Case Against Tomorrow
by
Frederik Pohl


The Midas Plaque
AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED.
The bride and groom made a beautiful couple, she in
her twenty-yard frill of immaculate white, he in his formal
gray ruffled blouse and pleated pantaloons.
It was a small weddingthe best he could afford. For
guests, they had only the immediate family and a few
close friends. And when the minister had performed the
ceremony, Morey Fry kissed his bride and they drove off
to the reception. There were twenty-eight limousines in
all (though it is true that twenty of them contained only
the caterer's robots) and three flower cars.
"Bless you both," said old man Elon sentimentally.
"You've got a fine girl in our Cherry, Morey." He blew
his nose on a ragged square of cambric.
The old folks behaved very well, Morey thought. At
the reception, surrounded by the enormous stacks of
wedding gifts, they drank the champagne and ate a great
many of the tiny, delicious canapes. They listened politely
to the fifteen-piece orchestra, and Cherry's mother even
danced one dance with Morey for sentiment's sake, though
it was clear that dancing was far from the usual pattern
of her life. They tried as hard as they could to blend into
the gathering, but all the same, the two elderly figures
in severely simple and probably rented garments were
dismayingly conspicuous in the quarter-acre of tapestries
and tinkling fountains that was the main ballroom of
Morey's country home.
When it was time for the guests to go home and let
the newlyweds begin their life together Cherry's father
shook Morey by the hand and Cherry's mother kissed him.
But as they drove away in their tiny runabout their faces
were full of foreboding.
It was nothing against Morey as a person, of course.
But poor people should not marry wealth.
Morey and Cherry loved each other, certainly. That
helped. They told each other so, a dozen times an hour,
all of the long hours they were together, for all of the first
months of their marriage. Morey even took time off to go
shopping with his bride, which endeared him to her
enormously. They drove their shopping carts through the
immense vaulted corridors of the supermarket, Morey
checking off the items on the shopping list as Cherry
picked out the goods. It was fun.
For a while.
Their first fight started in the supermarket, between
Breakfast Foods and Floor Furnishings, just where the
new Precious Stones department was being opened.
Morey called off from the list, "Diamond lavaliere, cos-
tame rings, earbobs."
Cherry said rebelliously, "Morey, I have a lavaliere.
Please, dear!"
Morey folded back the pages of the list uncertainly.
The lavaliere was on there, all right, and no alternative
selection was shown.
"How about a bracelet?" he coaxed. "Look, they have
some nice ruby ones there. See how beautifully they go
with your hair, darling!" He beckoned a robot clerk, who
busded up and handed Cherry the bracelet tray. "Lovely,"
Morey exclaimed as Cherry slipped the largest of the lot
on her wrist.
"And I don't have to have a lavaliere?" Cherry asked.
"Of course not." He peeked at the tag. "Same number
of ration points exactly!" Since Cherry looked only
dubious, not convinced, he said briskly, "And now we'd
better be getting along to the shoe department. I've got
to pick up some dancing pumps."
Cherry made no objection, neither then nor throughout
the rest of their shopping tour. At the end, while they
were sitting in the supermarket's ground-floor lounge wait-
ing for the robot accountants to tote up their bill and the
robot cashiers to stamp their ration books, Morey re-
membered to have the shipping department save out the
bracelet.
"I don't want that sent with the other stuff, darling," he
explained. "I want you to wear it right now. Honestly, I
don't think I ever saw anything looking so right for you."
Cherry looked flustered and pleased. Morey was de-
lighted with himself; it wasn't everybody who knew how
to handle these little domestic problems just right!
He stayed self-satisfied all the way home, while Henry,
their companion-robot, regaled them with funny stories of
the factory in which it had been built and trained. Cherry
wasn't used to Henry by a long shot, but it was hard not
to like the robot. Jokes and funny stories when you
needed amusement, sympathy when you were depressed,
a never-failing supply of news and information on any
subject you cared to nameHenry was easy enough to
take. Cherry even made a special point of asking Henry
to keep them company through dinner, and she laughed
as thoroughly as Morey himself at its droll anecdotes.
But later, in the conservatory, when Henry had con-
siderately left them alone, the laughter dried up.
Morey didn't notice. He was very conscientiously mak-
ing the rounds: turning on the tri-D, selecting their after-
dinner liqueurs, scanning the evening newspapers.
Cherry cleared her throat self-consciously, and Morey
stopped what he was doing. "Dear," she said tentatively,
"I'm feeling kind of restless tonight. Could we1 mean
do you think we could just sort of stay home andwell,
relax?"
Morey looked at her with a touch of concern. She lay
back wearily, eyes half closed. "Are you feeling all right?"
he asked.
"Perfectly. I just don't want to go out tonight, dear. I
don't feel up to it."
He sat down and automatically lit a cigarette. "I see,"
he said. The tri-D was beginning a comedy show; he got
up to turn it off, snapping on the tape-player. Muted
strings filled the room.
"We had reservations at the club tonight," he reminded
her.
Cherry shifted uncomfortably. "I know."
"And we have the opera tickets that I turned last week's
in for. I hate to nag, darling, but we haven't used any of
our opera tickets."
"We can see them right here on the tri-D," she said
in a small voice.
"That has nothing to do with it, sweetheart. I1 didn't
want to tell you about it, but Wainwright, down at the
office, said something to me yesterday. He told me he
would be at the circus last night and as much as said he'd
be looking to see if we were there, too. Well, we weren't
there. Heaven knows what I'll tell him next week."
He waited for Cherry to answer, but she was silent.
He went on reasonably, "So if you could see your way
clear to going out tonight"
He stopped, slack-jawed. Cherry was crying, silently
and in quantity.
"Darling!" he said inarticulately.
He hurried to her, but she fended him off. He stood
helpless over her, watching her cry.
"Dear, what's the matter?" he asked.
She turned her head away.
Morey rocked back on his heels. It wasn't exactly the
first  time  he'd  seen  Cherry  crythere had  been  that
poignant scene when they Gave Each Other Up, realizing
that their backgrounds were too far apart for happiness,
before the realization that they had to have each other, no
matter what. . . . But it was the first time her tears had
made him feel guilty.
And he did feel guilty. He stood there staring at her.
Then he turned his back on her and walked over to
the bar. He ignored the ready liqueurs and poured two
stiff highballs, brought them back to her. He set one down
beside her, took a long drink from the other.
In quite a different tone, he said, "Dear, what's the
matter?"
No answer.
"Come on. What is it?"
She looked up at him and rubbed at her eyes. Almost
sullenly, she said, "Sorry."
"I know you're sorry. Look, we love each other. Let's
talk this thing out."
She picked up her drink and held it for a moment,
before setting it down untasted. "What's the use, Morey?"
"Please. Let's try."
She shrugged.
He went on remorselessly, "You aren't happy, are you?
And it's because ofwell, all this." His gesture took in
the richly furnished conservatory, the thick-piled carpet,
the host of machines and contrivances for their comfort
and entertainment that waited for their touch. By implica-
tion it took in twenty-six rooms, five cars, nine robots.
Morey said, with an effort, "It isn't what you're used to,
is it?"
"I can't help it," Cherry said. "Morey, you know I've
tried. But back home"
"Dammit," he flared, "this is your home. You don't
live with your father any more in that five-room cottage;
you don't spend your evenings hoeing the garden or play-
ing cards for matchsticks. You live here, vrith me, your
husband! You knew what you were getting into. We
talked all this out long before we were married"
The words stopped, because words were useless. Cherry
was crying again, but not silently.
Through her tears, she wailed: "Darling, I've tried. You
don't know how I've tried! I've worn all those silly
clothes and I've played all those silly games and I've gone
out with you as much as I possibly could andI've eaten
all that terrible food until I'm actually getting fa-fa-/af/ I
thought I could stand it. But I just can't go on like this;
I'm not used to it. I1 love you, Morey, but I'm going
crazy, living like this. I can't help it, MoreyI'm tired of
being poor!"
Eventually the tears dried up, and the quarrel healed,
and the lovers kissed and made up. But Morey lay awake
that night, listening to his wife's gentle breathing from
the suite next to his own, staring into the darkness as
tragically as any pauper before him had ever done.
Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed Morey, heir to more worldly goods than he
could possibly consume.
Morey Fry, steeped in grinding poverty, had never gone
hungry a day in his life, never lacked for anything his
heart could desire in the way of food, or clothing, or a
place to sleep. In Morey's world, no one lacked for these
things; no one could.
Malthus was rightfor a civilization vidthout ma-
chines, automatic factories, hydroponics and food syn-
thesis, nuclear breeder plants, ocean-mining for metals
and minerals . . .
And a vastly increasing supply of labor . . .
And architecture that rose high in the air and dug deep
in the ground and floated far out on the water on piers
and pontoons . . . architecture that could be poured one
day and lived in the next . . .
And robots.
Above all, robots . . . robots to burrow and haul and
smelt and fabricate, to build and farm and weave and sew.
What the land lacked in wealth, the sea was made to
yield and the laboratory invented the rest . . . and the
factories became a pipeline of plenty, churning out enough
to feed and clothe and house a dozen worlds.
Limitless discovery, infinite power in the atom, tireless
labor of humanity and robots, mechanization that drove
jungle and swamp and ice off the Earth, and put up office
buildings and manufacturing centers and rocket ports in
their place . . .
The pipeline of production spewed out riches that no
king in the time of Malthus could have known.
But a pipeline has two ends. The invention and power
and labor pouring in at one end must somehow be drained
out at the other . . .
Lucky Morey, blessed economic-consuming unit, drown-
ing in the pipeline's flood, striving manfully to eat and
drink and wear and wear out his share of the ceaseless
tide of wealth.
Morey felt far from blessed, for the blessings of the
poor are always best appreciated from afar.
Quotas worried his sleep until he awoke at eight o'clock
the next morning, red-eyed and haggard, but inwardly
resolved. He had reached a decision. He was starting a
new life.
There was trouble in the morning mail. Under the let-
terhead of the National Ration Board, it said:
"We regret to advise you that the following items re-
turned by you in connection with your August quotas as
used and no longer serviceable have been inspected and
found insufficiently worn." The list followeda long one,
Morey saw to his sick disappointment. "Credit is hereby
disallowed for these and you are therefore given an addi-
tional consuming quota for the current month in the
amount of 435 points, at least 350 points of which must
be in the textile and home-furnishing categories."
Morey dashed the letter to the floor. The valet picked
it up emotionlessly, creased it and set it on his desk.
It wasn't fair! All right, maybe the bathing trunks and
beach umbrellas hadn't been really used very much
though how the devil, he asked himself bitterly, did you
go about using up swimming gear when you didn't have
time for such leisurely pursuits as swimming? But cer-
tainly the hiking slacks were used! He'd worn them for
three whole days and part of a fourth; what did they
expect him to do, go around in rags?
Morey looked belligerently at the coffee and toast that
the valet-robot had brought in with the mail, and then
steeled his resolve. Unfair or not, he had to play the
game according to the rules. It was for Cherry, more than
for himself, and the way to begin a new way of life was to
begin it.
Morey was going to consume for two.
He told the valet-robot, "Take that stuff back. I want
cream and sugar with the coffeelots of cream and sugar.
And besides the toast, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes,
orange juiceno, make it half a grapefruit. And orange
juice, come to think of it."
"Right away, sir," said the valet. "You won't be hav-
ing breakfast at nine then, will you, sir?"
"I certainly will," said Morey virtuously. "Double por-
tions!" As the robot was closing the door, he called after
it, "Butter and marmalade with the toast!"
He went to the bath; he had a full schedule and no time
to waste. In the shower, he carefully sprayed himself with
lather three times. When he had rinsed the soap off, he
went through the whole assortment of taps in order: three
lotions, plain talcum, scented talcum and thirty seconds
of ultra-violet. Then he lathered and rinsed again, and
dried himself with a towel instead of using the hot-air
drying jet. Most of the miscellaneous scents went down
the drain with the rinse water, but if the Ration Board
accused lii'w of waste, he could claim he was experiment-
ing. The effect, as a matter of fact, wasn't bad at all.
He stepped out, full of exuberance. Cherry was awake,
staring in dismay at the tray the valet had brought. "Good
morning, dear," she said faintly. "Ugh."
Morey kissed her and patted her hand. "Well!" he said,
looking at the tray with a big, hollow smile. "Food!"
"Isn't that a lot for just the two of us?"
"Two of us?" repeated Morey masterfully. "Nonsense,
my dear, I'm going to eat it all by myself!"
"Oh, Morey!" gasped Cherry, and the adoring look she
gave him was enough to pay for a dozen such meals.
Which, he thought as he finished his morning exercises
with the sparring-robot and sat down to his real breakfast,
it just about had to be, day in and day out, for a long,
long time.
Still, Morey had made up his mind. As he worked his
way through the kippered herring, tea and crumpets, he
ran over his plans with Henry. He swallowed a mouthful
and said, "I want you to line up some appointments for
me right away. Three hours a week in an exercise gym
pick one with lots of reducing equipment, Henry. I think
I'm going to need it. And fittings for some new clothes
I've had these for weeks. And, let's see, doctor, dentist
say, Henry, don't I have a psychiatrist's date coming up?"
"Indeed you do, sir!" it said warmly. "This morning,
in fact. I've already instructed the chauffeur and notified
your office."
"Fine! Well, get started on the other things, Henry."
"Yes, sir," said Henry, and assumed the curious absent
look of a robot talking on its TBR circuitsthe "Talk
Between Robots" radioas it arranged the appointments
for its master.
Morey finished his breakfast in silence, pleased with his
own virtue, at peace with the world. It wasn't so hard to be
a proper, industrious consumer if you -worked at it, he
reflected. It was only the malcontents, the ne'er-do-wells
and the incompetents who simply could not adjust to the
world around them. Well, he thought with distant pity,
someone had to suffer; you couldn't break eggs without
making an omelet. And his proper duty was not to be
some sort of wild-eyed crank, challengmg the social order
and beating his breast about injustice, but to take care of
his wife and his home.
It was too bad he couldn't really get right down to work
on consuming today. But this was his one day a week to
hold a jobfour of the other six days were devoted to
solid consumingand, besides, he had a group therapy
session scheduled as well. His analysis, Morey told him-
self, would certainly take a sharp turn for the better, now
that he had faced up to his problems.
Morey was immersed in a glow of self-righteousness as
he kissed Cherry good-by (she had finally got up, all in
a confusion of delight at the new regime) and walked out
the door to his car. He hardly noticed the little man in
enormous floppy hat and garishly ruffled trousers who
was standing almost hidden in the shrubs.
"Hey, Mac." The man's voice was almost a whisper.
"Hub? Ohwhat is it?"
The man looked around furtively. "Listen, friend," he
said rapidly, "you look like an intelligent man who could
use a little help. Times are tough; you help me. III help
you. Want to make a deal on ration stamps? Six for one.
One of yours for six of mine, the best deal youTI get
anywhere in town. Naturally, my stamps aren't exactly
the real McCoy, but they'll pass, friend, they'll pass"
Morey biinked at him. "No!" he said violently, and
pushed the man aside. Now it's racketeers, he thought
bitterly.  Slums  and  endless  sordid  preoccupation  with
rations weren't enough to inflict on Cherry; now the
neighborhood was becoming a hangout for people on the
shady side of the law. It was not, of course, the first time
he had ever been approached by a counterfeit ration-
stamp hoodlum, but never at his own front door!
Morey thought briefly, as he climbed into his car, of
calling the police. But certainly the man would be gone
before they could get there; and, after all, he had handled
it pretty well as it was.
Of course, it would be nice to get six stamps for one.
But very far from nice if he got caught.
"Good morning, Mr. Fry," tinkled the robot reception-
ist. "Won't you go right in?" With a steel-tipped finger, it
pointed to the door marked GROUP THERAPY.
Someday, Morey vowed to himself as he nodded and
complied, he would be in a position to afford a private
analyst of his own. Group therapy helped relieve the in-
finite stresses of modern living, and without it he might
find himself as badly off as the hysterical mobs in the
ration riots, or as dangerously anti-social as the counter-
feiters.  But  it  lacked  the  personal  touch.  It was,  he
thought, too public a performance of what should be a
private affair, like trying to live a happy married life with
an interfering, ever-present crowd of robots in the house
Morey brought himself up in panic. How had that
thought crept in? He was shaken visibly as he entered the
room and greeted the group to which he was assigned.
There were eleven of them: four Freudians, two Reich-
ians, two Jungians, a Gestalter, a shock therapist and the
elderly and rather quiet SuMivanite. Even the members of
the majority groups had their own individual differences in
technique and creed, but, despite four years with this par-
ticular group of analysts, Morey hadn't quite been able
to keep them separate in his mind. Their names, though,
he knew well enough.
"Morning, Doctors," he said. "What is it today?"
"Morning," said Semmelweiss morosely. "Today you
come into the room for the first time looking as if some-
thing is really bothering you, and yet the schedule calls for
psychodrama. Dr. Fairless," he appealed, "can't we change
the schedule a little bit? Fry here is obviously under a
strain; that's the time to start digging and see what he
can find. We can do your psychodrama next time, can't
we?"
Fairless shook his gracefully bald old head. "Sorry,
Doctor. If it were up to me, of coursebut you know the
rules."
"Rules, rules," jeered Semmelweiss. "Ah, what's the
use? Here's a patient in an acute anxiety state if I ever
saw oneand believe me, I saw plentyand we ignore it
because the rules say ignore it. Is that professional? Is
that how to cure a patient?"
Little Blaine said frostily, "If I may say so. Dr. Semmel-
weiss, there have been a great many cures made without
the necessity of departing from the rules. I myself, in
fact"
"You yourself!" mimicked Semmelweiss. "You your-
self never handled a patient alone in your life. When you
going to get out of a group, Blaine?"
Blaine said furiously, "Dr. Fairless, I don't think I have
to stand for this sort of personal attack. Just because
Semmelweiss has seniority and a couple of private patients
one day a week, he thinks"
"Gentlemen," said Fairless mildly. "Please, let's get on
with the work. Mr. Fry has come to us for help, not to
listen to us losing our tempers."
"Sorry," said Semmelweiss curtly. "All the same, I ap-
peal from the arbitrary and mechanistic ruling of the
chair."
Fairless inclined his head. "All in favor of the ruling of
the chair? Nine, I count. That leaves only you opposed,
Dr. Semmelweiss. We'll proceed with the psychodrama,
if the recorder will read us the notes and comments of the
last session.'*
The recorder, a pudgy, low-ranking youngster named
Sprogue, flipped back the pages of his notebook and read
in a chanting voice, "Session of twenty-fourth May, sub-
ject, Morey Fry; in attendance. Doctors Fairless, Bileck,
Semmelweiss, Carrado, Weber"
Fairless interrupted kindly, "Just the last page, if you
please. Dr. Sprogue."
"Umoh, yes. After a ten-minute recess for additional
Rorschachs and an electro-encephalogram, the group con-
vened and conducted rapid-fire word association. Results
were tabulated and compared with standard deviation
patterns,  and it was  determined that subject's major
traumas derived from, respectively"
Morey found his attention waning. Therapy was good;
everybody knew that, but every once in a while he found
it a little dull. If it weren't for therapy, though, there was
no telling what might happen. Certainly, Morey told him-
self, he had been helped considerablyat least he hadn't
set fire to his house and shrieked at the fire-robots, like
Newell down the block when his eldest daughter divorced
her husband and came back to live with him, bringing her
ration quota along, of course. Morey hadn't even been
tempted to do anything as outrageously, frighteningly im-
moral as destroy things or -waste themwell, he admitted
to himself honestly, perhaps a little tempted, once in a
great while. But never anything important enough to worry
about; he was sound, perfectly sound.
He looked up, starfled. All the doctors were staring at
him. "Mr. Fry," Fairless repeated, "will you take your
place?"
"Certainly," Morey said hastily. "Uhwhere?"
Semmelweiss guffawed. "Told you. Never mind, Morey;
you didn't miss much. We're going to run through one of
the big scenes in your life, the one you told us about last
time. Remember? You were fourteen years old, you said.
Christmas time. Your mother had made you a promise."
Morey swallowed. "I remember," he said unhappily.
"Well, all right. Where do I stand?"
"Right here," said Fairless. "You're you, Carrado is
your mother. I'm your father. Will the doctors not par-
ticipating mind moving back? Fine. Now, Morey, here we
are on Christmas morning. Merry Christmas, Morey!"
"Merry Christmas," Morey said half-heartedly. "Uh
Father dear, where's myuhmy puppy that Mother
promised me?"
"Puppy!" said Fairless heartily. "Your mother and I
have something much better than a puppy for you. Just
take a look under the tree thereit's a robot! Yes, Morey,
your very own robota full-size thirty-eight-tube fully
automatic companion robot for you! Go ahead, Morey,
go right up and speak to it. Its name is Henry. Go on,
boy."
Morey felt a sudden, incomprehensible tingle inside the
bridge of his nose. He said shakily, "But I1 didn't want
a robot."
"Of course you want a robot," Carrado interrupted.
"Go on, child, play with your nice robot."
Morey said violently, "I hate robots!" He looked around
him at the doctors, at the gray-paneled consulting room.
He added defiantly, "You hear me, all of you? I still hate
robots!"
There was a second's pause; then the questions began.
It was half an hour before the receptionist came in and
announced that time was up.
In that half hour, Morey had got over his trembling and
lost his wild, momentary passion, but he had remembered
what for thirteen years he had forgotten.
He hated robots.
The surprising thing was not that young Morey had
hated robots. It was that the Robot Riots, the ultimate
violent outbreak of flesh against metal, the battle to the
death between mankind and its machine heirs . . . never
happened. A little boy hated robots, but the man he be-
came worked with them hand in hand.
And yet, always and always before, the new worker,
the competitor for the job, was at once and inevitably
outside the law. The waves swelled inflie Irish, the
Negroes, the Jews, the Italians. They were squeezed into
their ghettoes, where they encysted, seethed and struck
out, until the burgeoning generations became indistinguish-
able.
For the robots, that genetic relief was not in sight. And
still the conflict never came. The feed-back circuits aimed
the anti-aircraft guns and, reshaped and newly planned,
found a place in a new sort of machinetogether with a
miraculous trail of cams and levers, an indestructible and
potent power source and a hundred thousand parts and
sub-assemblies.
And the first robot clanked off the bench.
Its  mission  was  its  own  destruction;  but  from  the
scavenged wreck of its pilot body, a hundred better robots
drew their inspiration. And the hundred went to work,
and hundreds more, until there were millions upon untold
millions.
And still the riots never happened.
For the robots came bearing a gift and the name of it
was "Plenty."
And by the time the gift had shown its own unguessed
ills, the time for a Robot Riot was past. Plenty is a habit-
forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick
it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the. convul-
sions that follow may wreck the body once and for all.
The addict craves the grainy white powder; he doesn't
hate it, or the runner who sells it to him. And if Morey
as a little boy could hate the robot that had deprived him
of his pup, Morey the man was perfectly aware that the
robots were his servants and his friends.
But the little Morey inside the manhe had never been
convinced.
Morey ordinarily looked forward to his work. The one
day a week at which he did anything was a wonderful
change from the dreary consume, consume, consume
grind. He entered the bright-lit drafting room of the Brad-
moor Amusements Company with a feeling of uplift.
But as he was changing from street garb to his drafting
smock, Howland from Procurement came over with a
knowing look. "Wainwright's been looking for you," How-
land whispered. "Better get right in there."
Morey nervously thanked him and got. Wainwright's
office was the size of a phone booth and as bare as
Antarctic ice. Every time Morey saw it, he felt his in-
sides churn with envy. Think of a desk with nothing on it
but work surfaceno calendar-clock, no twelve-color pen
rack, no dictating machinesi
He squeezed himself in and sat down while Wainwright
finished a phone call. He mentally reviewed the possible
reasons why Wainwright would want to talk to him in
person instead of over the phone, or by dropping a word
to him as he passed through the drafting room.
Very few of them were good.
Wainwright put down the phone and Morey straight-
ened up. "You sent for me?" he asked.
Wainwright in a chubby world was aristocratically lean.
As General Superintendent of the Design & Development
Section of the Bradmoor Amusements Company, he
ranked high in the upper section of the well-to-do. He
rasped, "I certainly did. Fry, just what the hell do you
think you're up to now?"
"I don't know what you m-mean, Mr. Wainwright,"
Morey stammered, crossing off the list of possible reasons
for the interview all of the good ones.
  Wainwright snorted. "I guess you don't. Not because
you weren't told, but because you don't want to know.
Think back a whole week. What did I have you on the
carpet for then?"
Morey said sickly, "My ration book. Look, Mr. Wain-
wright, I know I'm running a little bit behind, but"
"But nothing! How do you think it looks to the Com-
mittee, Fry? They got a complaint from the Ration Board
about you. Naturally they passed it on to me. And na-
turally I'm going to pass it right along to you. The ques-
tion is, what are you going to do about it? Good God,
man, look at these figurestextiles, fifty-one per cent;
food, sixty-seven per cent; amusements and entertain-
ment, thirty per cent! You haven't come up to your ration
in anything for months!"
Morey stared at the card miserably. "Wethat is, my
wife and Ijust had a long talk about that last night, Mr.
Wainwright. And, believe me, we're going to do better.
We're going to buckle right down and get to work and
uhdo better," he finished weakly.
Wainwright nodded, and for the first time there was a
note of sympathy in his voice. "Your wife. Judge Eton's
daughter, isn't she? Good family. I've met the Judge
many times." Then, gruffly, "Well, nevertheless, Fry, I'm
warning you. I don't care how you straighten this out, but
don't let the Committee mention this to me again."
"No, sir."
"All right. Finished with the schematics on the new
K-50?"
Morey brightened. "Just about, sir! I'm putting the
first section on tape today. I'm very pleased with it, Mr.
Wainwright, honestly I am. I've got more than eighteen
thousand moving parts in it now, and that's without"
"Good. Good." Wainwright glanced down at his desk.
"Get back to it. And straighten out this other thing. You
can do it. Fry. Consuming is everybody's duty. Just keep
that in mind."
Howland followed Morey out of the drafting room,
down to the spotless shops. "Bad time?" he inquired
solicitously. Moray grunted. It was none of Howland's
business.
Howland looked over his shoulder as he was setting up
the programing panel. Morey studied the matrices silently,
then got busy reading the summary tapes, checking them
back against the schematics, setting up the instructions on
the programing board. Howland kept quiet as Morey com-
pleted the setup and ran off a test tape. It checked per-
fectly; Morey stepped back to light a cigarette in celebra-
tion before pushing the start button.
Howland said, "Go on, run it. I can't go until you put
it in the works."
Morey grinned and pushed the button. The board
lighted up; within it, a tiny metronomic beep began to
pulse. That was all. At the other end of the quarter-mile
shed, Morey knew, the automatic sorters and conveyers
were fingering through the copper reels and steel ingots,
measuring hoppers of plastic powder and colors, setting
up an intricate weaving path for the thousands of in-
dividual components that would make up Bradmoor's new
K-50 Spin-a-Game. But from where they stood, in the
elaborately muraled programing room, nothing showed.
Bradmoor was an ultra-modernized plant; in the manu-
facturing end, even robots had been dispensed with in
favor of machines that guided themselves.
Morey glanced at his watch and logged in the starting
time while Howland quickly counter-checked Morey's
raw-material flow program.
"Checks out," Howland said solemnly, slapping him
on the back. "Calls for a celebration. Anyway, it's your
first design, isn't it?"
"Yes. First all by myself, at any rate."
Howland was already fishing in his private locker for
the bottle he kept against emergency needs. He poured
with a flourish. "To Morey Fry," he said, "our most fa-
vorite designer, in whom we are much pleased."
Morey drank. It went down easily enough. Morey had
conscientiously used his liquor rations for years, but he
had never gone beyond the minimum, so that although
liquor was no new experience to him, the single drink
immediately warmed him. It warmed his mouth, his
throat, the hollows of his chest; and it settled down with
a warm glow inside him. Howland, exerting himself to be
nice, complimented Morey fatuously on the design and
poured another drink. Morey didn't utter any protest at
all.
Howland drained his glass. "You may wonder," he
said formally, "why I am so pleased with you, Morey Fry.
I will tell you why this is."
Morey grinned. "Please do."
Howland nodded. "I will. It's because I am pleased
with the world, Morey. My wife left me last night."
Morey was as shocked as only a recent bridegroom can
be by the news of a crumbling marriage. "That's too ba
I mean is that a fact?"
"Yes, she left my beds and board and five robots, and
I'm happy to see her go." He poured another drink for
both of them. "Women. Can't live with them and can't
live without them. First you sigh and pant and chase
after 'emyou like poetry?" he demanded suddenly.
Morey said cautiously, "Some poetry."
Howland quoted: " 'How long, my love, shall I behold
this wall between our gardensyours the rose, and mine
the swooning lily.' Like it? I wrote it for Jocelynthat's
my wifewhen we were first going together."
"It's beautiful," said Morey.
"She wouldn't talk to me for two days." Howland
drained his drink. "Lots of spirit, that girl. Anyway, I
hunted her like a tiger. And then I caught her. Wowl"
Morey took a deep drink from his own glass. "What
do you mean, wow?" he asked.
"Wow." Howland pointed his finger at Morey. "Wow,
that's what I mean. We got married and I took her home
to the dive I was living in, and wow we had a kid, and
wow I got in a little trouble with the Ration Board
nothing serious, of course, but there was a mixupand
wow fights.
"Everything was a fight," he explained. "She'd start
with a little nagging, and naturally I'd say something or
other back, and bang we were off. Budget, budget, budget;
I hope to die if I ever hear the word 'budget' again. Morey,
you're a married man; you know what it's like. Tell me
the truth, weren't you Just about ready to blow your top
the first time you caught your wife cheating on the
budget?"
"Cheating on the budget?" Morey was startled. "Cheat-
ing how?"
"Oh, lots of ways. Making your portions bigger than
hers. Sneaking extra shirts for you on her clothing ration.
You know."
"Damn it, I do not know!" cried Morey. "Cherry
wouldn't do anything like that!"
Rowland looked at him opaquely for a long second.
"Of course not," he said at last. "Let's have another
drink."
Ruffled, Morey held out his glass. Cherry wasn't the
type of girl to cheat. Of. course she wasn't. A fine, loving
girl like hera pretty girl, of a good family; she wouldn't
know how to begin.
Howland was saying, in a sort of chant, "No more
budget. No more fights. No more 'Daddy never treated
me like this.' No more nagging. No more extra radons
for household allowance. No moreMorey, what do you
say we go out and have a few drinks? I know a place
where"
"Sorry, Howland," Morey said. "I've got to get back
to the office, you know."
Howland guffawed. He held out his wristwatch. As
Morey, a little unsteadily, bent over it, it tinkled out the
hour. It was a matter of minutes before the office dosed
for the day.
"Oh," said Morey. "I didn't realizeWell, anyway,
Howland, thanks, but I can't. My wife will be expecting
me."
"She certainly will," Howland sniggered. "Won't catch
her eating up your rations and hers tonight."
Morey said tightly, "Howland!"
"Oh, sorry, sorry." Howland waved an arm. "Don't
mean to say anything against your wife, of course. Guess
maybe Jocelyn soured me on women. But honest, Morey,
you'd like this place. Name of Uncle Piggotty's, down in
the Old Town. Crazy bunch hangs out there. You'd like
them. Couple nights last week they had1 mean, you
understand, Morey, I don't go there as often as all that,
but I just happened to drop in and"
Morey interrupted firmly. "Thank you, Rowland. Must
go home. Wife expects it. Decent of you to offer. Good
night. Be seeing you."
