still there,
forming a frozen lake three kilometers
across. I hear that there is a plan afoot
to electrolize it and provide Five with a
breathable atmosphere again, as soon as the
meteor holes in the outer shell have been
plugged.

The more we saw of their work, the more
we grew to like the race whose possessions
we were disturbing for the first time in
five million years. Even if they were
giants from another sun, they had much in
common with man, and it is a great tragedy
that our races missed each other by what
is, on the cosmic scale, such a narrow
margin.

We were, I suppose, more fortunate than
any archaeologists in history. The vacuum
of space had preserved everything from
decay and this was something which could
not have been expected the Jovians had not
emptied their mighty ship of all its
treasures when they had

_                . .           ...

JUPITER FIVE 141

set out to colonize the Solar System.
Here on the inner surface of Five
everything still seemed intact, as it
had been at the end of the ship's long
journey. Perhaps the travelers had
preserved it as a shrine in memory of
their lost home, or perhaps they had
thought that one day they might have
to use these things again.

Whatever the reason, everytlung was
here as its makers had left it.
Sometimes it frightened me. I might be
photographing, with Bill's help, some
great wall carving when the sheer
timelessness of the place would strike into
my heart. I would look round
nervously, half expecting to see giant
shapes come stalking in through the
pointed doorways, to continue the
tasks that had been momentarily
interrupted.

We discovered the art gallery on the
fourth day. That was the only name for
it; there was no mistaking its pur-
pose. When Groves and Searle, who had
been doing rapid sweeps over the
southern hemisphere, reported the dis-
covery we decided to concentrate all
our forces there. Forj as somebody or
other has said, the art of a people
reveals its soul, and here we might
find the key to Culture X

The building was huge, even by the
standards of this giant race. Like all
the other structures on Five, it was
made of metal, yet there was nothing
cold or mechanical about it. The
topmost peak climbed half way to the
remote roof of the world, and from a
distance before the details were
visible the building looked not unlike
a Gothic cathedral. Misled by this
chance resemblance, some later writers
have called it a temple; but we have
never found any trace of what might be
called a religion among the Jovians.
Yet there seems something appropriate
about the name "The Temple of Art,"
and it's stuck so thoroughly that no
one can change it now.

It has been estimated that there are
between ten and twenty million
individual exhibits in this single
building  the harvest garnered during
the whole history of a race that may
have been much older than Man. And it
was here that I found a small,
circular room which at first sight
seemed to be no more than the meeting
place of six

142 REACH FOR TOMORROW

radiating corridors. I was by myself
(and thus, I'm afraid, disobeying the
Professor's orders) and taking what I
thought would be a short-cut back to
my companions. The dark walls were
drifting silently past me as I glided
along, the light of my torch dancing
over the ceiling ahead. It was covered
with deeply cut lettering, and I was
so busy looking for familiar character
groupings that for some time I paid no
attention to the chamber's floor. Then
I saw the statue and focused my beam
upon it

The moment when one first meets a
great work of art has an impact that
can never again be recaptured. In this
case the subject matter made the
effect all the more overwhelming. I
was the first man ever to know what
the Jovians had looked like, for here,
carved with superb skill and
authority, was one obviously modeled
from life.

The slender, reptilian head was
looking straight toward me, the
sightless eyes staring into mine. Two
of the hands were clasped upon the
breast as if in resignation; the other
two were holding an instrument whose
purpose is still unknown. The long,
powerful tail which, like a
kangaroo's, probably balanced the rest
of the body was stretched out along
the ground, adding to the impression
of rest or repose.

There was nothing human about the
face or the body. There were, for
example, no nostrils only gill-like
openings in the neck. Yet the figure
moved me profoundly; the artist had
spanned the barriers of time and
culture in a way I should never have
believed possible. "Not human  but
humane" was the verdict Professor
Forster gave. There were many things
we could not have shared with the
builders of this world, but all that
was really important we would have
felt in common.

Just as one can read emotions in the
alien but familiar face of a dog or a
horse, so it seemed that I knew the
feelings of the being confronting me.
Here was wisdom and authority the
calm, confident power that is shown,
for example; in Bellini's famous
portrait of the Doge Loredano. Yet
there was sadness also the sadness of
a race which had made some stupendous
effort, and made it in vain.

JUPITER FIVE 143

We still do not know why this single
statue is the only representation the
Jovians have ever made of themselves
in their art. One would hardly expect
to find taboos of this nature among
such an advanced race; perhaps we will
know the answer when we have
deciphered the writing carved on the
chamber walls.

Yet I am already certain of the
statue's purpose. It was set here to
bridge time and to greet whatever
beings might one day stand in the
footsteps of its makers. That, perhaps,
is why they shaped it so much smaller
than life. Even then they must have
guessed that the future belonged to
Earth or Venus, and hence to beings
whom they would have dwarfed. They
knew that size could be a barrier as
well as time.

A few minutes later I was on my way
back to the ship with my companions,
eager to tell the Professor about the
discovery. He had been reluctantly
snatching some rest, though I don't
believe he averaged more than four
hours sleep a day all the time we were
on Five. The golden light of Jupiter
was flooding the great metal plain as
we emerged through the shell and stood
beneath the stars once more.

"Hello!" I heard Bill say over the
radio, "the Prof's moved the ship."

"Nonsense," I retorted. "It's exactly
where we left it."

Then I turned my head and saw the
reason for Bill's nistake. We had
visitors.

The second ship had come down a
couple of kilometers away, and as far
as my non-expert eyes could tell it
might have been a duplicate of ours.
When we hurried through the airlock,
we foumd that the Professor, a little
blearyeyed, was already entertaining.
To our surprise, though not exactly to
our displeasure, one of the three
visitors was an extremely attractive
brunette.

"This," said Professor Forster, a
little wearily, "is Mr. Randolph Mays,
the science writer. I imagine you've
heard of him. And this is " He turned
to Mays. "I'm afraid I didn't quite
catch the names."

