Fantastic Stories Presents the Worlds of If Super Pack #1

By R.A. Lafferty

Worlds of If' was a three-time winner of the Hugo Award for best science fiction magazine. 'Worlds of If' discovered many talented writers who would go on to dominate genre fiction. Here are more than 250,000 words of some of the best stories ever published in its pages.

'The Snowbank Orbit' by Fritz Leiber
'The Victor' by Bryce Walton
'Breeder Reaction' by Winston Marks
'Turning Point' by Alfred Coppel
'Masters of Space' by Edward E. Smith & E. Everett Evans
'Cultural Exchange' by Keith Laumer
'The Lonely Ones' by Edward W. Ludwig
'The Kenzie Report' by Mark Clifton
'The Very Secret Agent' by Mari Wolf
'Irresistible Weapon' by H. B. Fyfe
'In the Garden' by R. A. Lafferty
'The Eyes Have It' by James McKimmey, Jr.
'Trees Are Where You Find Them' by Arthur Dekker Savage
'The Real Hard Sell' by William W. Stuart
'Waste Not, Want' by Dave Dryfoos
'The Last Supper' by T. D. Hamm
'Letter of the Law' by Alan E. Nourse
'Sweet Their Blood and Sticky' by Albert R. Teichner
'The Last Place on Earth' by Jim Harmon
'Quiet, Please' by Kevin Scott
'Service with a Smile' by Charles L. Fontenay
'Time Fuze' by Randall Garrett
'The Skull' by Philip K. Dick
'The Ordeal of Colonel Johns' by George H. Smith
'Incident on Route 12' by James H. Schmitz
'Brink of Madness' by Walt Sheldon
'Love Story' by Irving E. Cox, Jr.
'Navy Day' by Harry Harrison
'The Anglers of Arz' by Roger Dee
'Assassin' by J. F. Bone
'Probability' by Louis Trimble
'Sjambak' by Jack Vance
'Deadly City' by Ivar Jorgenson
'The Mightiest Man' by Patrick Fahy
'Mutineer' by Robert J. Shea
'And That’s How it Was, Officer' by Ralph Sholto
'No Shield from the Dead' by Gordon R. Dickson
'Seven-Day Terror' by R.A. Lafferty
'I'll Kill You Tomorrow' by Helen Huber
'Security Risk' by Ed M. Clinton, Jr.
'Confidence Game' by James Mckimmey, Jr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781515411482

R.A. Lafferty

R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) lived almost his entire life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After service in the South Pacific during World War II, he worked as an electrical engineer. He began selling fiction regularly in the early 1960s, and went full-time as a writer in 1971. His work draws on many influences, ranging from Irish and Native American tales to the writings of St. Teresa of Avila. His novels include Past Master (1968), Fourth Mansions (1969), and the Native American historical Okla Hannali (1972).

Book preview

The Snowbank Orbit

by Fritz Leiber

Chapter I

The pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans, but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran and Antares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool. Dear blowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with your Shakespearean moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague, spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling on the black floor of an infinite barroom, what a sweet last view of the Solar System you are for a clean-cut young spaceman.

Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve breaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heat and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through Prospero’s bridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost in pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through the seventh planet’s thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with the time since rim contact.

At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.

Grunfeld didn’t think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The captain hadn’t gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and Ness. And he wasn’t, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the captain’s face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld’s imagination when he wasn’t actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better than one. Grunfield found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope, stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he’d been straining them on.

The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top, where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a second—a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.

Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she’d overflow the port as they whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she’d be as small as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able to slow Prospero and her sister ships or turn them back at their 100 miles a second than the fleet’s solar jets could operate at this chilly distance from Sol. G’by, fleet. G’by, C.C.Y. spaceman.

Grunfeld looked for the pale planet’s moons. Miranda and Umbriel were too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above the planet and Oberon a dozen below. Spectral sequins. If the fleet were going to get a radio signal from any of them, it would have to be Titania, occulted now by the planet and the noisy natural static of her roiling hydrogen air and seething methane seas—but it had always been only a faint hope that there were survivors from the First Uranus Expedition.

Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the curving star-bordered forward edge of Prospero’s huge mirror and the thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages below the spaceshield.

Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for helium to crawl, if you had some helium. Prospero’s insulation, originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in reverse.

Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of Uranus’ sunlit face. Check.

Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly…if it were right to drag out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.

Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.

The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue—one each for Caliban, Snug, Moth, and Starveling, following Prospero in line astern on slave automatic—though for months inertia had done all five ships’ piloting. Once the buttons had been green, but they’d wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.

The gages still showed their last maximums. Skin 793 Kelvin, Cabin 144 Fahrenheit, Gravs 3.2. All of them hit: almost a year ago, when they’d been arcing past the sun. Grunfield’s gaze edged back to the five bulbous pressure suits, once more rigidly upright in their braced racks, that they’d been wearing during that stretch of acceleration inside the orbit of Mercury. He started. For a moment he’d thought he saw the dark-circled eyes of the captain peering between two of the bulging black suits. Nerves! The captain had to be in his cabin, readying alternate piloting programs for Copperhead.

Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite direction. This time he’d thought he saw the Enemy’s green flashing near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld’s mind retreated to the circumstances that had brought Prospero (then only Mercury One) out here.

Chapter II

When the First Interstellar War erupted, the pioneer fleets of Earth’s nations had barely pushed their explorations beyond the orbit of Saturn. Except for the vessels of the International Meteor Guard, spaceflight was still a military enterprise of America, Russia, England and the other mega-powers.

During the first months the advantage lay wholly with the slim black cruisers of the Enemy, who had an antigravity which allowed them to hover near planets without going into orbit; and a frightening degree of control over light itself. Indeed, their principal weapon was a tight beam of visible light, a dense photonic stiletto with an effective range of several Jupiter-diameters in vacuum. They also used visible light, in the green band, for communication as men use radio, sometimes broadcasting it and sometimes beaming it loosely in strange abstract pictures that seemed part of their language. Their gravity-immune ships moved by reaction to photonic jets the tightness of which rendered them invisible except near the sun, where they tended to ionize electronically dirty volumes of space. It was probably this effective invisibility, based on light-control, which allowed them to penetrate the Solar System as deep as Earth’s orbit undetected, rather than any power of travel in time or sub-space, as was first assumed. Earthmen could only guess at the physical appearance of the Enemy, since no prisoners were taken on either side.

Despite his impressive maneuverability and armament, the Enemy was oddly timid about attacking live planets. He showed no fear of the big gas planets, in fact hovering very close to their turgid surfaces, as if having some way of fueling from them.

Near Terra the first tactic of the black cruisers, after destroying Lunostrovok and Circumluna, was to hover behind the moon, as though sharing its tide-lockedness—a circumstance that led to a sortie by Earth’s Combined Fleet, England and Sweden excepted.

At the wholly disastrous Battle of the Far Side, which was visible in part to naked-eye viewers on Earth, the Combined Fleet was annihilated. No Enemy ship was captured, boarded, or seriously damaged—except for one which, apparently by a fluke, was struck by a fission-headed anti-missile and proceeded after the blast to burn, meaning that it suffered a slow and puzzling disintegration, accompanied by a dazzling rainbow display of visible radiation. This was before the stupidity of the Enemy with regard to small atomic missiles was noted, or their allergy to certain radio wave bands, and also before Terran telepaths began to claim cloudy contact with Enemy minds.

Following Far Side, the Enemy burst into activity, harrying Terran spacecraft as far as Mercury and Saturn, though still showing great caution in maneuver and making no direct attacks on planets. It was as if a race of heavily armed marine creatures should sink all ocean-going ships or drive them to harbor, but make no assaults beyond the shore line. For a full year Earth, though her groundside and satellite rocket yards were furiously busy, had no vehicle in deep space—with one exception.

At the onset of the War a fleet of five mobile bases of the U. S. Space Force were in Orbit to Mercury, where it was intended they take up satellite positions prior to the prospecting and mineral exploitation of the small sun-blasted planet. These five ships, each with a skeleton five-man crew, were essentially Ross-Smith space stations with a solar drive, assembled in space and intended solely for space-to-space flight inside Earth’s orbit. A huge paraboloid mirror, its diameter four times the length of the ship’s hull, superheated at its focus the hydrogen which was ejected as a plasma at high exhaust velocity. Each ship likewise mounted versatile radio-radar equipment on dual lattice arms and carried as ship’s launch a two-man chemical fuel rocket adaptable as a fusion-headed torpedo.

After Far Side, this tin can fleet was ordered to bypass Mercury and, tacking on the sun, shape an orbit for Uranus, chiefly because that remote planet, making its 84-year circuit of Sol, was currently on the opposite side of the sun to the four inner planets and the two nearer gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. In the empty regions of space the relatively defenseless fleet might escape the attention of the Enemy.

However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum boost, the fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers were in pursuit. The five ships cracked on all possible speed, drawing on the solar drive’s high efficiency near the sun and expending all their hydrogen and most material capable of being vaporized, including some of the light-metal hydrogen storage tanks—like an old steamer burning her cabin furniture and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the curving course that would have taken years to reach the outer planet flattened into a hyperbola that would make the journey in 200 days.

In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to join in the crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth’s largely new-built, more heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet—a battle that proved to be only a prelude to the decisive Battle of Jupiter.

Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive quite useless in this twilight region even if it could have scraped together the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its flight. Weeks became months. The ships were renamed for the planet they were aimed at. At least the fleet’s trajectory had been truly set.

Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the fleet’s course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish…

Unless, Grunfeld told himself…unless the fleet shed its velocity by ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a year ago—a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery new-fallen snow.

Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction mass, Prospero could have shed her present velocity in five hours, decelerating at a comfortable one G.

But allowing her 12,000 miles of straight-line travel through Uranus’ frigid soupy atmosphere—and that might be dipping very close to the methane seas blanketing the planet’s hypothetical mineral core—Prospero would have two minutes in which to shed her velocity.

Two minutes—at 150 Gs.

Men had stood 40 and 50 Gs for a fractional second.