He walked out, turned at the door to bow politely, and
in turning back cracked the side of his face against the
door jamb. A sort of pleasant numbness had taken pos-
session of his entire skin surface, though, and it wasn't
until he perceived Henry chattering at him sympathetic-
ally that he noticed a trickle of blood running down the
side of his face.
"Mere flesh wound," he said with dignity. "Nothing to
cause you least conshterconsternation, Henry. Now
kindly shut your ugly face. Want to think."
And he slept in the car all the way home.
It was worse than a hangover. The name is "hold-
over." You've had some drinks; you've started to sober
up by catching a little sleep. Then you are required to be
awake and to function. The consequent state has the
worst features of hangover and intoxication; your head
thumps and your mouth tastes like the floor of a bear-pit,
but you are nowhere near sober.
There is one cure. Morey said thickly, "Let's have a
cocktail, dear."
Cherry was delighted to share a cocktail with him be-
fore dinner. Cherry, Morey thought lovingly, was a won-
derful, wonderful, wonderful
He found his head nodding in time to his thoughts and
the motion made him wince.
Cherry flew to his side and touched his temple. "Is it
bothering you, darling?" she asked solicitously. "Where
you ran into the door, I mean?"
Morey looked at her sharply, but her expression was
open and adoring. He said bravely, "Just a little. Nothing
to it, really."
The butler brought the cocktails and retired. Cherry
lifted her glass. Morey raised his, caught a whiff of the
liquor and nearly dropped it. He bit down hard on his
churning insides and forced himself to swallow.
.He was surprised but grateful: It stayed down. In a
moment, the curious phenomenon of warmth began to
repeat itself. He swallowed the rest of the drink and held
out his glass for a refill. He even tried a smile. Oddly
enough, his face didn't fall off.
One more drink did it. Morey felt happy and relaxed,
but by no means drunk. They went in to dinner in fine
spirits. They chatted cheerfully with each other and Henry,
and Morey found time to feel sentimentally sorry for poor
Howland, who couldn't make a go of his marriage, when
marriage was obviously such an easy relationship, so bene-
ficial to both sides, so warm and relaxing . . .
Startled, he said, "What?"
Cherry repeated, "It's the cleverest scheme I ever heard
of. Such a funny little man, dear. All kind of nervous, if
you know what I mean. He kept looking at the door as if
he was expecting someone, but of course that was silly.
None of his friends would have come to our house to see
him."
Morey said tensely, "Cherry, please! What was that
you said about ration stamps?"
"But I told you, darling! It was just after you left this
morning. This funny little man came to the door; the
butler said he wouldn't give any name. Anyway, I talked
to him. I thought he might be a neighbor and I certainly
would never be rude to any neighbor who might come to
call, even if the neighborhood was"
"The ration stamps!" Morey begged. '"Did I hear you
say he was peddling phony ration stamps?"
Cherry said uncertainly, "Well, I suppose that in a way
they're phony. The way he explained it, they weren't the
regular official kind. But it was four for one, dearfour
of his stamps for one of ours. So I just took out our house-
hold book and steamed off a couple of weeks' stamps
and"
"How many?" Morey bellowed.
Cherry biinked. "Aboutabout two weeks' quota," she
said faintly. "Was that wrong, dear?"
Morey closed bis eyes dizzily. "A couple of weeks'
stamps," he repeated. "Four for oneyou didn't even get
the regular rate."
Cherry wailed, "How was I supposed to know? I never
had anything like this when I was home! We didn't have
food riots and slums and all these horrible robots and
filthy little revolting men coming to the door!"
Morey stared at her woodenly. She was crying again,
but it made no impression on the case-hardened armor
that was suddenly thrown around his heart.
Henry made a tentative sound that, in a human, would
have been a preparatory cough, but Morey froze him with
a white-eyed look.
Morey said in a dreary monotone that barely penetrated
the sound of Cherry's tears, "Let me tell you just what it
was you did. Assuming, at best, that these stamps you got
are at least average good counterfeits, and not so bad
that the best thing to do with them is throw them away
before we get caught with them in our possession, you
have approximately a two-month supply of funny stamps.
In case you didn't know it, those ration books are not
merely ornamental. They have to be turned in every
month to prove that we have completed our consuming
quota for the month.
"When they are turned in, they are spot-checked. Every
book is at least glanced at. A big chunk of them are gone
over very carefully by the inspectors, and a certain per-
centage are tested by ultra-violet, infra-red. X-ray, radio-
isotopes,  bleaches,  fumes,  paper  chromatography  and
every other damned test known to Man." His voice was
rising to an uneven crescendo. "If we are lucky enough
to get away with using any of these stamps at all, we
daren'twe simply dare notuse more than one or two
counterfeits to every dozen or more real stamps.
"That means, Cherry, that what you bought is not a
.two-month supply, but maybe a two-year supplyand
since, as you no doubt have never noticed, the things have
expiration dates on them, there is probably no chance in
the world that we can ever hope to use more than half of
them." He was bellowing by the time he pushed back his
chair and lowered over her. "Moreover," he went on,
"right now, "right as of this minute, we have to make up
the stamps you gave away, which means that at the very
best we are going to be on double rations for two weeks
or so.
"And that says nothing about the one feature of this
whole grisly mess that you seem to have thought of least,
namely that counterfeit stamps are against the lawl I'm
poor. Cherry; I live in a slum, and I know it; I've got a
long way to go betore I'm as rich or respected or powerful
as your father, about whom I am beginning to get con-
siderably tired of hearing. But poor as I may be, I can
tell you this for sure: Up until now, at any rate, I have
been honest."
Cherry's tears had stopped entirely and she was bowed
white-faced and dry-eyed by the time Morey had finished.
He had spent himself; there was no violence left in him.
He stared dismally at Cherry for a moment, then turned
wordlessly and stamped out of the house.
Marriage! he thought as he left.
He walked for hours, blind to where he was going.
What brought him back to awareness was a sensation
he had not felt in a dozen years. It was not, Morey
abruptly realized, the dying traces of his hangover that
made his stomach feel so queer. He was hungryactually
hungry.
He looked about him. He was in the Old Town, miles
from home, jostled by crowds of lower-class people. The
block he was on was as atrocious a slum as Morey had
ever seenChinese pagodas stood next to rococo imita-
tions of the chapels around Versailles; gingerbread marred
every facade; no building was without its brilliant signs
and flarelights.
He saw a blindingly overdecorated eating establishment
called Billie's Budget Busy Bee and crossed the street
toward it, dodging through the unending streams of traf-
fic. It was a miserable excuse for a restaurant, but Morey
was in no mood to care. He found a seat under a potted
palm, as far from the tinkling fountains and robot string
ensemble as he could manage, and ordered recklessly, pay-
ing no attention to the ration prices. As the waiter was
gliding noiselessly away, Morey had a sickening realiza-
tion: He'd come out without his ration book. He groaned
out loud; it was too late to leave without causing a dis-
turbance. But then, he thought rebelliously, what differ-
ence did one more unrationed meal make, anyhow?
Food made him feel a little better. He finished the last
of his profiterole au chocolate, not even leaving on the
plate the uneaten one-third that tradition permitted, and
paid his check. The robot cashier reached automatically
for his ration book. Morey had a moment of grandeur as
he said simply, "No ration stamps."
Robot cashiers are not equipped to display surprise, but
this one tried. The man behind Morey in line audibly
caught his breath, and less audibly mumbled something
about slummers. Morey took it as a compliment and strode
outside feeling almost in good humor.
Good enough to go home to Cherry? Morey thought
seriously of it for a second; but he wasn't going to pre-
tend he was wrong and certainly Cherry wasn't going to
be willing to admit that she was at fault.
Besides, Morey told himself grimly, she was undoubt-
edly asleep. That was an annoying thing about Cherry at
best: she never had any trouble getting to sleep. Didn't
even use her quota of sleeping tablets, though Morey had
spoken to her about it more than once. Of course, he re-
minded himself, he had been so polite and tactful about it,
as befits a newlywed, that very likely she hadn't even
understood that it was a complaint. Well, that would stop!
Man's man Morey Fry, wearing no collar ruff but his
own, strode determinedly down the streets of the Old
Town.
"Hey, Joe, want a good time?"
Morey took one unbelieving look. "You again!" he
roared.
The little man stared at him in genuine surprise. Then
a faint glimmer of recognition crossed his face.  "Oh,
yeah," he said. "This morning, hub?" He clucked com-
miseratingly. "Too bad you wouldn't deal with me. Your
wife was a lot smarter. Of course, you got me a little sore,
Jack, so naturally I had to raise the price a little bit."
"You skunk, you cheated my poor wife blind! You and
I are going to the local station house and talk this over."
The little man pursed his lips. "We are, hub?"
Morey nodded vigorously. "Damn right! And' let me
tell you" He stopped in the middle of a threat as a
large hand cupped around his shoulder.
The equally large man who owned the hand said, in a
mild and cultured voice, "Is this gentleman disturbing
you, Sam?"
"Not so far," the little man conceded. "He might want
to, though, so don't go away."
Morey wrenched his shoulder away. "Don't think you
can strongarm me. I'm taking you to the police."
Sam shook his head unbelievingly. "You mean you're
going to call the law in on this?"
"I certainly am!"
Sam sighed regretfully. "What do you think of that,
Walter? Treating his wife like that. Such a nice lady, too."
"What are you talking about?" Morey demanded, stung
on a peculiarly sensitive spot..
"I'm talking about your wife," Sam explained. "Of
course. I'm not married myself. But it seems to me that if
I was, I wouldn't call the police when my wife was en-
gaged in some kind of criminal activity or other. No, sir,
I'd try to settle it myself. Tell you what," he advised, "why
don't you talk this over with her? Make her see the error
of"
"Wait a minute," Morey interrupted. "You mean you'd
involve my wife in this thing?"
The man spread his hands helplessly. "It's not me that
would involve her. Buster," he said. "She already involved
her own self. It takes two to make a crime, you know. I
sell, maybe; I won't deny it. But after all, I can't sell unless
somebody buys, can I?"
Morey stared at him glumly. He glanced in quick specu-
lation at the large-sized Walter; but Walter was just as big
as he'd remembered, so that took care of that. Violence
was out; the police were out; that left no really attractive
way of capitalizing on the good luck of running into the
man again.
Sam said, "Well, I'm glad to see that's off your mind.
Now, returning to my original question, Mac, how would
you like a good time? You look like a smart fellow to me;
you look like you'd be kind of interested in a place I
happen to know of down the block."
Morey said bitterly, "So you're a dive-steerer, too. A
real talented man."
"I admit it," Sam agreed. "Stamp business is slow at
night, in my experience. People have their minds more on
a good time. And, believe me, a good time is what I can
show 'em. Take this place I'm talking about, Uncle Pig-
gotty's is the name of it, it's what I would call an unusual
kind of place. Wouldn't you say so, Walter?"
"Oh, I agree with you entirely," Walter rumbled.
But Morey was hardly listening. He said, "Uncle Pig-
gotty's, you say?"
"That's right," said Sam.
Morey frowned for a moment, digesting an idea. Uncle
Piggotty's sounded like the place Howland had been talk-
ing about back at the plant; it might be interesting, at that.
While he was making up his mind, Sam slipped an arm
through his on one side and Walter amiably wrapped a
big hand around the other. Morey found himself walking.
"YouTI like it," Sam promised comfortably. "No hard
feelings about this morning, sport? Of course not. Once
you get a look at Piggotty's, youTI get over your mad, any-
how. It's something special. I swear, on what they pay me
for bringing in customers, I wouldn't do it unless I believed
in it."
"Dance, Jack?" the hostess yelled over the noise at the
bar. She stepped back, lifted her flounced skirts to ankle
height and executed a tricky nine-step.
"My name is Morey," Morey yelled back. "And I don't
want to dance, thanks."
The hostess shrugged, frowned meaningfully at Sam
and danced away.
Sam flagged the bartender. "First round's on us," he
explained to Morey. "Then we won't bother you any
more. Unless you want us to, of course. Like the place?"
Morey hesitated, but Sam didn't wait. "Fine place," he
yelled, and picked up the drink the bartender left him.
"See you around."
He and the big man were gone. Morey stared after
them uncertainly, then gave it up. He was here, anyhow;
might as well at least have a drink. He ordered and looked
around.
Uncle Piggotty's was a third-rate dive disguised to look,
in parts of it at least, like one of the exclusive upper-class
country clubs. The bar, for instance, was treated to re-
semble the clean lines of nailed wood; but underneath the
surface treatment, Morey could detect the intricate lamina-
tions of plyplastic. What at first glance appeared to be
burlap hangings were in actuality elaborately textured
synthetics. And all through the bar the motif was carried
out.
A floor show of sorts was going on, but nobody seemed
to be paying much attention to it. Morey, straining briefly
to hear the master of ceremonies, gathered that the wit was
on a more than mildly vulgar level. There was a dispirited
string of chorus beauties in long ruffled pantaloons and
diaphanous tops; one of them, Morey was almost sure, was
the hostess who had talked to him just a few moments
before.
Next to him a man was declaiming to a middle-aged
woman:
Smote I the monstrous rock, yahoo!
Smote I the turgid tube. Bully Boy!
Smote I the cankered hill
"Why, Morey!" he interrupted himself. "What are you
doing here?"
He turned farther around and Morey recognized him.
"Hello, Howland," he said. "Iuh1 happened to be
free tonight, so I thought"
Howland sniggered. "Well, guess your wife is more
liberal than mine was. Order a drink, boy."
"Thanks, I've got one," said Morey.
The woman, with a tigerish look at Morey, said, "Don't
stop, Everett. That was one of your most beautiful things."
"Oh, Morey's heard my poetry," Howland said. "Morey,
I'd like you to meet a very lovely and talented young lady,
Tanaquil Bigelow. Morey works in the office with me,
Tan."
"Obviously," said Tanaquil Bigelow in a frozen voice,
and Morey hastily withdrew the hand he had begun to
put out.
The conversation stuck there, impaled, the woman
cold, Rowland relaxed and abstracted, Morey wondering
if, after all, this had been such a good idea. He caught the
eye-cell of the robot bartender and ordered a round of
drinks for the three of them, politely putting them on
Howland's ration book. By the time the drinks had come
and Morey had just got around to deciding that it wasn't
a very good idea, the woman had all of a sudden become
thawed.
She said abruptly, "You look like the kind of man who
thinks, Morey, and I like to talk to that kind of man.
Frankly, Morey, I just don't have any patience at all with
the stupid, stodgy men who just work in their offices all
day and eat all their dinners every night, and gad about
and consume like mad and where does it all get them,
anyhow? That's right, I can see you understand. Just one
crazy rush of consume, consume from the day you're born
plop to the day you're buried pop! And who's to blame if
not the robots?"
Faintly, a tinge of worry began to appear on the surface
of Howland's relaxed calm. "Tan," he chided, "Morey
may not be very interested in politics."
Politics, Morey thought; well, at least that was a clue.
He'd had the dizzying feeling, while the woman was talk-
ing, that he himself was the ball in the games machine he
had designed for the shop earlier that day. Following the
woman's conversation might, at that, give his next design
some valuable pointers in swoops, curves and obstacles.
He said, with more than half truth, "No, please go on,
Miss Bigelow. I'm very much interested."
She smiled; then abruptly her face changed to a fright-
ening scowl. Morey flinched, but evidently the scowl
wasn't meant for him. "Robots!" she hissed. "Supposed
to work for us, aren't they? Hah! We're their slaves, slaves
for every moment of every miserable day of our lives.
Slaves! Wouldn't you like to join us and be free, Morey?"
Morey took cover in his drink. He made an expressive
gesture with his free handexpressive of exactly what, he
didn't truly know, for he was lost. But it seemed to satisfy
the woman.
She said accusingly, "Did you know that more than
three-quarters of the people in this country have had a
nervous breakdown in the past five years and four months?
That more than half of them are under the constant care
of psychiatrists for psychosisnot just plain ordinary
neurosis like my husband's got and Rowland here has got
and you've got, but psychosis. Like I've got. Did you know
that? Did you know that forty per cent of the population
are essentially manic depressive, thirty-one per cent are
schizoid, thirty-eight per cent have an assortment of other
unfixed psychogenic disturbances and twenty-four"
"Hold it a minute. Tan," Howland interrupted critically.
"You've got too many per cents there. Start over again."
"Oh, the hell with it," the woman said moodily. "I wish
my husband were here. He expresses it so much better
than I do." She swallowed her drink. "Since you've wrig-
gled off the hook," she said nastily to Morey, "how about
setting up another roundon my ration book this time?"
Morey did; it was the simplest thing to do in his con-
fusion. When that was gone, they had another on How-
land's book.
As near as he could figure out, the woman, her husband
and quite possibly Howland as well belonged to some kind
of anti-robot group. Morey had heard of such things; they
had a quasi-legal status, neither approved nor prohibited,
but he had never come into contact with them before. Re-
membering the hatred he had so painfully relived at the
psychodrama session, he thought anxiously that perhaps
he belonged with them. But, question them though he
might, he couldn't seem to get the principles of the organ-
ization firmly in mind.
The woman finally gave up trying to explain it, and
went off to find her husband while Morey and Howland
had another drink and listened to two drunks squabble
over who bought the next round. They were at the Al-
phonse-Gaston stage of inebriation; they would regret it m
the morning; for each was bending over backward to per-
mit the other to pay the ration points. Morey wondered
uneasily about his own points; Howland was certainly get-
ting credit for a lot of Morey's driaking tonight. Served
him right for forgetting his book, of course.
When the woman came back, it was with the large man
Morey had encountered in the company of Sam, the coun-
terfeiter, steerer and general man about Old Town.
"A remarkably small world, isn't it?" boomed Walter
Bigelow, only slightly crushing Morey's hand in his. "Well,
sir, my wife has told me how interested you are in the
basic philosophical drives behind our movement, and I
should like to discuss them further with you. To begin
with, sir, have you considered the principle of Twoness?"
Morey said, "Why"
"Very good," said Bigelow courteously. He cleared his
throat and declaimed:
Han-headed Cathay saw it first,
Bright as brightest solar burst;
Whipped it into boy and girl,
The blinding spiral-sliced swirl:
Yang
And Yin.
He shrugged deprecatingly. "Just the first stanza," he
said. "I don't know if you got much out of it."
"Well, no," Morey admitted.
"Second stanza," Bigelow said firmly:
Hegal saw if, saw it clear;
Jackal Marx drew near, drew near:
O'er his shoulder saw it plain,
Turned it upside down again:
Yang
And Yin.
There was an expectant pause. Morey said, "Iuh"
"Wraps it all up, doesn't it?" Bigelow's wife demanded.
"Oh, if only others could see it as clearly as you do! The
robot peril and the robot savior. Starvation and surfeit.
Always twoness, always!"
Bigelow patted Morey's shoulder. "The next stanza
makes it even clearer," he said. "It's really very clever
I shouldn't say it, of course, but it's Howland's as much
as it's mine. He helped me with the verses." Morey darted
a glance at Howland, but Howland was carefully looking
away. "Third stanza," said Bigelow. "This is a hard one,
because it's long, so pay attention."
Justice, tip your sightless scales;
One pan. rises, one pan falls.
"Howland," he interrupted himself, "are you sure about
that rhyme? I always trip over it. Well, anyway:
Add to A and B grows less;
A's B's partner, nonetheless.
Next, the Twoness that there be
In even electricity.
Chart the current as ifs found:
Sine the hot lead, line the ground.
The wild sine dances, soars and falls,
But only to figures the zero calls.
Sine wave, scales, all things that be
Share a reciprocity.
Male and female, light and dark:
Name the numbers of Noah's Ark!
Yang
And Yini
"Dearest!" shrieked Bigelow's wife. "You've never done
it better!" There was a spatter of applause,  and Morey
realized for the first time that half the bar had stopped its
noisy revel to listen to them. Bigelow was evidently quite
a well-known figure here.
Morey said weakly, "I've never heard anything like it"
He turned hesitantly to Howland, who promptly said,
"Drink! What we all need right now is a drink."
They had a drink on Bigelow's book.
Morey got Howland aside and asked him, "Look, level
with me. Are these people nuts?"
Howland showed pique. "No. Certainly not."
"Does that poem mean anything? Does this whole busi-
ness of twoness mean anything?"
Howland shrugged. "If it means something to them, it
means something. They're philosophers, Morey. They see
deep into things. You don't know what a privilege it is for
me to be allowed to associate with them."
They had another drink. On Rowland's book, of course.
Morey eased Walter Bigelow over to a quiet spot. He
said, "Leaving twoness out of it for the moment, what's
this about the robots?"
Bigelow looked at him round-eyed. "Didn't you under-
stand the poem?"
"Of course I did. But diagram it for me in simple terms
so I can tell my wife."
Bigelow beamed. "It's about the dichotomy of robots,"
he explained. "Like the little salt mill that the boy wished
for: it ground out salt and ground outsalt and ground
out salt. He had to have salt, but not that much salt.
Whitehead explains it clearly"
They had another drink on Bigelow's book.
Morey wavered over Tanaquil Bigelow. He said fuzzily,
"Listen. Mrs. Walter Tanaquil Strongarm Bigelow. Listen."
She grinned smugly at him. "Brown hair," she said
dreamily.
Morey shook his head vigorously. "Never mind hair," he
ordered. "Never mind poem. Listen. In pre-cise and el-e-
men~ta.-ry terms, explain to me what is wrong with the
world today."
"Not enough brown hair," she said promptly.
"Never mind hair!"
"All right," she said agreeably. "Too many robots. Too
many robots make too much of everything."
"Ha! Got it!" Morey exclaimed triumphantly. "Get rid
of robots!"
"Oh, no. No! No! No. We wouldn't eat. Everything is
mechanized. Can't get rid of them, can't slow down pro-
ductionslowing down is dying, stopping is quicker dying.
Principle of twoness is the concept that clarifies all
these"
"No!" Morey said violently. "What should we do?"
"Do? I'll tell you what we should do, if that's what you
want. I can tell you."
"Then tell me."
"What we should do is" Tanaquil hiccupped with a
look of refilled consternation"have another drink."
They had another drink. He gallantly let her pay, of
course. She ungallantly argued with the bartender about
the ration points due her.
Though not a two-fisted drinker, Morey tried. He really
worked at it.
He paid the price, too. For some little time before his
limbs stopped moving, his mind stopped functioning.
Blackout. Almost a blackout, at any rate, for all he re-
tamed of the late evening was a kaleidoscope of people
and places and things. Howland was there, drunk as a
skunk, disgracefully drunk, Morey remembered thinking
as he stared up at Howland from the floor. The Bigelows
were there. His wife, Cherry, solicitous and amused, was
there. And oddly enough, Henry was there.
It was very, very hard to reconstruct. Morey devoted a
whole morning's hangover to the effort. It was important
to reconstruct it, for some reason. But Morey couldn't
even remember what the reason was; and finally he dis-
missed it, guessing that he had either solved the secret of
twoness or whether Tanaquil Bigelow's remarkable figure
was natural.
He did, however, know that the next morning he had
waked in his own bed, with no recollection of getting
there. No recollection of anything much, at least not of
anything that fit into the proper chronological order or
seemed to mesh with anything else, after the dozenth drink
when he and Howland, arms around each other's shoul-
ders, composed a new verse on twoness and, plagiarizing
an old marching tune, howled it across the boisterous bar-
room:
A twoness on the scene much later
Rests in your refrigerator.
Heat your house and insulate if.
Next your food: Refrigerate it.
Frost will damp your Freon coils,
So flux in nichrome till it boils.
See the picture? Heat in cold
In heat in cold, the story's told!
Giant-writ the sacred scrawl:
Oh, the twoness of it all!
Yang
And Yin!
It had, at any rate, seemed to mean something at the
time.
If alcohol opened Morey's eyes to the fact that there
was a twoness, perhaps alcohol was what he needed. For
there was.
Call it a dichotomy, if the word seems more couth. A
kind of two-pronged struggle, the struggle of two unweary-
ing runners in an immortal race. There is the refrigerator
inside the house. The cold air, the bubble of heated air
that is the house, the bubble of cooled air that is the re-
frigerator, the momentary bubble of heated air that de-
frosts it. Call the heat Yang, if you will. Call the cold Yin.
Yang overtakes Yin. Then Yin passes Yang. Then Yang
passes Yin. Then
Give them other names. Call Yin a mouth; call Yang a
hand.
If the hand rests, the mouth will starve. If the mouth
stops, the hand will die. The hand, Yang, moves faster.
Yin may not lag behind.
Then call Yang a robot.
And remember that a pipeline has two ends.
Like any once-in-a-lifetime lush, Morey braced himself
for the consequencesand found startledly that there
were none.
Cherry was a surprise to him. "You were so funny,"
she giggled. "And, honestly, so romantic."
He shakily swallowed his breakfast coffee.
The office staff roared and slapped him on the back.
"Howland tells us you're living high, boy!" they bellowed
more or less in the same words. "Hey, listen to what
Morey didwent on the town for the night of a lifetime
and didn't even bring his ration book along to cash in!"
They thought it was a wonderful joke.
But, then, everything was going well. Cherry, it seemed,
had reformed out of recognition. True, she still hated to go
out in the evening and Morey never saw her forcing herself
to gorge on unwanted food or play undesired games. But,
moping into the pantry one afternoon, he found to his in-
credulous delight that they were well ahead of their ration
quotas. In some items, in fact, they were outa month's
supply and more was gone ahead of schedule!
Nor was it the counterfeit stamps, for he had found
them tucked behind a bain-marie and quietly burned them.
He cast about for ways of complimenting her, but caution
prevailed. She was sensitive on the subject; leave it be.
And virtue had its reward.
Wainwright called him in, all smiles. "Morey, great
news! We've all appreciated your work here and we've
been able to show it in some more tangible way than
compliments. I didn't want to say anything till it was
definite, butyour status has been reviewed by Classifica-
tion and the Ration Board. You're out of Class Four
Minor, Morey!"
Morey said tremulously, hardly daring to hope, "I'm
a full Class Four?"
"Class Five, Morey. Class Five! When we do something,
we do it right. We asked for a special waiver and got it
you've skipped a whole class." He added honestly, "Not
that it was just our backing that did it, of course. Your
own recent splendid record of consumption helped a lot.
I told you you could do it!"
Morey had to sit down. He missed the rest of what
Wainwright had to say, but it couldn't have mattered. He
escaped from the office, sidestepped the knot of fellow-
employees waiting to congratulate him, and got to a phone.
Cherry was as ecstatic and inarticulate as he. "Oh, dar-
ling!" was all she could say.
"And I couldn't have done it without you," he babbled.
"Wainwright as much as said so himself. Said if it wasn't
for the way wewell, you have been keeping up with the
rations, it never would have got by the Board. I've been
meaning to say something to you about that, dear, but I
just haven't known how.  But I do appreciate it. I
Hello?" There was a curious silence at the other end of
the phone. "Hello?" he repeated worriedly.
Cherry's voice was intense and low. "Morey Fry, I think
you're mean. I wish you hadn't spoiled the good news."
And she hung up.
Morey stared slack-jawed at the phone.
Howland appeared behind him, chuckling. "Women,"
he said. "Never try to figure them. Anyway, congratula--
tions, Morey."
"Thanks," Morey mumbled.
Howland coughed and said, "Uhby the way, Morey,
now that you're one of the big shots, so to speak, you
won'tuhfeel obliged towell, say anything to Wain-
wright, for instance, about anything I may have said while
w&"
"Excuse me," Morey said, imhearing, and pushed past
him. He thought wildly of calling Cherry back, of racing
home to see just what he'd said that was wrong. Not that
there was much doubt, of course. He'd touched her on her
sore point.
Anyhow, his wristwatch was chiming a reminder of the
fact that his psychiatric appointment for the week was
coming up.
Morey sighed. The day gives and the day takes away.
Blessed is the day that gives only good things.
If any.
The session went badly. Many of the sessions had been
going badly, Morey decided; there had been more and
more whispering in knots of doctors from which he was
excluded, poking and probing in the dark instead of the
precise psychic surgery he was used to. Something was
wrong, he thought
Something was. Semmelweiss confirmed it when he ad-
journed the group session. After the other doctor had left,
he sat Morey down for a private talk. On his own time,
toohe didn't ask for his usual ration fee. That told
Morey how important the problem was.
"Morey," said Semmelweiss, "you're holding back."
"I don't mean to. Doctor," Morey said earnestly.
"Who knows what you 'mean' to do? Part of you
'means' to. We've dug pretty deep and we've found some
important things. Now there's something I can't put my
finger on. Exploring the mind, Morey, is like sending
scouts through cannibal territory. You can't see the can-
nibalsuntil it's too late. But if you send a scout through
the jungle and he doesn't show up on the other side, it's
a fair assumption that something obstructed his way. In
that case, we would label the obstruction 'cannibals.' In
the case of the human mind, we label the obstruction a
'trauma.' What the trauma is, or what its effects on be-
havior will be, we have to find out, once we know that it's
there."
Morey nodded. All of this was familiar; he couldn't see
what Semmelweiss was driving at.
Semmelweiss sighed. "The trouble with healing traumas
and penetrating psychic blocks and releasing inhibitions
the trouble with everything we psychiatrists do, in fact, is
that we can't afford to do it too well. An inhibited man is
under a strain. We try to relieve the strain. But if we
succeed completely, leaving him with no inhibitions at all,
we have an outlaw, Morey. Inhibitions are often socially
necessary. Suppose, for instance, that an average man
were not inhibited against blatant waste. It could happen,
you know. Suppose that instead of consuming his ration
quota in an orderly and responsible way, he did such
things as set fire to his house and everything in it or
dumped his food allotment in the river.
"When only a few individuals are doing it, we treat the
individuals. But if it were done on a mass scale, Morey, it
would be the end of society as we know it. Think of the
whole collection of anti-social actions that you see in
every paper. Man beats wife; wife turns into a harpy;
junior smashes up windows; husband starts a black-market
stamp racket. And every one of them traces to a basic
weakness in the mind's defenses against the most impor-
tant single anti-social phenomenonfailure to consume."
Morey flared, "That's not fair. Doctor! That was weeks
ago! We've certainly been on the ball lately. I was just
commended by the Board, in fact"
The doctor said mildly, "Why so violent, Morey? I only
made a general remark."
"It's just natural to resent being accused."
The doctor shrugged. "First, foremost and above all,
we do not accuse patients of things. We try to help you
find things out." He lit his end-of-session cigarette. "Think
about it, please. I'll see you next week."
Cherry was composed and unapproachable. She kissed
him remotely when he came in. She said, "I called Mother
and told her the good news. She and Dad promised to
come over here to celebrate."
"Yeah," said Morey. "Darling, what did I say wrong on
the phone?"
"They'll be here about six."
"Sure. But what did I say? Was it about the rations?
If you're sensitive, I swear 111 never mention them again."
"I am sensitive, Morey."
He said despairingly, "I'm sorry. I just"
He had a better idea. He kissed her.
Cherry was passive at first, but not for long. When he
had finished kissing her, she pushed him away and actually
giggled. "Let me get dressed for dinner."
"Certainly. Anyhow, I was just"
She laid a finger on his lips.
He let her escape and, feeling much less tense, drifted
into the library. The afternoon papers were waiting for
him. Virtuously, he sat down and began going through
them in order. Midway through the World-Telegram-Sun-
Post-and-News, he rang for Henry.
Morey had read clear through to the drama section of
the Times-Herald-Tribune-Mirror before the robot ap-
peared. "Good evening," it said politely.
"What took you so long?" Morey demanded. "Where
are all the robots?"