"My pilot, Donald Hopkins~my
secretary, Marianne MitchelL"

144 REACH FOR TOMORROW

There was just the slightest pause
before the word "secretary," but it
was long enough to set a little signal
light flashing in my brain. I kept my
eyebrows from going up, but I caught a
glance from Bill that said, without
any need for words: If you're thinking
what I'm thinking, I'm ashamed of you.

Mays was a tale rather cadaverous
man with thinning hair and an attitude
of bonhomie which one felt was only
skin-deep the protective coloration of
a man who has to be friendly with too
many people.

"I expect this is as big a surprise
to you as it is to me," he said with
unnecessary heartiness. "I certainly
never expected to find anyone here
before me; and I certainly didn't
expect to find all this."

"What brought you here?" said
Ashton, trying to sound not too
suspiciously inquisitive.

"I was just explaining that to the
Professor. Can I have that folder
please, Marianne? Thanks."

He drew out a series of very fine
astronomical paintings and passed them
round. They showed the planets from
their satellites a common-enough
subject, of course.

"You've all seen this sort of thing
before," Mays continued. "But there's
a difference here. These pictures are
nearly a hundred years old. They were
painted by an artist named Chesley
Bonestell and appeared in Life back in
1911 long before space-travel began,
of course. Now what's happened is that
Life has commissioned me to go round
the Solar System and see how well I
can match these imaginative paintings
against the reality. In the centenary
issue, they'll be published side by
side with photographs of the real
thing. Good idea, eh?"

I had to admit that it was. But it
was going to make matters rather
complicated, and I wondered what the
Professor thought about it. Then I
glanced again at Miss MitchelL
standing demurely in the corner, and
decided that there would be
compensations.

In any other circumstances, we would
have been glad to meet another party
of explorers, but here there was the
question of priority to be considered.
Mays would certainly be hurrying back
to Earth as quickly as he could,

JUPITER FIVE 145

his original mission abandoned and all
his film used up here and now. It was
difficult to see how we could stop
him, and not even certain that we
desired to do so. We wanted all the
publicity and support we could get,
but we would prefer to do things in
our own time, after our own fashion.
I wondered how strong the Professor
was on tact, and feared the worst.

Yet at firr,t diplomatic relations
were smooth enough The Professor had
hit upon the bright idea of pairing
each of us with one of Mays's team, so
that we acted simultaneously as guides
and supervisors. Doubling the number
of investigating groups also greatly
increased the rate at which we could
work. It was unsafe for anyone to
operate by himself under there
conditions, and this had handicapped
us a great deaL

The Professor outlined his policy to
us the day after the arrival of Mays's
party.

"I hope we can get along together,"
he said a lithe anxiously. "As far as
I'm concerned they can go where they
like and photograph what they like, as
long as they don't take anything, and
as long as they don't get back to
Earth with their records before we
do."

"I don't see how we can stop them,"
protested Ashton.

"Well, I hadn't intended to do this,
but I've now registered a claim to
Five. T radioed it to Ganymede last
night, and it will be at The Hague by
now."

"But no one can claim an
astronomical body for himself. That
was settled in the case of the Moon,
back in the last century."

The Professor gave a rather crooked
smile.

"I'm not annexing an astronomical
body, remember. I've put in a claim
for salvage, and I've done it in the
name of the World Science
Organization. If Mays takes anything
out of Five, he'll be stealing it from
them. Tomorrow I'm going to explain
the situation gently to him, just in
case he gets any bright ideas."

It certainly seemed peculiar to
think of Satellite Five as salvage,
and I could imagine some pretty legal
quarrels developing when we got home.
But for the present the Professor's
move should have given us some
safeguards and

146 REACH FOR TOMORROW

might discourage Mays from collecting
souvenirs so we were optimistic enough
to hope.

It took rather a lot of organizing, but
I managed to get paired off with
Marianne for several trips round the in-
terior of Five. Mays didn't seem to
mind: there was no particular reason why
he should. A spacesuit is the most
perfect chaperon ever devised, confound
it

Naturally enough I took her to the art
gallery at the first opportunity, and
showed her my find. She stood looking at
the statue for a long time while I held
my torch beam upon it.

"It's very wonderful," she breathed at
last "Just think of it waiting here in
the darkness all those millions of
years! But you'll have to give it a
name."

"I have. I've christened it 'The
Ambassador."'

"Why? "

"Well, because I think it's a kind of
envoy, if you like, carrying a greeting
to us. The people who made it knew that
one day someone else was bound to come
here and find this place."

"I think you're right. 'The
Ambassador' yes, that was clever of you.
There's something noble about it, and
something very sad, too. Don't you feel
it?"

I could tell that Marianne was a very
intelligent woman. It was quite
remarkable the way she saw my point of
view, and the interest she took in
everything I showed her. But "The
Ambassador" fascinated her most of all,
and she kept on coming back to it.

"You know, Jack," she said (I think
this was sometime the next day, when
Mays had been to see it as well) "you
must take that statue back to Earth.
Think of the sensation it would cause."

I sighed.

"The Professor would like to, but it
must weigh a ton. We can't afford the
fuel. It will have to wait for a later
trip."

She looked puzzled.

"But things hardly weigh anything here,"
she protested.

"That's different," I explained.
"There's weight, and there's inertia two
quite different things. Now inertia

. .

JUPITER FIVE 147

oh, never mind. We can't take it back,
anyway. Captain Searle's told us that,
definitely."

"What a pity," said Marianne.

I forgot all about this conversation
until the night before we left. We had
had a busy and exhausting day packing
our equipment (a good deaL of course,
we left behind for future use.) All
our photographic material had been
used up. As Charlie Ashton remarked,
if we met a live Jovian now we'd be
unable to record the fact. I think we
were all wanting a breathing space, an
opportunity to relax and sort out our
impressions and to recover from our
head-on collision with an alien
culture.