But for two minutes… Grunfeld told himself that the only surer way to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy fleet. According to one calculation the ship’s skin would melt by heat of friction in 90 seconds, despite the low temperature of the abrading atmosphere.

The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus. He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale planet’s hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.

Chapter III

In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.

Captain won’t like that, plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from where he floated in womb position across the cabin. Enemy can feel a candle of our light, captain says, ten million miles away. He rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a pollywog’s.

And Jackson hears the Enemy think…and Heimdall hears the grass grow, Croker commented with a harsh manic laugh. Isn’t an Enemy for a billion miles, Ness. He launched aft from the hammock. We haven’t spotted their green since Saturn orbit. There’s nowhere for them.

There’s the far side of Uranus, Ness pointed out. That’s less than ten million miles now. Eight. A bare day. They could be there.

Yes, waiting to bushwack us as we whip past on our way to eternity, Croker chuckled as he crumpled up against the aft port, shedding momentum. That’s likely, isn’t it, when they didn’t have time for us back in the Belt? He scowled at the tiny white sun, no bigger a disk than Venus, but still with one hundred times as much light as the full moon pouring from it—too much light to look at comfortably. He began to button the inner cover over the port.

Don’t do that, Ness objected without conviction. There’s not much heat in it but there’s some. He hugged his elbows and shivered. I don’t remember being warm since Mars orbit.

The sun gets on my nerves, Croker said. It’s like looking at an arc light through a pinhole. It’s like a high, high jail light in a cold concrete yard. The stars are highlights on the barbed wire. He continued to button out the sun.

You ever in jail? Ness asked. Croker grinned.

With the tropism of a fish, Ness began to paddle toward the little light at the head of Jackson’s hammock, flicking his hands from the wrists like flippers. I got one thing against the sun, he said quietly. It’s blanketing out the radio. I’d like us to get one more message from Earth. We haven’t tried rigging our mirror to catch radio waves. I’d like to hear how we won the battle of Jupiter.

If we won it, Croker said.

Our telescopes show no more green around Jove, Ness reminded him. We counted 27 rainbows of Enemy cruisers ‘burning.’ Captain verified the count.

Repeat: if we won it. Croker pushed off and drifted back toward the hammock. If there was a real victory message they’d push it through, even if the sun’s in the way and it takes three hours to catch us. People who win, shout.

Ness shrugged as he paddled. One way or the other, we should be getting the news soon from Titania station, he said. They’ll have heard.

If they’re still alive and there ever was a Titania Station, Croker amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he neared the hammock. Look, Ness, we know that the First Uranus Expedition arrived. At least they set off their flares. But that was three years before the War and we haven’t any idea of what’s happened to them since and if they ever managed to set up housekeeping on Titania—or Ariel or Oberon or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station could raise Earth I haven’t been told. Sure thing Prospero hasn’t heard anything and we’re getting close.

I won’t argue. Ness said. Even if we raise ‘em, it’ll just be hello-goodbye with maybe time between for a battle report.

And a football score and a short letter from home, ten seconds per man as the station fades. Croker frowned and added, If Captain had cottoned to my idea, two of us at any rate could have got off this express train at Uranus.

Tell me how, Ness asked drily.

How? Why, one of the 16 ship’s launches. Replace the fusion-head with the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks instead of divvying it between the ship and the launch.

I haven’t got the brain for math Copperhead has, but I can subtract, Ness said, referring to Prospero’s piloting robot. Fully fueled, one of the launches has a max velocity change in free-fall of 30 miles per second. Use it all in braking and you’ve only taken 30 from 100. The launch is still going past Uranus and out of the system at 70 miles a second.

You didn’t hear all my idea. Croker said. You put piggyback tanks on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four launches. Then you’ve 100 miles of braking and a maneuvering reserve. You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second’s the close circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed it.

Cute, Ness conceded. Especially the jeep. But I’m glad just the same we’ve got 70 percent of our chem fuel in our ships’ tanks instead of the launches. We’re on such a bull’s eye course for Uranus—Copperhead really pulled a miracle plotting our orbit—that we may need a sidewise shove to miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup at our 100 mps—

Croker shrugged. We still could have dropped a couple of us, he said.

Captain’s got to look after the whole fleet, Ness said. You’re beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grunfeld—or the captain himself.

But if Titania Station’s alive, a couple of men dropped off would do the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a message through to Earth and get a really high-speed retrieve-and-rescue ship started out after us. If we’ve won the War.

But Titania Station’s dead or never was, not to mention its jeep. And we’ve lost the Battle of Jupiter. You said so yourself, Ness asserted owlishly. Captain’s got to look after the whole fleet.

Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of old age in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space Force and See the Stars! Ness, do you know how long it’d take us to reach the nearest star—except we aren’t headed for her—at our 100 mps? Eight thousand years!

That’s a lot of time to kill, Ness said. Let’s play chess.

Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids. Croker said, Suppose he knows what the Enemy looks like?

I suppose, Ness said. When he talks about them it’s as if he was their interpreter. How about the chess?

Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three.

Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor.

Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D, Croker objected.

That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the position really visualized in my head than the game’s over.

I don’t want to start a game of three-D with Uranus only 18 hours away.