Robots do not stammer, but there was a distinct pause
before Henry said, "Belowstairs, sir. Did you want them
for something?"
"Well, no. I just haven't seen them around. Get me a
drink."
It hesitated. "Scotch, sir?"
"Before dinner? Get me a Manhattan."
"We're all out of Vermouth, sir."
"All out? Would you mind telling me how?"
"It's all used up, sir."
"Now that's just ridiculous," Morey snapped. "We have
never run out of liquor in our whole lives and you know
it.  Good heavens,  we  just got our allotment in the other
day and I certainly"
He checked himself. There was a sudden flicker of
horror in his eyes as he stared at Henry.
"You certainly what, sir?" the robot prompted.
Morey swallowed. "Henry, did Idid I do something
I shouldn't have?"
"I'm sure I wouldn't know, sir. It isn't up to me to say
what you should and shouldn't do."
"Of course not," Morey agreed grayly.
He sat rigid, staring hopelessly into space, remembering.
What he remembered was no pleasure to him at all.
"Henry," he said. "Come along, we're going belowstairs.
Right now!"
It  had  been  Tanaquil  Bigelow's  remark  about  the
robots. Too many robotsmake too much of everything.
That had implanted the idea; it germinated in Morey's
home. More than a little drunk, less than ordinarily in-
hibited, he had found the problem clear and the answer
obvious.
He stared around him in dismal worry. His ovm robots,
following his own orders, given weeks before . . .
Henry said, "It's just what you told us to do, sir."
Morey groaned. He was watching a scene of unparal-
leled activity, and it sent shivers up and down his spine.
There was the butler-robot, hard at work, his copper
face expressionless. Dressed in Morey's own sports knick-
ers and golfing shoes, the robot solemnly hit a ball against
the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and
again, with Morey's own clubs. Until the ball wore rag-
ged and was replaced; and the shafts of the clubs leaned
out of true; and the close-stitched seams in the clothing
began to stretch and abrade.
"My God!" said Morey hollowly.
There were the maid-robots, exquisitely dressed in
Cherry's best, walking up and down in the delicate, slim
shoes, sitting and rising and bending and turning. The
cook-robots and the sendng-robots were preparing diony-
sian meals.
Morey swallowed. "Youyou've been doing this right
along," he said to Henry. "That's why the quotas have
been filled."
"Oh, yes, sir. Just as you told us."
Morey had to sit down. One of the serving-robots po-
litely scurried over with a chair, brought from upstairs fo"
their new chores.
Waste.
Morey tasted the word between his lips.
Waste.
You never wasted things. You used them. If necessary,
you drove yourself to the edge of breakdown to use them;
you made every breath a burden and every hour a torment
to use them, until through diligent consuming and/or oc-
cupational merit, you were promoted to the next higher
class, and were allowed to consume less frantically. But
you didn't wantonly destroy or throw out. You consumed.
Morey thought fearfully: When the Board finds out
about this . . .
Still, he reminded himself, the Board hadn't found out.
It might take some time before they did, for humans, after
all, never entered robot quarters. There was no law against
it, not even a sacrosanct custom. But there was no reason
to. When breaks occurred, which was infrequently, main-
tenance robots or repair squads came in and put them
back in order. Usually the humans involved didn't even
know it had happened, because the robots used their own
TBR radio circuits and the process was next thing to auto-
matic.
Morey said reprovingly, "Henry, you should have told
well, I mean reminded me about this."
"But, sir!" Henry protested. " 'Don't tell a living soul,'
you said. You made it a direct order."
"Umph. Well, keep it that way. Iuh1 have to go
back upstairs. Better get the rest of the robots started on
dinner."
Morey left, not comfortably.
The dinner to celebrate Morey's promotion was-difficult.
Morey liked Cherry's parents. Old Elon, after the pre-
marriage inquisition that father must inevitably give to
daughter's suitor, had buckled right down to the job of
adjustment. The old folks were good about not interfering,
good about keeping their superior social status to them-
selves, good about helping out on the budgetat least
once a week, they could be relied on to come over for a
hearty meal, and Mrs. Elon had more than once remade
some of Cherry's new dresses to fit herself, even to the
extent of wearing all the high-point ornamentation.
And they had been wonderful about the wedding gifts,
when Morey and their daughter got married. The most
any member of Morey's family had been willing to take
was a silver set or a few crystal table pieces. The Elons
had come through with a dazzling promise to accept a
car, a bird-bath for their garden and a complete set of
living-room furniture! Of course, they could afford it
they had to consume so little that it wasn't much strain
for them even to take gifts of that magnitude. But without
their help, Morey knew, the first few months of matrimony
would have been even tougher consuming than they were.
But on this particular night it was hard for Morey to
like anyone. He responded with monosyllables; he barely
grunted when Elon proposed a toast to his promotion and
his brilliant future. He was preoccupied.
Rightly so. Morey, in his deepest, bravest searching,
could find no clue in his memory as to just what the pun-
ishment might be for what he had done. But he had a sick
certainty that trouble lay ahead.
Morey went over his problem so many times that an
anesthesia set in. By the time dinner was ended and he
and his father-in-law were in the den with their brandy,
he was more or less functioning again.
Elon, for the first time since Morey had known him,
offered him one of his cigars. "You're Grade Fivecan
afford to smoke somebody else's now, hey?"
"Yeah," Morey said glumly.
There was a moment of silence. Then Elon, as punctili-
ous as any companion-robot, coughed and tried again.
"Remember being peaked till I hit Grade Five," he remin-
isced meaningfully. "Consuming keeps a man on the go,
all right. Things piled up at the law office, couldn't be
taken care of while ration points piled up, too. And con-
suming comes first, of coursethat's a citizen's prime
duty. Mother and I had our share of grief over that, but
a couple that wants to make a go of marriage and citizen-
ship Just pitches in and does the job, hey?"
Morey repressed a shudder and managed to nod.
"Best thing about upgrading," Eton went on, as if he
had elicited a satisfactory answer, "don't have to spend so
much time consuming, give more attention to work. Great-
est luxury in the world, work. Wish I had as much stamina
as you young fellows. Five days a week in court are about
all I can manage. Hit six for a while, relaxed first time in
my life, but my doctor made me cut down. Said we can't
overdo pleasures. You'll be working two days a week now,
hey?"
Morey produced another nod.
Elon drew deeply on his cigar, his eyes bright as they
watched Morey. He was visibly puzzled, and Morey, even
in his half-daze, could recognize the exact moment at
which Elon drew the wrong inference. "Ah, everything
okay with you and Cherry?" he asked diplomatically.
"Fine!" Morey exclaimed. "Couldn't be better!"
"Good, Good." Elon changed the subject with almost
an audible wrench. "Speaking of court, had an interesting
case the other day. Young fellowyear or two younger
than you, I guesscame in with a Section Ninety-seven
on him. Know what that is? Breaking and entering!"
"Breaking and entering," Morey repeated wonderingly,
interested in spite of himself.  "Breaking and entering
what?"
"Houses. Old term; law's full of them. Originally ap-
plied to stealing things. Still does, I discovered."
"You mean he stole something?" Morey asked in be-
wilderment.
"Exactly! He stole. Strangest thing I ever came across.
Talked it over with one of his bunch of lawyers later; new
one on him, too. Seems this kid had a girl friend, nice kid
but a little, you know, plump. She got interested in art."
"There's nothing wrong with that," Morey said.
"Nothing wrong with her, either. She didn't do any-
thing. She didn't like him too much, though. Wouldn't
marry him. Kid got to thinking about how he could get
her to change her mind andwell, you know that big
Mondrian in the Museum?"
"I've never been there," Morey said, somewhat embar-
rassed.
"Urn. Ought to try it some day, boy. Anyway, comes
closing time at the Museum the other day, this kid sneaks
in. He steals the painting. That's rightsteals it. Takes it
to give to the girl."
Morey shook his head blankly. "I never heard of any-
thing like that in my life."
"Not many have. Girl wouldn't take it, by the way. Got
scared when he brought it to her. She must've tipped off
the police, I guess. Somebody did. Took 'em three hours
to find it, even when they knew it was hanging on a wall.
Pretty poor kid. Forty-two room house."
"And there was a law against it?" Morey asked. "I
mean it's like making a law against breathing."
"Certainly was. Old law, of course. Kid got set back two
grades. Would have been more but, my God, he was only
a Grade Three as it was."
"Yeah," said Morey, wetting his lips. "Say, Dad"
"Urn?"
Morey cleared his throat. "Uh1 wonder1 mean
what's the penalty, for instance, for things likewell, mis-
using rations or anything like that?"
Elon's eyebrows went high. "Misusing rations?"
"Say yon had a liquor ration, it might be, and instead
of drinking it, youwell, flushed it down the drain or
something..."
His voice trailed off. Elon was frowning. He said,
"Funny thing, seems I'm not as broadminded as I thought
I was. For some reason, I don't find that amusing."
"Sorry," Morey croaked.
And he certainly was.
It might be dishonest, but it was doing him a lot of
good, for days went by and no one seemed to have pene-
trated his secret. Cherry was happy. Wainwright found oc-
casion after occasion to pat Morey's back. The wages of
sin were turning out to be prosperity and happiness.
There was a bad moment when Morey came home to
find Cherry in the middle of supervising a team of packing-
robots; the new house, suitable to his higher grade, was
ready, and they were expected to move in the next day.
But Cherry hadn't been belowstairs, and Morey had his
household robots clean up the evidences of what they had
been doing before the packers got that far.
The new house was, by Morey's standards, pure lux-
ury.
It was only fifteen rooms. Morey had shrewdly retained
one more robot than was required for a Class Five, and
had been allowed a compensating deduction in the size
of his house.
The robot quarters Were less secluded than in the old
house, though, and that was a disadvantage. More than
once Cherry had snuggled up to him in the delightful in-
timacy of their one bed in their single bedroom and said,
with faint curiosity, "I wish they'd stop that noise." And
Morey had promised to speak to Henry about it in the
morning. But there was nothing he could say to Henry, of
course, unless he ordered Henry to stop the tireless con-
suming through each of the day's twenty-four hours that
kept them always ahead, but never quite far enough ahead,
of the inexorable weekly increment of ration quotas.
But, though Cherry might once in a while have a mo-
ment's curiosity about what the robots were doing, she
was not likely to be able to guess at the facts. Her up-
bringing was, for once, on Morey's sideshe knew so little
of the grind, grind, grind of consuming that was the lot
of the lower classes that she scarcely noticed that there
was less of it.
Morey almost, sometimes, relaxed.
He thought of many ingenious chores for robots, and
the robots politely and emotionlessly obeyed.
Morey was a success.
It wasn't all gravy. There was a nervous moment for
Morey when the quarterly survey report came in the mail.
As the day for the Ration Board to check over the degree
of wear on the turned-in discards came due, Morey began
to sweat. The clothing and furniture and household goods
the robots had consumed for him were very nearly in
shreds. It had to look plausible, that was the big thing
no normal person would wear a hole completely through
the knee of a pair of pants, as Henry had done with his
dress suit before Morey stopped him. Would the Board
question it?
Worse, was there something about the way the robots
consumed the stuff that would give the whole show away?
Some special wear point in the robot anatomy, for in-
stance, that would rub a hole where no human's body
could, or stretch a seam that should normally be under
no strain at all?
It was worrisome. But the worry was needless. When
the report of survey came, Morey let out a long-held
breath. Not a single item disallowed!
Morey was a successand so was his scheme!
To the successful man come the rewards of success.
Morey arrived home one evening after a hard day's work
at the office and was alarmed to find another car parked
in his drive. It was a tiny two-seater, the sort affected by
top officials and the very well-to-do.
Right then and there Morey learned the first half of the
embezzler's lesson: Anything different is dangerous. He
came uneasily into his own home, fearful that some high
officer of the Ration Board had come to ask questions.
But Cherry was glowing. "Mr. Porfirio is a newspaper
feature writer and he wants to write you up for their
'Consumers of Distinction' page! Morey, I couldn't be
more proud!"
"Thanks," said Morey ginmiy. "Hello."
Mr. Porfirio shook Morey's hand warmly. "I'm not ex-
actly from a newspaper," he corrected. "Trans-video Press
is what it is, actually. We're a news wire service; we sup-
ply forty-seven hundred papers with news and feature
material. Every one of them," he added complacently, "on
the required consumption list of Grades One through Six
inclusive. We have a Sunday supplement self-help feature
on consuming problems and we like towell, give credit
where credit is due. You've established an enviable record,
Mr. Fry. We'd like to tell our readers about it."
"Urn," said Morey. "Let's go in the drawing room."
"Oh, no!" Cherry said firmly. "I want to hear this. He's
so modest, Mr. Porfirio, you'd really never know what
kind of a man he is just to listen to him talk. Why, my
goodness, I'm his wife and I swear / don't know how he
does all the consuming he does. He simply"
"Have a drink, Mr. Porfirio," Morey said, against all
etiquette. "Rye? Scotch? Bourbon? Gin-and-tonic? Brandy
Alexander? Dry Manha1 mean what would you like?"
He became conscious that he was babbling like a fool.
"Anything," said the newsman. "Rye is fine. Now, Mr.
Fry, I notice you've fixed up your place very attractively
here and your wife says that your country home is just as
nice. As soon as I came in, I said to myself, 'Beautiful
home. Hardly a stick of furniture that isn't absolutely
necessary. Might be a Grade Six or Seven.' And Mrs. Fry
says the other place is even barer."
"She does, does she?" Morey challenged sharply. "Well,
let me tell you, Mr. Porfirio, that every last scrap of my
furniture allowance is accounted for! I don't know what
you're getting at, but"
"Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply anything like
that! I just want to get some information from you that I
can pass on to our readers. You know, to sort of help
them do as well as yourself. How do you do it?"
Morey swallowed. "Weuhwell, we just keep after
it. Hard work, that's  all."
Porfirio nodded admiringly. "Hard work," he repeated,
and fished a triple-folded sheet of paper out of his pocket
to make notes on. "Would you say," he went on, "that
anyone could do as well as you simply by devoting him-
self to itsetting a regular schedule, for example, and
keeping to it very strictly?"
"Oh, yes," said Morey.
"In other words, it's only a matter of doing what you
have to do every day?"
"That's it exactly. I handle the budget in my house
more experience than my wife, you seebut no reason
a woman can't do it."
"Budgeting," Porfirio recorded approvingly. "That's our
policy, too."
The interview was not the terror it had seemed, not even
when Porfirio tactfully called attention to Cherry's slim
waistline ("So many housewives, Mrs. Fry, find it difficult
to keep from beingwell, a little plump") and Morey had
to invent endless hours on the exercise machines, while
Cherry looked faintly perplexed, but did not interrupt.
From the interview, however, Morey learned the second
half of the embezzler's lesson. After Porfirio had gone, he
leaped in and spoke more than a little firmly to Cherry.
"That business of exercise, dear. We really have to start
doing it. I don't know if you've nodced it, but you are
beginning to get just a trifle heavier and we don't want
that to happen, do we?"
In the following grim and unnecessary sessions on the
mechanical horses, Morey had plenty of time to reflect on
the lesson. Stolen treasures are less sweet than one would
like, when one dare not enjoy them in the open.
But some of Morey's treasures were fairly earned.
The new Bradmoor K-50 Spin-a-Game, for instance,
was his very own. His job was design and creation, and
he was a fortunate man in that his efforts were permitted
to be expended along the line of greatest social utility
namely, to increase consumption.
The Spin-a-Game was a well-nigh perfect machine for
the purpose. "Brilliant," said Wainwright, beaming, when
the pilot machine had been put through its first tests.
"Guess they don't call me the Talent-picker for nothing. I
knew you could do it, boy!"
Even Howland was lavish in his praise. He sat munch-
ing on a plate of petits-fours (he was still only a Grade
Three) while the tests were going on, and when they were
over, he said enthusiastically, "It's a beauty, Morey. "That
series-corruptersensational! Never saw a prettier piece
of machinery.'*
Morey flushed gratefully.
Wainwright left, exuding praise, and Morey patted his
pilot model affectionately and admired its polychrome
gleam. The looks of the machine, as Wainwright had lec-
tured many a time, were as important as its function;
"You have to make them want to play it, boy! They won't
play it if they don't see it!" And consequently the whole
K series was distinguished by flashing rainbows of light,
provocative strains of music, haunting scents that drifted
into the nostrils of the passerby with compelling effect.
Morey had drawn heavily on all the old masterpieces of
designdie one-arm bandit, the pinball machine, the juke
box. You put your ration book in the hopper. You spun
the wheels until you selected the game you wanted to play
against the machine. You punched buttons or spun dials
or, in any of 325 different ways, you pitted your human
skill against the magnetic-taped skills of the machine.
And you lost. You had a chance to win, but the inexor-
able statistics of the machine's setting made sure that if
you played long enough, you had to lose.
That is to say, if you risked a ten-point ration stamp
showing, perhaps, that you had consumed three six-course
mealsyour statistic return was eight points. You might
hit the jackpot and get a thousand points back, and thus
be exempt from a whole freezerful of steaks and joints
and prepared vegetables; but it seldom happened. Most
likely you lost and got nothing.
Got nothing, that is, m the way of your hazarded ration
stamps. But the beauty of the machine, which was Morey's
main contribution, was that, win or lose, you always found
a pellet of vitamin-drenched, sugar-coated antibiotic hor-
mone gum in the hopper. You played your game, won or
lost your stake, popped your hormone gum into your
mouth and played another. By the time that game was
ended, the gum was used up, the coating dissolved; you
discarded it and started another.
"That's what the man from the NRB liked," Howland
told Morey confidentially. "He took a set of schematics
back with him; they might install it on all new machines.
Oh, you're the fair-haired boy, all right!"
It was the first Morey had heard about a man from the
National Ration Board. It was good news. He excused
himself and hurried to phone Cherry the story of his latest
successes. He reached her at her mother's, where she was
spending the evening, and she was properly impressed and
affectionate. He came back to Howland in a glowing hu-
mor.
"Drink?" said Howland diffidently.
"Sure," said Morey. He could afford, he thought, to
drink as much of Howland's liquor as he liked; poor guy,
sunk in the consuming quicksands of Class Three. Only
fair for somebody a little more successful to give him a
hand once in a while.
And when Howland, learning that Cherry had left
Morey a bachelor for the evening, proposed Uncle Pig-
gotty's again, Morey hardly hesitated at all.
The Bigelows were delighted to see him. Morey won-
dered briefly if they had a home; certainly they didn't
seem to spend much time in it.
It turned out they did, because when Morey indicated
virtuously that he'd only stopped in at Piggotty's for a
single drink before dinner, and Howland revealed that he
was free for the evening, they captured Morey and bore
him off to their house.
Tanaquil Bigelow was haughtily apologetic. "I don't
suppose this is the kind of place Mr. Fry is used to," she
observed to her husband, right across Morey, who was
standing between them. "Still, we call it home."
Morey made an appropriately polite remark. Actually,
the place nearly turned his stomach. It was an enormous
glaringly new mansion, bigger even than Morey's former
house, stuffed to bursting with bulging sofas and pianos
and massive mahogany chairs and tri-D sets and bedrooms
and drawing rooms and breakfast rooms and nurseries.
The nurseries were a shock to Morey; it had never oc-
cured to him that the Bigelows had children. But they did
and, though the children were only five and eight, they
were still up, under the care of a brace of robot nurse-
maids, doggedly playing with their overstuffed animals and
miniature trains.
"You don't know what a comfort Tony and Dick are,"
Tanaquil Bigelow told Morey. "They consume so much
more than their rations. Walter says that every family
ought to have at least two or three children to, you know,
help out. Walter's so intelligent about these things, it's a
pleasure to hear him talk. Have you heard his poem,
Morey? The one he calls The Twoness of"
Morey hastily admitted that he had. He reconciled him-
self to a glum evening. The Bigelows had been eccentric
but fun back at Uncle Piggotty's. On their own ground,
they seemed just as eccentric, but painfully dull.
They had a round of cocktails, and another, and then
the Bigelows no longer seemed so dull. Dinner was ghastly,
of course; Morey was nouveau-riche enough to be a snob
about his relatively Spartan table. But he minded his man-
ners and sampled, with grim concentration, each successive
course of chunky protein and rich marinades. With the
help of the endless succession of table wines and liqueurs,
dinner ended without destroying his evening or his strained
digestive system.
And afterward, they were a pleasant company in the
Bigelow's ornate drawing room. Tanaquil Bigelow, in con-
sultation with the children, checked over their ration books
and came up with the announcement that they would have
a brief recital by a pair of robot dancers, followed by
string music by a robot quartet. Morey prepared himself
for the worst, but found before the dancers were through
that he was enjoying himself. Strange lesson for Morey:
When you didn't have to watch them, the robot entertain-
ers were funt
"Good night, dears," Tanaquil Bigelow said firmly to
the children when the dancers were done. The boys re-
belled, naturally, but they went. It was only a matter of
minutes, though, before one of them was back, clutching
at Morey's sleeve with a pudgy hand.
Morey looked at the boy uneasily, having little experi-
ence with children. He said, "Uhwhat is it, Tony?"
"Dick, you mean," the boy said. "Gimme your auto-
graph." He poked an engraved pad and a vulgarly jeweled
pencil at Morey.
Morey dazedly signed and the child ran off, Morey star-
ing after him. Tanaquil Bigelow laughed and explained,
"He saw your name in Porfirio's column. Dick loves Por-
firio, reads him every day. He's such an intellectual kid,
really. He'd always have his nose in a book if I didn't keep
after him to play with his trains and watch tri-D."
"That was quite a nice write-up," Walter Bigelow com-
menteda little enviously, Morey thought. "Bet you make
Consumer of the Year. I wish," he sighed, "that we could
get a little ahead on the quotas the way you did. But it
just never seems to work out. We eat and play and con-
sume like crazy, and somehow at the end of the month
we're always a little behind in somethingeverything
keeps piling upand then the Board sends us a warning,
and they call me down and, first thing you know, I've got
a couple of hundred added penalty points and we're worse
off than before."
"Never you mind," Tanaquil replied staunchly. "Con-
suming isn't everything in life. You have your work."
Bigelow nodded judiciously and offered Morey another
drink.  Another drink,  however, was not what Morey
needed. He was sitting in a rosy glow, less of alcohol than
of sheer contentment with the world.
He said suddenly, "Listen."
Bigelow looked up from his own drink. "Eh?"
"If I tell you something that's a secret, will you keep it
that way?"
Bigelow rumbled, "Why, I guess so, Morey."
But his wife cut in sharply, "Certainly we will, Morey.
Of course! What is it?" There was a gleam in her eye,
Morey noticed. It puzzled him, but he decided to ignore it.
He said, "About that write-up. II'm not such a hot-
shot consumer, really, you know. In fact" All of a
sudden, everyone's eyes seemed to be on him. For a tor-
tured moment, Morey wondered if he was doing the right
thing. A secret that two people know is compromised, and
a secret known to three people is no secret. Still
"It's like this," he said firmly. "You remember what we
were talking about at Uncle Piggotty's that night? Well,
when I went home I went down to the robot quarters, and
I"
He went on from there.
Tanaquil Bigelow said triumphantly, "I knew it!"
Walter Bigelow gave his wife a mild, reproving look.
He declared soberly. "You've done a big thing, Morey. A
mighty big thing. God willing, you've pronounced the
death sentence on our society as we know it. Future gen-
orations will revere the name of Morey Fry." He solemnly
shook Morey's hand.
Morey said dazedly, "I -what?"
Walter nodded. It was a valedictory. He turned to his
wife. "Tanaquil, we'll have to call an emergency meeting."
"Of course, Walter," she said devotedly.
"And Morey will have to be there. Yes, you'll have to,
Morey; no excuses. We want the Brotherhood to meet
you. Right, Howland?"
Howland coughed uneasily. He nodded noncommittally
and took another drink.
Morey demanded desperately, "What are you talking
about? Howland, you tell me!"
Howland fiddled with his drink. "Well," he said, "it's
like Tan was telling you that night. A few of us, well,
politically mature persons have formed a little group.
We"
"Little group!" Tanaquil Bigelow said scornfully. "How-
land, sometimes I wonder if you really catch the spirit of
the thing at all! It's everybody, Morey, everybody in the
world. Why, there are eighteen of us right here in Old
Town! There are scores more all over the world! I knew
you were up to something like this, Morey. I told Walter
so the morning after we met you. I said, 'Walter, mark
my words, that man Morey is up to sometliing.' But I
must say," she admitted worshipfully, "I didn't Imow it
would have the scope of what you're proposing now! Im-
aginea whole world of consumers, rising as one man,
shouting the name of Morey Fry, fighting the Ration
Board with the Board's own weaponthe robots. What
poetic justice!"
Bigelow nodded enthusiastically. "Call Uncle Piggotty's,
dear," he ordered. "See if you can round up a quorum
right now! Meanwhile, Morey and I are going belowstairs.
Let's go, Moreylet's get the new world started!"
Morey sat there open-mouthed. He closed it with a
snap. "Bigelow," he whispered, "do you mean to say that
you're going to spread this idea around through some kind
of subversive organization?"
"Subversive?" Bigelow repeated stiffly. "My dear man,
all creative minds  are  subversive,  whether they operate
singly or in such a group as the Brotherhood of Freemen.
I scarcely like"
"Never mind what you like," Morey insisted. "You're
going to call a meeting of this Brotherhood and you want
me to tell them what I just told you. Is that right?"
"Wellyes."
Morey got up. "I wish I could say it's been nice, but it
hasn't. Good night!"
And he stormed out before they could stop him.
* Out on the street, though, his resolution deserted him.
He hailed a robot cab and ordered the driver to take him
on the traditional time-killing ride through the park while
he made up his mind.
The fact that he had left, of course, was not going to
keep Bigelow from going through with his announced in-
tention. Morey remembered, now, fragments of conversa-
tion from Bigelow and his wife at Uncle Piggotty's, and
cursed himself. They had, it was perfectly true, said and
hinted enough about politics and purposes to put him on
his guard. All that nonsense about twoness had diverted
him from what should have been perfectly clear: They
were subversives indeed.
He glanced at his watch. Late, but not too late; Cherry
would still be at her parents' home.
He leaned forward and gave the driver their address. It
was like beginning the first of a hundred-shot series of
injections: you know it's going to cure you, but it hurts
just the same.
Morey said manfully: "And that's it, sir. I know I've
been a fool. I'm willing to take the consequences."
Old Elon rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "Um," he said.
Cherry and her mother had long passed the point where
they could say anything at all; they were seated side by
side on a couch across the room, listening with expres-
sions of strain and incredulity.
Elon said abruptly, "Excuse me. Phone call to make."
He left the room to make a brief call and returned. He
said over his shoulder to his wife, "Coffee. We'll need it.
Got a problem here."
Morey said, "Do you think1 mean what should I do?"
Elon shrugged, then, surprisingly, grinned. "What can
you do?" he demanded cheerfully. "Done plenty already,
I'd say. Drink some coffee. Call I made," he explained,
"was to Jim, my law clerk. He'll be here in a minute. Get
some dope from Jim, then we'll know better."
Cherry came over to Morey and sat beside him. All she
said was, "Don't worry," but to Morey it conveyed all the
meaning in the world. He returned the pressure of her
hand with a feeling of deepest relief. Hell, he said to him-
self, why should I worry? Worst they can do to me is drop
me a couple of grades and what's so bad about that?
He grimaced involuntarily. He had remembered his own
early struggles as a Class One and what was so bad about
that.
The law clerk arrived, asmallish robot with a battered
stainless-steel hide and dull coppery features. Elon took
the robot aside for a terse conversation before he came
back to Morey.
"As I thought," he said in satisfaction. "No precedent.
No laws prohibiting. Therefore no crime."
"Thank heaven!" Morey said in ecstatic relief.
Elon shook his head. "They'll probably give you a re-
conditioning and you can't expect to keep your Grade
Five. Probably call it anti-social behavior. Is, isn't it?"
Dashed, Morey said, "Oh." He frowned briefly, then
looked up. "All right, Dad, if I've got it coming to me,
I'll take my medicine."
"Way to talk," Elon said approvingly. "Now go home.
Get a good night's sleep. First thing in the morning, go
to the Ration Board. Tell 'em the whole story, beginning
to end. They'll be easy on you." Elon hesitated. "Well,
fairly easy," he amended. "I hope."
The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast.
He had to. That morning, as Morey awoke, he had the
sick certainty that he was going to be consuming triple
rations for a long, long time to come.
He kissed Cherry good-by and took the long ride to the
Ration Board in silence. He even left Henry behind.
At the Board, he stammered at a series of receptionist
robots and was finally brought into the presence of a
mildly supercilious young man named Hachette:
"My name," he started, "is Morey Fry. II've come
totalk over something I've been doing with"
"Certainly, Mr. Fry," said Hachette. "I'll take you in
to Mr. Newman right away."
"Don't you want to know what I did?" demanded
Morey.
Hachette smiled. "What makes you think we don't
know?" he said, and left.
That was Surprise Number One.
Newman explained it. He grinned at Morey and rue-
fully shook his head. "All the time we get this," he com-
plained. "People just don't take the trouble to learn any-
thing about the world around them. Son," he demanded,
"what do you think a robot is?"
Morey said, "Hub?"
"I mean how do you think it operates? Do you think it's
just a kind of a man with a tin skin and wire nerves?"
"Why, no. It's a machine, of course. It isn't human."
Newman beamed. "Fine!" he said. "It's a machine. It
hasn't got flesh or blood or intestinesor a brain. Oh"
he held up a hand"robots are smart enough. I don't
mean that. But an electronic thinking machine, Mr. Fry,
takes about as much space as the house you're living in.
It has to. Robots don't carry brains around with them;
brains are too heavy and much too bulky."
"Then how do they think?"
"With their brains, of course."
"But you just said"
"I said they didn't carry them. Each robot is in constant
radio communication with the Master Control on its TBR
circuitthe 'Talk Between Robots' radio. Master Control
gives the answer, the robot acts."
"I see," said Morey. "Well, that's very interesting,
but"
"But you still don't see," said Newman. "Figure it out.
If the robot gets information from Master Control, do you
see that Master Control in return necessarily gets informa-
tion from the robot?"
"Oh," said Morey. Then, louder, "Oh! You mean that
all my robots have been" The words wouldn't come.
Newman nodded in satisfaction. "Every bit of informa-
tion of that sort comes to us as a matter of course. Why,
Mr. Fry, if you hadn't come in today, we would have been
sending for you within a very short time."
That was the second surprise. Morey bore up under it
bravely. After all, it changed nothing, he reminded him-
self.
He said, "Well, be that as it may, sir, here I am. I came
in of my own free will. I've been using my robots to con-
sume my ration quotas"
"Indeed you have," said Newman.
"and I'm willing to sign a statement to that effect any
time you like. I don't know what the penalty is, but I'll
take it. I'm guilty; I admit my guilt."
Newman's eyes were wide. "Guilty?" he repeated. "Pen-
alty?"
Morey was startled. "Why, yes," he said. "I'm not deny-
ing anything."
"Penalties," repeated Newman musingly. Then he began
to laugh. He laughed, Morey thought, to considerable
excess; Morey saw nothing he could laugh at, himself, in
the situation. But the situation, Morey was forced to ad-
mit, was rapidly getting completely incomprehensible.
"Sorry," said Newman at last, wiping his eyes, "but I
couldn't help it. Penalties! Well, Mr. Fry, let me set your
mind at rest. I wouldn't worry about the penalties if I
were you. As soon as the reports began coming through
on what you had done with your robots, we naturally as-
signed a special team to keep observing you, and we for-
warded a report to the national headquarters. We made
certainahrecommendations in it andwell, to make
a long story short, the answers came back yesterday.