Mays's ship, the "Henry Luce," was
also nearly ready for take-off. We
would leave at the same time, an
arrangement which suited the Professor
admirably as he did not trust Mays
alone on Five.

Everytlung had been settled when,
while checking through our records, I
suddenly found that six rolls of
exposed film were missing. They were
photographs of a complete set of
transcriptions in the Temple of Art.
After a certain amount of thought I
recalled that they had been entrusted
to my charge, and I had put them very
carefully on a ledge in the Temple,
intending to collect them later.

It was a long time before take-off,
the Professor and Ashton were
canceling some arrears of sleep, and
there seemed no reason why I should
not slip back to collect the missing
material. I knew there would be a row
if it was left behind, and as I
remembered exactly where it was I need
be gone only thirty minutes. So I
went, explaining my mission to Bill
just in case of accidents.

The floodlight was no longer working,
of course, and the darkness inside the
shell of Five was somewhat oppressive.
But I left a portable beacon at the
entrance, and dropped freely until my
hand torch told me it was time to
break the fall. Ten minutes later,
with a sigh of relief, I gathered up
the missing films.

It was a natural-enough thing to pay
my last respects to The Ambassador: it
might be years before I saw him again,
and that calmly enigmatic figure had
begun to exercise an extraordinary
fascination over me.

148 REACH FOR TOMORROW

Unfortunately, that fascination had
not been confined to me alone. For the
chamber was empty and the statue gone.

I suppose I could have crept back
and said nothing, thus avoiding
awkward explanations. But I was too
furious to think of discretion, and as
soon as I returned we woke the
Professor and told him what had
happened.

He sat on his bunk rubbing the sleep
out of his eyes, then uttered a few
harsh words about Mr. Mays and his
companions which it would do no good
at all to repeat here.

"What I don't understand," said
Searle "is how they got the thing
out if they have, in fact. We should
have spotted it."

"There are plenty of hiding places,
and they could have waited until there
was no one around before they took it
up through the hull. It must have been
quite a job, even under this gravity,"
remarked Eric Fulton, in tones of
admiration.

"There's no time for post-mortems,"
said the Professor savagely. "We've
got five hours to think of something.
They can't take off before then,
because we're only just past
opposition with Ganymede. That's
correct, isn't it Kingsley?"

Searle nodded agreement.

"Yes We must move round to the other
side of Jupiter before we can enter a
transfer orbit at least, a reasonably
economical one."

"Good. That gives us a breathing
space. Well, has anyone any ideas? "

Looking back on the whole thing now,
it often seems to me that our
subsequent behavior was, shall I say,
a little peculiar and slightly
uncivilized. It was not the sort of
thing we could have imagined ourselves
doing a few months before. But we were
annoyed and overwrought, and our
remoteness from all other human beings
somehow made everything seem
different. Since there were no other
laws here, we had to make our own....

"Can't we do something to stop them
from taking off?

            JUPITER FIVE 149
Could we sabotage their rockets, for
instance?" asked BILL

Searle didn't like this idea at all.

"We musm't do anything drastic," he
said. "Besides, Don Hopkins is a good
friend of mine. He'd never forgive me
if I damaged his ship. There'd be the
danger, too, that we might do
something that couldn't be repaired."

"Then pinch their fuel," said Groves
laconically.

"Of course! They're probably all
asleep, there's no light in the cabin.
An we've got to do is to connect up
and pump."

"A very nice idea," I pointed out
"but we're two kilometers apart. How
much pipeline have we got? Is it ar.
much as a hundred meters?"

The others ignored this interruption
as though it was beneath contempt and
went on making their plans. Five
minutes later the technicians had
settled everything: we only had to
climb into our spacesuits and do the
work.

I never thought, when I joined the
Professor's expedition, that I should
end up like an African porter in one
of those old adventure stories,
carrying a load on my head. Especially
when that load was a sixth of a
spaceship (being so short, Professor
Forster wasn't able to provide very
effective help). Now that its fuel
tanks were half empty, the weight of
the ship in this gravity was about two
hundred kilograms. We squeezed
beneath, heaved, and up she went very
slowly, of course, because her inertia
was still unchanged. Then we started
marching.

It took us quite a while to make the
journey, and it wasn't quite as easy
as we'd thought it would be. But
presently the two ships were lying
side by side, and nobody had noticed
us. Everyone in the "Henry Luce" was
fast asleep, as they had every reason
to expect us to be.

Though I was still rather short of
breath, I found a certain schoolboy
amusement in the whole adventure as
Searle and Fulton drew the refueling
pipeline out of on; airlock and
quietly coupled up to the other ship.

"The beauty of this plan," explained
Groves to me as we stood watching, "is
that they can't do anything to stop
us, unless they come outside and
uncouple our line. We can

150 REACH FOR TOMORROW

drain them dry in five minutes, and it
will take them half that time to wake
up and get into their spacesuits."

A sudden horrid fear smote me.

"Suppose they turned on their
rockets and tried to get away?"

"Then we'd both be smashed up. No,
they'll just have to come outside and
see what's going on. Ah, there go the
pumps."

The pipeline had stiffened like a
fire-hose under pressure, and I knew
that the fuel was pouring into our
tanks. Any moment now the lights would
go on in the "Henry Luce" and her
startled occupants would come
scuttling out.

It was something of an anticlimax
when they didn't. They must have been
sleeping very soundly not to have felt
the vibration from the pumps, but when
it was all over nothing had happened
and we just stood round looking rather
foolish Searle and Fulton carefully
uncoupled the pipeline and put it back
into the airlock.

"Well?" we asked the Professor.

He thought things over for a minute.

"Let's get back into the ship," he
said.

When we had climbed out of our suits
and were gathered together in the
control room, or as far in as we could
get, the Professor sat down at the
radio and punched out the "Emergency"
signal. Our sleeping neighbors would
be awake in a couple of seconds as
their automatic receiver sounded the
alarm.