Jackson stirred in his hammock. His lips worked. They… he breathed. Croker and Ness instantly watched him. They…

I wonder if he is really inside the Enemy’s mind? Ness said.

He thinks he speaks for them, Croker replied and the next instant felt a warning touch on his arm and looked sideways and saw dark-circled eyes in a skull-angular face under a battered cap with a tarnished sunburst. Damn, thought Croker, how does the captain always know when Jackson’s going to talk?

They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus, Jackson breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little louder, though his eyes stayed shut. They’re welcoming us, they’re our brothers. The smile died. But they know they got to kill us, they know we got to die.

The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch leading forward.

Grunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought he’d be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.

Ambush, he said. At least two cruisers.

He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.

The blue telltales for Caliban and Starveling began to blink.

They’ve seen it too, the captain said. He snatched up the mike and his next words rang through the Prospero.

Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr. Grunfeld, raise the fleet.

Aft, Croker muttered, Rig our shrouds, don’t he mean? Rig shrouds and firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.

Ness said, Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdrawal in history has to end some time.

Chapter IV

Three quarters of a day later Grunfeld felt a spasm of futile fear and revolt as the pressure suit closed like a thick-fleshed carnivorous plant on his drugged and tired body. Relax, he told himself. Fine thing if you cooked up a fuss when even Croker didn’t. He thought of forty things to recheck. Relax, he repeated—the work’s over; all that matters is in Copperhead’s memory tanks now, or will be as soon as the captain’s suited up.

The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides—the best attitude, except he was still facing forward, for taking high G, providing the ship herself didn’t start to tumble. Only the cheekpieces and visor hadn’t closed in on his face—translucent hand-thick petals as yet unfolded. He felt the delicate firm pressure of built-in fingertips monitoring his pulses and against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles of the jet hypodermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in free-fall again. When.

He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention, pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.

Beyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with the onrushing planet’s pale mottled green that now had the dulled richness of watered silk. They were so close that the rim hardly showed curvature. The atmosphere must have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought, or they’d already be feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like water than any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still half out of his suit.

There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago. Its robot pilots were set to follow Prospero and imitate, nothing else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still…

Grunfeld wet his lips. Captain, he said hesitantly. Captain?

Thank you, Grunfeld. He caught the edge of the skull’s answering grin. We are beginning to hit hydrogen, the quiet voice went on. Forward skin temperature’s up to 9 K.

Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began to talk dreamily from his suit.

They’re still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a little more now. Their ship’s one thing and they’re another. Their ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it knows to do is to kill us. They can’t stop it, they’re even less than passengers…

The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up, carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction.

The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of green—bright green as it narrowed to a thread—then for a few seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and semicircles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted interior cabin lights glowed on.

Jackson droned: They and their ships come from very far away, from the edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the…discontinuum, where they don’t have stars but something else and where gravity is different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn’t want to…

And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it—the first faint thrill, less than a cobweb’s tug, of weight.

The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld’s suit had begun to revolve slowly on a vertical axis.

For a moment he glimpsed Jackson’s dark profile—all five suits were revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn’t pull forward at high-G decel, or spines crush through thorax and abdomen.

The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld’s forehead. And now he was sure he felt weight—maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was up. It was as if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield.

A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it. He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the other ships—the fleet’s feeble sting. Like a bee’s, just one, in dying.

The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld’s suit began to close on his face like layers of pliable ice.

Jackson called faintly, Now I understand. Their ship— His voice was cut off.

Grunfeld’s ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.

But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now…now on Mars…now back on Earth…

The weight was stifling now, crushing—a hill of invisible sand. Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had red fringe around it. It grew.

There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the ship’s jets roared, everything recovered, or didn’t.

The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out thought.

*

The universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and in freefall. His body didn’t feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages. Or did it?

He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward again? If they’d actually come through—

There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after frictional heating?

There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?

He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin lights were broken.

The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top of his opening suit.

Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex upward, that must, he realized, be the dark side of Uranus.

Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and pulled himself past the captain’s to the spaceshield.

The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.

A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed him twisted stumps of the radio lattices. There was no sign of the mirror at all. It must have been torn away, or vaporized completely, in the fiery turbulence of decel.

New maxs showed on the board: Cabin Temperature 214 F, Skin Temperature 907 K, Gravs 87.

Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish phosphorescing.

The torps got to ‘em, Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to the right.

*

I did find out at the end. Jackson said quietly from the left, his voice at last free of the trance-tone. The Enemy ships weren’t ships at all. They were (there’s no other word for it) space animals. We’ve always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues through the sea before you notice life and I guess space is the same. Anyway the Enemy was (what else can I call ‘em?) space-whales. Inertialess space-whales from the discontinuum. Space-whales that ate hydrogen (that’s the only way I know to say it) and spat light to move and fight. The ones I talked to, our brothers, were just their parasites.

That’s crazy, Grunfeld said. All of it. A child’s picture.

Sure it is, Jackson agreed.

From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, Quiet.

The radio came on thin and wailing with static: Titania Station calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have jeep fueled and set to go—

Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and last blue telltales still glowed for Caliban and Starveling. Breathe a prayer, he thought, for Moth and Snug.

Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.

The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length, which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into their eyes.

They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.

The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the monitor box of the captain’s suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken from their max.

He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of Uranus.

But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as dark as those of Moth and Snug.

Grunfeld thought, now he can rest.

The Victor

by Bryce Walton

Under the new system of the Managerials, the fight was not for life but for death! And great was the ingenuity of—The Victor.

Charles Marquis had a fraction of a minute in which to die. He dropped through the tubular beams of alloydem steel and hung there, five thousand feet above the tiers and walkways below. At either end of the walkway crossing between the two power-hung buildings, he saw the plainclothes security officers running in toward him.

He grinned and started to release his grip. He would think about them on the way down. His fingers wouldn’t work. He kicked and strained and tore at himself with his own weight, but his hands weren’t his own any more. He might have anticipated that. Some paralysis beam freezing his hands into the metal.

He sagged to limpness. His chin dropped. For an instant, then, the fire in his heart almost went out, but not quite. It survived that one terrible moment of defeat, then burned higher. And perhaps something in that desperate resistance was the factor that kept it burning where it was thought no flame could burn. He felt the rigidity of paralysis leaving his arms as he was lifted, helped along the walkway to a security car.

The car looked like any other car. The officers appeared like all the other people in the clockwork culture of the mechanized New System. Marquis sought the protection of personal darkness behind closed eyelids as the monorail car moved faster and faster through the high clean air. Well—he’d worked with the Underground against the System for a long time. He had known that eventually he would be caught. There were rumors of what happened to men then, and even the vaguest, unsubstantiated rumors were enough to indicate that death was preferable. That was the Underground’s philosophy—better to die standing up as a man with some degree of personal integrity and freedom than to go on living as a conditioned slave of the state.

He’d missed—but he wasn’t through yet though. In a hollow tooth was a capsule containing a very high-potency poison. A little of that would do the trick too. But he would have to wait for the right time . . . .

*

The Manager was thin, his face angular, and he matched up with the harsh steel angles of the desk and the big room somewhere in the Security Building. His face had a kind of emotion—cold, detached, cynically superior.

We don’t get many of your kind, he said. Political prisoners are becoming more scarce all the time. As your number indicates. From now on, you’ll be No. 5274.

He looked at some papers, then up at Marquis. You evidently found out a great deal. However, none of it will do you or what remains of your Underground fools any good. The Manager studied Marquis with detached curiosity. You learned things concerning the Managerials that have so far remained secret.

It was partly a question. Marquis’ lean and darkly inscrutable face smiled slightly. You’re good at understatement. Yes—I found out what we’ve suspected for some time. That the Managerial class has found some way to stay young. Either a remarkable longevity, or immortality. Of all the social evils that’s the worst of all. To deny the people knowledge of such a secret.

The Manager nodded. Then you did find that out? The Underground knows? Well, it will do no good.

It will, eventually. They’ll go on and someday they’ll learn the secret. Marquis thought of Marden. Marden was as old as the New System of statism and inhumanity that had started off disguised as social-democracy. Three-hundred and three years old to be exact.

The Manager said, No. 5274—you will be sent to the work colony on the Moon. You won’t be back. We’ve tried re-conditioning rebels, but it doesn’t work. A rebel has certain basic deviant characteristics and we can’t overcome them sufficiently to make happy, well-adjusted workers out of you. However on the Moon—you will conform. It’s a kind of social experiment there in associative reflex culture, you might say. You’ll conform all right.

He was taken to a small, naked, gray-steel room. He thought about taking the capsule from his tooth now, but decided he might be observed. They would rush in an antidote and make him live. And he might not get a chance to take his life in any other way. He would try of course, but his knowledge of his future situation was vague—except that in it he would conform. There would be extreme conditioned-reflex therapeutic techniques. And it would be pretty horrible. That was all he knew.

He didn’t see the pellet fall. He heard the slight sound it made and then saw the almost colorless gas hissing softly, clouding the room. He tasted nothing, smelled or felt nothing.

He passed out quickly and painlessly.

*

He was marched into another office, and he knew he was on the Moon. The far wall was spherical and was made up of the outer shell of the pressure dome which kept out the frigid cold nights and furnace-hot days. It was opaque and Marquis could see the harsh black and white shadows out there—the metallic edges of the far crater wall.

This Manager was somewhat fat, with a round pink face and cold blue eyes. He sat behind a chrome shelf of odd shape suspended from the ceiling with silver wires.

The Manager said, No. 5274, here there is only work. At first, of course, you will rebel. Later you will work, and finally there will be nothing else. Things here are rigidly scheduled, and you will learn the routines as the conditioning bells acquaint you with them. We are completely self-sufficient here. We are developing the perfect scientifically-controlled society. It is a kind of experiment. A closed system to test to what extremes we can carry our mastery of associative reflex to bring man security and happiness and freedom from responsibility.

Marquis didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. He knew he couldn’t get away with trying to kill this particular Managerial specimen. But one man, alone, a rebel, with something left in him that still burned, could beat the system. He had to!