"Mr. Fry, the National Ration Board is delighted to
know of your contribution toward improving our distribu-
tion problem. Pending a further study, a tentative program
has been adopted for setting up consuming-robot units all
over the country based on your scheme. Penalties? Mr.
Fry, you're a herol"
A hero has responsibilities. Morey's were quickly made
clear to him. He was allowed time for a brief reassuring
visit to Cherry, a triumphal tour of his old office, and then
he was rushed off to Washington to be quizzed. He found
the National Ration Board in a frenzy of work.
"The most important job we've ever done," one of the
high officers told him. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's the
last one we ever have! Yes, sir, we're trying to put our-
selves out of business for good and we don't want a single
thing to go wrong."
"Anytiling I can do to help" Morey began diffidently.
"You've done fine, Mr. Fry. Gave us just the push
we've been needing. It was there all the time for us to see,
but we were too close to the forest to see the trees, if you
get what I mean. Look, I'm not much on rhetoric and this
is the biggest step mankind has taken in centuries and I
can't put it into words. Let me show you what we've been
doing."
He and a delegation of other officials of the Ration
Board and men whose names Morey had repeatedly seen
in the newspapers took Morey on an inspection tour of
the entire plant.
"It's a closed cycle, you see," he was told, as they
looked over a chamber of industriously plodding con-
sumer-robots working off a shipment of shoes. "Nothing
is permanently lost. If you want a car, you get one of the
newest and best. If not, your car gets driven by a robot
until it's ready to be turned in and a new one gets built
for next year. We don't lose the metalsthey can be sal-
vaged. All we lose is a little power and labor. And the
Sun and the atom give us all the power we need, and the
robots give us more labor than we can use. Same thing
applies, of course, to all products."
"But what's in it for the robots?" Morey asked.
"I beg your pardon?" one of the biggest men in the
country said uncomprehendingly.
Morey had a difficult moment. His analysis had condi-
tioned him against waste and this decidedly was sheer
destruction of goods, no matter how scientific the jargon
might be.
"If the consumer is just using up things for the sake of
using them up," he said doggedly, realizing the danger he
was inviting, "we could use wear-and-tear machines in-
stead of robots. After all why waste them?"
They looked at each other worriedly.
"But that's what you were doing," one pointed out with
a faint note of threat.
"Oh, no!" Morey quickly objected. "I built in satisfac-
tion circuitsmy training in design, you know. Adjustable
circuits, of course."
"Satisfaction circuits?" he was asked. "Adjustable?"
"Well, sure. If the robot gets no satisfaction out of using
up things"
"Don't talk nonsense," growled the Ration Board offi-
cial. "Robots aren't human. How do you make them feel
satisfaction? And adjustable satisfaction at that!"
Morey explained. It was a highly technical explanation,
involving the use of great sheets of paper and elaborate
diagrams. But there were trained men in the group and
they became even more excited than before.
"Beautiful!" one cried in scientific rapture. "Why, it
takes care of every possible moral, legal and psychological
argument!"
"What does?" the Ration Board official demanded.
"How?"
"You tell him, Mr. Fry."
Morey tried and couldn't. But he could show how his
principle operated. The Ration Board lab was turned over
to him, complete with more assistants than he knew how
to give orders to, and they built satisfaction circuits for
a squad of robots working in a hat factory.
Then Morey gave his demonstration. The robots manu-
factured hats of all sorts. He adjusted the circuits at the
end of the day and the robots began trying on the hats,
squabbling over them, each coming away triumphantly
with a huge and diverse selection. Their metallic features
were incapable of showing pride or pleasure, but both
were evident in the way they wore their hats, their fierce
possessiveness . . . and their faster, neater, more intensive,
more dedicated work to produce a still greater quantity of
hats . . . which they also were allowed to own.
"You see?" an engineer exclaimed deUghtedly. "They
can be adjusted to want hats, to wear them loyingly, to
wear the hats to pieces. And not just for the sake of wear-
ing them outthe hats are an incentive for them!"
"But how can we go on producing just hats and more
hats?" the Ration Board man asked puzzledly. "Civiliza-
tion does not live by hats alone."
"That," said Morey modestly, "is the beauty of it.
Look."
He set the adjustment of the satisfaction circuit as
porter robots brought in skids of gloves. The hat-manu-
facturing robots fought over the gloves with the same
mechanical passion as they had for hats.
"And that can apply to anything we  or the robots 
produce," Morey added. "Everything from pins to yachts.
But the point is that they get satisfaction from possession,
and the craving can be regulated according to the glut in
various industries, and the robots show their appreciation
by working harder." He hesitated. "That's what I did for
my servant-robote. It's a feedback, you see. Satisfaction
leads to more workand better workand that means
more goods, which they can be made to want, which
means incentive to work, and so on, all around."
"Closed cycle," whispered the Ration Board man in
awe. "A reed closed cycle this time!"
And so the inexorable laws of supply and demand were
irrevocably repealed. No longer was mankind hampered
by inadequate supply or drowned by overproduction. What
mankind needed was there. What the race did not require
passed into the insatiableand adjustablerobot maw.
Nothing was wasted.
For a pipeline has two ends.
Morey was thanked, complimented, rewarded, given a
ticker-tape parade through the city, and put on a plane
back home. By that time, the Ration Board had liquidated
itself.
Cherry met him at the airport. They jabbered excitedly
at each other all the way to the house.
In their own living room, they finished the kiss they had
greeted each other with. At last Cherry broke away,
laughing.
Morey said, "Did I tell yon I'm through with Bradmoor?
From now on I work for the Board as civilian consultant.
And," he added impressively, "starting right away. I'm a
Class Eight!"
"My!" gasped Cherry, so worshipfully that Morey felt
a twinge of conscience.
He said .honestly, "Of course, if what they were saying
in Washington is so, the classes aren't going to mean much
pretty soon. Still, it's quite an honor."
"It certainly is," Cherry said staunchly. "Why, Dad's
only a Class Eight himself and he's been a judge for I
don't know how many years."
Morey pursed his lips. "We can't all be fortunate," he
said generously. "Of course, the classes still will count for
somethingthat is, a Class One will have so much to con-
sume in a year, a Class Two will have a little less, and so
on. But each person in each class will have robot help, you
see, to do the actual consuming. The way it's going to be,
special facsimile robots will"
Cherry flagged him down. "I know, dear. Each family
gets a robot duplicate of every person in the family."
"Oh," said Morey, slightly annoyed. "How did you
know?"
"Ours came yesterday," she explained. "The man from
the Board said we were the first in the areabecause it
was your idea, of course. They haven't even been activated
yet. I've still got them in the Green Room. Want to see
them?"
"Sure," said Morey buoyantly. He dashed ahead of
Cherry to inspect the results of his own brainstorm. There
they were, standing statue-still against the wall, waiting to
be energized to begin their endless tasks.
"Yours is real pretty," Morey said gallantly. "Butsay,
is that thing supposed to look like me?" He inspected the
chromium face of the man-robot disapprovingly.
"Only roughly, the man said." Cherry was right behind
him. "Notice anything else?"
Morey leaned closer, inspecting the features of the
facsimile robot at a close range. "Well, no," he said. "It's
got a kind of a squint that I don't like, butOh, you
mean that!" He bent over to examine a smaller robot, half
hidden between the other pair. It was less than two feet
high,  big-headed, pudgy-limbed,  thick-bellied.  In fact,
Morey thought wonderingly, it looked almost like
"My God!" Morey spun around, staring wide-eyed at
his wife. "You mean"
"I mean," said Cherry, blushing slightly.
Morey reached out to grab her in his arms.
"Darling!" he cried. "Why didn't you tell me?"
The Census Takers
IT GETS TO BE A MADHOUSE around here along about the
end of the first week. Thank heaven we only do this
once a year, that's what I say! Six weeks on, and forty-six
weeks offthat's pretty good hours, most people think.
But they don't know what those six weeks are like.
It's bad enough for the field crews, but when you get to
be an Area Boss like me it's frantic. You work your way
up through the ranks, and then they give you a whole C.A.
of your own; and you think you've got it made. Fifty
three-man crews go out, covering the whole Census Area;
a hundred and fifty men in the field, and twenty or thirty
more in Area Commandand you boss them all. And
everything looks great, until- Census Period starts and
you've got to work those hundred and fifty men; and six
weeks is too unbearably long to live through, and too im-
possibly short to get the work done; and you begin living
on black coffee and thiamin shots and dreaming about the
vacation hostel on Point Loma.
Anybody can panic, when the pressure is on like that.
Your best field men begin to crack up. But you can't
afford to, because you're the Area Boss. ...
Take Witeck. We were Enumerators together, and he
was as good a man as you ever saw, absolutely nerveless
when it came to processing the Overs. I counted on that
man the way I counted on my own right arm; I always
bracketed him with the greenest, shakiest new cadet
Enumerators, and he never gave me a moment's trouble
for years. Maybe it was too good to last; maybe I should
have figured he would crack.
I set up my Area Command in a plush penthouse apart-
ment. The people who lived there were pretty well off,
you know, and they naturally raised the dickens about
being shoved out. "Blow it," I told them. "Get out of here
in five minutes, and we'll count you first." Well, that took
care of that; they were practically kissing my feet on the
way out. Of course, it wasn't strictly by the book, but you
have to be a little flexible; that's why some men-become
Area Bosses, and others stay Enumerators.
Like Witeck.
Along about Day Eight things were really hotting up. I
was up to my neck in hurry-ups from Regional Control
we were running a little slowwhen Witeck called up.
"Chief," he said, "I've got an In."
I grabbed the rotary file with one hand and a pencil
with the other. "Blue card number?" I asked.
Witeck sounded funny over the phone. "Well, Chief,"
he said, "he doesn't have a blue card. He says"
"No blue card?" I couldn't believe it. Come in to a
strange C.A. without a card from your own Area Boss,
and you're one In that's a cinch to be an Over. "What
kind of a crazy C.A. does he come from, without a blue
card?"
Witeck said, '"He don't come from any C.A., Chief.
He says"
"You mean he isn't from this country?"
"That's right, Chief. He-"
"Hold it!" I pushed away the rotary file and grabbed the
immigration roster. There were only a couple of dozen
names on it, of coursewe have enough trouble with our
own Overs, without taking on a lot of foreigners, but still
there were a handful every year who managed to get on
the quotas. "I.D. number?" I demanded.
"Well, Chief," Witeck began, "he doesn't have an I.D.
number. The way it looks to me"
Well, you can fool around with these irregulars for a
month, if you want to, but it's no way to get the work
done. I said: "Over him!" and hung up. I was a little
surprised, though; Witeck knew the ropes, and it wasn't
like him to buck an irregular on to me. In the old days,
when we were both starting out, I'd seen him Over a
whole family just because the spelling of their names on
their registry cards was different from the spelling on the
checklist.
But we get older. I made a note to talk to Witeck as
soon as the rush was past. We were old friends; I wouldn't
have to threaten him with being Overed himself, or any-
thing like that. He'd know, and maybe that would be all
he would need to snap him back. I certainly would talk
to him, I promised myself, as soon as the rush was over,
or anyway as soon as I got back from Point Loma.
I had to run up to Regional Control to take a little
talking-to myself just then, but I proved to them that we
were catching up and they were only medium nasty. When
I got back Witeck was on the phone again. "Chief," he
said, real unhappy, "this In is giving me a headache. I"
"Witeck," I snapped at him, "are you bothering me
with another In? Can't you handle anything by yourself?"
He said, "It's the same one. Chief. He says he's a kind
of ambassador, and"
"Oh," I said. "Well, why-the devil don't you get your
facts straight in the first place? Give me his name and I'll
check his legation."
"Well, Chief," he began again, "he, uh, doesn't have
any legation. He says he's from the" he swallowed
"from the middle of the earth."
"You're crazy." I'd seen it happen before, good men
breaking under the strain of census taking. They say in
cadets that by the time you process your first five hundred
Overs you've had it; either you take a voluntary Over
yourself, or you split wide open and they carry you off to
a giggle farm. And Witeck was past the five hundred mark,
way past.
There was a lot of yelling and crying from the filter
center, which I'd put out by the elevators, and it looked
like Jumpers. I stabbed the transfer button on the phone
and called to Carias, my number-two man: "Witeck's
flipped or something. Handle it!"
And then I forgot about it, while Carias talked to
Witeck on the phone; because it was Jumpers, all right, a
whole family of them.
There was a father and a mother and five kidsfive of
them. Aren't some people disgusting? The field Enumer-
ator turned them over to the guardsthey were moaning
and cryingand came up and gave me the story. It was
bad.
"You're the head of the household?" I demanded of
the man.
He nodded, looking at me like a sick dog. "Wewe
weren't Jumping," he whined. "Honest to heaven, mister
you've got to believe me. We were"
I cut in, "You were packed and on the doorstep when
the field crew came by. Right?" He started to say some-
thing, but I had him dead to rights. "That's plenty, friend,"
I told him. "That's Jumping, under the law: Packing, with
intent to move, while a census Enumeration crew is oper-
ating in your locale. Got anything to say?"
Well, he had plenty to say, but none of it made any
sense. He turned my stomach, listening to him. I tried to
keep my temperyou're not supposed to think of indi-
viduals, no matter how worthless and useless and generally
unfit they are; that's against the whole principle of the
Censusbut I couldn't help telling him: "I've met your
kind before, mister. Five kids! If it wasn't for people like
you we wouldn't have any Overs, did you ever think of that?
Sure you didn'tyou people never think of anything but
yourself! Five kids, and then when Census comes around
you think you can get smart and Jump." I tell you, I was
. shaking. "You keep your little beady eyes peeled, sneaking
around, watching the Enumerators, trying to count how
m~ny it takes to make an Over; and then you wait until
they get close to you, so you can Jump. Ever stop to think
what trouble that makes for us?" I demanded. "Census
is supposed to be fair and square,  everybody an even
chanceand how can we make it that way unless every-
body stands still to be counted?" I patted Old Betsy, on
my hip. "I haven't Overed anybody myself in five years,"
I told him, "but I swear, I'd like to handle you personally!"
He didn't say a word once I got started on him. He just
stood there, taking it. I had to force myself to stop, finally;
I could have gone on for a long time, because if there's
one thing I hate it's these lousy, stinking breeders who try
to Jump when they think one of them is going to be an
Over in the count-off. Regular Jumpers are bad enough,
but when it's the people who make the mess in the first
place
Anyway, time was wasting. I took a deep breath and
thought things over. Actually, we weren't too badly off;
we'd started off Overing every two-hundred-and-fiftieth
person, and it was beginning to look as though onr pre-
liminary estimate was high; we'd just cut back to Overing
every three-hundredth. So we had a little margin to play
with.
I told the man, dead serious: "You know I could Over
the lot of you on charges, don't you?" He nodded sickly.
"All right, I'll give you a chance. I don't want to bother
with the red tape; if you'll take a voluntary Over for your-
self, we'll start the new count with your wife."
Call me soft, if you want to; but I still say that it was
a lot better than fussing around with charges and a hear-
ing. You get into a hearing like that and it can drag on
for half an hour or more; and then Regional Control is
on your tail because you're falling behind.
It never hurts to give a man a break, even a Jumper, I
always sayas long as it doesn't slow down your Census.
Carias was waiting at my desk when I got back; he
looked worried about something, but I brushed him off
while I initialed the Overage report on the man we'd just
processed. He'd been an In, I found out when I canceled
his blue card. I can't say I was surprised. He'd come from
Denver, and you know how they keep exceeding their
Census figures; no doubt he thought he'd have a better
chance in my C.A. than anywhere else. And no doubt he
was right, because we certainly don't encourage breeders
like himactually, if he hadn't tried to Jump it was odds-
on that the whole damned family would get by without
an Over for years.
Carias was hovering right behind me as I finished. "I
hate these voluntaries," I told him, basketing the canceled
card. "I'm going to talk to Regional Control about it;
there's no reason why they can't be processed like any
other Over, instead of making me okay each one individ-
ually. Now, what's the matter?"
He rubbed his jaw. "Chief," he said, "it's Witeck."
"Now what? Another In?"
Carias glanced at me, then away. "Uh, no, Chief. It's
the same one. He claims he comes from, uh, the center of
the earth."
I swore out loud. "So he has to turn up in my C.A.!" I
complained bitterly. "He gets out of the nuthouse, and
right away"
Carias said, "Chief, he might not be crazy. He makes
it sound pretty real."
I said: "Hold it, Carias. Nobody can live in the center
of the earth. It's solid, like a potato."
"Sure, Chief," Carias nodded earnestly. "But he says it
isn't. He says there's a what he calls neutronium shell,
whatever that is, with dirt and rocks on both sides of it.
We live on the outside. He lives on the inside. His
people"                         ;;t
"Carias!" I yelled. "You're as bad as <Rteck. This guy
turns up, no blue card, no I.D. number, no credentials of
any kind. What's he going to say, 'Please sir, I'm an Over,
please process me'? Naturally not! So he makes up a
crazy story, and you fall for it!"
"I know, Chief," Carias said humbly.
"Neutronium shell!" I would have laughed out loud, if
I'd had the time. "Neutronium my foot! Don't you know
it's hot down there?"
"He says it's hot neutronium," Carias said eagerly. "I
asked him that myself. Chief. He said it's just the shell
that"
"Get back to work!" I yelled at him. I picked up the
phone and got Witeck on his wristphone. I tell you, I was
boiling. As soon as Witeck answered I lit into him; I
didn't give him a chance to get a word in. I gave it to him
up and down and sidewise; and I finished off by giving
him a direct order. "You Over that man," I told him, "or
I'll personally Over you! You hear me?"
There was a pause. Then Witeck said, "Jerry? Will you
listen to me?"
That stopped me. It was the first time in ten years, since
I'd been promoted above him, that Witeck had dared call
me by my first name. He said, "Jerry, listen. This is some-
thing big. This guy is really from the center of the earth,
no kidding. He"
"Witeck," I said, "you've cracked."
"No, Jerry, honest! And it worries me. He's right there
in the next room, waiting for me. He says he had no idea
things were like this on the surface; he's talking wild about
cleaning us off and starting all over again; he says"
"/ say he's an Over!" I yelled. "No more talk, Witeck.
You've got a direct ordernow carry it out!"
So that was that.
We got through the Census Period, after all, but we
had to do it shorthanded; and Witeck was hard to replace.
I'm a sentimentalist, I guess, but I couldn't help remem-
bering old times. We started even; he might have risen as
far as Ibut of course he made his choice when he got
married and had a kid; you can't be a breeder and an
officer of the Census both. If it hadn't been for his record
he couldn't even have stayed on as an Enumerator.
I never said a word to anyone about his crackup. Carias
might have talked, but after we found Witeck's body I
took him aside. "Carias," I said reasonably, "we don't
want any scandal, do we? Here's Witeck, with an hon-
orable record; he cracks, and kills himself, and that's bad
enough. We won't let loose talk make it worse, will we?"
"Carias said uneasily, "Chief, where's the gun he killed
himself with? His own processor wasn't even fired."
You can let a helper go just so far. I said sharply,
"Carias, we still have at least a hundred Overs to process.
You can be on one end of the processingor you can be
on the other. You understand me?"
He coughed. "Sure, Chief. I understand. We don't want
any loose talk."
And that's how it is when you're an Area Boss. But I
didn't ever get my vacation at Point Loma; the tsunami
there washed out the whole town the last week of the
Census. And when I tried Baja California, they were
having that crazy volcanic business; and the Yellowstone
Park bureau wouldn't even accept my reservation because
of some trouble with the geysers, so I just stayed home.
But the best vacation of all was just knowing that the
Census was done for another year.
Carias was all for looking for this In that Witeck was
talking about, but I turned him down. "Waste of time," I
told him. "By now he's a dozen C.A.'s away. We'll never
see him again, him or anybody like himI'll bet my life
on that."
The Candle Lighter
THE TRUSTEESHIP DIRECTOR fished out a pack of ciga-
rettes and offered them to Jaffa Doane. "I heard your
speech last night," he said. "Cigarette?"
"I don't smoke," said Jaffa Doane.
"It was a good speech." The Director lit his cigarette
thoughtfully, flicked the match away. Doane waited with
patience in his eyesan expression that seemed very much
out of place on the face of Jaffa Doane. But Doane had
practiced patience before the Director's "invitation" had
reached him that morning. He knew it was coming; you
can't tell blunt truths on a world hookup and not expect
to make a stir.
The Director said, "I've checked your record, Doane.
It's a good one. You have consistently fought for a lot of
things that I happen to believe in myself. Naturally, I
think you're off base this time, but I was with you on the
Kaffirs; I was with you on the Ainus; I'll be with you
again. I'm sure. In fact, if you look it up in the books of
your Equality League, you'll find that I sent in my two
dollars dues long ago." He peered at Doane under his
eyebrows and chuckled. "Don't look so surprised."
"I can't help it," Doane said severely. "After what your
administration has done to the Martians"
"The Martians! Why, thoseNever mind." He clamped
the words down in his throat. "Just what," he demanded,
"have we done to them?"
Doane leaned forward. "Turned them into savages! Ex-
ploited them, degraded them, reduced them to barbarism.
Do you want the entire catalogue, sir? / know how the
Mars Trusteeship has been run! The Administrators have
made themselves gods, sir, godsl Their every whim is a
commandment. That's what you've done!"
The Director managed a smile, though his nostrils were
flaring. "I said I heard your speech," he reminded Doane.
"You had some suggestions to make, didn't you?"
"I did," said Doane proudly.
"And among them, you suggested that we remove Ad-
ministrator Kellem and replace him with someone accept-
able to the Equality League."
"It was. Kellem's handling of the General Mercantile
incident was"
"I know," the Director interrupted, and for the first
time his smile relaxed. "I have here a radiogram from the
Administration Comzone on Mars. Read it, Mr. Doane."
Doane took it suspiciously, but as he read, he began
to beam.
MEDICAL CHECKUP SHOWS LOW-PRESSURE ASTHMA
APPROACHING TERTIARY STAGE, INCURABLE AND DAN-
GEROUS WITHOUT IMMEDIATE PERMANENT RETURN
TO EARTH. REQUEST IMMEDIATE CLEARANCE FOR
REPLACEMENT AND RETIREMENT.
KELLEM, MARS
Doane gloated, "He's retiring! Low-pressure asthma, my
foot! I thought the stink from General Mercantile would
drive him out!"
The Director said in a level tone, "Kellem almost died
last week, Doane."
"All right." Doane shrugged. "It makes no difference.
In any case, I demand to be consulted in choosing his
successor."
The Director eyed him. "You do, do you?" He pressed
a button on his desk and said, "Ask Ne Mieek to come
in." A sexy contralto replied, "Yes, sir."
The Director looked at Doane. "Ever seen a Martian?"
he asked. "You take such an interest in them, I wonder
if you've ever met one. Face-to-face, I mean; the pictures
don't quite do them justice. No? Well, it's about time
you did."
He stood up and gestured toward the door.
"Jaffa Doane," he said, "meet Ne Mieek."
Doane rose and turned to see who was coming in. He
swallowed. "How do you do," he managed to say.
A suppressed sighing sound came from the thing that
dragged itself through the doorway. Doane thought it
formed words in a sort of airless whisper, the sound that
might be made by a man with a slashed throat.
It went:  "GI'd f n'w y" The vowels were almost
inaudible, the consonants as though they were being forced
out against a gag. It was English, all right; you could
make it out if you tried.
But if the thing's words were understandable, its ex-
pression was not. As the Director had said, you had to
meet a Martian in the flesh; photos did not give more than
a hint. On the squashed, whitely translucent face was what
Doane thought a grin of savage glee, while the huge dull
eyes held inexpressible sorrow. Neither interpretation,
Doane told himself, meant much; that was anthrophomor-
phic thinking, and dangerous. But those looks took a little
getting used to, all the same.
"Don't try to shake hands with him, Mr. Doane," said
the Director. "He hasn't any."
It was true. Four supple, articulated tentacles waved
around the .Martian's midsection, but there were no hands
or arms. The pear-shaped body was supported on stubby
little legs which had neither knee nor ankle, as far as
Jaffa Doane could see.
The Director was saying, "Ne Mieek is the Martian
legate here in Washington and, like Kellem, the strain of
an alien environment has hurt his health. He'll be going
back to Mars on your ship, Doane, and you'll be working
with him."
"Working with him?" Doane gasped.
The Director allowed himself a look of surprise.
"Haven't you figured it out yet, Doane? Since we must
replace Kellem anyhow, we have decided to grant the
Equality League's request. We are picking a man for the
post that the League is certain to approvebecause he is
the president of it I mean you, Mr. Doane."
"Me? Me? But I've never been on Mars!"
"In eighteen days," said the Director, "you will no
longer be able to make that statement. That is, unless you
refuse the appointment."
Jaffa Doane stood up and there was corrosive anger in
his voice. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? You want me
to turn it down, so you can tell the news services what a
lot of hot air the president of the Equality League really
is. Well, I can recognize a shoddy little political trick when
I see one. You hand me a political hot potato, throw me
in on a job that your fat-cats have finally messed up to
the point where there are riots and investigations. If things
go wrong. I'm the goat that shuts up the Equality League.
If things go right, your administration gets the credit."
"I take it you refuse," said the Director.
"No, sir! I don't refuse! It's a cheap trickand I'll make
you wish you'd never thought of it. I accept!"
He looked over his shoulder at the Martian who had
become, in the space of a heartbeat, one of his charges.
Jaffa Doane couldn't help wincing a littlethey did look
so much like ragged corpses!
But he said, "Come along, Ne Mieek. We're going to
your home."
For more than a million members of the Equality
League, Jaffa Doane was a severe and shining leader; his
words were trumpet calls and his surging drive for justice
was a bright flame. One or two of the members, however,
took a more personal view of their president, among them
a young lady whose name was Ruth-Ann Wharton. On the
books, she was listed as Mr. Doane's personal secretary,
but it had been several months now since she had first
begun to contemplate a promotion for herself.
It had occurred to her that the eighteen-day flight to
Mars on the shuttle rocket might provide the time and
leisure for Jaffa Doane to notice just what a pearl he had
as a secretary. But it had been a disappointing voyage;
Doane had kept to his stateroom most of the way.
A hatful of hours out of Marsport, Ruth-Ann was
banging on her boss's stateroom door. "Jaffa," she called
plaintively, and not for the first time, "Ne Mieek and
another Martian are waiting for you. Please hurry."
Doane's low, controlled voice said, "I'll be there in a
moment, Miss Wharton."
She scowled at the door. "Ill give you exactly one
minute." But she didn't give him that much. She ham-
mered again. "Jaffa, they're waiting."
Pause. Then the calm, relaxed voice. "Yes, of course.
One moment."
Ruth-Ann stamped her foot. "Oh, darn you!" she said
and did what she had wanted to do in the first place. She
turned the knob and walked in. "They've been waiting
half an hour and Ne Mieek says it's very important."
The room was in semi-darkness, lit only by the light
from the corridor outside. From the rumpled heap of
bedclothing, Jaffa Doane's voice said placidly, "I'm aware
of that, Miss Wharton."
Her hands found the light switch. The bedclothing
erupted and Jaffa Doane sat up, leaning on an elbow,
blinking at her.
"What?" he croaked blearily. "Say, haven't I asked you
to call me only from the outside?"
"You have," she said hotly, flinging back the ray-screen
on the port. The tempered glass was treated to filter out
most of the glare, but the direct sunlight lit up the little
room like a movie set.
"Get up," she ordered. "If you're not outside and fully
dressed in five minutes, I'm coming back and I'll dress you
myself. Anyway, Jaffa, it looks as if it really is important.
Ne Mieek is sighing and talking about your duty to your
job. And the other Martianwell, it's hard to tell, every-
thing considered, but he looks sick."
"Sick?" Jaffa Doane yawned and scratched. "Sick how?"
Ruth-Ann shook her head. "Come on out and see for
yourself."
Looking hazily at his face in the mirror of the tiny
washroom as he shaved, Jaffa Doane decided that Ruth-
Ann, after all, was right. He did have a tendency to be
not difficult, exactly, not grumpy or nasty, but a little hard
to wake up in the mornings. And besides, this was an
important day. He was about to meet his charges. He
wiped off the depilatory and stubble and stood erect, eyes
burning into his own reflection in the mirror.
The sound of his stateroom door made him jump. "I'm
coming right out!" he yelled.
In the room that had been fitted out as his office for
the duration of the tripand which he had hardly set foot
inNe Mieek and Ruth-Ann were waiting. With them
was another Martian and, looking at him, Jaffa Doane
knew what the girl had meant when she said there was
something wrong. A strapping young adult Martian, with
a  life expectancy  of hundreds  of  years,  somewhat re-
sembles a wilting fungus; but this one looked rotten.
"Good morning, Ne Mieek," Jaffa Doane said cour-
teously. "What can I do for you?"
The Martian's wheezy voice was somewhat easier to
understand in the spaceship's half-and-half atmosphere
pressure an even eight pounds to the square inch, compo-
sition largely heliumthan it had been when he was
laboring to force his voice into the dense Earth air. "In-
deed you can, honored sir. Gadian Pluur has the sickness
and wishes Your Honor to cure him in the way that is
known."
Jaffa Doane's eyebrows went up. "Cure him? You mean
you want me to call a doctor?"
"Ah, no," whispered the Martian. "Your Honor will
cure him yourself, surely."
Ruth-Ann was signaling. "You don't know what he
wants, do you?" she said in a low tone.
"Good heavens, no."
She nodded smugly. "He wants you to touch this other
one. That's all, just touch him."
"Touch him?" Doane stared at the Martian. "Ne Mieek,
are you out of your mind?"
"Not so," the Martian whispered indignantly, the mad
face working. "It is our custom, as is known. The Ad-
ministrator Kellem and the Admiral Rosenman who was
his assistant have always healed those ill of the sickness."
"Barbarous," marveled Jaffa Doane, forgetting to be
angry. "And you, an intelligent manan intelligent Mar-
tian like you, you believe in this?"
"There is nothing to believe or disbelieve," sighed Ne
Mieek, his tentacles agitated, the pale eyes desolate. "It is
our custom since the first of your honored administrators
came."
Doane shook his head wonderingly.
"Touch him," Ruth-Ann advised.
"But"
"Go ahead, touch him!"
Doane frowned. "Miss Wharton, this is a matter of
principle. I am responsible not only to the Trusteeship
Director, but to the League, and I certainly couldn't
Justify"
"Touch him!" The girl's face was set.
Doane was about to reply, but the ship gave a gentle
course-correcting lurch and everyone in the little room
staggered slightlyeveryone but the sick Martian, Gadian
Pluur, who staggered halfway across the room and brushed
against Doane's fingers.
Jaffa Doane jerked back his hand. It had been a curious
sensation, almost like an electric shock, but not localized
he could feel a tiny tingle up his backbone and at the
base of his skull.
"Thanks to Your Honor," whispered Ne Mieek.
And the two Martians slipped slowly out, leaving Jaffa
Doane staring frustratedly after them.
"But I have a speech all ready," Doane objected rea-
sonably. "Jfs not just a lot of glowing promises and empty
words, but facts. It tells how I am going to put a stop
to" he hesitated over the word "the indiscretions of
the previous Administrators."
Admiral Rosenman said cheerfully, "Fine." He was a
chunky man with a big head of curly white hair. And he
wore the severe uniform as though he had been born with
it on. "But you can't get out of the Conjunction Offering."
"That's nothing short of murder! And my speech"
"It's merely an execution, Mr. Doane. The Martian has
had his trial and he has been convicted. It's up to you."