The TV screen glimmered into life.
There, looking rather frightened, was
Randolph Mays.

"Hello, Forster," he snapped. "What's
the trouble?"

"Nothing wrong here," replied the
Professor in his best deadpan manner,
"but you've lost something important.
Look at your fuel gauges."

The screen emptied, and for a moment
there was a confused mumbling and
shouting from the speaker. Then Mays
was back, annoyance and alarm
competing for possession of his
features.

"What's going on?" he demanded
angrily. "Do you know anything about
this?"

JUP'iTER F,ivi; 151

The Prof. let him sizzle for a moment
before he replied. "I think you'd
better come across and talk things
over," he said. "You won't have far to
walk."

Mays glared back at him uncertainly,
then retorted "You bet I will!" The
screen went blank.

"He'll have to climb down now!" said
Bill gleefully. "There's nothing else
he can do!"

"It's not so simple as you think,"
warned Fulton. "If he really wanted to
be awkward, he could just sit tight
and radio Ganymede for a tanker."

"What good would that do him? It
would waste days and cost a fortune."

"Yes, but he'd still have the statue,
if he wanted it that badly. And he'd
get his money back when he sued us."

The airlock light flashed on and Mays
stumped into the room. He was in a
surprisingly conciliatory mood; on the
way over, he must have had second
thoughts.

"Well, well," he said affably.
"What's all this nonsense in aid of?"

"You know perfectly well," the
Professor retorted coldly. "I made it
quite clear that nothing was to be
taken off Five. You've been stealing
property that doesn't belong to you."

"Now, let's be reasonable. Who does
it belong to? You can't claim
everything on this planet as your
personal property."

"This is not a planet it's a ship and
the laws of salvage operate."

"Frankly, that's a very debatable
point. Don't you think you should wait
until you get a ruling from the
lawyers?"

The Professor was being icily polite,
but I could see that the strain was
terrific and an explosion might occur
at any moment.

"Listen, Mr. Mays," he said with
ominous calm. "What you've taken is
the most important single find we've
made here. I will make allowances for
the fact that you don't appreciate
what you've done, and don't understand
the viewpoint of an archaeologist like
myself. Return that statue, and we'll
pump your fuel back and say no more."

Mays rubbed his chin thoughtfu'Ny.

1 5 2 REACH} TOMORROW

"I really don't see why you should
make such a fuss about one statue,
when you consider all the stuff
that's still here."

It was then that the Professor made
one of his rare mistakes.

"You talk like a man who's stolen
the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and
argues that nobody will miss it
because of all the other paintings.
This statue's unique in a way that no
terrestrial work of art can ever be.
That's why I'm determined to get it
back."

You should never, when you're
bargaining, make it obvious that you
want something really badly. I saw
the greedy glint in Mays's eye and
said to myself "Uh-huh! He's going to
be tough." And I remembered Fulton's
remark about calling Ganymede for a
tanker.

"Give me half an hour to think it
over," said Mays, turning to the
airlock.

"Very well," replied the Professor
stiffly. "Half an hour  no more."

I must give Mays credit for brains.
Within five minutes we saw his
communications aerial start stewing
round until it locked on Ganymede.
Naturally we tried to listen in, but
he had a scrambler. These newspaper
men must trust each other.

The reply came back a few minutes
later; that was scrambled, too. While
we were waiting for the next de-
velopment, we had another council of
war. The Professor was now entering
the stubborn, stop-at-nothing stage.
He realized he'd miscalculated and
that had made him fighting mad.

I think Mays must have been a little
apprehensive, because he had
reinforcements when he returned.
Donald Hopkins, his pilot, came with
him, looking rather uncomfortable.

"I've been able to fix things up,
Professor," he said smugly. "It will
take me a little longer, but I can
get back without your help if I have
to. Still, I must admit that it will
save a good deal of time and money if
we can come to an agreement. I'll
tell you what. Give me back my fuel

JUPITER FIVE 153

and I'll return the other er souvenirs
I've collected. But I insist on
keeping Mona Lisa, even if it means I
won't get back to Ganymede until the
middle of next week."

The Professor then uttered a number
of what are usually called deep-space
oaths, though I can assure you they're
much the same as any other oaths. That
seemed to relieve his feelings a lot
and he became fiendishly friendly.

"My dear Mr. Mays," he said, "You're
an unmitigated crook, and accordingly
I've no compunction left in dealing
with you. I'm prepared to use force,
knowing that the law will justify me."

Mays looked slightly alarmed, though
not unduly so. We had moved to
strategic positions round the door.

"Please don't be so melodramatic,"
he said haughtily. "This is the
twenty-first century, not the Wild
West back in 1800."

"1880," said Bill, who is a stickler
for accuracy.

"I must ask you," the Professor
continued, "to consider yourself under
detention while we decide what is to
be done. Mr. Searle, take him to Cabin
B."

Mays sidled along the wall with a
nervous laugh.

"Really, Professor, this is too
childish! You can't detain me against
my will." He glanced for support at
the Captain of the "Henry Luce."

Donald Hopkins dusted an imaginary
speck of flufl from his uniform.

"I refuse," he remarked for the
benefit of all concerned, "to get
involved in vulgar brawls."

Mays gave him a venomous look and
capitulated with bad grace. We saw
that he had a good supply of reading
matter, and locked him in.

When he was out of the way, the
Professor turned to Hopkins, who was
looking enviously at our fuel gauges.

"Can I take it, Captain," he said
politely, "that you don't wish to get
mixed up in any of your employer's
dirty business?"

"I'm neutral. My job is to fly the
ship here and take her home. You can
fight this out among yourselves."

"Thank you. I think we understand each
other perfect

154 REACEI FOR TOMORROW

ly. Perhaps it would be best if you
returned to your ship and explained
the situation. We'll be calling you in
a few minutes."