Our work here is specialized. During the indoctrination period you will do a very simple routine job in coordination with the cybernetics machines. There, the machines and the nervous system of the workers become slowly cooperative. Machine and man learn to work very intimately together. Later, after the indoctrination—because of your specialized knowledge of food-concentrate preparation—we will transfer you to the food-mart. The period of indoctrination varies in length with the individuals. You will be screened now and taken to the indoctrination ward. We probably won’t be seeing one another again. The bells take care of everything here. The bells and the machines. There is never an error—never any mistakes. Machines do not make mistakes.

He was marched out of there and through a series of rooms. He was taken in by generators, huge oscilloscopes. Spun like a living tube through curtains of vacuum tube voltimeters, electronic power panels. Twisted and squeezed through rolls of skeins of hook-up wire. Bent through shieldings of every color, size and shape. Rolled over panel plates, huge racks of glowing tubes, elaborate transceivers. Tumbled down long surfaces of gleaming bakelite. Plunged through color-indexed files of resistors and capacitances . . . .

 . . . here machine and man learn to work very intimately together.

As he drifted through the machine tooled nightmare, Marquis knew what he had been fighting all his life, what he would continue to fight with every grain of ingenuity. Mechanization—the horror of losing one’s identity and becoming part of an assembly line.

He could hear a clicking sound as tubes sharpened and faded in intensity. The clicking—rhythm, a hypnotic rhythm like the beating of his own heart—the throbbing and thrumming, the contracting and expanding, the pulsing and pounding . . . .

 . . . the machines and the nervous system of the workers become slowly cooperative.

*

Beds were spaced ten feet apart down both sides of a long gray metal hall. There were no cells, no privacy, nothing but beds and the gray metalene suits with numbers printed across the chest.

His bed, with his number printed above it, was indicated to him, and the guard disappeared. He was alone. It was absolutely silent. On his right a woman lay on a bed. No. 329. She had been here a long time. She appeared dead. Her breasts rose and fell with a peculiarly steady rhythm, and seemed to be coordinated with the silent, invisible throbbing of the metal walls. She might have been attractive once. Here it didn’t make any difference. Her face was gray, like metal. Her hair was cropped short. Her uniform was the same as the man’s on Marquis’ left.

The man was No. 4901. He hadn’t been here so long. His face was thin and gray. His hair was dark, and he was about the same size and build as Marquis. His mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were closed and there was a slight quivering at the ends of the fingers which were laced across his stomach.

Hello, Marquis said. The man shivered, then opened dull eyes and looked up at Marquis. I just got in. Name’s Charles Marquis.

The man blinked. I’m—I’m—No. 4901. He looked down at his chest, repeated the number. His fingers shook a little as he touched his lips.

Marquis said. What’s this indoctrination?

You—learn. The bells ring—you forget—and learn—

There’s absolutely no chance of escaping? Marquis whispered, more to himself than to 4901.

Only by dying, 4901 shivered. His eyes rolled crazily, then he turned over and buried his face in his arms.

The situation had twisted all the old accepted values squarely around. Preferring death over life. But not because of any anti-life attitude, or pessimism, or defeatism. None of those negative attitudes that would have made the will-to-die abnormal under conditions in which there would have been hope and some faint chance of a bearable future. Here to keep on living was a final form of de-humanized indignity, of humiliation, of ignominy, of the worst thing of all—loss of one’s-self—of one’s individuality. To die as a human being was much more preferable over continuing to live as something else—something neither human or machine, but something of both, with none of the dignity of either.

*

The screening process hadn’t detected the capsule of poison in Marquis’ tooth. The capsule contained ten grains of poison, only one of which was enough to bring a painless death within sixteen hours or so. That was his ace in the hole, and he waited only for the best time to use it.

Bells rang. The prisoners jumped from their beds and went through a few minutes of calisthenics. Other bells rang and a tray of small tins of food-concentrates appeared out of a slit in the wall by each bed. More bells rang, different kinds of bells, some deep and brazen, others high and shrill. And the prisoners marched off to specialized jobs co-operating with various machines.

You slept eight hours. Calisthenics five minutes. Eating ten minutes. Relaxation to the tune of musical bells, ten minutes. Work period eight hours. Repeat. That was all of life, and after a while Marquis knew, a man would not be aware of time, nor of his name, nor that he had once been human.

Marquis felt deep lancing pain as he tried to resist the bells. Each time the bells rang and a prisoner didn’t respond properly, invisible rays of needle pain punched and kept punching until he reacted properly.

And finally he did as the bells told him to do. Finally he forgot that things had ever been any other way.

Marquis sat on his bed, eating, while the bells of eating rang across the bowed heads in the gray uniforms. He stared at the girl, then at the man, 4901. There were many opportunities to take one’s own life here. That had perplexed him from the start—why hasn’t the girl, and this man, succeeded in dying?

And all the others? They were comparatively new here, all these in this indoctrination ward. Why weren’t they trying to leave in the only dignified way of escape left?

No. 4901 tried to talk, he tried hard to remember things. Sometimes memory would break through and bring him pictures of other times, of happenings on Earth, of a girl he had known, of times when he was a child. But only the mildest and softest kind of recollections . . . .