"But I'm not a hangman!"
"You're the Earth Administrator on Mars and one of
your duties is carrying out the decisions of the Martian
courts."
Doane glowered. "What's he convicted of?" he de-
manded suspiciously.
"What's the difference? Under the Martian laws, it's a
crime punishable by death. They call it bad thinking."
"Bad thinking." Doane shook his head and walked over
to the window of the Ad-Building office that was now his.
The orange sandscape, dotted with smoke-trees, hurt his
eyes; it was the Martian idea of a formal park, in the heart
of the little city of Marsport, and it was a great honor to
have one's office looking out over it. Or so the Martians
thought.
They also thought it was an honor to be the executioner
in what seemed to have some of the aspects of a ritual
murder.
"I can't even see the conjunction of the moons," Doane
said peevishly.
"The Martians can. Both moons are perfectly visible
to them."
"And this Conjunction Offering is traditional? What did
they do back forty or fifty years ago, before the first Earth-
men got here?"
Admiral Rosenman shrugged and glanced at the clock.
"You ought to be getting ready," he said. "Am I dis-
missed?"
"You're dismissed," Doane said ungraciously and
frowned at the Admiral's back as he left, using the weav-
ing,  flat-footed  Mars walk  that  Doane  had  not  yet
mastered.
He sat down at his desk, carefully allowing for the light
gravitationand misjudged it, as he had six times before,
and bumped his shin against the desk, as he had six times
before.
Ruth-Ann Wharton said sympatheticaUy, "It takes a lit-
tle getting used to. Do you want me to come to the Con-
junction Offering with you?"
"No!"
"There's no need to take my skin off."
He said stiffly, "I am sorry, Miss Wharton. Perhaps I'm
a little upset."
"I understand, Jaffa."
"It didn't seem like this back on Earth," he said mo-
rosely, staring out at the smoke-trees. "You haven't heard
the worst of it. Miss Wharton. Not only do I have to slit
some poor devil's throat this eveningnot only am I
expected to perform the laying on of hands like somebody
from the Dark Agesbut look at this!" He turned to his
desk and picked up a thick sheaf of papers. "Duties for
the Earth Administratorme! The most ridiculous mass
of superstitious nonsense I ever saw. If this is the way
Kellem kept the Martians down, I can understand why
there were riots at the General Mercantile base."
"At Niobe? But those were Earthmen involved in the
brawl, Jaffa, not Martians."
"How do you know?" he asked pugnaciously. "Because
Kellem's publicity men said so? All we know for sure is
that there was trouble. There's bound to be trouble when
you try to keep an intelligent, civilized race like Ne
Mieek's down with barbarous tricks like these."
He glanced at the list and flinched. "Well, there's an
end to it," he said grimly. "Kellem's gone and I'm here
now. I'll be at the Conjunction Ceremony tonight, all
right, and I'll start things rolling right then and there.
You'll see! I'm telling you, Miss Wharton, Mars is going
towhat's the matter?" he demanded irritably. "You look
like you've got a question."
The girl nodded emphatically. "I have. Why do you call
me Miss Wharton instead of Ruth-Ann?"
The Conjunction Offering was to take place in what the
Martians had named the Park of Sparse Beauty.
"It's sparse enough," Jaffa Doane said from the rostrum,
watching the Martians gather before him. "But is it beau-
tiful enough?"
Admiral Rosenman asked sourly, "Are you ready for
the ceremony?"
"Oh, quite ready," said Jaffa Doane. He started to hum
to himself with a satisfied air, but you do not hum with
oxygen plugs in your nostrils. He coughed and choked,
and looked at the Admiral suspiciously. But the Admiral
wasn't laughing.
The Admiral didn't think he had very much to laugh
about. He had been on duty on Mars for seven years, sur-
viving five Administrators, only one of whom had com-
pleted his three-year term. He had formed certain con-
clusions about the Martians and one of them was that
they weren't too likely to get along well with the likes of
Jaffa Doane. ...
It was dark and the Martians carried torchesnot flam-
ing brands, for flames do not thrive in Mars' thin atmos-
phere, but glowing balls of punk from the little bushes that
grew wild in the wide reaches between settlements. The
scene was hardly brightly illuminated. Martian eyes were
not human eyes, though, and to them, Doane realized, it
might have been bright as day.
He looked fruitlessly at the spot in the sky where the
two moons were supposed to be in conjunction with a
particular star. One moon was visible, the other not. The
star might or might not be visiblewith all the stars in
the Martian sky, one more or less made very little differ-
ence. But to the Martians, of course, with their very
much more acute vision, both moons were as visible as
Luna from Earth and each star of the tens of thousands
was an individual in its own right.
Jaffa Doane sighed. It was hard remembering all the
differences between Martians and Earthmenand trying
to remember, at the same time, the diamond-clear prin-
ciples of the Equality League, which said that the differ-
ences were as nothing. . . .
There was no sound of trumpets, no burst of prompted
applause from the idly drifting audience, but all of a sud-
den the ceremony seemed to have begun. Ne Mieek ap-
peared on the high platform where the Earth party was
standing.
"In three of your minutes and eleven seconds, as is
known to Your Honor," he said, "the conjunction will
occur. This is he who is to die." He stepped aside to reveal
another Martian, who gestured courteously with his
tentacles.
"This is Fnihi Bel."
The condemned Martian said politely, "It is an honor
to meet Your Honor. I am most sorry for the circum-
stances."
Doane looked embarrassedly at Ruth-Ann and the
Admiral. He had had no lessons in how Jack Ketch
greeted his clients; there was no precedent in his experi-
ence with the Equality League to guide him in the proper
conduct of the maul-man meeting the steer at the top of
the slippery chute.
But the Martian was tactful. He said, "Since I shall
not have the power afterward, let me now thank Your
Honor for the greatest of favors."
"For killing you?" Doane blurted, scandalized. He
made a face expressing his mood about the enforced sub-
jection of the Martians; it was wasted on the Martians
who expressed their feelings with formalized gestures of
the tentacles, but not on Admiral Rosenman, who licked
his lips and started to speak.
But not soon enough. "Fnihi Bel," Doane said com-
passionately, "under the authority vested in me as Ad-
ministrator, I grant a stay of execution pending review of
your case. You shall not die tonight."
Admiral Rosenman swore and looked helplessly at
Ruth-Ann. "If the crazy idiot had only talked it over
first! No, not him! He made up his mind ten years before
he ever saw a Martian and nothing's going to change it,
especially facts!"
"What facts?" asked Ruth-Ann hotly. "You never told
him anything."
"It's all in the files."
"Which he hasn't had a chance to look at. Honestly,
Admiral, you're unreasonable." Ruth-Ann looked fret-
fully out the window. It was nearly daybreak; the sharp
Martian dawn had popped into light over the horizon
minutes before. "Do you suppose he's all right?"
The Admiral growled and flipped the switch on the
intercom. "Any word?"
The uniformed man whose face appeared in the screen
said, "Not yet, sir. The Administrator was seen about an
hour ago near the Shacks. A detail has gone to search the
area, but they haven't reported in yet."
"All right," the Admiral grumbled, clicking off.
"What are the Shacks?" Ruth-Ann wanted to know.
"Abandoned part of town. The Martians gave it up
years ago. Nobody lives there now. Unpleasant place.
Serves him right, the"
"Watch yourself!" Ruth-Ann warned. "He's your boss!"
The Admiral glowered at her, but stopped. He yawned
and stretched. "Not used to staying up all night any
more," he said. "Kind of takes it out of me, but Go
ahead!" he snapped as the intercom called hi name.
"Administrator Doane has been located by the search
party, sir," said the officer. "Any orders?"
"Hold him there," roared the Admiral. "And get a car
in front of the door in thirty secondsI'm going to meet
him!"
He clicked off the switch as Ruth-Ann corrected, "We're
going to meet him, Admiral! If that big stuffed-shirt thinks
he can scare me out of my wits and stir up every Martian
from here to"
"Hey, wait a minute!" the Admiral protested. "I thought
you wouldn't let me call him names!"
"That's you," Ruth-Ann said shortly. "The rules are
different for me. Come on. Admiral. What are you wait-
ing for?"
They found Earth Administrator Jaffa Doane sitting on
the ramp before an abandoned and decrepit Martian
dwelling, staring into space. Admiral Rosenman dismissed
the detail and helped the Administrator into the pres-
surized car. Doane's attention was elsewhere. Rosenman
had to remind him even to take the oxygen plugs out of
his nostrils.
"Thanks," said Doane absently.
And, after a pause, "I messed it up, didn't I?"
"You did," the Admiral told him. "You messed it up
enough to put forty-eight Martians in the hospitalthe
Earth hospital."
Doane biinked.
"For physical injuries," the Admiral explained. "The
Martians don't ordinarily hospitalize for that; a couple of
hours of what they call good thinking and they can patch
almost anything that's wrong with themselves. But these
were pretty well beat up, mostly from running into moving
vehicles, and I don't think there's a Martian within fifty
miles that's capable of good thinking right now."
Jaffa Doane shook his head. "I don't get it," he com-
plained. "All I did was try to save a man's life. Maybe I
was wrong1 don't know. But how could it make so much
trouble? Rioting like crazy people. Getting themselves run
overand all because of a thing like that. I could under-
stand it if they were ignorant natives, only they're not
ignorant; they have a civilization of their own. How can
these silly customs mean so much to them?"
The Admiral exploded, "Don't you understand yet? It is
not just a silly custom! They were crazy, all right, but not
because you violated a silly tabubecause you did the
thing that was bound to drive them insane. You pushed
them across the brink. They were sick. Infected by you."
"But"
"Don't argue with me! Sickness is not only of the body;
even an Earthman can have mental illnesses, too. And
Martians have no other kind. Shock them and they get
sick. When they're sick, they need to be healed. If you
break a leg, you splint it; if a Martian's mind is injured,
it needs to be splinted with a stronger, stabler mind.
"Think back to the ship, Doane! When Ne Mieek
begged you to touch the other Martian, did you think it
was only a primitive custom? It was not. It was splinting
and healing. When you made contact with him, his mind
was braced against yours and you were the one who
helped him grow well."
Doane swallowed. "All right," he said reasonably.
"Granted. But that's one thing and murder is another.
What about the one I was supposed to kill?"
"The same principle, Doane. Even a Martian doesn't
live foreverJ and when he is too sick to be cured, he has
to die. The only way a Martian can die is by being phys-
ically destroyed. He can't kill himself. No Martian can.
He can't be killed by another Martianthe shock would
destroy him. So you're elected, Doanethe strongest,
stablest being on Marsthe Earth Administrator."
Doane protested, "But what about the time before the
Earthmen were here? How did they manage?"
Rosenman shrugged. "They didn't have Earthmen to do
the dirty work, so they used Martians, of course."
"But you said"
"I know what I said. Take a look around you, Doane."
He gestured out the window at the rickety, abandoned
buildings called the Shacks.
Compared with the clean, functional lines of the rest
of the Martian architecture, the Shacks were a hideous
blot. They leaned and they staggered. They were put to-
gether at random distances out of random materials. They
looked unfit for even human habitation, much less Mar-
tian.
"This is where they lived, the Outcasts," Rosenman
said. "The strongest and healthiest of every generation,
selected by rigorous tests and segregated into a caste of
Healers. It was an honor to be a Healer, Doanethe
greatest, most tragic honor that a Martian could attain.
Read the Martian literature. It has noble stories in it, the
Healers who sacrificed themselves for others. They were
untouchables. There were a couple of hundred of them
all the time, right here in the Shacks, injured mentally
every time they had to put an incurable out of his misery,
until they were beyond repair and had to be destroyed
after a few years of agonizing service."
"And when we came, we became the untouchables?"
Rosenman hesitated. "Well, not exactly," he said, a
little less  roughly.  "We  took  over  the  functions of the
Healers to some extent, yes. After all, we Earthmen aren't
as sensitive; and just for that reason, we're more stable.
But, of course, even we crack up when the pressure is
too great. Suppose the picture was different, Doane; sup-
pose it was the Martians who were stronger and stabler,
and suppose they came to Earth and showed us a way of
emptying our asylums.
"We use psychiatrists because they're all we haveall
the Martians had were the Healers. But the Healers
weren't altogether satisfactory, as you can see, because
it's an expensive cure that merely passes the disease on to
someone else. Our psychiatrists aren't as effective as they
should be, eitherthey're human, too; they have their
own problems, which seriously interfere with and become
intermingled with those of their patients.
"If the Martians had come to us with a real cure, not
the half-cure that psychiatrists are capable of, we'd be
stupid to go on using inadequate therapy. And the Mar-
tians aren't stupid. In fact, that's the mistake you and your
Equality League made."
The Administrator flared, "That's enough, Resenman!
The Equality League never"
"Wait a minute! Admit it, Doaneyou came here all
full of red-hot ideas- about how the Earth masters should
be kind to their Martian slaves. No, don't argue; that's
how it looked to you. Think it over. But the Martians
aren't slaves, you see. In many ways, they're more cul-
tured and smarter and a lot more sensitive than you and
1. In some ways, in fact, they remind me of my grand-
father."
"Your what?" Doane gasped, baffled.
"My grandfather. He was a very religious man," the Ad-
*  miral explained reminiscently. "Every Friday night, we'd
have the candles for the Sabbath, andwell, I don't know
how familiar you are with the ritual, but on the Sabbath,
the truly orthodox aren't allowed to work from sundown
to sundown'. Not even lighting the candles. So my grand-
father used to hire an Irish kid from the neighborhood to
be our candle lightera shabbas goy, he called him.
"Marty Madden, the boy's name was. Marty wasn't any
better than we were or any worse1 don't think my
grandfather ever thought that. But he was, in that one
way, different; he could do something for us that we
weren't allowed to do for ourselves. So, naturally, he did
it.  Just as you and I, Doane, do things for the Martians
that they can't do for themselves."
The Admiral started the car for the trip back.
"I used to know Marty pretty well," he said. "We went
to the same school during the week. In a way, I was sorry
for himhe missed all the fun of the feasts and so on. In
another way, I envied him, because he could do things I
couldn't. But I never thought that so many years later,
forty million miles from Mosholu Parkway, I'd be taking
his job away from him . .."
They rode back to the Administration Building in
silence for most of the way, while Jaffa Doane digested
some of the most ill-tasting realizations of his career.
As the building came into sight, he shook himself and
sat up.
"All right," he said humbly, "I'll start all over. Make
believe I landed this morning. Where do I start?"
Rosenman smiled and leaned over to pat his shoulder.
"You'll do," he promised. "Where you start is in the
clinic. You'll find about fifty Martians with some degree
of shock, needing the healing touch of a sound mind
like yours. It won't be too bad. You'll have a headache
afterward, but you can take a minor discomfort like that,
can't you?"
"Gladly!" Doane said. "That's the least I can do. I
want to apologize to both of you. You, too, Ruth-Ann.
I've been about as big a self-centered, wrong-headed"
She cut him off. "Oh, don't get all wound up. You're
a bit of a phony,  heaven knows"  she ignored  the
strangled noise he made"but there are worse. Deep
down inside, you're quite a guy. You wouldn't be as much
of a man as you are if you didn't have a little ham in you,
and a touch of pig-headedness, too. I've given the matter
a lot of thought, you see."
Rosenman grinned at Doane's expression. "She's right,"
he agreed. "Between us, we'll get you straightened out, so
don't worry about it. Two more years here ought to do it.
Basically, your ideas are rightthe Martians ought to
learn to get by on their own feet. You can start finding
out how they can do it. It'll be good for you. When the
two years of your term are up, you'll go home with a
better, more human understanding of what's what, ready
to settle down to a normal, productive existence on Earth
with your wife and family."
Doane yelped, "Hold on there! I haven't got a. wife,
much less a family!"
Ruth-Ann patted his arm reassuringly. "You're not
home yet," she said.
The Celebrated No-Hit Inning
This is A TRUE STORY, you have to remember. You have
to keep that firmly in mind because, frankly, in some
places it may not sound like a true story. Besides, it's a
true story about baseball players, and maybe the only one
there is. So you have to treat it with respect.
You know Boley, no doubt. It's pretty hard not to know
Boley, if you know anything at all about the National
Game. He's the one, for instance, who raised such a
scream when the sportsvmters voted him Rookie of the
Year. "I never was a rookie," he bellowed into three mil-
lion television screens at the dinner. He's the one who
ripped up his contract when his manager called him, "The
hittin'est pitcher I ever see." Boley wouldn't stand for
that.  "Four-eighteen  against  the  best  pitchers  in  the
league," he yelled, as the pieces of the contract went out
the window. "Fogarty, I am the hittin'est hitler you ever
see!"
He's the one they all said reminded them so much of
Dizzy Dean at first. But did Diz win thirty-one games in
his first year? Boley did; he'll tell you so himself. But
politely, and without bellowing. . . .
Somebody explained to Boley that even a truly great
Hall-of-Fame pitcher really ought to show up for spring
training. So, in his second year, he did. But he wasn't con-
vinced that he needed the training, so he didn't bother
much about appearing on the field.
Manager Fogarty did some extensive swearing about
that, but he did all of his swearing to his pitching coaches
and not to Mr. Boleslaw. There had been six ripped-up
contracts already that year, when Boley's feelings got
hurt about something, and the front office were very in-
sistent that there shouldn't be any more.
There wasn't much the poor pitching coaches could do,
of course. They tried pleading with Boley. All he did was
grin and ruffle their hair and say, "Don't get all in an
uproar." He could ruffle their hair pretty easily, since he
stood six inches taller than the tallest of them.
"Boley," said Pitching Coach MagiU to him desper-
ately, "you are going to get me into trouble with the
manager. I need this job. We just had another little boy
at our house, and they cost money to feed. Won't you
please do me a favor and come down to the field, just for
a little while?"
Boley had a kind of a soft heart. "Why, if that will
make so much difference to you. Coach, I'll do it. But I
don't feel much like pitching. We have got twelve exhibi-
tion games lined up with the Orioles on the way north,
and if I pitch six of those that ought to be all the warm-up
I need."
"Three innings?" Magill haggled. "You know I wouldn't
ask you if it wasn't important. The thing is, the owner's
uncle is watching today."
Boley pursed his lips. He shrugged. "One inning."
"Bless you, Boley!" cried the coach. "One inning it is!"
Andy Andalusia was catching for the regulars when
Boley turned up on the field. He turned white as a sheet.
"Not the fast ball, Boley! Please, Boley," he begged. "I
only been catching a week and I have not hardened up
yet."
Boleslaw turned the rosin bag around in his hands and
looked around the field. There was action going on at all
six diamonds, but the spectators, including the owner's
uncle, were watching the regulars.
"I tell you what I'll do," said Boley thoughtfully. "Let's
see. For the first man, I pitch only curves. For the second
man, the screwball. And for the third manlet's see. Yes.
For the third man, I pitch the sinker."
"Fine!" cried the catcher gratefully, and trotted back
to home plate.
"He's a very spirited player," the owner's uncle com-
mented to Manager Fogarty.
"That he is," said Fogarty, remembering how the pieces
of the fifth contract had felt as they hit him on the side
of the head.
"He must be a morale problem for you, though. Doesn't
he upset the discipline of the rest of the team?"
Fogarty looked at him, but he only said.) "He win thirty-
one games for us last year. If he had lost thirty-one he
would have upset us a lot more."
The owner's uncle nodded, but there was a look in his
eye all the same. He watched without saying anything
more, while Boley struck out the first man with three
sizzling curves, right on schedule, and then turned around
and yelled something at the outfield.
"That crazy By heaven," shouted the manager, "he's
chasing them back into the dugout. I told that"
The owner's uncle clutched at Manager Fogarty as he
was getting up to head for the field. "Wait a minute.
What's Boleslaw doing?"
"Don't you see? He's chasing the outfield off the field.
He wants to face the next two men without any outfield!
That's Satchell Paige's old trick, only he never did it
except in exhibitions where who cares? But that Boley"
"This is only an exhibition, isn't it?" remarked the
owner's uncle mildly.
Fogarty looked longingly at the field, looked back at
the owner's uncle, and shrugged.
"All right." He sat down, remembering that it was the
owner's uncle whose sprawling factories had made the
family money that bought the owner his team. "Go
ahead!" he bawled at the right fielder, who was hesitating
halfway to the dugout.
Boley nodded from the mound. When the outfielders
were all out of the way he set himself and went into his
windup. Boleslaw's windup was a beautiful thing to all
who chanced to behold itunless they happened to root
for another team. The pitch was more beautiful still.
"I got it, I got it!" Andalusia cried from behind the
plate, waving the ball in his mitt. He returned it to the
pitcher triumphantly, as though he could hardly believe he
had caught the Boleslaw screwballafter only the first
week of spring training.
He caught the second pitch, too. But the third was
unpredictably low and outside. Andalusia dived for it in
vain.
"Ball one!" cried the umpire. The catcher scrambled
up, ready to argue.
"He is right," Boley called graciously from the mound.
"I am sorry, but my foot slipped. It was a ball."
"Thank you," said the umpire. T"P_ next screwball was
a strike, though, and so were the thiee sinkers to the third
manthough one of those caught a little piece of the bat
and turned into an into-the-dirt foul.
Boley came off the field to a spattering of applause. He
stopped under the stands, on the lip of the dugout. "I
guess I am a little rusty at that, Fogarty," he called.
"Don't let me forget to pitch another inning or two be-
fore we play Baltimore next month."
"I won't!" snapped Fogarty. He would have said more,
but the owner's uncle was talking.
"I don't know much about baseball, but that strikes me
as an impressive performance. My congratulations."
"You are right," Boley admitted. "Excuse me while I
shower, and then we can resume this discussion some
more. I think you are a better judge of baseball than you
say."
The owner's uncle chuckled, watching him go into the
dugout. "You can laugh," said Fogarty bitterly. "You
don't have to put up with that for a hundred fifty-four
games, and spring training, and the Series."
"You're pretty confident about making the Series?"
Fogarty said simply, "Last year Boley win thirty-one
games."
The owner's uncle nodded, and shifted position un-
comfortably. He was sitting with one leg stretched over a
large black metal suitcase, fastened with a complicated
lock. Fogarty asked, "Should I have one of the boys put
that in the locker room for you?"
"Certainly not!" said the owner's uncle. "I want it right
here where I can touch it." He looked around him. "The
fact of that matter is," he went on in a lower tone, "this
goes up to Washington with me tomorrow. I can't discuss
what's in it. But as we're among friends, I can mention
that where it's going is the Pentagon."
"Oh," said Fogarty respectfully. "Something new from
the factories."
"Something very new," the owner's uncle agreed, and
he winked. "And I'd better get back to the hotel with it
But there's one thing, Mr. Fogarty. I don't have much
time for baseball, but it's a family affair, after all, and
whenever I can help I mean, it just occurs to me that
possibly, with the help of what's in this suitcase "That is,
would you like me to see if I could help out?"
"Help out how?" asked Fogarty suspiciously.
"Well I really mustn't discuss what's in the suitcase.
But would it hurt Boleslaw, for example, to be a little
more, well, modest?"
The manager exploded, "No."
The owner's uncle nodded. "That's what I've thought.
Well, I must go. Will you ask Mr. Boleslaw to give me a
ring at the hotel so we can have dinner together, if it's
convenient?"
It was convenient, all right. Boley had always wanted
to see how the other half lived; and they had a fine dinner,
served right in the suite, with five waiters in attendance
and four kinds of wine. Boley kept pushing the little
glasses of wine away, but after all the owner's uncle was
the owner's uncle, and if he thought it was all right
It must have been pretty strong wine, because Boley began
to have trouble following the conversation.
It was all right as long as it stuck to earned-run averages
and batting percentages, but then it got hard to follow,
like a long, twisting grounder on a dry September field.
Boley wasn't going to admit that, though. "Sure," he said,
trying to follow; and "You say the fourth dimension?" he
said; and, "You mean a time machine, like?" he said; but
he was pretty confused.
The owner's uncle smiled and filled the wine glasses
again.
Somehow the black suitcase had been unlocked, in a
slow, difficult way. Things made out of crystal and steel
were sticking out of it. "Forget about the time machine,"
said the owner's uncle patiently. "It's a military secret,
anyhow. I'll thank you to forget the very words, because
heaven knows what the General would think if he found
out Anyway, forget it. What about you, Boley? Do you
still say you can hit any pitcher who ever lived and strike
out any batter?"
"Anywhere," agreed Boley, leaning back in the deep
cushions and watching the room go around and around.
"Any time. 111 bat their ears off."
"Have another glass of wine, Boley," said the owner's
uncle, and he began to take things out of the black suit-
case.
Boley woke up with a pounding in his' head like Snider,
Mays and Mantle hammering Three-Eye League pitching.
He moaned and opened one eye.
Somebody blurry was holding a glass out to him. "Hurry
up. Drink this."
Boley shrank back. "I will not. That's what got me into
this trouble in the first place."
'Trouble? You're in no trouble. But the game's about
to start and you've got a hangover."
Ring a fire bell beside a sleeping Dalmation; sound the
Charge in the ear of a retired cavalry major. Neither will
respond more quickly than Boley to the words, "The
game's about to start."
He managed to drink some of the fizzy stuff in the
glass and it was a miracle; like a triple play erasing a
ninth-inning threat, the headache was gone. He sat up,
and the world did not come to an end. In fact, he felt
pretty good.
He was being rushed somewhere by the blurry man.
They were going very rapidly, and there were tail, bright
buildings outside. They stopped.
"We're at the studio," said the man, helping Boley out
of a remarkable sort of car.
"The stadium," Boley corrected automatically. He
looked around for the lines at the box office but there
didn't seem to be any.
"The studio. Don't argue all day, will you?" The man
was no longer so blurry. Boley looked at him and blushed.
He was only a little man, with a worried look to him, and
what he was wearing was a pair of vivid orange Bermuda
shorts that showed his knees. He didn't give Boley much
of a chance for talking or thinking. They rushed into a
building, all green and white opaque glass, and they were
met at a flimsy-looking elevator by another little man. "This
one's shorts were aqua, and he had a bright red cummer-
bund tied around his waist.
"This is him," said Boley's escort.
The little man in aqua looked Boley up and down.
"He's a big one. I hope to goodness we got a uniform to
fit him for the Series."
Boley cleared his throat. "Series?"
"And you're in it!" shrilled the little man in orange.
"This way to the dressing room."
Well, a dressing room was a dressing room, even if
this one did have color television screens all around it and
machines that went wheepety-boom softly to themselves.
Boley began to feel at home.
He biinked when they handed his uniform to him, but
he put it on. Back in the Steel & Coal League, he had
sometimes worn uniforms that still bore the faded legend
100 Lbs. Best Fortified Gro-Chick, and whatever an
owner gave you to put on was all right with Boley. Still,
he thought to himself, kilts!
It was the first time in Boley's life that he had ever
worn a skirt. But when he was dressed it didn't look too
bad, he thoughtespecially because all the other players
(it looked like fifty of them, anyway) were wearing the
same thing. There is nothing like seeing the same costume
on everybody in view to make it seem reasonable and
right. Haven't the Paris designers been proving that for
years?
He saw a familiar figure come into the dressing room,
wearing a uniform like his own. "Why, Coach Magill,"
said Boley, turning with his hand outstretched. "I did not
expect to meet you here."
The newcomer frowned, until somebody whispered in
his ear. "Oh," he said, "you're Boleslaw."
"Naturally I'm Boleslaw, and naturally you're my pitch-
ing coach, Magill, and why do you look at me that way
when I've seen you every day for three weeks?"
The man shook his head. "You're thinking of Grand-
daddy Jim," he said, and moved on.
Boley stared after him. Granddaddy Jim? But Coach
Magill was no granddaddy, that was for sure. Why, his
eldest was no more than six years old. Boley put his hand
against the wall to steady himself. It touched something
metal and cold. He glanced at it.
It was a bronze plaque, floor to ceiling high, and it was
embossed at the top with the words World Series Honor
Roll. And it listed every team that had ever won the
World Series, from the day Chicago won the first Series of
all in 1906 untiluntil
Boley said something out loud, and quickly looked
around to see if anybody had heard him. It wasn't some-
thing he wanted people to hear. But it was the right time
for a man to say something like that, because what that
-  crazy lump of bronze said, down toward the bottom, with
only empty spaces below, was that the most recent team to
win the World Series was the Yokahama Dodgers, and
the year they won it in was1998.
1998.
A time machine, thought Boley wonderingly, I guess
what he meant was a machine that traveled in time.
Now, if you had been picked up in a time machine that
leaped through the years like a jet plane leaps through
space you might be quite astonished, perhaps, and for a
while you might not be good for much of anything, until
things calmed down.
But Boley was born calm. He lived by his arm and his
eye, and there was nothing to worry about there. Pay him
his Class C league contract bonus, and he turns up in
Western Pennsylvania, all ready to set a league record for
no-hitters his first year. Call him up from the minors and
he bats .418 against the best pitchers in baseball. Set him
down in the year 1999 and tell him he's going to play in
the Series, and he hefts the ball once or twice and says,
"I better take a couple of warm-up pitches. Is the spitter
allowed?"
They led him to the buUpen. And then there was the
playing of the National Anthem and the teams took the
field. And Boley got the biggest shock so far.
"Magill," he bellowed in a terrible voice, "what is that
other pitcher doing out on the mound?"
The manager looked startled. "That's our starter,
Padgett. He always starts with the number-two defensive
lineup against right-hand batters when the outfield shift
goes"
"MagUI! I am not any relief pitcher. If you pitch Bole-
slaw, you start with Boleslaw."
Magill said soothingly, "It's perfectly all right. There
have been some changes, that's all. You can't expect the
rules to stay the same for forty or fifty years, can you?"
"I am not a relief pitcher. I"
"Please, please. Won't you sit down?"
Boley sat down, but he was seething. "We'll see about
that," he said to the world. "We'll just see."
Things had changed, all right. To begin with, the studio
really was a studio and not a stadium. And although it
was a very large room it was not the equal of Ebbetts
Field, much less the Yankee Stadium. There seemed to
be an awful lot of bunting, and the ground rules con-
fused Boley very much.
Then the dugout happened to be just under what seemed
to be a complicated sort of television booth, and Boley
could hear the announcer screaming himself hoarse just
overhead. That had a familiar sound, but
"And here," roared the announcer, "comes the all-
important nothing-and-one pitch! Fans, what a pitcher's
duel this is! Delasantos is going into bis motion! He's
coming down! He's delivered it! And it's in there for a
count of nothing and two! Fans, what a pitcher that
Tiburcio Delasantos is! And here comes the all-important
nothing-and-two pitch, andandyes, and he struck him
out! He struck him out! He struck him out! It's a no-
hitter, fans! In the all-important second inning, it's a no-
hitter for Tiburcio Delasantos!"
Boley swallowed and stared hard at the scoreboard,
which seemed to show a score of 14-9, their favor. His
teammates were going wild with excitement, and so was
the crowd of players, umpires, cameramen and announcers
watching the game. He tapped the shoulder of the man
next to him.
"Excuse me. What's the score?"
"Dig that Tiburcio!" cried the man. "What a first-string
defensive pitcher against left-handers he is!"
"The score. Could you tell me what it is?"
"Fourteen to nine. Did you see that"
Boley begged, "Please, didn't somebody just say it was
a no-hitter?"
"Why, sure." The man explained: "The inning. It's a
no-hit inning." And he looked queerly at Boley.
It was all like that, except that some of it was worse.
After three innings Boley was staring glassy-eyed into
space. He dimly noticed that both teams were trotting off
the field and what looked like a whole new corps of play-
ers were warming up when Manager MagiU stopped in
' front of him. "You'll be playing in a minute," Magill said
kindly.