Captain Hopkins made his way
languidly to the door. As he was about
to leave he turned to Searle.

"By the way, Kingsley," he drawled.
"Have you thought of torture? Do call
me if you get round to it  I've some
jolly interesting ideas." Then he was
gone, leavmg us with our hostage.

I think the Professor had hoped he
could do a direct exchange. If so, he
had not bargained on Marianne's stub-
borness.

"It serves Randolph right," she
said. "But I don't really see that it
makes any difference. He'll be just as
comfortable in your ship as in ours,
and you can't do anything to him. Let
me know when you're fed up with having
him around."

It seemed a complete impasse. We had
been too clever by half, and it had
got us exactly nowhere. We'd captured
Mays, but he wasn't any use to us.

The Professor was standing with his
back to us, staring morosely out of
the window. Seemingly balanced on the
horizon, the immense bulk of Jupiter
nearly filled the sky.

"We've got to convince her that we
really do mean business," he said.
Then he turned abruptly to me.

"Do you think she's actually fond of
this blackguard?"

"Er I shouldn't be surprised. Yes, I
really believe so."

The Professor looked very
thoughtful. Then he said to Searle,
"Come into my room. I want to talk
something over."

They were gone quite a while. When
they returned, they both had an
indefinable air of gleeful
anticipation, and the Professor was
carrying a piece of paper covered with
figures. He went to the radio, and
called the "Henry Luce."

"Hello," said Marianne, replying so
promptly that she'd obviously been
waiting for us. "Have you decided to
call it off? I'm getting so bored."

JUPITER Fly 155

The Professor looked at her gravely.

"Miss Mitchell," he replied. "It's
apparent that you have not been taking
us seriously. I'm therefore arranging
a somewhat drastic little
demonstration for your benefit. I'm
going to place your employer in a
position from which he'll be only too
anxious for you to retrieve him as
quickly as possible."

"Indeed?" replied Marianne
noncommittally though I thought I
could detect a trace of apprehension
in her voice.

"I don't suppose," continued the
Professor smoothly, "that you know
anything about celestial mechanics.
No? Too bad, but your pilot will
confirm everything I tell you. Won't
you, Hopkins? "

"Go ahead," came a painstakingly
neutral voice from the background.

"Then listen carefully, Miss
Mitchell. I want to remind you of our
curious indeed our precarious position
on this satellite. You've only got to
look out of the window to see how
close to Jupiter we are, and I need
hardly remind you that Jupiter has by
far the most intense gravitational
field of all the planets. You follow
me?"

"Yes," replied Marianne, no longer
quite so self-possessed. "Go on."

"Very well. This little world of
ours goes round Jupiter in almost
exactly twelve hours. Now there's a
well-known theorem stating that if a
body falls from an orbit to the center
of attraction, it will take point one
seven seven of a period to make the
drop. In other words, anything falling
from here to Jupiter would reach the
center of the planet in about two
hours seven minutes. I'm sure Captain
Hopkins can confirm this."

There was a long pause. Then we
heard Hopkins say, "WeR, of course I
can't confirm the exact figures, but
they're probably correct. It would be
something like that, anyway."

"Good," continued the Professor.
"Now I'm sure you realize," he went on
with a hearty chuckle, "that a fall to
the center of the planet is a very
theoretical case. If

156 REACH FOR TOMORROW

anything really was dropped from here, it
would reach the upper atmosphere of
Jupiter in a considerably shorter time. I
hope I'm not boring you?"

"No," said Marianne, rather faintly.

"I'm so glad to hear it. Anyway, Captain
Searle has worked out the actual time for
me, and it'd one hour thirty five
minutes with a few minutes either way. We
can't guarantee complete accuracy, ha, ha!

"Now, it has doubtless not escaped your
notice that this satellite of ours has an
extremely weak gravitational field. It's
escape velocity is only about ten meters a
second, and anything thrown away from it
at that speed would never come back.
Correct, Mr. Hopkins?"

"Perfectly correct."

"Then, if I may come to the point, we
propose to take Mr. Mays for a walk until
he's immediately under Jupiter, remove the
reaction pistols from his suit,
and ah launch him forth. We will be
prepared to retrieve him with our ship as
soon as you've handed over the property
you've stolen. After what I've told you,
I'm sure you'll appreciate that time will
be rather vital. An hour and thirty five
minutes is remarkably short, isn't it?"

"Professor!" I gasped, "You can't possibly
do this!"

"Shut up! " he barked. "Well, Miss
Mitchell, what about it? "

Marianne was staring at him with mingled
horror and disbelief.

"You're simply bluffing!" she cried. "I
don't believe you'd do anything of the
kind! Your crew won't let you! "

The Professor sighed.

"Too bad," he said. "Captain Searle Mr.
Groves will you take the prisoner and
proceed as instructed."

"Aye-aye, sir," replied Searle with great
solemnity.

Mays looked frightened but stubborn.

"What are you going to do now?" he said,
as his suit was handed back to him.

Searle upholstered his reaction pistols.
"Just climb in," he said. "We're going for a
walk."

I realized then what the Professor hoped
to do. The whole thing was a colossal
bluff: of course he wouldn't

.                                   .
                   .              .

JUPITER Fun 157

really have Mays thrown into Jupiter;
and in any case Searle and Groves
wouldn't do it. Yet surely Marianne
would see through the bluff, and then
we'd be left looking mighty foolish.

Mays couldn't run away; without his
reaction pistols he was quite
helpless. Grasping his arms and towing
him along like a captive balloon, his
escorts set off toward the horizon and
towards Jupiter.

I could see, looking across the space
to the other ship, that Marianne was
staring out through the observation
windows at the departing trio.
Professor Forster noticed it too.

"I hope you're convinced, Miss
Mitchell, that my men aren't carrying
along an empty spacesuit. Might I sug-
gest that you follow the proceedings
with a telescope? They'll be over the
horizon in a minute, but you'll be
able to see Mr. Mays when he starts
to er ascend."