Marquis said, I don’t think there’s a prisoner here who doesn’t want to escape, and death is the only way out for us. We know that.

For an instant, No. 4901 stopped eating. A spoonful of food concentrate hung suspended between his mouth and the shelf. Then the food moved again to the urging of the bells. Invisible pain needles gouged Marquis’ neck, and he ate again too, automatically, talking between tasteless bites. A man’s life at least is his own, Marquis said. They can take everything else. But a man certainly has a right and a duty to take that life if by so doing he can retain his integrity as a human being. Suicide—

No. 4901 bent forward. He groaned, mumbled Don’t—don’t— several times, then curled forward and lay on the floor knotted up into a twitching ball.

The eating period was over. The lights went off. Bells sounded for relaxation. Then the sleep bells began ringing, filling up the absolute darkness.

Marquis lay there in the dark and he was afraid. He had the poison. He had the will. But he couldn’t be unique in that respect. What was the matter with the others? All right, the devil with them. Maybe they’d been broken too soon to act. He could act. Tomorrow, during the work period, he would take a grain of the poison. Put the capsule back in the tooth. The poison would work slowly, painlessly, paralyzing the nervous system, finally the heart. Sometime during the beginning of the next sleep period he would be dead. That would leave six or seven hours of darkness and isolation for him to remain dead, so they couldn’t get to him in time to bring him back.

He mentioned suicide to the girl during the next work period. She moaned a little and curled up like a fetus on the floor. After an hour, she got up and began inserting punch cards into the big machine again. She avoided Marquis.

Marquis looked around, went into a corner with his back to the room, slipped the capsule out and let one of the tiny, almost invisible grains, melt on his tongue. He replaced the capsule and returned to the machine. A quiet but exciting triumph made the remainder of the work period more bearable.

Back on his bed, he drifted into sleep, into what he knew was the final sleep. He was more fortunate than the others. Within an hour he would be dead.

*

Somewhere, someone was screaming.

The sounds rose higher and higher. A human body, somewhere  . . . pain unimaginable twisting up through clouds of belching steam  . . . muscles quivering, nerves twitching  . . . and somewhere a body floating and bobbing and crying  . . . sheets of agony sweeping and returning in waves and the horror of unescapable pain expanding like a volcano of madness . . . .

Somewhere was someone alive who should be dead.

And then in the dark, in absolute silence, Marquis moved a little. He realized, vaguely, that the screaming voice was his own.

He stared into the steamy darkness and slowly, carefully, wet his lips. He moved. He felt his lips moving and the whisper sounding loud in the dark.

I’m alive!

He managed to struggle up out of the bed. He could scarcely remain erect. Every muscle in his body seemed to quiver. He longed to slip down into the darkness and escape into endless sleep. But he’d tried that. And he was still alive. He didn’t know how much time had passed. He was sure of the poison’s effects, but he wasn’t dead. They had gotten to him in time.

Sweat exploded from his body. He tried to remember more. Pain. He lay down again. He writhed and perspired on the bed as his tortured mind built grotesque fantasies out of fragments of broken memory.

The routine of the unceasing bells went on. Bells, leap up. Bells, calisthenics. Bells, eat. Bells, march. Bells, work. He tried to shut out the bells. He tried to talk to 4901. 4901 covered up his ears and wouldn’t listen. The girl wouldn’t listen to him.

There were other ways. And he kept the poison hidden in the capsule in his hollow tooth. He had been counting the steps covering the length of the hall, then the twenty steps to the left, then to the right to where the narrow corridor led again to the left where he had seen the air-lock.

After the bells stopped ringing and the darkness was all around him, he got up. He counted off the steps. No guards, no alarms, nothing to stop him. They depended on the conditioners to take care of everything. This time he would do it. This time they wouldn’t bring him back.

No one else could even talk with him about it, even though he knew they all wanted to escape. Some part of them still wanted to, but they couldn’t. So it was up to him. He stopped against the smooth, opaque, up-curving glasite dome. It had a brittle bright shine that reflected from the Moon’s surface. It was night out there, with an odd metallic reflection of Earthlight against the naked crags.

He hesitated. He could feel the intense and terrible cold, the airlessness out there fingering hungrily, reaching and whispering and waiting.

He turned the wheel. The door opened. He entered the air-lock and shut the first door when the air-pressure was right. He turned the other wheel and the outer lock door swung outward. The out-rushing air spun him outward like a balloon into the awful airless cold and naked silence.

His body sank down into the thick pumice dust that drifted up around him in a fine powdery blanket of concealment. He felt no pain. The cold airlessness dissolved around him in deepening darkening pleasantness. This time he was dead, thoroughly and finally and gloriously dead, even buried, and they couldn’t find him. And even if they did finally find him, what good would it do them?

Some transcendental part of him seemed to remain to observe and triumph over his victory. This time he was dead to stay.

*

This time he knew at once that the twisting body in the steaming pain, the distorted face, the screams rising and rising were all Charles Marquis.

Maybe a dream though, he thought. So much pain, so much screaming pain, is not real. In some fraction of a fraction of that interim between life and death, one could dream of so much because dreams are timeless.