"Isn't the game over?" Boley gestured toward the field.
"Over? Of course not. It's the third-inning stretch,"
Magill told him. "Ten minutes for the lawyers to file their
motions and make their appeals. You know." He laughed
condescendingly. "They tried to get an injunction against
the bases-loaded pitchout. Imagine!"
"Hah-hah," Boley echoed. "Mister Magill, can I go
home?"
"Nonsense, boy! Didn't you hear me? You're on as
soon as the lawyers come off the field!"
Well, that began to make sense to Boley and he
actually perked up a little. When the minutes had passed
and Magill took him by the hand he began to feel almost
cheerful again. He picked up the rosin bag and flexed his
fingers and said simply, "Boley's ready."
Because nothing confused Boley when he had a ball or
a bat in his hand. Set him down any time, anywhere, and
he'd hit any pitcher or strike out any batter. He knew
exactly what it was going to be like, once he got on the
playing field.
Only it wasn't like that at all.
Boley's team was at bat, and the first man up got on
with a bunt single. Anywa-y, they said it was a bunt single.
To Boley it had seemed as though the enemy pitcher had
charged beautifully off. the mound, fielded the ball with
machine-like precision and flipped it to the first-base
player with inches and inches to spare for the out. But
the umpires declared interference by a vote of eighteen to
seven, the two left-field umpires and the one with the
field glasses over the batter's head abstaining; it seemed
that the first baseman had neglected to say "Excuse me" to
the runner. Well, the rules were the rules. Boley tightened
his grip on his bat and tried to get a lead on the pitcher's
style.
That was hard, because the pitcher was fast. Boley ad-
mitted it to himself uneasily; he was very fast. He was a
big monster of a player, nearly seven feet tall and with
something queer and sparldy about his eyes; and when
he came down with a pitch there was a sort of a hiss and
a splat, and the ball was in the catcher's hands. It might,
Boley confessed, be a little hard to hit that particular
pitcher, because he hadn't yet seen the ball in transit.
Manager MagiU came up behind him in the on-deck
spot and fastened something to his collar. "Your inter-
com," he explained. "So we can tell you what to do when
you're up."
"Sure, sure." Boley was only watching the pitcher. He
looked sickly out there; his skin was a grayish sort of
color, and those eyes didn't look right. But there wasn't
anything sickly about the way he delivered the next pitch,
a sweeping curve that sizzled in and spun away.
The batter didn't look so good eithersame sickly
gray skin, same giant frame. But he reached out across
the plate and caught that curve and dropped it between
third-base and short; and both men were safe.
"You're on," said a tinny little voice in Boley's ear; it
was the little intercom, and the manager was talking to
him over the radio. Boley walked numbly to the plate.
Sixty feet away, the pitcher looked taller than ever.
Boley took a deep breath and looked about him. The
crowd was roaring ferociously, which was normal enough
except there wasn't any crowd. Counting everybody,
players and officials and all, there weren't more than three
or four hundred people in sight in the whole studio. But
he could hear the screams and yells of easily fifty or sixty
thousand There was a man, he saw, behind a plate-
glass window who was doing things with what might have
been records, and the yells of the crowd all seemed to
come from loudspeakers under his window. Boley winced
and concentrated on the pitcher.
"I will pin his ears back," he said feebly, more to
reassure himself than because he believed it.
The little intercom on his shoulder cried in a tiny voice:
"You will not, Boleslaw! Your orders are to take the first
pitch!"
"But, listen"
"Take it! You hear me, Boleslaw?"
There was a time when Boley would have swung just
-._to prove who was boss; but the time was not then. He
stood there while the big gray pitcher looked him over
with those sparkling eyes. He stood there through the
windup. And then the arm came down, and he didn't
stand there. That ball wasn't invisible, not coming right
at him; it looked as big and as fast as the Wabash Can-
nonbaU and Boley couldn't help it, for the first time in
his life he jumped a yard away, screeching.
"Hit batter! Hit batter!" cried the intercom. "Take your
base, Boleslaw."
Boley biinked. Six of the umpires were beckoning him
on, so the intercom was right. But still and all Boley
had his pride. He said to the little button on his collar,
"I am sorry, but I wasn't hit. He missed me a mile, easy.
I got scared is all."
"Take your base, you silly fool!" roared the intercom.
"He scared you, didn't he? That's just as bad as hitting
you, according to the rules. Why, there is no telling what
incalculable damage has been done to your nervous sys-
tem by this fright. So kindly get the bejeepers over to first
base, Boleslaw, as provided in the rules of the game!"
He got, but he didn't stay there long, because there was
a pinch runner waiting for him. He barely noticed that it
was another of the gray-skinned giants before he headed
for the locker room and the showers. He didn't even re-
member getting out of his uniform; he only remembered
that he, Boley, had just been through the worst experience
of his life.
He was sitting on a bench, with his head on his hands,
when the owner's uncle came in, looking queerly out of
place in his neat pin-striped suit. The owner's Uncle had
to speak to him twice before his eyes focused.
"They didn't let me pitch," Boley said wonderingly.
"They didn't, want Boley to pitch."
The owner's uncle patted his shoulder. "You were a
guest star, Boley. One of the all-time greats of the game.
Next game they're going to have Christy Mathewson.
Doesn't that make you feel proud?"
"They didn't let me pitch," said Boley.
The owner's uncle sat down beside him. "Don't you
see? You'd be out of place in this kind of a game. You
got on base for them, didn't you? I heard the announcer
say it myself; he said you filled the bases in the all-
important fourth inning. Two hundred million people were
watching this game on television! And they saw you gpt
on base!"
"They didn't let me hit either," Boley said.
There was a commotion at the door and the team came
trotting in screaming victory. "We win it, we win it!" cried
Manager Magitt. "Eighty-seven to eighty-three! What a
squeaker!"
Boley lifted his head to croak, "That's fine." But no-
body was listening. The manager jumped on a table and
yelled, over the noise in the locker room:
"Boys, we pulled a close one out, and you know what
that means. We're leading in the Series, eleven games to
nine! Now let's just wrap those other two up, and"
He was interrupted by a bloodcurdling scream from
Boley. Boley was standing up, pointing with an expression
of horror. The athletes had scattered and the trainers were
working them over; only some of the trainers were using
pliers and screwdrivers instead of towels and liniment.
Next to Boley, the big gray-skinned pinch runner was
flat on his back, and the trainer was lifting one leg away
from the body
"Murder!" bellowed Boley. "That fellow is murdering
that fellow!"
The manager jumped down next to him. "Murder?
There isn't any murder, Boleslaw! What are you talking
about?"
Boley pointed mutely. The trainer stood gaping at him,
with the leg hanging limp in his grip. It was completely
removed from the torso it belonged to, but the torso
seemed to be making no objections; the curious eyes were
open but no longer sparkling; the gray skin, at closer
hand, seemed metallic and cold.
The manager said fretfully, "I swear, Boleslaw, you're
a nuisance. They're just getting cleaned and oiled, bat-
teries recharged, that sort of thing. So they'll be in shape
tomorrow, you understand."
"Cleaned," whispered Boley. "Oiled." He stared around
e the room. All of the gray-skinned ones were being some-
how disassembled; bits of metal and glass were sticking
out of them. "Are you trying to tell me," he croaked, "that
those fellows aren't fellows?"
"They're ballplayers," said Manager Magill impatiently.
"Robots. Haven't you ever seen a robot before? We're
allowed to field six robots on a nine-man team, it's per-
fectly legal. Why, next year I'm hoping the Commission-
er'11 let us play a whole robot team. Then you'll see some
baseball!"
With bulging eyes Boley saw it was true. Except for a
handful of flesh-and-blood players like himself the team
was made up of man-shaped machines, steel for bones,
electricity for blood, steel and plastic and copper cogs for
muscle. "Machines," said Boley, and turned up his eyes.
The owner's uncle tapped him on the shoulder wor-
riedly. "It's time to go back," he said.
So Boley went back.
He didn't remember much about it, except that the
owner's uncle had made him promise never, never to tell
anyone about it, because it was orders from the Defense
Department, you never could tell how useful a time ma-
chine might be in a war. But he did get back, and he
woke up the next morning with all the signs of a hangover
and the sheets kicked to shreds around his feet.
He was still bleary when he staggered down to the
coffee shop for breakfast. Magill the pitching coach, who
had no idea that he was going to be granddaddy to Magill
the series-winning manager, came solicitously over to
him. "Bad night, Boley? You look like you have had a
bad night."
"Bad?" repeated Boley. "Bad? MagiU, you have got no
idea. The owner's uncle said he would show me some-
thing that would learn me a little humility and, Magill, he
came through. Yes, he did. Why, I saw a big bronze tablet
with the names of the Series winners on it, and I saw"
And he closed his mouth right there, because he re-
membered right there what the owner's uncle had said
about closing his mouth. He shook his head and shud-
dered. "Bad," he said, "you bet it was bad."
Magill coughed. "Gosh, that's too bad, Boley. I guess
I mean, then maybe you wouldn't feel like pitching an-
other couple of inningswell, anyway one inningtoday,
because"
Boley held up his hand. "Say no more, please. You
want me to pitch today, Magill?"
"That's about the size of it," the coach confessed.
"I will pitch today," said Boley. "If that is what you
want me to do, I will do it. I am now a reformed char-
acter. I will pitch tomorrow, too, if you want me to pitch
tomorrow, and any other day you want me to pitch. And
if you do not want me to pitch, I will sit on the sidelines.
Whatever you want is perfectly all right with me, Magill,
because, Magill, Ihey! Hey, Magill, what are you doing
down there on the floor?"
So that is why Boley doesn't give anybody any trouble
any more, and if you tell him now that he reminds you
of Dizzy Dean, why he'll probably shake your hand and
thank you for the complimenteven if you're a sports-
writer, even. Oh, there still are a few special little things
about him, of coursenot even counting the things like
how many shut-outs he pitched last year (eleven) or how
many home runs he hit (fourteen). But everybody finds
him easy to get along with. They used to talk about the
change that had come over him a lot and wonder what
caused it. Some people said he got religion and others
said he had an incurable disease and was trying to do
good in his last few weeks on earth; but Boley never said,
he only smiled; and the owner's uncle was too busy in
Washington to be with the team much after that. So now
they talk about other things when Boley's name comes
up. For instance, there's his little business about the pitch-
ing machinewhen he shows up for batting practice
(which is every morning, these days), he insists on hitting
against real live pitchers instead of the machine. It's even
in his contract. And then, every March he bets nickels
against 'anybody around the training camp that'll bet with
him that he can pick that year's Series winner. He doesn't
bet more than that, because the Commissioner naturally
doesn't like big bets from baUplayers.
But, even for nickels, don't bet against him, because he
isn't ever going to lose, not before 1999.
Wapshot's Demon
HE KEPT ME WAITING on a hard wooden bench for
three-quarters of an hour before his secretary came wan-
dering out, glanced casually at me, stopped to chat with
the switchboard girl, drifted in my direction again, paused
to straighten out the magazines on the waiting-room table,
and finally came over to tell me that the Postal Inspector
would see me now.
I was in no mood to be polite, but I was very good. I
marched in and put my briefcase on his desk and said,
"Sir, I must protest this high-handed behavior. I assure
yon, I have no client whose activities would bring him
in conflict in any way with the Post Office Department. I
said as much to one of your staff on the phone, after I
received your letter ordering me to appear here, but
they"
He stood up, smiling amiably, and shook my hand be-
fore I could get it out of the way. "That's all right," he
said cheerfully. "That's perfectly all right. We'll straighten
it out right away. What did you say your name was?"
I told him my name and started to go on with what I
had to say, but he wasn't listening. "Roger Barclay," he
repeated, looking at a pile of folders on his desk. "Bar-
clay, Barclay, Barclay. Oh, yes." He picked up one of
the folders and opened it. "The Wapshot business," he
said.
The folder seemed to contain mostly large, bright-
colored, flimsy-looking magazines entitled Secret, Most
Secret, Top Secret and Shush! He opened one of them
where a paper clip marked a place and handed it to me.
There was a small ad circled in red crayon. "That's it," he
said. "Your boy Wapshot."
The ad was of no conceivable interest to me; I barely
glanced at it, something about fortune-telling, it looked
like, signed by somebody named Cleon Wapshot at an
address in one of those little towns in Maine. I handed
it back to the Postal Inspector.  "I have already mformed
you," I said, "that I have no client involved in difficulties
with the Post Office Department; that is not my sort of
practice at all. And I most certainly have no client named
aeon Wapshot."
That took some of the wind out of his sails. He looked
at me suspiciously, then took a scrawly piece of paper out
of the folder and read it over, then looked at me suspi-
ciously again. He handed over the piece of paper. "What
about this, then?" he demanded.
It was a penciled letter, addressed to the Postal In-
spector in Eastport, Maine; it said:
Dear Sir:
Please send all further communications to my Attorney,
Roger Barclay, Esq., of 404 Fifth Avenue, New York,
and oblige,
Yours sincerely,
Clean Wapshot
Naturally, that was a puzzler to me. But I finally con-
vinced the Postal Inspector that I'd never heard of this
Wapshot. You could see he thought there was something
funny about the whole thing and wasn't quite sure
whether I had anything to do with it or not. But, after all,
the Post Office Department is used to cranks and he
finally let me go, and even apologized for taking my time,
after I had assured him for the tenth time that I had
nothing to do with Wapshot.
That shows how wrong you can be. I hurried back to
my office and went in through the private door down the
hall. When I rang for Phoebe I had already put the affair
out of my mind, as the sort of ridiculous time-waster that
makes it so difficult to run a law office on schedule. Phoebe
was bursting with messages; Frankel had called on the
Harry's Hideaway lease, call him back; Mr. Zimmer had
called three times, wouldn't leave a message; the process
server had been unable to find the defendants in the Her-
lihy suit; one of the operatives from the Splendid Detec-
tive Agency was bringing in a confidential report at 3:30.
"And there's a man to see you," she finished up. "He's
been here over an hour; his name's, uh, WapShot, Cleon
Wapshot."
He was a plump little man with a crew cut. Not very
much like any Down-East lobsterman I ever had imagined,
but his voice was authentic of the area. I said, "Sir, you
have caused me a great deal of embarrassment. What in
heaven's name possessed you to give the Post Office my
name?"
He biinked at me mildly. "You're my lawyer."
"Nonsense! My good man, there are some formalities
to go through before"
"Pshaw," he said, "here's your retainer, Mr. Barclay."
He pushed a manila envelope toward me across the desk.
I said, "But I haven't taken your case"
"You will."
"But the retainer1 scarcely know what the figure
should be. I don't even know what law you brwhat
allegations were made."
"Oh, postal fraud, swindling, fortune-telling, that kind
of thing," he said. "Nothing to it. How much you figure
you ought to have just to get started?"
I sat back and looked him over. Fortune-telling! Postal
fraud! But he had a round-faced honesty, you know, the
kind of expression jurymen respect and trust. He didn't
look rich and he didn't look poor; he had a suit on that
was very far from new, but the overcoat was new, brand-
new, and not cheap. And besides he had come right out
and said what his business was; none of this fake air of
"I don't need a lawyer, but if you want to pick up a
couple bucks for saving me the trouble of writing a letter,
you're on" that I see coming in to my office thirty times
a week.
I said briskly, "Five hundred dollars for a starter, Mr.
Wapshot."
He grinned and tapped the envelope. "Count 'er up,"
he said.
I stared at him, but I did what he said. I dumped the
contents of the manila envelope on my desk.
There was a thick packet of U. S. Postal Money Orders
a hundred and forty-one of them, according to a neatly
penciled slip attached to them, made out variously to
"aeon Wapshot," "Clion Wopshatt," "C. Wapshut" and
a dozen other alternate forms, each neatly endorsed on
the back by my new client, each in the amount of $1.98.
There was a packet, not quite so thick, of checks, all
colors and sizes; ninety-six of these, all in the same
amount of $1.98.
There was a still thinner packet of one-dollar bills
thirty of them; and finally there were stamps amounting
to 74c. I took a pencil and added them up:
$279.18
190.08
30.00
.74

$500.00

Wapshot said anxiously, "That's all right, isn't it? I'm
sorry about the stamps, but that's the way the orders come
in and there's nothing I can do about it1 tried and tried
to turn them in, but they won't give me but half the value
for them in the post office, and that's not right. That's
wasteful. You can use them around here, can't you?"
I said with an effort, "Sit down, Mr. Wapshot. Tell me
what this is all about."
Well, he told me. But whether I understood or didn't
understand I can't exactly say. Parts of it made sense, and
parts of it were obviously crazy.
But what it all came to was that, with five appointments
and a heavy day's mail untouched, I found myself in a cab
with this deon Wapshot, beetling across town to a little
fleabag hotel on the West Side. I didn't think the elevator
was going to make it, but I have to admit I was wrong. It
got us to the fifth floor, and Wapshot led the way down
a hall where all the doors seemed to be ajar and the
guests peeping impassively out at us, and we went into a
room with an unmade bed and a marble-topped bureau
and a dripping shower in the pint-sized bath, and a lug-
gage rack andon the luggage rack, a washing machine.
Or anyway, it looked like a washing machine. 
Wapshot put his hand on it with simple pride.
"My Semantic Polarizer," he explained.
I followed him into the room, holding my breath. There
was a fine, greasy film of grit on the gadgetWapshot had
not been clever enough to close the window to the air-
shaft, which appeared to double as a garbage chute for the
guests on the upper stories. Under the gritas I say, a
washing machine. One of the small light-housekeeping
kinds: a drawn aluminum pail, a head with some sort of
electric business inside. And a couple of things that didn't
seem connected with washing clothestwo traps, one on
either side of the pail. The traps were covered with wire
mesh, and both of them were filled with white cards.
"Here," said Wapshot, and picked one of the cards out
of the nearest trap. It was a tiny snapshot, like the V-mail
letters, photographically diminished, soldiers overseas used
to send. I read it without difficulty:
Dear Mr. Wapshat,
My Husband was always a good Husband to me, not
counting the Drink, but when his Cousin moved in up-
stairs he cooled off to me. He is always buying her Candy
and Flowers because he promised her Mother he would
take care of her after the Mother, who was my Husband's
Aunt, died. Her Television is always getting broken and
he has to go up to fix it, sometimes until four o'clock in
the Morning. Also, he never told me he had an Aunt until
she moved in. I enclose $1 Dollar and .98 Cents as it says
in your ad. in SHUT UP!, please tell me, is she really
his Cousin?
I looked up from the letter. Wapshot took it from me,
glanced at it, shrugged. "I get a lot of that kind," he said.
"Mr. Wapshot, are you confessing that you are telling
fortunes by mail?"
"No!" He looked upset. "Didn't I make you under-
stand? It hasn't got anything to do with fortunes. Ques-
tions that have a yes or no answer, that's allif I can
give them a definite yes or a definite no, I do it and keep
the dollar ninety-eight. If I can't I give back the money."
I stared at him, trying to tell if he was joking. He didn't
look as though he was joking. In the airshaft something
went whiz-pop; a fine spray of grit blew in off the window
sill.
Wapshot shook his head reproachfully. "Throwing their
trash down again. Mr. Barclay, I've told the desk clerk a
dozen times"
"Forget the desk clerk! What's the difference between
what you said and fortune-telling?"
He took a deep breath. "I swear, Mr. Barclay," he said
sadly, "I don't think you listen. I went all through this in
your office."
"Do it again."
He shrugged. "Well," he said, "you start with Clerk
Maxwell. He was a man who discovered a lot of things,
and one of the things he discovered he never knew about"
I yelled, "Now, how could he"
"Just listen, Mr. Barclay. It was something that they
call 'Maxwell's Demon.' You know what hot air is?"
I said, meaning it to hurt, "I'm learning."
"No, no, not that kind of hot air. I mean just plain
hot air, like you might get out of a radiator. It's hot be-
cause the molecules in it are moving fast. Understand?
Heat is fast molecules, cold is slow molecules. That's the
only difference." He was getting warmed up. "Now,
ordinary air," he went on, "is a mixture of molecules at
different speeds. Some move fast, some move slow; it's
the average that gives you your temperature. What Clerk
Maxwell said, and he said it kind of as a joke, you know
except a genius never really jokes, and never really
makes a mistake; even the things he doesn't really mean
sometimes turn out to be true Anyway, what Clerk
Maxwell said was, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we could train
a little demon to  stand in the window of a house.  He
could direct the fast-moving molecules inside, giving us
heat,  and direct the slow-moving ones into, say, the
kitchen refrigeratorgiving us cold.' You follow me so
far?"
I laughed. "Ha-ha. But I'm not a fool, Mr. Wapshot,
and I have had a certain amount of education. I am
aware that there is a law of entropy that"
"Ha-ha," he interrupted. "Hold on for a minute, Mr.
Barclay. I heard all about the law of entropy, which says
that high and low temperatures tend to merge and average
out, instead of separating. I heard about it, you heard
about it, and even Maxwell heard about it. But there was
a German fellow name of Hilsch, and he didn't hear about
it. Because what he did, Mr. Barclay, was to invent some-
thing called the 'Hilsch Tube,' and all the Hilsch tube is
is Maxwell's demon come to life. Honest. It really works.
You blow into itit's a kind of little pipe with a joint
sticking out of it, the simplest-looking little thing you ever
sawand hot air comes out of one end, cold air comes
out of the other. Don't take my word for it," he said hur-
riedly, holding up his hand. "Don't argue with me. After
World War II, they brought back a couple of those things
from Germany, and they're all over the country now. They
work."
I said patiently, "Mr. Wapshot, what has this got to
do with fortune-telling?"
He scowled. "It isn't fortune Well, never mind that.
So we take my Semantic Polarizer. I put into it a large
sample of particleswhat we call a 'universe.' These par-
ticles are microfilmed copies of letters people have sent
me, along with their checks for a dollar ninety-eight, just
like I told them to do in my ads. I run the Polarizer for a
while, until the particles in the 'universe' are thoroughly
randomed, and then I start tapping off the questions. The
ones that come out at this end, the answer is 'yes.' The
ones that come out at the other, 'no.' I have to admit," he
confessed, a little embarrassed, "that I can only pull about
sixty per cent out before the results begin getting un-
reliablethe ones that come off slowly are evidently less
highly charged than the ones that come off right away, and
so there's a chance of error. But the ones that come off
early, Mr. Barclay, they're for sure. After all," he de-
manded, "what else can they be but definite? Don't for-
get, the particles are exactly alike in every respectshape,
color, weight, size, texture, appearance, feel, everything
every respect but one. The only difference is, for some the
answer is 'yes,' for some the answer is 'no.' "
I stood looking at him silently.
A bottle whizzed and splintered in the airshaft; we both
ducked.
I said, "It works?"
"It works," he said solemnly.
"You've tried it out?"
He grinnedalmost for the first time. "You took my
case, didn't you? That was a yes. Your price was five
hundred? That was a yes. It works, Mr. Barclay. As I
see it, that ends the discussion."
And so it did, of coursepermanently.
The Semantic Polarizer was remarkably easy to run. I
played with it for a while, and then I sent the white-haired
bellboy down for the Sunday papers. He looked at me as
if I was  some kind of  an idiot.  "Excuse me," he said,
scratching his head, "but isn't today Wednes"
"I want the Sunday papers," I told him. "Here." Well,
the five-dollar bill got the papers for me, but obviously
he still thought I was crazy. He said:
"Excuse me, but did the gemmun in this room go out?"
"You mean Mr. Wapshot?" I asked him. "Yes. That's
right. He went out. And now, if you will kindly do the
same...."
I locked the door behind him. Oh, Wapshot had gone
out, all right. I pulled the papers apartthey were a stack
nearly a foot highand crumpled them section by section,
and when I had dumped them down the airshaft piece by
piece, stare how I might, lean as far out as I would, I
could see nothing at the bottom of the shaft but paper.
So much for Cleon Wapshot, gone early to join the
immortals.
I checked the room over carefully. There was one small
blood spot on the floor, but in that room it hardly mat-
tered. I pulled the leg of the chair over to cover it, put
the Semantic Analyzer in its crate, turned off the light and
rang for the elevator. The blasted thing weighed a ton, but
I managed it.
The elevator starter at my office gave me a lot of
trouble, but I finally got the thing into a freight elevator
andfor another five bucks to the porterin the private
door to my office. Phoebe heard me moving around and
came trotting in with a face like cataclysm. "Mr. Barclay,"
she cried, "they're here! They've been waiting ever since
you left with Mr. Wapshot."
"God rest him," I said. "Who are yon talking about?"
"Why, the men from the Bar Association," she ex-
plained. It had completely slipped my mind.
I patted her hand. "There," I said. "Show them in, my
dear."
The two men from the Bar Association came in like
corpse robbers. "Mr. Barclay," the fat one said, "speaking
for the Committee, we cannot accept your explanation
that $11,577.16 of the Hoskins Estate was expended for
'miscellany.' Lacking a more detailed accounting, we have
no choice but to"
"I understand perfectly," I told him, bowing. "You
wish me to pay backto make up the deficit out of my
own pocket."
He scowled at me. "Whyyes, that for a starter," he
said sternly. "But there is also the matter of the Annie
Sprayragen Trust Fund, where the item of $9,754.08 for
'general expense' has been challenged by"
"That too," I said. "Gentlemen, I shall pauperize my-
self to make good these sums. My whole fortune will go
to it, if necessary."
"Fortune!" squawked the short, thin one. "That's the
trouble, Barclay! We've talked to your bank, and they say
you haven't two dimes to rub together!"
"Disbarment!" snarled the fat one. "That's why we're
here, Barclay!"
It was time to make an end. I gave up the pretense of
politeness. "Gentlemen," I said crisply, "I think not."
They stared. "Barclay," snapped the fat one, "bluff will
get you"
"There's no bluff." I walked over to my desk, patting
the crate of the Semantic Polarizer on the way. I pre-
tended to consult my calendar. "Be good enough to return
on Monday next," I told them. "I shall have certified
checks for the full amounts ready at that time."
The short, thin one said uncertainly, "Why should we
let you stall?"
"What else can you do? The money's gone, gentlemen.
If you want it back,  be here on Monday.  And now,
good-day."
Phoebe appeared to show them out.
And I got down to work.
Busy, busy, busy.
Phoebe was busier than I, at thatafter the first day.
I spent the rest of that day printing out yes-or-no ques-
tions on little squares of paper, microfilming them and
bouncing them through the hopper of the Semantic Polar-
izer. While the drum of the machine spun and bounced, I
stood and gloated.
Wapshot's Demon! And all he could think to use it for
was a simple mail-order business, drudgery instead of
wealth beyond dreaming. With a brain that could create
the Semantic Polarizer, he was unable to see beyond the
cash value of a fortune-telling service. Well, it was an easy
way to pay his bills, and obviously he wasn't much in-
terested in wealth.
But I, however, was.
And that was why I ran poor Phoebe ragged. To the
bookmakers; to the bank; to the stockbrokers; to the
track; to the numbers runners; back to the office. I loaned
her my pigskin case, and when that wasn't big enough
the numbers bank, for instance, paid off in fives and tens
she took a hundred dollars out of the bottom file
drawer and bought a suitcase. Because it was, after all,
simple enough to get rich in a hurry. Take a race at Aque-
duct; there are eight horses entered, maybe; write a slip
for each one: Will  win the first at Aqueduct
today? Repeat for the second race, the third race, all the
races to the end of the day; run them through the Polar-
izer, pick out the cards that come through the "yes"
hopper
And place your bets.
Numbers? You need thirty slips. Will the first digit of
the winning number be 1, 2, 3, 4etc. Ten slips for the
first digit, ten for the second, ten for the third; pick out
the three that come out "yes," put them together, and
A bet on the numbers pays odds of 600 to one.
It took me thirty-six hours to work out the winners of
the next three weeks' races, fights, ball games and tennis
matches; the stock quotations of a hundred selected issues,
and the numbers that would come up on the policy wheel.
And, I say this, they were the happiest thirty-six hours of
my life.
Of all my life.
It was a perfectly marvelous time, and too bad that it
couldn't go on. I had everything ready: My suitcase of
currency, my lists of the bets to place in the immediate
future, my felt-lined wardrobe trunk for transporting the
Polarizer, my anonymous letter to the manager of the late
Cleon Wapshot's hotel, directing his attention to the air-
shaft; even my insulting note to the Committee on Dis-
barments of the Bar Association. My passport was in
order, my reservation by Air France to New Guinea was
confirmed, and I was only waiting for Phoebe to come
back with the tickets. I had time to kill.
And Curiosity is a famed killer. Of cats. Of time. And
of other things.
When Phoebe came back she pounded on the door for
nearly an hour, knowing I was in there, knowing I would
miss my plane, begging me to come out, to answer, to
speak to her. But what was the use? I took my list of bets
and tore it in shreds. I took the Polarizer and smashed it
to jangling bits. And then I waited.
Good-by, Wall Street! good-by, Kentucky Derby. Good-
by, a million dollars a month. I suppose they'll find Wap-
shot's body sooner or later, and there isn't a doubt that
they'll trace it back to methe bellboy, the postal inspec-
tor, even Phoebe might provide the link. Say, a week to
find the body; another week, at the most, to put the finger
on me. Two months for the trial, and sentence of execu-
tion a month or two after. Call it four months from date
until they would put me in the chair.
I wish I hadn't asked the Polarizer one certain question.
I wish I were going still to be alive, four months from
date.
My Lady Green Sleeves

His NAME WAS LIAM O' LEARY and there was something
stinking in his nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He
hadn't found what the trouble was yet, but he would. That
was his business. He was a captain of guards in Estates-
General Correctional Institutionbetter known to its in-
mates as the Jugand if he hadn't been able to detect
the scent of trouble brewing a cellblock away he would
never have survived to reach his captaincy.
And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee
No. WFA-656R.
He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what
got a girl like her into a place like this. And, what was
more important, why she couldn't adjust herself to it, now
that she was in.
He demanded, "Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?"
The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward.
The block guard, Sodaro, growled wamingly, "Watch it,
auntie!"
O'Leary shook his head. "Let her talk, Sodaro." It said
in the Civil Service Guide to Prison Administration: "De-
tainees will be permitted to speak in their own behalf in
disciplinary proceedings." And O'Leary was a man who
lived by the book.
She burst out, "I never got a chance! That old witch
Mathias never told me I was supposed to mop up. She
banged on the door and said, 'Slush up, sister!' And then
ten minutes later she called the guards and told them I
refused to mop."
The block guard guffawed. "Wipe talk! That's what she
was telling you to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about
this? This Bradley is"
"Shut up, Sodaro." Captain O'Leary put down his
pencil and looked at the girl. She was attractive and young
not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off to a
wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in
the disciplinary block help straighten her out? He nibbed
his ear and looked past her at the line of prisoners on the
rap detail, waiting for him to judge their cases. He said
patiently, "Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out
your cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was
talking about you should have asked her. Now, I'm warn-
ing you, the next time"
"Hey, Cap'n, wait!" Sodaro was looking alarmed. "This
isn't a first offense. Look at the rap sheetyesterday she
pulled the same thing in the mess hall." He shook his
head reprovingly at the prisoner. "The block guard had
to breakup a fight between her and another wench, and
she claimed the same businesssaid she didn't under-
stand when the other one asked her to move along." He
said virtuously, "The guard warned her then that next
time she'd get the Green Sleeves for sure."
Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She
said tautly, "I don't care. I don't care!"