There was a stubborn silence from the
loudspeaker. The period of suspense
seemed to last for a very long time.
Was Marianne waiting to see how far
the Professor really would go?

By this time I had got hold of a pair
of binoculars and was sweeping the sky
beyond the ridiculously close horizon.
Suddenly I saw it a tiny flare of
light against the vast yellow
back-cloth of Jupiter. I focused
quickly, and could just make out the
three figures rising into space. As I
watched, they separated: two of them
decelerated with their pistols and
started to fall back toward Five. The
other went on ascending helplessly
toward the ominous bulk of Jupiter.

I turned on the Professor in horror
and disbelief.

"They've really done it!" I cried. "I
thought you were only bluffing!"

"So did Miss Mitchell, I've no
doubt," said the Professor calmly, for
the benefit of the listening
microphone. "I hope I don't need to
impress upon you the urgency of the
situation. As I've remarked once or
twice before, the time of fan from our
orbit to Jupiter's surface is
ninety-five minutes. But, of course,
if one waited even half that time, it
would be much too late...."

:. .                                   t

158 REACH FOR TOMORROW

HE let that sink in. There was no reply
from the other ship.

"And now," he continued, "I'm going to
switch off our receiver so we can't have any
more arguments. We'll wait until you've
unloaded that statue~zd the other items Mr.
Mays was careless enough to mention before
we'll talk to you again. Good-by."

It was a very uncomfortable ten minutes.
I'd lost track of Mays, and was seriously
wondering if we'd better overpower the
Professor and go after him before we had a
murder on our hands. But the people who-
could fly the ship were the ones who had
actually carried out the crime. I didn't know
what to think.

Then the airlock of the "Henry Luce" slowly
opened. A couple of space-suited figures
emerged, 'coating the cause of all the
trouble between them.

"Unconditional surrender," murmured the
Professor with a sigh of satisfaction. "Get
it into our ship," he called over the radio,
"I'll open up the airlock for you."

He seemed in no hurry at all. I kept
looking anxiously at the clock; fifteen
minutes had already gone by. Presently there
was a clanking and banging in the airlock,
the inner door opened, and Captain Hopkins
entered. He was followed by Marianne, who
only needed a bloodstained axe to make her
look like Clytaemnestra. I did my best to
avoid her eye, but the Professor seemed to be
quite without shame. He walked into the
airlock, checked that his property was back,
and emerged rubbing his hands.

"Well, that's that," he said cheerfully.
"Now let's sit down and have a drink to
forget all this unpleasantness, shall we? "

I pointed indignantly at the clock.

"Have you gone crazy!" I yelled. "He's
already halfway to Jupiter! "

Professor Forster looked at me
disapprovingly.

"Impatience," he said, "is a common failing
in the young. I see no cause at all for hasty
action."

Marianne spoke for the first time; she now
looked really scared.

"But you promised," she whispered.

JUPITER FIVE 159

The Professor suddenly capitulated.
He had had his little joke, and didn't
want to prolong the agony.

"I can tell you at once, Miss
Mitchell- and you too, Jack that Mays
is in no more danger than we are. We
can go and collect him whenever we
like."

"Do you mean that you lied to me>"

"Certainly not. Everything I told you
was perfectly true. You simply jumped
to the wrong conclusions. When I said
that a body would take ninety-five
minutes to fall from here to Jupiter,
I omitted not, I must confess, acci-
dentally a rather important phrase. I
should have added "a body at rest with
respect to Jupiter." Your friend Mr.
Mays was sharing the orbital speed of
this satellite, and he's still got it.
A little matter of twenty-six
kilometers a second, Miss Mitchell.

"Oh yes, we threw him completely off
Five and toward Jupiter. But the
velocity we gave him then was trivial.
He's still moving in practically the
same orbit as before. The most he can
do I've got Captain Searle to work out
the figures is to drift about a
hundred kilometers inward. And in one
revolution twelve hours- he'll be
right back where he started, without
us bothering to do anytlung at all."

There was a long, long silence.
Marianne's face was a study in
frustration, relief, and annoyance at
having been fooled. Then she turned on
Captain Hopkins.

"You must have known all the time!
Why didn't you tell me?"

Hopkins gave her a wounded expression.

"You didn't ask me," he said.

We hauled Mays down about an hour
later. He was only twenty kilometers
up, and we located him quickly enough
by the flashing light on his suit. His
radio had been disconnected, for a
reason that hadn't occurred to me. He
was intelligent enough to realize that
he was in no danger, and if his set
had been working he could have called
his ship and exposed our bluff. That
is, if he wanted to. Personally, I
think I'd have been glad enough to
call the whole thing off even if I had
known that I was per

160 REACH FOR TOMORROW

fectly safe. It must have been awfully lonely
up there. To my great surprise, Mays wasn't
as mad as I'd expected. Perhaps he was too
relieved to be back in our snug little
cabin when we drifted up to him on the
merest fizzle of rockets and yanked him in.
Or perhaps he felt that he'd been worsted
in fair fight and didn't bear any grudge.
I really think it was the latter.

There isn't much more to tell, except
that we did play one other trick on him
before we left Five. He had a good deal
more fuel in his tanks than he really
needed, now that his payload was
substantially reduced. By keeping the
excess ourselves, we were able to carry The
Ambassador back to Ganymede after all. Oh,
yes, the Professor gave him a cheque for
the fuel we'd borrowed. Everything was
perfectly legal.

There's one amusing sequel I must tell
you, though The day after the new gallery
was opened at the British Museum I went
along to see The Ambassador, partly to
discover if his impact was still as great
in these changed surroundings. (For the
record, it wasn't though it's still
considerable and Bloomsbury will never be
quite the same to me again.) A huge crowd
was milling around the gallery, and there
in the middle of it was Mays and Marianne.