Yet he found himself anticipating, even through the shredded, dissociated, nameless kind of pain, a repetition of that other time.

The awful bitterness of defeat.

*

He opened his eyes slowly. It was dark, the same darkness. He was on the same bed. And the old familiar dark around and the familiar soundlessness that was now heavier than the most thunderous sound.

Everything around him then seemed to whirl up and go down in a crash. He rolled over to the floor and lay there, his hot face cooled by the cold metal.

As before, some undeterminable interim of time had passed. And he knew he was alive. His body was stiff. He ached. There was a drumming in his head, and then a ringing in his ears as he tried to get up, managed to drag himself to an unsteady stance against the wall. He felt now an icy surety of horror that carried him out to a pin-point in space.

A terrible fatigue hit him. He fell back onto the bed. He lay there trying to figure out how he could be alive.

He finally slept pushed into it by sheer and utter exhaustion. The bells called him awake. The bells started him off again. He tried to talk again to 4901. They avoided him, all of them. But they weren’t really alive any more. How long could he maintain some part of himself that he knew definitely was Charles Marquis?

He began a ritual, a routine divorced from that to which all those being indoctrinated were subjected. It was a little private routine of his own. Dying, and then finding that he was not dead.

He tried it many ways. He took more grains of the poison. But he was always alive again.

You—4901! Damn you—talk to me! You know what’s been happening to me?

The man nodded quickly over his little canisters of food-concentrate.

This indoctrination—you, the girl—you went crazy when I talked about dying—what—?

The man yelled hoarsely. "Don’t  . . . don’t say it! All this—what you’ve been going through, can’t you understand? All that is part of indoctrination. You’re no different than the rest of us! We’ve all had it! All of us. All of us! Some more maybe than others. It had to end. You’ll have to give in. Oh God, I wish you didn’t. I wish you could win. But you’re no smarter than the rest of us. You’ll have to give in!"

It was 4901's longest and most coherent speech. Maybe I can get somewhere with him, Marquis thought. I can find out something.

But 4901 wouldn’t say any more. Marquis kept on trying. No one, he knew, would ever realize what that meant—to keep on trying to die when no one would let you, when you kept dying, and then kept waking up again, and you weren’t dead. No one could ever understand the pain that went between the dying and the living. And even Marquis couldn’t remember it afterward. He only knew how painful it had been. And knowing that made each attempt a little harder for Marquis.

He tried the poison again. There was the big stamping machine that had crushed him beyond any semblance of a human being, but he had awakened, alive again, whole again. There was the time he grabbed the power cable and felt himself, in one blinding flash, conquer life in a burst of flame. He slashed his wrists at the beginning of a number of sleep periods.

When he awakened, he was whole again. There wasn’t even a scar.

He suffered the pain of resisting the eating bells until he was so weak he couldn’t respond, and he knew that he died that time too—from pure starvation.

But I can’t stay dead!

" . . . You’ll have to give in!"

*

He didn’t know when it was. He had no idea now how long he had been here. But a guard appeared, a cold-faced man who guided Marquis back to the office where the fat, pink-faced little Manager waited for him behind the shelf suspended by silver wires from the ceiling.

The Manager said. You are the most remarkable prisoner we’ve ever had here. There probably will not be another like you here again.

Marquis’ features hung slack, his mouth slightly open, his lower lip drooping. He knew how he looked. He knew how near he was to cracking completely, becoming a senseless puppet of the bells. Why is that? he whispered.

You’ve tried repeatedly to—you know what I mean of course. You have kept on attempting this impossible thing, attempted it more times than anyone else here ever has! Frankly, we didn’t think any human psyche had the stuff to try it that many times—to resist that long.

The Manager made a curious lengthened survey of Marquis’ face. Soon you’ll be thoroughly indoctrinated. You are, for all practical purposes, now. You’ll work automatically then, to the bells, and think very little about it at all, except in a few stereotyped ways to keep your brain and nervous system active enough to carry out simple specialized work duties. Or while the New System lasts. And I imagine that will be forever.

Forever . . . .

Yes, yes. You’re immortal now, the Manager smiled. "Surely, after all this harrowing indoctrination experience, you realize that!"

Immortal. I might have guessed. I might laugh now, but I can’t. We who pretend to live in a hell that is worse than death, and you, the Managerials who live in paradise. We two are immortal.

That is, you’re immortal as long as we desire you to be. You’ll never grow any older than we want you to, never so senile as to threaten efficiency. That was what you were so interested in finding out on Earth, wasn’t it? The mystery behind the Managerials? Why they never seemed to grow old. Why we have all the advantage, no senility, no weakening, the advantage of accumulative experience without the necessity of re-learning?

Yes, Marquis whispered.

The Manager leaned back. He lit a paraette and let the soothing nerve-tonic seep into his lungs. He explained.

"Every one of you political prisoners we bring here want, above everything else, to die. It was a challenge to our experimental social order here. We have no objection to your killing yourself. We have learned that even the will to die can be conditioned out of the most determined rebel. As it has been conditioned out of you. You try to die enough times, and you do die, but the pain of resurrection is