O'Leary stopped her. "That's enough! Three days in
Block 0," he snapped, and waved her away. It was the
only thing to dofor her own sake as much as for his. He
had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had
omitted to say "sir" every time she spoke to him; but he
couldn't keep it up forever, and he certainly couldn't over-
look hysteria. And hysteria was clearly the next step for
her.
All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed
the rap sheet to Sodaro and said absently, "Too bad a kid
like her has to be here. What's she m for?"
"You didn't know, Cap'n?" Sodaro leered. "She's in for
conspiracy to violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't
waste your time with her, Cap'nshe's a figger-lover!"
Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the
fountain marked "Civil Service." But it didn't wash the
taste out of his mouth.
What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind
of dirty business? He checked out of the cell blocks and
walked across the yard, wondering about her. She'd had
every advantagedecent Civil Service parents, a good
education, everything a girl could wish for. If anything,
she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself,
and look what she had made of it.
"Evening, Cap'n." A bleary old inmate orderly stood
up straight and touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.
"Evening." O'Leary noted, with the part of his mind
that always noted those things, that the orderly had been
lealling on his broom until he'd noticed the captain coming
by. Of course, there wasn't much to sweepthe spray
machines and sweeperdozers had been over the cobble-
stones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an
inmate's job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's
job to notice when they didn't.
There wasn't anything wrong with that job, he told
himself. It was a perfectly good civil-service position
better than post-office clerk, not as good as Congressman,
but a job you could be proud to hold. He was proud of
it. It was right that he should be proud of it. He was civil-
service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and
content to do a good, clean civil-service job. If he had
happened to be born a figa clerk, he told himself; if he
had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have
been proud of that too. There wasn't anything wrong with
being a clerkor a mechanic or a soldier, or even a
laborer for that matter. Good laborers were the salt of
the earth! They weren't smart, maybe, but they had a
well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary was
a broadminded man, and many times he had thought al-
most with a touch of envy how comfortable it must be to
be a wipea laborer, he corrected himself. No responsi-
bilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work
and loaf, work and loaf.
Of course, he wouldn't really want that kind of life,
because he was Civil Service, and not the kind to try to
cross over class barriers that weren't meant to be
"Evening, Cap'n."
He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoreti-
cally, in charge of maintaining the prison's car pool, just
inside the gate. "Evening, Conan," he said. Conan, now
he was a big buck greaser, and he would be there for the
next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air
filter on the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, cer-
tamly. Bat he kept the cars goingand, O'Leary thought
approvingly, when his sentence was up in another year or
so, he would go back to his life with his status restored,
a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he
certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by
trying to pass as Civil Service or anything else. He knew
his place.
So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know
hers?

n
Every prison has its Green Sleevessometimes they
are called by different names. Old Marquette called it
"the canary"; Louisiana State called it "the red hats";
elsewhere it was called "the hole," "the snake pit," "the
Klondike." When you're in it you don't much care what
it is called; it is a place for punishment.
And punishment is what you get.
Block 0 in Estates-General Correctional Institution was
the disciplinary block, and because of the green strait-
jackets its inhabitants wore it was called the Green Sleeves.
It was a community of its own, an enclave within the
larger city-state that was the Jug. And like any other com-
munity, it had its leading citizens . . . two of them. Their
names were Sauer and Flock.
Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the
Green Sleeves. She was in a detachment of three unfor-
tunates like herself, convoyed by an irritable guard, climb-
ing the steel steps toward Block 0 from the floor below,
when she heard the yelling.
"Owoo-o-o," screamed Sauer from one end of the cell
block; and "Yow-w-w!" shrieked Flock at the other.
The inside deck guard of Block 0 looked nervously at
the outside deck guard. The outside guard looked im-
passively backafter all, he was on the outside. The in-
side guard muttered, "Wipe rats! They're getting on my
nerves."
The outside guard shrugged.
"Detail, halt!" The two guards turned to see what was
coming in as the three new candidates for the Green
Sleeves slumped to a stop at the head of the stairs. "Here
they are," Sodaro told them. "Take good care of 'em, will
you? Especially the ladyshe's going to like it here, be-
cause there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to
keep her company." He laughed coarsely and abandoned
his charges to the Block 0 guards.
The outside guard said sourly, "A woman, for God's
sake. Now, O'Leary knows I hate it when there's a woman
in here. It gets the others all riled up."
"Let them in," the inside guard told him. "The others
are riled up already."   -
Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid
them no attention. The outside guard pulled the switch
that  turned  on  the  tanglefoot  electronic  fields  that
swamped the floor of the block corridor and of each in-
dividual cell. While the fields were on, you could ignore
the prisonersthey simply could not move fast enough,
against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm.
But it was a rule that even in Block 0 you didn't leave
the tangler fields on all the timeonly when the cell doors
had to be opened or a prisoner's restraining garment re-
moved.
Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened
gateand fell flat on her face. It was like walking through
molasses; it was her first experience of a tanglefoot field.
The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder.
'Take it easy, auntie. Come on, get in your cell." He
steered her in the right direction and pointed to a green-
sleeved straitjacket on the cell cot. "Put that on. Being
as you're a lady, we won't tie it upbut the rules say
you got to wear it, and the rulesHey! She's crying!" He
shook his head, marveling. It was the first time he had
ever seen a prisoner cry in the Green Sleeves.
However, he was wrong. Sue-Ami's shoulders were
shaking, but not from tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a
good look at Sauer and at Flock as she passed them by,
and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge
to retch.
Sauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves.
They were laborers"wipes," for shortor at any rate
they had been once; they had spent so much time in
prisons that it was sometimes hard even for them to re-
member what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,
grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock
was a lithe five-footer, with the build of a water moccasin
and the sad, stupid eyes of a calf.
Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. "Hey, Flock," he
cried.
"What do you want, Sauer?" called Flock from his
own cell.
"Didn't you see, Rock?" bellowed Sauer. "We got a
lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so
as not to disturb the lady!" He screeched with howling,
maniacal laughter. "Anyway, if we don't cut this out,
they'll get us in trouble. Flock!"
"Oh, you think so?" shrieked Flock. "Jeez, I wish you
hadn't said that, Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared
I'm gonna have to yell!"
The howling started all over again.
The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners
away and turned off the tangler field once more. He licked
his lips. "Say, you want to take a turn in here for a
while?"
"Uh-uh," said the outside guard.
"You're yellow," the inside guard said moodily. "Ah,
I don't know why I don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you!
Pipe down or III come in and beat your head off!"
"Ee-ee-ee!" shrieked Sauer. "I'm scared!" Then he
grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes.
"Don't you know you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on
the head, boss?"
"Shut up!" yelled the inside guard. . . .
Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She
simply could not help it. The crazy yowling of the hard-
timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting under her skin. They
weren't eveneven human, she told herself miserably,
trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the
satisfaction of hearing her. They were animals!
Resentment and anger she could understandshe told
herself doggedly that resentment and anger were natural
and right. They were perfectly normal expressions of the
freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against the vile and
stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was good that
Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to straggle against
the vicious system
But did they have to scream so?
The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She aban-
doned herself to weeping, and she didn't even care who
heard her any more. Senseless!
It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not
be senseless, because noise hides noise. But then, she
hadn't been a prisoner very long.
m
"I smell trouble," said O'Leary to the warden.
"Trouble, trouble?" Warden Schluckebier clutched his
throat and his little round eyes looked terrifiedas per-
haps they should have. Warden Godfrey Schlackebier was
the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in the Jug,
but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto
the last decent job he would have in his life. 'Trouble?
What trouble?"
O'Leary shrugged. "Different things. You know Lafon,
from Block A? This afternoon he was playing ball with
the laundry orderlies in the yard."
The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded:
"O'Leary, what did you want to worry me for? There's
nothing wrong with playing ball in the yard. That's what
recreation periods are for!"
"No. You don't see what I mean, warden. Lafon was a
professional on the outsidean architect. Those laundry
cons were laborers. Pros and wipes don't mix, it isn't
natural. And there are other things." O'Leary hesitated,
frowning. How could you explain to the warden that it
didn't smell right? "For instance Well, there's Aunt
Mathias in the women's block. She's a pretty good old
girlthat's why she's the block orderly, she's a lifer, she's
got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.
But today she put a woman named Bradley on report.
Why? Because she told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk
117
and Bradley didn't understand. Now, Mathias wouldn't"
The warden raised his hand. "Please, O'Leary," he
begged. "Don't bother me about that kind of stuff." He
sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured himself a
cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a
desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary,
then dropped a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it
down eagerly, ignoring its temperature.
He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and more
assured.
"O'Leary," he said, "you're a guard captain, right? And
I'm your warden. You have your job, keeping the inmates
in line, and I have mine. Now, your job is just as im-
portant as my job," he said piously, staring gravely at
O'Leary. "Everybody's job is just as important as every-
body else's, right? But we have to stick to our own jobs.
We don't want to try to pass."
O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the
devil way was that for the warden to talk to him.
"Excuse the expression, O'Leary," the warden said
anxiously. "I mean, after all, 'Specialization is the goal of
civilization,' right?" He was a great man for platitudes,
was Warden Schluckebier. "You know, you don't want
to worry about my end of running the prison. And I don't
want to worry about yours. You see?" And he folded his
hands and smiled like a civil-service Buddha.
O'Leary choked back his temper. "Warden, I'm telling
you that there's trouble coming up. I smell the signs."
"Handle it, then!" snapped the warden, irritated at last.
"But suppose it's too big to handle? Suppose"
"It isn't," the warden said positively. "Don't borrow
trouble with all your supposing, O'Leary." He sipped the
remains of his coffee, made a wry face, poured a fresh
cup and, with an elaborate show of not noticing what he
himself was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets
into it this time.
He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take
effect.
"Well, then," he said at last. "You just remember what
I've told you tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine.
'Specialization is the' Oh, curse the thing."
His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up ir-
ritablythat was the trouble with those pale blue tablets,
thought O'Leary; they gave you a lift, but they put you
on edge. "Hello," barked the warden, not even glancing
at the viewscreen. "What the devil do you want? Don't
you know I'm What? You did what? You're going to
WHAT?"
He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure
horror.
Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His
eyes opened like clamshells in a steamer.
"O'Leary," he said faintly, "my mistake."
And he hung upmore or less by accident; the handset
dropped from his fingers.
The person on the other end of the phone was calling
from Cell Block 0.
Five minutes before he hadn't been anywhere near the
phone, and it didn't look as if his chances of ever getting
near it were very good. Because five minutes before he was
in his cell, with the rest of the hard-timers of the Green
Sleeves.
His name was Flock.
He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across
from him, thought that maybe, after all, the man was
really in pain. Maybe the crazy screams were screams of
agony, because certainly his face was the face of an
agonized man.
The outside guard bellowed: "Okay, okay. Take ten!"
Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What
actually did happen was that the guard reached up and
closed the switch that actuated the tangler fields on the
floors of the cells. The prison rules were humanitarian,
even for the dregs that inhabited the Green Sleeves. Ten
minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case had
to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining gar-
ment. "Rest period" it was calledin the rule book; the
inmates had a less lovely term for it.
At the guard's yell, the inmates jumped to their feet.
Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-
slat bednobody had warned her that the eddy currents
in the tangler fields had a way of making metal smoke-hot.
She gasped, but didn't cry out. Score one more painful
lesson in her new language course. She rubbed the backs
of her thighs gingerlyand slowly, slowly. The eddy
currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like push-
ing against rubber; the faster you tried to move, the
greater the resistance.
The guard peered genially into her cell. "You're okay,
auntie." She proudly ignored him as he slogged deliber-
ately away on his rounds. At least he didn't have to untie
her, and practically stand over her while she attended to
various personal matters, as he did with the male prison-
ers. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann
Bradley was grateful. At least, she didn't have to live
quite like a figlike an underprivileged clerk, she told
herself, conscience-stricken.
Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably, "What
the hell's the matter with you?" He opened the door of
the cell with an asbestos-handled key held in a canvas
glove.
Flock was in that cell, and he was doubled over.
The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick,
maybe. Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face, and
the agony in it was real enough. And Flock was gasping,
through real tears: "Cramps. I1"
"Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut." The
guard lumbered around Rock to the drawstrings at the
back of the jacket. Funny smell in here, he told himself
not for the first time. And imagine, some people didn't
believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time,
he realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Some-
thing burning. Scorchingalmost like meat scorching.
It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned
away; let the stinking wipe take care of his own troubles.
He only had ten minutes to get all the way around Block
0, and the inmates complained like crazy if he didn't
make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was
pretty good at snow-shoeing through the tangler field. He
was a little vain about it, even; at times he had been
known to boast of his ability to make the rounds in two
minutes, every time. . . .
Every time but this.
For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.
The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was
Flockastonishing, he was half out of his jacket; his arms
hadn't been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands,
incredibly, there was something that glinted and smoked.
"All right," croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes
nearly shut with pain.
But it wasn't the tears that held the guard, it was the
shining, smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv!
It looked as though it had been made out of a bedspring,
ripped loose from its frame God knows how, hidden in-
side the green-sleeved jacket God knows howfiled, filed
to  sharpness  over  endless  hours.  No  wonder  Flock
moaned! For the eddy-currents in the shiv were slowly
cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen
where the shiv had rested during other rest periods felt
like raw acid.
"All right," whispered Flock, "just walk out the door,
and you won't get hurt. Unless the other screw makes
trouble, you won't get hurtso tell him not to, you hear?"
He was nearly fainting with the pain.
But he hadn't let go.
He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.

IV
And it was Flock on the phone to the wardenFlock
with his eyes still streaming tears. Flock with Sauer stand-
ing right bebind him, menacing the two bound deck
guards.
Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. "Hey, warden!" he
saidand the voice was a cheerful bray, though the ser-
pent eyes were cold and hating. "Warden, you got to get
a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt himself real bad
and he needs a doctor." He gestured playfully at the
guards with the shiv. "I tell yon, warden. I got this knife,
and I got your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic
in here quickyou hear?"
And he snapped the connection.
O'Leary said, "Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!"
The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to
speak, hesitated, and picked up the long-distance phone.
He said sadly to the prison operator: "Get me the Gover-
norfasti"
Riot!
The word spread out from the prison on seven-league
boots. It snatched the City Governor out of a friendly
game of Seniority with his Manager and their wivesand
just when he was holding the Porkbarrel Joker concealed
in the hole. It broke up the Base Championship Scramble
Finals at Hap Arnold Field to the south, as half the con-
testants had to scramble in earnest to a Red Alert that
was real. It reached to police precinct houses and TV
newsrooms and highway checkpoints, and from there it
filtered into the homes and lives of the nineteen million
persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.
Riot. And yet, fewer than half a dozen men were ac-
tually involved.
A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-
state quivered in every limb and class. It was like a
quarrel of fleas on the hide of a rhino!
But a flea-bite can kill a rhino with the slow agony of
communicated disease; and the city-state around the
prison leaped in fear. In its ten million homes, in its hun-
dreds of thousands of public places, the city-state's people
shook under the impact of the news from the prison.
For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot!
And not merely a street brawl among roistering wipes, or
a barroom fight of greasers relaxing from a hard day at
the plantthe riot was down among the corrupt sludge
that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes,
and no one cared; but in the Jug all classes were cast
together.
Thirty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a
blaze of light. The airmen tumbled out of their quarters
and dayrooms at the screech of the alert siren, and behind
them their wives and children stretched and yawned and
worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained
and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any
alert scheduled for tonight; no, they didn't know where
Daddy was going; no, the kids couldn't get up yetit was
the middle of the night!
And as soon as they had the kids back in bed, most of
the mothers struggled into their own airwac uniforms and
headed for the Briefing Area to hear.
They caught the words from a distancenot quite cor-
rectly.   "Riot!"  gasped  an  aircraftswoman  first-class,
mother of three. "The wipes! I told Charlie they'd get out
of hand, and Alys, we aren't safe. You know how they
are about Gl women! I'm going right home and get a club
and stand right by the door and"
"Club!" snapped Alys, radarscope-sergeant, with two
children querulously awake in her nursery at home. "What
in God's name is the use of a club? You can't hurt a wipe
hitting him on the head. You'd better come along to Sup-
ply with me and draw a gunyou'll need it before this
night is out!"
But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and
clear over the scramble-call speakers, and they knew it
was not merely a matter of trouble in the wipe quarters.
The Jug! The governor himself had called them out; they
were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such levels
on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison. So the
rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off
with a whistling roar; and last of all the helicopters took
off . . . and they were the ones who might actually ac-
complish something. They took up their picket posts on
the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers in each
copter,  stone-faced,  staring grimly alert at the prison
below.
They were ready for the break-out.
Butthere wasn't any break-out.
The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home
for fuel. The helicopters hung onstill ready, still waiting.
The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about,
and went away again. They stayed away. The helicopter
men never faltered and never relaxed. The prison below
them was washed with lightfrom the guard posts on the
walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile
lights of the guard squadrons surrounding the walls. North
of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of
reclaimed land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical
neighborhoods showed lights in every window as the
figgers stood ready to repel invasion from their undesired
neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded tene-
ments of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from
window to window; and there were crowds in the bright
streets.
"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!" a heli-
copter bombardier yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the
flutter and roar of the whirling blades. "Look at the mobs
in GreaserviUe! The first break-out from the Jug's going to
start a fight like you never sawand well be right in the
middle of it!"
He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of
itfor every man, woman and child in the city-state
would be right in the middle of it; there was no place
anywhere that would be spared. No Mixing. That was the
prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm
in a family fightand aren't all mechanics a family, aren't
all laborers a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers re-
lated by closer ties than blood or skin? But the declassed
cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and once
they spread the neat compartmentation of society was
pierced. The break-out would mean riot on a bigger scale
than any prison had ever known. . . .
But he was also partly wrong. Because the break-out
wasn't seeming to come.
The Jug itself was coming to a boil.
Honor Block A, relaxed and comfortable at the end of
another, day, found itself shaken alert by strange goings-
on. First there was the whir and roar of the Air Force
overhead. Trouble. Then there was the sudden arrival of
extra guards, doubling the normal complementday-shift
guards, summoned away from their comfortable civil-
service homes at some urgent call. Trouble for sure.
Honor Block A wasn't used to trouble. A Block was as
far from the Green Sleeves of 0 Block as you could get
and still stay in the Jug. Honor Block A belonged to the
prison's halfbreedsthe honor prisoners, the trusties who
did guards' work because there weren't enough guards to
go around. They weren't Apaches or Piutes; they were
camp-following Injuns who had sold out for the white
man's firewater. The ppce of their services was privilege
many privileges. Item:' TV sets in every cell. Item: Hobby
tools, to make gadgets for the visitor tradethe only way
an inmate could earn an honest dollar. Item: In conse-
quence, an exact knowledge of everything the outside
world knew and put on its TV screens (including the
grim, alarming reports of "trouble at Estates-General")
and the capacity to convert their "hobby tools" toother
uses.
An honor prisoner named Wilmer Lafon was watching
the TV screen with an expression of rage and despair.
Lafon was a credit to the Jughe was a showpiece for
visitors. Prison rules provided for prisoner trainingit
was a matter of "rehabilitation." Prisoner rehabilitation is
a joke, and a centuries-old one at that; but it had its
serious uses, and one of them was to keep the prisoners
busy. It didn't much matter at what.
Lafon, for instance, was being "rehabilitated" by study-
ing architecture. The guards made a point of bringing in-
spection delegations to his cell to show him off. There
were his walls, covered with pin-upsbut not of women.
The pictures were sketches Lafon had drawn himself; they
were of buildings, highways, dams and bridges; they were
splendidly conceived and immaculately executed. "Looka
that!" the guards would rumble to their guests. "There
isn't an architect on the outside as good as this boy!
What do you say, Wilmer? Tell the gentlemenhow long
you been taking these correspondence courses in architec-
ture? Six years! Ever since he came to the Jug."
And Lafon would grin and bob his head, and the dele-
gation would go, with the guard saying something like:
"Believe me, that Wihner could design a whole skyscraper
and it wouldn't fall down, either!"
And they were perfectly, provably right. Not only could
Inmate Lafon design a skyscraper, but he had already
done so. More than a dozen of them. And none had
fallen down.
Of course, that was more than six years bade, before
he was convicted of a felony and sent to the Jug. He
would never design another. Or if he did, it would never
be built. For the plain fact of the matter was that the Jug's
rehabilitation courses were like rehabilitation in every
prison that was ever built since time and punishment be-
gan. They kept the inmates busy. They made a show of
purpose for an institution that had never had a purpose
that made sense. And that was all.
For punishment for a crime is not satisfied by a jail
sentencehow does it hurt a man to feed and clothe and
house him, with the bills paid by the state? Lafon's pun-
ishment was that he, as an architect, was through. Savage
tribes used to lop off a finger or an ear to punish a crimi-
nal. Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits
and pieces of the personality. Chop-chop, and a man's rep-
utation comes off; chop again, and his professional stand-
ing is gone; chop-chop and he has lost the respect and
trust of his fellows. The jail itself isn't the punishment.
The jail is only the shaman's hatchet that performs the
amputation. If rehabilitation in a jail workedii it was
meant to workit would be the end of jails.
Rehabilitation? Rehabilitation for what?
Wilmer Lafon switched off the television set and silently
pounded his fist into the wall.
Never again to return to the Professional class! For
naturally, the conviction had cost him his membership in
the Architectural Society, and that had cost him his Pro-
fessional standing.
But stilljust to be out of the Jug, that would be
something! And his whole hope of ever getting out lay
not here in Honor Block A, but in the turmoil of the
Green Sleeves, a hundred meters and fifty armed guards
away.
He was a furious man. He looked into the cell next
door, where a con named Garcia was trying to concentrate
on a game of Solitaire Splitfee. Once Garcia had been a
Professional too; he was the closest thing to a friend Wil-
mer Lafon had. Maybe he could now help to get Lafon
where he wantedneededto be. . . .
Lafon swore silently and shook his head. Garcia was
a spineless milksop, as bad as any clerkLafon was
nearly sure there was a touch of the inkwell somewhere
in his family. Clever enough, like all figgers. But you
couldn't rely on him in a pinch.
He would have to do it all himself.
He thought for a second, ignoring the rustle and mum-
ble of the other honor prisoners of Block A. There was no
help for it; he would have to dirty his hands with physical
activity.
Outside on the deck, the guards were grumbling to
each other. Lafon wiped the scowl off his black face, put
on a smile, rehearsed what he was going to say, and
rattled the door of his cell.
"Shut up down there!" one of the screws bawled. Lafon
recognized the voice; it was the guard named Sodaro.
That was all to the good. He knew Sodaro, and he had
some plans for him.
He rattled the cell door again and called: "Chief, can
you come here a minute, please?"
Sodaro yelled, "Didn't you hear me? Shut up!" But in
a moment he came wandering by and looked into Lafon's
tidy little cell.
"What the devil do you want?" he grumbled.
Lafon said ingratiatingly, "Hey, chief, what's going on?"
"Shut your mouth," Sodaro said absently and yawned.
He hefted his shoulder holster comfortably. That O'Leary,
what a production he had made of getting the guards
back! And here he was, stuck in Block A on the night he
had set aside for getting better acquainted with that little
blue-eyed statistician from the Census office.
"Aw, chief. The television says there's something going
on in the Green Sleeves. What's the score?"
Sodaro had no reason not to answer him; but it was
his unvarying practice to make a con wait before doing
anything the con wanted. He gave Lafon a ten-second
stare before he relented.
"That's right. Sauer and Flock took over Block 0. What
about it?"
Much, much about it! But Lafon looked away to hide
the eagerness in his eyes. Perhaps, after all, it was not too
late. . . . He suggested humbly: "You look a little sleepy.
Do you want some coffee?"
"Coffee?" Sodaro scratched. "You got a cup for me?"
"Certainly! I've got one put asideswiped it from the
messhall, you know, not the one I use myself."
"Um." Sodaro leaned on the cell door. "You know I
could toss you in the Green Sleeves for stealing from the
messhall."
"Aw, chief!" Lafon grinned.
"You been looking for trouble. O'Leary says you were
messing around with the bucks from the laundry detail,"
Sodaro said half-heartedly. But he didn't really like pick-
ing on Lafon, who was, after all, an agreeable inmate to
have on occasion. "All right. Where's the coffee?"
They didn't bother with tanglefoot fields in Honor Block
A. Sodaro just unlocked the door and walked in, hardly
bothering to look at Lafon. He took three steps toward the
neat little desk at the back of the cell, where Lafon had
rigged up a drawing board and a table, where Lafon kept
his little store of luxury goods. Three steps. And then,
suddenly aware that Lafon was very close to him, 'he
turned, astonished A little too late. He saw that Lafon
had snatched up a metal chair; he saw Lafon swinging it,
his black face maniacal; he saw the chair coming down.
He reached for his shoulder holster; but it was very much
too late for that.

v
Captain O'Leary dragged the scared little wretch into
the warden's office. He shook the con angrily. "Listen to
this, warden! The boys just brought this one in from the
Shops Building. Do you know what he's been up to?"
The warden wheezed sadly and looked away. He had
stopped even answering O'Leary by now, he had stopped
talking to Sauer on the interphone when the big convict
called, every few minutes, to rave and threaten and de-
mand a doctor. He had almost stopped doing everything
except worry and weep. Butstill and all, he was the
warden. He was the one who gave the orders.
O'Leary barked, "Warden, pay attention! This little
greaser has boUixed up the whole tangler circuit for the
prison. If the cons get out into the Yard now you won't
be able to tangle them. You know what that means?
They'll have the freedom of the Yard, and who knows
what comes next?"
The warden frowned sympathetically. "Tsk, tsk."
O'Leary shook the con again. "Come on, Hiroko! Tell
the warden what you told the guards."
The con shrank away from him. Beads of sweat were
glistening on his furrowed yellow forehead. "I1 had to
do it, Cap'n!" he babbled. "I shorted the wormcan in the
tangler subgrid, but I had to! I got a signal, 'BoUix the
grid tonight or wheep, some day you'll be in the Yard
and they'll static you." What could I do, Cap'n? I didn't
want to"
O'Leary pressed: "Who did the signal come from?" But
the con only shook his head, perspiring the more.
The warden asked faintly, "What's he saying?"
O'Leary rolled his eyes to heaven. And this was the
wardencouldn't even understand shoptalk from the
mouths of his own inmates!
He translated: "He got orders from the prison under-
ground to short-circuit the electronic units in the tangler
circuit. They threatened to kill him if he didn't."
The warden drummed with his fingers on the desk.
"The tangler field, eh? My, yes. That is important.
You'd better get it fixed, O'Leary. Right away."
"Fixed? Warden, lookwho's going to fix it?" O'Leary
demanded. "You know as well as I do that every me-
chanic in the prison is a con. Even if one of the guards
would do a thing like thatand I'd bust him myself if he
did!he wouldn't know where to start. That's mechanic
work."
The warden swallowed. He had to admit that O'Leary
was right. Naturally nobody but a mechanicand a spe-
cialist electrician from a particular subgroup of the greaser
class at thatcould fix something like the tangler field
generators. That was a fact of life. These days, he thought
pathetically, the world was so complex that it took a
specialist to do anything at all.
He said absently, "Well, that's true enough. After all,
'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' you know."
O'Leary took a deep breathhe needed it.
He beckoned to the guard at the door. "Take this
greaser out of herel" The con shambled out, his head
hanging.
O'Leary turned to the warden and spread his hands.
"Warden," he said reasonably, "don't you see how this
thing is building up? Let's not just wait for the place to
explode in our faces! Let me take a squad into Block 0
before it's too late."
The warden pursed his lips thoughtfully and cocked his
head, as though he were trying to find some trace of merit
in an unreasonable request.
He said at last, "No."
O'Leary made a passionate sound that was trying to be
bad language; but he was too raging mad to articulate it.
He walked stiffly away from the limp, silent warden and
stared out the window.
At least, he told himself, he hadn't gone to pieces. It
was his doing, not the warden's, that all the off-duty
guards had been dragged double-time back to the prison,
his doing that they were now ringed around the outer
walls or scattered on extra-man patrols throughout the
prison.
It was something, but O'Leary couldn't believe that it
was enough. He'd been in touch with half a dozen of the
details inside the prison on the intercom, and all of them
had reported the same thing. In all of E-G not a single
prisoner was asleep. They were talking back and forth be-
tween the cells, and the guards couldn't shut them up; they
were listening to concealed radios, and the guards didn't
dare make a shake-down to find them; they were working
themselves up to something. To what?
O'Leary didn't want ever to find out what. He wanted
to go in there with a couple of the best guards he could
get his hands onshoot his way into the Green Sleeves if
he had toand clean up the infection.
But the warden said no.
O'Leary moaned and stared balefully at the hovering
helicopters.
The warden was the warden! He was placed in that
position through the meticulously careful operations of
the Civil Service machinery, maintained in that position
year after year through the penetrating annual inquiries
of the Reclassification Board. It was subversive to think
that the Board could have made a mistake!
But O'Leary was absolutely sure that the warden was a
scared, ineffectual jerk.
The interphone was ringing again.
The warden picked up the handpiece and held it limply
at arm's length, his eyes fixed glassily on the wall. It was
Sauer from the Green Sleeves again; O'Leary could hear
his maddened bray.
"I warned you, warden!" O'Leary could see the big
con's contorted face in miniature, in the viewscreen of the
interphone. The grin was broad and jolly; the snake's eyes
poisonously cold. "I'm going to give you five minutes,
warden, you hear? Five minutes! And if there isn't a medic
in here in five minutes to take care of my boy Flock
your guards have had it! I'm going to chop off a hand and
throw it out the window, you hear me? And five minutes
later another hand! And five minutes later"
The warden groaned weakly. "I've called for the prison
medic, Sauer. Honestly I have! I'm sure he's coming as
rapidly as he"
"Five minutes!" And the ferociously grinning face dis-
appeared.
O'Leary leaned forward. "Warden. Warden, let me take
a squad in there!"
The warden stared at him for a blank moment. "Squad?
No, O'Leary. What's the use of a squad? It's a medic I
have to get in there. I have a responsibility to those
guards, and if I don't get a medic"
A cold, calm voice from the door: "I am here, warden!"
O'Leary and the warden both jumped up. The medic
nodded slightly. "You may sit down."
"Oh, doctor! Thank heaven you're here." The warden
was falling all over himself, getting a chair for his guest,
flustering about.
O'Leary said sharply, "Wait a minute, warden. You
can't let the doctor go in alone!"
"He isn't alone!" The doctor's interne came from be-
hind him, scowling belligerently at O'Leary. He was
youngish, his beard pale and silky, a long way from his
first practice. "I'm with him!"
O'Leary put a strain on his patience. "They'll eat you
up in there, Doc! Those are the worst cons in the prison.
They've got two hostages alreadywhat's the use of giv-
ing them two more?"
The medic fixed him with his eyes. He was a tail man
and he wore his beard proudly. "Guard, do you think you
can prevent me from healing a sufferer?" He folded his
hands over his abdomen and turned to leave.
The inteme stepped aside and bowed his head. O'Leary
surrendered.
"All right, you can go. But I'm coming with youwith
a squad!"
Inmate Sue-Ann Bradley cowered in her cell.
The Green Sleeves was jumping. She had neverno,
never, she told herself wretchedlythought that it would
be anything like this. She listened unbelieving to the
noise the released prisoners were making, smashing the
chairs and commodes in their cells, screaming threats at
the bound and terrified guards.
They were likelikeanimals!
She faced the thought, with fear, and with the sorrow
of a murdered belief that was worse than fear. It was bad
that she was, she knew, in danger of dying right here and
now; but what was even worse was that the principles that
had brought her to the Jug were dying too.