It ended up with us having a very
pleasant lunch to"ether in Holborn. I'll
say this about Mays he doesn't bear any
grudges. But I'm still rather sore about
Marianne.

And, frankly, I can't imagine what she sees
in him.

~_                .

fiche Possessed

JiND NOW 1~15 SUN AHEAD WAS SO CLOSE THAT THE HURRI

cane of radiation was forcing the
Swarm back into the dark night of
space. Soon it would be able to come
no closer; the gales of light on which
it rode from star to star could not be
faced so near their source. Unless it
encountered a planet very soon, and
could fall down into the peace and
safety of its shadow, this sun must be
abandoned as had so many before.

Six cold outer worlds had already
been searched and discarded. Either
they were frozen beyond all hope of
organic life, or else they harbored
entities of types that were useless to
the Swarm. If it was to survive, it
must find hosts not too unlike those
it had left on its doomed and distant
home. Millions of years ago the Swarm
had begun its journey, swept starward
by the fires of its own esploding sun.
Yet even now the memory of its lost
birthplace was still sharp and clear,
an ache that would never die.

There was a planet ahead, swinging
its cone of shadow through the
flame-swept night. The senses that the
Swarm had developed upon its long
journey reached out toward the
approaching world, reached out and
found it good.

The merciless buffeting of radiation
ceased as the black disc of the planet
eclipsed the sun. Falling freely under
gravity, the Swarm dropped swiftly
until it hit the outer fringe of the
atmosphere. The first time it had made
planetfall it had almost met its doom,
but now it contracted its tenuous
substance with the unthinking skill of
long practice, until it formed a tiny,
close-knit sphere. Slowly its velocity
slackened, until at last it was
floating motionless between earth and
sky.

For many years it rode the winds of the
stratosphere 161

1 62 REACH! FOR TOMORROW

from Pole to Pole, or let the
soundless fusillades of dawn blast it
westward from the rising sun.
Everywhere it found life, but nowhere
intelligence. There were things that
crawled and flew and leaped, but there
were no things that talked or built.
Ten million years hence there might be
creatures here with minds that the
Swarm could possess and guide for its
own purposes; there was no sign of
them now. It could not guess which of
the countless life-forms on this
planet would be the heir to the
future, and without such a host it was
helpless a mere pattern of electric
charges, a matrix of order and
self-awareness in a universe of chaos.
By its own resources the Swarm had no
control over matter, yet once it had
lodged in the mind of a sentient race
there was nothing that lay beyond its
powers.

It was not the first time, and it
would not be the last, that the planet
had been surveyed by a visitant from
space  though never by one in such
peculiar and urgent need. The Swarm
was faced with a tormenting dilemma It
could begin its weary travels once
more, hoping that ultimately it might
find the conditions it sought, or it
could wait here on this world, biding
its time until a race had arisen which
would fit its purpose.

It moved like mist through the
shadows, letting the vagrant winds
take it where they willed. The clumsy,
illformed reptiles of this young world
never saw its passing, but it observed
them, recording, analyzing, trying to
extrapolate into the future. There was
so little to choose between all these
creatures; not one showed even the
first faint glimmerings of conscious
mind. Yet if it left this world in
search of another, it might roam the
universe in vain until the end of
time.

At last it made its decision. By its
very nature, it could choose both
alternatives. The greater part of the
Swarm would continue its travels among
the stars, but a portion of it would
remain on this world, like a seed
planted in the hope of future harvest.

It began to spin upon its axis, its
tenuous body flattening into a disc.
Now it was wavering at the frontiers
of visibility it was a pale ghost, a
faint will-of-the-wisp that suddenly
fissured into two unequal fragments.
The spin

TEIE POSSESSED 163

ning slowly died away: the Swarm had
become two, each an entity with all
the memories of the original, and all
its desires and needs.

There was a last exchange of thoughts
between parent and child who were also
identical twins. If all went well with
them both, they would meet again in
the far future here at this valley in
the mountains. The one who was staying
would return to this point at regular
intervals down the ages; the one who
continued the search would send back
an emissary if ever a better world was
found. And then they would be united
again, no longer homeless exiles
vainly wandering among the indifferent
stars.

The light of dawn was spilling over
the raw, new mountains when the parent
swarm rose up to meet the sun. At the
edge of the atmosphere the gales of
radiation caught it and swept it
unresisting out beyond the planets, to
start again upon the endless search.

The one that was left began its
almost equally hopeless task. It
needed an animal that was not so rare
that disease or accident could make it
extinct, nor so tiny that it could
never acquire any power over the
physical world. And it must breed
rapidly, so that its evolution could
be directed and controlled as swiftly
as possible.

The search was long and the choice
difficult, but at last the Swarm
selected its host. Like rain sinking
into thirsty soiL it entered the
bodies of certain small lizards and
began to direct their destiny.

It was an immense task, even for a
being which could never know death.
Generation after generation of the
lizards was swept into the past before
there came the slightest improvement
in the race. And always, at the
appointed time, the Swarm returned to
its rendezvous among the mountains.
Always it returned in vain: there was
no messenger from the stars, bringing
news of better fortune elsewhere.

The centuries lengthened into
millennia, the millennia into eons. By
the standards of geological time, the
lizards were now changing rapidly.
Presently they were lizards no more,
but warm-blooded, fur-covered
creatures that brought forth their
young alive. They were still small and

164 REACH FOR TOMORROW

feeble, and their minds were
rudimentary, but they con- tained the
seeds of future greatness.

Yet not only the living creatures
were altering as the ages slowly
passed. Continents were being rent
asunder, mountains being worn down by
the weight of the unwearying rain.
Through all these changes, the Swarm
kept to its purpose; and always, at the
appointed times, it went to the meeting
place that had been chosen so long ago,
waited patiently for a while, and came
away. Perhaps the parent swarm was
still searching or perhaps it was a
hard and terrible thought to grasp some
unknown fate had overtaken it and it
had gone the way of the race it had
once ruled. There was nothing to do but
to wait and see if the stubborn
life-stuff of this planet could be
forced along the path to intelligence.

And so the eons passed....

Somewhere in the labyrinth of
evolution the Swarm made its fatal
mistake and took the wrong turning. A
hundred million years had gone since it
came to Earth, and it was very weary.
It could not die, but it could degen-
erate. The memories of its ancient home
and of its destiny were fading: its
intelligence was waning even while its
hosts climbed the long slope that would
lead to self-awareness.

By a cosmic irony, in giving the
impetus which would one day bring
intelligence to this world, the Swarm
had exhausted itself. It had reached
the last stage of parasitism; no longer
could it exist apart from its hosts.
Never again could it ride free above
the world, driven by wind and sun. To
make the pilgrimage to the ancient
rendezvous, it must travel slowly and
painfully in a thousand little bodies.
Yet it continued the immemorial custom,
driven on by the desire for reunion
which burned all the more fiercely now
that it knew the bitterness of failure.
Only if the parent swarm returned and
reabsorbed it could it ever know new
life and vigor.

The glaciers came and went; by a
miracle the little beasts that now
housed the waning alien intelligence
escaped the clutching fingers of the
ice. The oceans over

THE POSSESSED 165

whelmed the land, and still the race
survived. It even multiplied, but it
could do no more. This world would
never be its heritage, for far away in
the heart of another continent a
certain monkey had come down from the
trees and was looking at the stars
with the first glimmerings of
curiosity.

The mind of the Swarm was dispersing,
scattering among a million tiny
bodies, no longer able to unite and
assert its will. It had lost all
cohesion; its memories were fading. In
a million years, at most, they would
all be gone.

Only one thing remained the blind
urge which still, at intervals which
by some strange aberration were be-
coming ever shorter, drove it to seek
its consummation in a valley that long
ago had ceased to exist.

Quietly riding the lane of moonlight,
the pleasure steamer passed the island
with its winking beacon and entered
the fjord. It was a calm and lovely
night, with Venus sinking in the west
out beyond the Faroes, and the lights
of the harbor reflected with scarcely
a tremor in the still waters far
ahead.

Nils and Christina were utterly
content. Standing side by side against
the boat rail, their fingers locked
together, they watched the wooded
slopes drift silently by. The tall
trees were motionless in the
moonlight, their leaves unruffled by
even the merest breath of wind, their
slender trunks rising whitely from
pools of shadow. The whole world was
asleep; only the moving ship dared to
break the spell that had bewitched the
night.

Then suddenly, Christina gave a
little gasp and Nils felt her fingers
tighten convulsively on his. He
followed her gaze: she was staring out
across the water, looking toward the
silent sentinels of the forest.

"What is it, darling?" he asked
anxiously.

"Look!" she replied, in a whisper
Nils could scarcely hear. "There under
the pines!"

Nils stared, and as he did so the
beauty of the night ebbed slowly away
and ancestral terrors came crawling
back from exile. For beneath the trees
the land was alive: a dappled brown
tide was moving down the slopes of the

1 66 REACH FOR TOMORROW

hill and merging into the dark
waters. Here was an open patch on
which the moonlight fell unbroken by
shadow. It was changing even as he
watched: the surface of dhe land
seemed to be rippling downward like a
slow waterfall seeking union with the
sea.

And then Nils laughed and the world
was sane once more. Christina looked
at him, puzzled but reassured.

"Don't you remember?" he chuckled.
"We read all about it in the paper
this morning. They do tills every few
years, and always at night. It's been
going on for days."

He was teasing her, sweeping away
the tension of the last few- minutes.
Christina looked back at him, and a
slow smile lit up her face.

"Of course!" she said. "How stupid
of me!" Then she turned once more
toward the land and her expression
became sad, for she was very
tender-hearted.

"Poor little things!" she sighed. "I
wonder why they do it?"

Nils shrugged his shoulders
indifferently.

"No one knows," he answered. "It's
just one of those mysteries. I
shouldn't think about it if it
worries you. Look we'll soon be in
harbor!"

They turned toward the beckoning
lights where their future lay, and
Christina glanced back only once
toward the tragic, mindless tide chat
was still flowing beneadh the moon.

Obeying an urge whose meaning they
had never known, the doomed legions
of the lemmings were finding oblivion
beneath the waves.

          BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE
     IN BALLANTINE BOOKS EDITIONS
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A highly successful first collection of
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REACH FOR TOMORROW 75

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come to expect from Clarke, all literate
and all, in the best sense, entertaining."

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EARTHLIGHT 75

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TALES FROM THE WHITE HART 75

Stories that might have been strung out to
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handled with economy and ingenuity in the
space of a few pages. "Ingenious, hilar-
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fiction told by a master." Montgomery
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CHILDHOOD'S END 75

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both a poetic dreamer and a competent
scientist." Gilbert Highet

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Silverberg 75t
CHOC1lY                  John Wyndham 75
RESTOREE                 Anne McCaErey 75
DRAGONFLIGHT             Anne McCaffrey
75
CHTHON                   Piers Anthony
75
 THE WORM OUROBOROS              E. R. Eddison
950

MISTRESS OF MISTRESSES E. R. Eddison 95'
A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON E. R. Eddison 950
TITUS GROAN ~ Mervyn Peake 950
GORME NG HA ST - Trilogy Mervyn Peake 9 5 
TITUS ALONE . Mervyn Peake 95
DOLPHIN BOY Roy Meyers 75
DAUGHTERS OF THE DOLPHIN
Roy Meyers 75
Send price of book plus 5' a copy for postage to

 Dept. CS, BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC., 101    .'

Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003, with
your name, address and ZIP CODE NUMBER

 ._ .  , . . ....... .  .     . _  _  ...    _  _ _  ..
_   ,  _ . . ._