Wipes were not the same as civil-service people!
A bull's roar from the corridor, and a shocking crash
of glass; that was Flock, and apparently he had smashed
the TV interphone.
"What in the world are they doing?" Inmate Bradley
sobbed to herself. It was beyond comprehension. They
were yelling words that made no sense to her, threatening
punishments that she could barely imagine on the guards.
Sauer and Flock, they were laborers; some of the other
rioting cons were clerks, mechanicseven civil-service or
professionals, for all she could tell. But she could hardly
understand any of them. Why was the quiet little Chinese
clerk in Cell Six setting fire to his bed?
There did seem to be a pattern, of sortsthe laborers
were rocketing about, breaking things at random; the
mechanics were pleasurably sabotaging the electronic and
plumbing installations; the white-collar categories were
finding their dubious joys in less direct waysliking set-
ting fire to a bed. But what a mad pattern!
The more Sue-Ann saw of them, the less she under-
stood.
It wasn't just that they talked differentshe had spent
endless hours studying the various patois of shoptalk, and
it  had  defeated  her;  but  it  wasn't just  that.  It  was  bad
enough when she couldn't understand the wordsas when
that trusty Mathias had ordered her in wipe shoptalk to
mop out her cell.
But what was even worse was not understanding the
thought behind the words.
Sue-Ann Bradley had consecrated her young life to the
belief that all men were created free, and equaland
alike. Or alike in all the things that mattered, anyhow.
Alike in hopes, alike in motives, alike in virtues. She had
turned her back on a decent civil-service family and a
promising civil-service career to join the banned and de-
spised Association for the Advancement of the Categoried
Classes
Screams from the corridor outside.
Sue-Ann leaped to the door of her cell to see Sauer
clutching at one of the guards. The guard's hands were
tied but his feet were free; he broke loose from the clumsy
clown with the serpent's eyes, almost fell, ran toward Sue-
Ann.
There was nowhere else to run. The guard, moaning
and gasping, tripped, slid, caught himself and stumbled
into her cell. "Please!" he begged. "That crazy Sauer
he's going to cut my hand off! For heaven's sake, ma'am
stop him!"
Sue-Ann stared at him, between terror and tears. Stop
Sauer! If only she could stop Sauer. The big red-head was
lurching stiffly toward themraging, but not so angry
that the water-moccasin eyes showed heat.
"Come here, you figger scum!" he brayed.
The epithet wasn't even closethe guard was civil-
service through and throughbut it was like a reviving
whip-sting to Sue-Ann Bradley.
"Watch your language, Mr. Saueri" she snapped, in-
congruously.
Sauer stopped dead and biinked.
"Don't you dare hurt him!" she warned. "Don't you see,
Mr. Sauer, you're playing into their hands? They're trying
to divide us. They pit mechanic against clerk, laborer
against armed forces. And you're helping them! Brother
Sauer, I beg"
The red-head spat deliberately on the floor.
He licked his lips, and grinned an amiable clown's
grin, and said in his cheerful, buffoon bray: "Auntie, go
verb your adjective adjective noun."
Sue-Ann Bradley gasped and turned white.
She had known such words existedbut only theoreti-
cally. She had never expected to hear them. And cer-
tainly, she would never have believed she would hear
them, applied to her, from the lips of a . . . a laborer. At
her knees, the guard shrieked and fell to the floor.
"Sauer, Sauer!" A panicky bellow from the corridor;
the red-headed giant hesitated. "Sauer, come on out here!
There's a million guards coming up the stairs. Looks like
trouble!"
Sauer said hoarsely to the unconscious guard, "I'll take
care of you." And he looked blankly at the girl, and shook
his head, and hurried back to the corridor.
Guards were coming, all rightnot a million of them,
but half a dozen or more. And leading them all was the
medic, calm, bearded face looking straight ahead, hands
clasped before him, ready to heal the sick, comfort the
aged or bring new life into the world.
"Hold it!" shrieked little Flock, crouched over the
agonizing blister on his abdomen, gun in hand, peering
insanely down the steps. "Hold it or"
"Shut up." Sauer called softly to the approaching
group: "Let the doc come up. Nobody else!"
The inteme faltered; the guards stopped dead; the medic
said calmly:  "I must have my inteme with me." He
glanced at the barred gate wonderingly.
Sauer hesitated. "Well all right. Bat no guards!"
A few yards away Sue-Aim Bradley was stuffing the
syncoped form of the guard into her small washroom.
It was time to take a stand.
No more cowering, she told herself desperately. No
more waiting. She closed the door on the guard, still un-
conscious, and stood grimly before it. Him, at least, she
would save if she could. They could get him, but only over
her dead body. . ..
Or anywayshe thought with a sudden throbbing in
her throatover her body.

VI
After O'Leary and the medic left, the warden tottered to
a chairbut not for long. His secretary appeared, eyes
bulging. "The governor!" hegasped.
Warden .Schluckebier managed to say: "Why, Gover-
nor! How good of you to come"
The governor shook him off and held the door open for
the men who had come with him. There were reporters
from all the news services, officials from the township gov-
ernments within the city-state. There was an air Gl with
the major's leaves on his collar"Liaison, sir," he ex-
plained crisply to the warden, "just in case you have any
orders for our men up there." There were nearly a dozen
others.
The warden was quite overcome.
The governor rapped out: "Warden, no criticism of
you, of course, but I've come to take personal charge. I'm
superseding you under Rule Twelve, Para. A, of the Uni-
form Civil Service Code. Right?"
"Oh, right!" cried the warden, incredulous with joy.
"The situation is badperhaps worse than you think.
I'm seriously concerned about the hostages those men have
in there. The guards, the medicand I had a call from
Senator Bradley a short time ago"
"Senator Bradley?" echoed the warden.
"Senator Sebastian Bradley. One of our foremost civil
servants," the governor said firmly. "It so happens that his
daughter is in Block 0, as an inmate."
The warden closed his eyes. He tried to swallow, but
the throat muscles were paralyzed.
"There is no question," the governor went on briskly,
"about the propriety of her being thereshe was duly
convicted of a felonious act, namely conspiracy and in-
citement to riot. But you see the position."
The warden saw. All too well the warden saw.
"Therefore," said the governor, "I intend to go in to
Block 0 myself. Sebastian Bradley is an old and personal
friendas well," he emphasized, "as being a senior mem-
ber of the Reclassification Board. I understand a medic is
going to Block 0. I shall go with him."
The warden managed to sit up straight. "He's gone. I
meanthey already left. Governor. But I assure you. Miss
BradInmate Bradleythat is, the young lady is in no
danger. I have already taken precautions," he said, gain-
ing confidence as he listened to himself talk. "I, uh, I was
deciding on a course of action as you came in. See, Gov-
ernor, the guards on the walls are all armed. All they have
to do is fire a couple of rounds into the Yardand then
the copters could start dropping tear gas and light frag-
mentation bombs and"
The governor was already at the door. "You will not,"
he said; and, "Now, which way did they go?"
O'Leary was in the Yard, and he was smelling trouble,
loud and strong.
The first he knew that the rest of the prison had caught
the riot fever was when the lights flared on in Cell Block
A. "That Sodaro!" he snarled; but there wasn't time to
worry about that Sodaro. He grabbed the rest of his guard
detail and double-timed it toward the New Building, leav-
ing the medic and a couple of guards walking sedately to-
ward the Old. Block A, on the New Building's lowest tier
was already coming to life; a dozen yards, and Blocks B
and C lighted up.
And a dozen yards more, and they could hear the yell-
ing; and it wasn't more than a minute before the building
doors opened.
The cons had taken over three more blocks. How?
O'Leary didn't take time even to guess. The inmates were
piling out into the Yard. He took one look at the rushing
mob. Crazy! It was Wilmer Lafon leading the rioters, with
a guard's gun and a voice screaming threats! But O'Leary
didn't take time to worry about an honor prisoner gone
bad, either. "Let's get out of here!" he bellowed to the de-
tachment, and they ran. . . .
Just plain ran. Cut and ran, scattering as they went.
"Wait!" screamed O'Leary, but they weren't waiting.
Cursing himself for letting them get out of hand, O'Leary
salvaged two guards and headed on the run for the Old
Building, huge and dark, all but the topmost lights of
Block 0. They saw the medic and his escort disappearing
into the bulk of the Old Building; and they saw something
else. There were inmates between them and the Old Build-
ing! The Shops Building lay betweenwith a dozen more
cell blocks over the workshops that gave it its nameand
there was a milling rush of activity around its entrance,
next to the laundry shed
The laundry shed.
O'Leary stood stock still. Lafon talking to the laundry
cons; Lafon leading the break-out from Block A. The little
greaser who was a trusty in the Shops Building sabotaging
the Yard's tangler circuit. Sauer and Flock taking over
the Green Sleeves with a manufactured knife and a lot of
guts. Did it fit together? Was it all part of a plan?
That was something to find outbut not just then.
"Come on," O'Leary cried to the two guards, and they
raced for the temporary safety of the main gates.
The whole prison was up and yelling now.
O'Leary could hear scattered shots from the beat guards
on the wallOver their heads, over their heads! he prayed
silently. And there were other shots that seemed to come
from inside the wallsguards shooting, or convicts with
guards' guns, he couldn't tell which. The Yard was full of
convicts now, in bunches and clumps; but none near the
gate. And they seemed to have lost some of their drive.
They were milling around, lit by the searchlights from the
wall, yelling and making a lot of noise . . . but going no-
where in particular. Waiting for a leader, O'Leary thought,
and wondered briefly what had become of Lafon.
"You Captain O'Leary?" somebody demanded.
O'Leary turned and biinked. Good Lord, the governor!
He was coming through the gate, waving aside the gate
guards, alone. "You him?" the governor repeated. "All
right, glad I found you. I'm going in to Block 0 with you!"
O'Leary swallowed, and waved at the teeming cons.
True, there were none immediately nearbybut there
were plenty in the Yard! Riots meant breaking things up;
already the inmates had started to break up the machines
in the laundry shed and the athletic equipment in the Yard
lockers; when they found a couple of choice breakables
like O'Leary and the Governor they'd have a ball! "But
Governor"
"But my foot! Can you get me in there or can't you?"
O'Leary gauged their chances. It wasn't more than fifty
feet to the main entrance to the Old Buildingnot at the
moment guarded, since all the guards were in hiding or on
the walls, and not as yet being invaded by the inmates at
large.
He said, "You're the boss! Hold on a minute" The
searchlights were on the bare Yard cobblestones in front
of them; in a moment the searchlights danced away.
"Come on!" cried O'Leary, and jumped for the en-
trance. The governor was with him, and a pair of the
guards came stumbling after.
They made it to the Old Building.
Inside the entrance they could hear the noise from out-
side and the yelling of the inmates who were still in their
cells; but around them was nothing but gray steel walls
and the stairs going up to Block 0. "Up!" panted O'Leary,
and they clattered up the steel s~eps.
They nearly made it.
They would have made itif it hadn't been for the
honor inmate, Wilmer Lafon, who knew what he was after
and had headed for the Green Sleeves through the back
way. In fact, they did make itbut not the way they
planned. "Get out of the way!" yelled O'Leary at Lafon
and the half-dozen inmates with him; and "Go to hell!"
screamed Lafon, charging; and it was a rough-and-tumble
fight, and O'Leary's party lost it, fair and square.
So when they got to Block 0 it was with the governor
marching before a convict-held gun, and with O'Leary
cold unconscious, a lump from a gun-butt on the side of
his head.
As they came up the stairs, Sauer was howling at the
medic: "You got to fix up my boy! He's dying, and all
you do is sit there!"
The medic said patiently, "My son, I've dressed his
wound. He is under sedation, and I must rest. There will
be other casualties."
Sauer raged, and he danced around; but that was as far
as it went. Even Sauer wouldn't attack a medic! He would
as soon strike an Attorney, or even a Director of Funerals.
It wasn't merely that they were professionalseven among
the professional class, they were special; not superior, ex-
actly, but apart. They certainly were not for the likes of
Sauer to fool with, and Sauer knew it.
"Somebody's coming!" cried one of the other freed in-
mates.
Sauer jumped to the head of the steps, saw that Lafon
was leading the group, stepped back, saw who Lafon's
helpers were carrying, and leaped forward again. "Cap'n
O'Leary!" he roared. "Gimme!"
"Shut up," said Wilmer Lafon, and pushed the big red-
head out of the way. Sauer's jaw dropped, and the snake
eyes opened wide.
"Wilmer," he protested feebly. But that was all the
protest he made, because the snake's eyes had seen that
Lafon held a gun. He stood back, the big hands half out-
stretched toward the unconscious guard captain, O'Leary,
and the cold eyes became thoughtful.
And then he saw who else was with the party. "Wil-
mer!" he roared. "You got the governor there!"
Lafon nodded. "Throw them in a cell," he ordered, and
sat down on a guard's stool, breathing hard. It had been a
fine fight on the steps, before he and his boys had subdued
the governor and the guards; but Wilmer Lafon wasn't
used to fighting. Even six years in the Jug hadn't turned
an architect into a laborer; physical exertion simply was
not his metier.
Sauer said coaxingly, "Wilmer, won't you leave me
have O'Leary for a while? If it wasn't for me and Flock
you'd still be in A Block, and"
"Shut up," Lafon said again, gently enough, but he
waved the gun muzzle. He drew a deep breath, glanced
around him and grinned. "If it wasn't for you and Flock,"
he mimicked. "If it wasn't for you and Flock! Sauer, you
wipe clown, do you think it took brains to file down a shiv
and start things rolling? If it wasn't for me, you and Flock
would have beat up a few guards, and had your kicks for
half an hour, and then the whole prison would fall in on
you! It was me, Wilmer Lafon, that set things up, and you
know it!" He was yelling, and suddenly he realized he was
yelling. And what was the use, he demanded of himself
contemptuously, of trying to argue with a bunch of lousy
wipes and greasers? They never understand the long, soul-
killing hours of planning and sweat; they wouldn't realize
the importance of the careful timingof arranging that
the laundry cons would start a disturbance in the Yard
right after the Green Sleeves hard-timers kicked off the
riot; of getting the little greaser Hiroko to short-circuit the
Yard field so the laundry cons could start their disturb-
ance. It took a professional to organize and planyes,
and to make sure that he himself was out of it until every-
thing was ripe, so that if anything went wrong he was all
right It took somebody like Wilmer Lafona profes-
sional, who had spent six years too long in the Jug
And who would shortly be getting out.

VII
Any prison is a ticking bomb. Estates-General was in
process of going off.
From the Green Sleeves where the trouble had started,
clear out to the trusty farms that ringed the walls, every
inmate was up and jumping. Some were still in their cells
the scared ones, the decrepit oldsters, the short-termers
who didn't dare risk their early discharge. But for every
man in his cell, a dozen were out and yelling.
A torch, licking as high as the hanging helicopters,
blazed up from the Yardtiiat was the laundry shed. Why
burn the laundry? The cons couldn't have said. It was
bumable, and it was thereburn it!
The Yard lay open to the wrath of the helicopters, but
the helicopters made no move. The cobblestones were
solidly covered with milling men. The guards were on the
walls, sighting down their guns; the helicopter bombardiers
had their fingers on the bomb trips. There had been a few
rounds fired over the heads of the rioters, at first.
Nothing since.
In the milling mob, the figures clustered in groups. The
inmates from Honor Block A huddled under the guards'
guns at the angle of the wall. They had clubs, as all the
inmates had clubs, but they weren't using them.
Honor Block Aon the outside, civil service and pro-
fessionals. On the inside, the trusties, the "good" cons.
They weren't the type for clubs.
With all of the inmates, you looked at them and you
wondered what twisted devil had got into their heads to
land them in the Jug. Oh, perhaps you could understand
ita little bit at leastin the case of the figgers in Blocks
B and C, the greasers in the Shop Buildingthat sort. It
was easy enough for some of the Categoried Classes to
commit a crime, and thereby land in jail. Who could
blame a wipe for trying to "pass," if he thought he could
get away with it? But when he didn't get away with it, he
wound up in the Jug, and that was logical enough. And
greasers liked civil-service women, everyone knew that.
There was almost a sort of logic to iteven if it was a sort
of inevitable logic that made decent civil-service people
see red. You had to enforce the laws against rape if, for
instance, a greaser should ask an innocent young female
postal clerk for a date. But you could understand what
drove him to it. The Jug was full of criminals of that sort.
And the Jug was the place for them.
But what about Honor Block A?
Why would a Wilmer Lafona certified public archi-
tect, a Professional by categorydraw a portrait in oils
and get himself jugged for malpractice? Why -would a
dental nursepractically a medicsneak back into the
laboratory at night and cast an upper plate for her
mother? Greasers' work was greasers' work; she knew
what the penalty was. She must have realized she would
be caught.
But she had done it. And she had been caught; and
there she was, this wild night, huddled under the heli-
copters, feebly waving the handle of a floor mop.
It was a club. And she wasn't the type for clubs.
She shivered and turned to the stock convict next to
her. "Why don't they break down the gate?" she de-
manded, "How long are we going to hang around here,
waiting for the guards to get organized and pick us off?"
The convict next to her sighed and wiped his glasses
with a beefy hand. Once he had been an Income-Tax Ac-
countant, disbarred and convicted on three counts of im-
personating an attorney when he took the liberty of mak-
ing changes in a client's lease. He snorted, "Damn wipes!
Do they expect us to do their dirty work?"
The two of them glared angrily and fearfully at the
other convicts in the Yard.
And the other convicts, huddled greaser with greaser,
wipe with wipe, glared ragingly back. It wasn't their place
to plan the strategy of a prison break.
Captain Uam O'Leary muttered groggily, "They don't
want to escape, all they want is to make trouble. I know
cons." He came fully awake, sat up and focused his eyes.
His head was hammering.
That fgil, that Bradley, was leaning over him. She
looked scared and sick. "Sit still! Sauer is just plain crazy
listen to them yelling out there!"
O'Leary sat up and looked around, one hand holding
his drumming skull.
"They do so want to escape," said Sue-Ann Bradley.
"Listen to what they're saying!"
O'Leary discovered that he was in a cell. There was a
battle royal going on outside. Men were yelling, but he
couldn't see them.
He jumped up, remembering. "The governor!"
Sue-Ann Bradley said, "He's all right. I think he is,
anyway. He's in the cell right next to us, with a couple
guards. I guess they came up with you." She shivered, as
the yells in the corridor rose. "Sauer is angry at the
medic," she explained. "He wants him to fix Flock up so
they can'crush out,' I think he said. The medic says he
can't do it. You see, Flock got burned pretty badly with
a knife he madesomething about the tanglefoot field"
"Eddy currents," said O'Leary dizzily.
"I guess so. Anyway, the medic"
"Never mind the medic. What's Lafon doing?"
"Lafon? The black one?" Sue-Ann Bradley frowned.
"I didn't know his name. He started the whole thing, the
way it sounds. They're waiting for the mob down in the
Yard to break out, and then they're going to make a
break"
"Wait a minute," growled O'Leary. His head was be-
ginning to clear. "What about you? Are you in on this?"
She hung between laughter and tears. Finally: "Do I
look like I'm in on this?"
O'Leary took stock. Somehow, somewhere, the girl had
got a length of metal pipefrom the plumbing, maybe.
She was holding it in one hand, supporting him with the
other. There were two other guards in the cell, both out
coldone from O'Leary's squad, the other, O'Leary
guessed, a deck guard who had been on duty when the
trouble started. "I wouldn't let them in," she said wildly.
"I told them they'd have to kill me before they could
touch that guard."
O'Leary said suspiciously, "What about you? You be-
longed to that Double-A-C, didn't you? You were pretty
anxious to get in the Green Sleeves, disobeying Auntie
Mathias' orders. Are you sure you didn't know this was
going to"
It was too much. She dropped the pipe, buried her head
in her hands. He couldn't tell if she laughed or wept, but
he could tell that it hadn't been like that at all.
"I'm sorry," he said awkwardly, and touched her on the
shoulder. He turned and looked out the little barred win-
dow, because he couldn't think of any other way to apolo-
gize. He heard the wavering beat in the air, and saw them
bobbing a hundred yards up, their wide metal vanes
fluttering and hissing from the jets at the tips. The 01
copters. Waitingas everyone seemed to be waiting.
Sue-Ann Bradley demanded shaloly, "Is anything the
matter?"
O'Leary turned away. It was astonishing, he thought,
what a different perspective he had on those helicopter
bombers from inside Block 0. Once he had cursed the
warden for not ordering tear gas, at least, dropped. . . .
He said harshly, "Nothing. Just that the copters have the
place surrounded."
"Does it make any difference?"
He shrugged. Does it make a difference? The difference
between trouble and tragedy, or so it now seemed to Cap-
tain O'Leary. The riot was trouble. They could handle it,
one way or anotherit was his job, any guard's job, to
handle prison trouble.
But to bring the GIs into it was to invite race riot. Not
prison riotrace riot. Even the declassed scum in the Jug
would fight back against the GIs. They prere used to hav-
ing the civil-service guards over themthat was what
guards were for. Civil-service presidents presided, and
civil-service governors governed, and civil-service guards
guarded. What else? It was their jobas clerking was a
figger's job, and mechanics were a greaser's, and pick-and-
shovel strong-arm work was a wipe's. But the armed serv-
icestheir job was, theoretically, to defend the country
against forces outside. Race riot. The cons wouldn't stand
still under attack from the GIs.
But how could you tell that to a girl like this Bradley?
O'Leary glanced at her covertly. She looked all right.
Rather nice-looking, if anything. But he hadn't forgotten
why she was in E-G. Joining a terrorist organization, the
Association for the Advancement of the Categoried
Classes. Advocating desegregationactually getting up on
a street comer and proposing that greasers' children be
allowed to go to school with Gl's, that wipes intermarry
with civil service. Good Lord, they'd be suggesting that
doctors eat with laymen next!
The girl said evenly, "Don't look at me that way. I'm
not a monster."
O'Leary coughed. "I, uh, sorry. I didn't know I was
staring." She looked at him with cold eyes. "I mean," he
said, "you don't look like anybody who'd get mixed up in,
well, miscegenation."
"Miscegenation! Dirty mind!" she blazed. "You're all
alike, you talk about the mission of the Categoried Classes
and the rightness of segregationand it's always just the
one thing that's in your minds. Sex! You'reyou're trying
to turn the clock back," she sobbed. "I'll tell you this for
sure. Captain O'Leary! I'd rather marry a decent, hard-
working clerk any day than the sort of low-grade civil-
service trash I've seen around here!"
O'Leary cringed. He couldn't help it. Funny, he told
himself, I thought I was shockproofbut this goes too far!
A bull-roar from the corridor. Sauer. O'Leary spun.
The big red-head was yelling: "Bring the governor out
here. Lafon wants to talk to him!"
O'Leary went to the door of the cell, fast.
A slim, pale con from Block A was pushing the gover-
nor down the hall, toward Sauer and Lafon. The governor
was a strong man, but he didn't struggle. His face was as
composed and remote as the medic's; if he was afraid, he
concealed it extremely well.
Sue-Ann Bradley slipped beside O'Leary. "What's hap-
pening?"
He kept his eyes on what was going on. "Lafon is go-
ing to try to use the governor as a shield, I think." The
voice of Lafon was loud, but the noises outside made it
hard to understand. But O'Leary could make out what
the dark ex-professional was saying: "know damn well
you did something. But what? Why don't they crush out?"
Mumble-mumble from the governor; O'Leary couldn't
hear the words. But he could see the effect of them in
Lafon's face, hear the rage in Lafon's voice. "Don't call
me a liar, you ciwy punk! You did something. I had it all
planned, do you hear me? The laundry boys were going
to rush the gate, the Block A bunch would followand
then I was going to breeze right through. But you loused
it up.  You must've!" His voice was rising to a scream.
O'Leary, watching tautly from the cell, thought: He's go-
ing to break. He can't hold it in much longer.
"All right!" shouted Lafon, and even Saner, looming
behind him, looked alarmed. "It doesn't matter what you
did. I've got you now, and you are going to get me out of
here. You hear? I've got this gun, and the two of us are
going to walk right out, through the gate, and if anybody
tries to stop us"
"Hey," said Sauer, waking up.
"'d anybody tries to stop us, you'll get a bullet right
in"
"Hey!" Sauer was roaring loud as Lafon himself now.
"What's this talk about the two of you? You aren't going
to leave me and Flock!"
"Shut up," Lafon said conversationally, without taking
his eyes off the governor.
But Sauer, just then, was not the man to say "shut up"
to, and especially he was not a man to take your eyes away
from.
"That's torn it," O'Leary said aloud. The girl started
to say something.
But he was no longer there to hear.
It looked very much as though Sauer and Lafon were
going to tangle. And when they did, it was the end of the
line for the governor.
O'Leary hurtled out of the sheltering cell and skidded
down the corridor. Lafon's face was a hawk's face, gleam-
ing with triumph; as he saw O'Leary coming toward him,
the hawk sneer froze. He brought the gun up, but O'Leary
was a fast man.
O'Leary leaped on the lithe black honor prisoner. Lafon
screamed, and clutched; and O'Leary's lunging weight
drove him back against the wall. Lafon's arm smacked
against the steel grating and the gun went flying. The two
of them clinched and fell, gouging, to the floor.
O'Leary had the advantage; he hammered the con's
head against the deck, hard enough to split a skull. And
perhaps it split Lafon's, because the dark face twitched,
and froth appeared at the lips; and the body slacked.
One down!
And Sauer was charging. O'Leary wriggled sidewise,
and the big red-head blundered crashing into the steel
grate. Sauer fell, and O'Leary caught at him. He tried the
hammering of the head, he swarmed on top of the huge
clown. But Sauer only roared the louder. The bull body
surged under O'Leary, and then Sauer was on top and
O'Leary wasn't breathing. Not at alL
Everything was choking black dust.
Good-by, Sue-Ann, O'Leary said silently, without
meaning to say anything of the kind; and even then he
wondered why he was saying it.
O'Leary heard a gun explode beside his head.
Amazing, he thought. I'm breathing again! The chok-
ing hands were gone from his throat.
It took him a moment to realize that it was Sauer who
had taken the bullet, not him. Sauer who now lay dead
. . . not O'Leary. But he realized it, when he rolled over,
and looked up, and saw the girl with the gun still in her
hand, staring at him and weeping.
He sat up. The two guards still able to walk were
backing Sue-Ann Bradley up; the governor was looking
proud as an eagle, pleased as a mother hen.
The Green Sleeves was back in the hands of law and
order.
The medic came toward O'Leary, hands folded. "My
son," he said, "if your throat needs"
O'Leary interrupted him. "I don't need a thing, Doc!
I've got everything I want, right now."
VIII
Inmate Sue-Ann Bradley cried, "They're coming!
O'Leary, they're coming!"
The guards who had once been hostages clattered down
the steps to meet the party. The cons from the Green
Sleeves were back in their cells. The medic, having finished
his chores on O'Leary himself, paced meditatively out
into the wake of the riot, where there was plenty to keep
him busy. A faintly bilious expression tinctured his carven
face. He had not liked Lafon or Sauer.
The party of fresh guards appeared, and efficiently
began re-locking the cells of the Green Sleeves. "Excuse
me, Cap'n," said one, taking Sue-Ann Bradley by the
arm, "I'll just put this one back"
"I'll take care of her," said Liam O'Leary. He looked
at her sideways as he rubbed the bruises on his face.
The governor tapped him on the shoulder. "Come
along," he said, looking so proud of himself, so pleased.
"Let's go out in the Yard for a breath of fresh air." He
smiled contentedly at Sue-Ann Bradley. "You too," he
said.
O'Leary protested instinctively, "But she's an inmate!"
"And I'm a governor. Come along."
They walked out into the Yard. The air was fresh, all
right. A handful of cons, double-guarded by sleepy and
irritable men from the day shift, were hosing down the
rubble on the cobblestones. The Yard was a mess; but it
was quiet now. The helicopters were still riding their picket
line, glowing softly in the early light that promised sun-
rise.
"My car," the governor said quietly to a state police-
man who appeared from nowhere. The trooper snapped
a salute and trotted away.
"I killed a man," said Sue-Ann Bradley, looking ab-
stracted and a little ill.
"You saved a man," corrected the governor. "Don't
weep for that Lafon. He was willing to kill a thousand men
if he had to, to break out of here."
"But he never did break out," said Sue-Ann.
The governor stretched contentedly. "Of course not. He
never had a chance. Lafon spent too much time in the
Jug; he forgot what the world was like. Laborers and
clerks join together in a break-out? It would never happen.
They don't even speak the same languageas my young
friend here has discovered."
Sue-Ann blazed: "I still believe in the equality of man!"
"Oh, please do," the Governor said, straight-faced.
"There's nothing wrong with that! Your father and I are
perfectly willing to admit that men are equal; but we can't
admit that all men are the same. Use your eyes! What you
believe in is your own businessbut," he added, "when
your beliefs extend to setting fire to segregated public lava-
tories as a protest move, which is what got you arrested,
you apparently need to be taught a lesson. Well, perhaps
you've learned it. You were a help here tonight, and that
counts for a lot. . . ."
Captain O'Leary said, face fun-owed, "What about the
warden, Governor? They say the category system is what
makes the world go round, it fits the right man to the right
job and keeps him there. But look at Momma Schlucke-
bier! He fell apart at the seams. He"
"Turn it around, O'Leary."
"Turn?"
The governor nodded. "You've got it backwards. Not
the right man for the jobthe right job for the man!
We've got Schluckebier on our hands, see? He's been
born; it's too late to do anything about that. He will go
to pieces in an emergency. So where do we put him?"
O'Leary stubbornly clamped his jaw, frowning.
"We put him," the governor went on gently, "where the
best thing to do in a crisis is to go to pieces! Why,
O'Leary, you get some hot-headed man of action in here,
and every time an inmate sneezes in E-G youTI have
bloodshed! And there's no harm in a prison riot. Let the
poor devils work off steam. I wouldn't have bothered to
get out of bed for itexcept I was worried about the
hostages. So I came down to make sure they were pro-
tected."
O'Leary's jaw dropped. "But yon were"
The governor nodded. "I was a hostage myself. That's
one way to protect them, isn't it? By giving the cons a
hostage that's worth more to them."
He yawned, and looked around for Ms car. "So the
world keeps going around," he said. "Everybody is some-
body else's outgroup, and maybe it's a bad thing, but did
you ever stop to realize that we don't have wars any more?
The categories stick tightly together. Who is to say that
that's a bad thing?" He grinned. "Reminds me of a story,
if you two will pay attention to me long enough to listen.
There was a meetingthis is an old, old story a neigh-
borhood meeting of the leaders of the two biggest women's
groups on the block. There were eighteen Irish ladies from
the Church Auxiliary and three Jewish ladies from B'nai
B'rith. The first thing they did was have an election for a
temporary chairwoman. Twenty-one votes were cast. Mrs.
Grossinger from B'nai B'rith got three, and Mrs. O'Flah-
erty from the Auxiliary got eighteen.  So when Mrs.
Murphy came up to congratulate Mrs. O'Flaherty after
the election, she whispered, 'Good for you! But isn't it
terrible, the way these Jews stick together?' "
He stood up and waved wildly, as his long official car
came poking hesitantly through the gate. "Well," he said
professionally, "that's that. As we politicians say, any
questions?"
Sue-Ann hesitated. "Well," she said"yes, I guess I
do have a question. What's a Jew?"
Maybe there was an answer. And maybe the question
answered itself; and maybe the governor, riding sleepily
homeward in the dawn, himself learned something from it
which was true: That a race's greatest learning may be in
the things it has learned enough to forget.