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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
yellow marble. A light the color of sunrise gleamed through tall
pseudo-windows.
I dumped an armfull of books on the table. "Look at these," I said.
"All made from the same stuff as the journal. And the pictures...."
I flipped open one of the books, a heavy folio-sized volume, to a
double-page spread in color showing a group of bearded Arabs in
dingy white djellabas staring toward the camera, a flock of thin
goats in the background. It looked like the kind of picture the
National Geographic runs, except that the quality of the color and
detail was equal to the best color transparencies.
"I can't read the print," I said, "but I'm a whiz at looking at pictures.
Most of the books showed scenes like I hope I never see in the
flesh, but I found a few that were made on earth—God knows how
long ago."
"Travel books, perhaps," Foster said.
"Travel books that you could sell to any university on earth for their
next year's budget," I said, shuffling pages. "Take a look at this
one."
Foster looked across at the panoramic shot of a procession of
shaven-headed men in white sarongs, carrying a miniature golden
boat on their shoulders, descending a long flight of white stone
steps leading from a colonnade of heroic human figures with folded
arms and painted faces. In the background, brick-red cliffs loomed
up, baked in desert heat.
"That's the temple of Hat-Shepsut in its prime," I said. "Which
makes this print close to four thousand years old. Here's another I
recognize." I turned to a smaller, aerial view, showing a gigantic
pyramid, its polished stone facing chipped in places and with a few
panels missing from the lower levels, revealing the cruder structure
of massive blocks beneath.
"That's one of the major pyramids, maybe Khufu's," I said. "It was
already a couple thousand years old, and falling into disrepair. And
look at this——" I opened another volume, showed Foster a vivid
photograph of a great shaggy elephant with a pinkish trunk upraised
between wide-curving yellow tusks.
"A mastodon," I said. "And there's a woolly rhino, and an ugly-
looking critter that must be a sabre-tooth. This book is old...."
"A lifetime of rummaging wouldn't exhaust the treasures aboard this
ship," said Foster.
"How about bones? Did you find any more?"
Foster nodded. "There was a disaster of some sort. Perhaps disease.
None of the bones was broken."
"I can't figure the one in the lifeboat," I said. "Why was he wearing
a necklace of bear's teeth?" I sat down across from Foster. "We've
got plenty of mysteries to solve, all right, but there are some other
items we'd better talk about. For instance: where's the kitchen? I'm
getting hungry."
Foster handed me a black rod from among several that lay on the
table. "I think this may be important," he said.
"What is it, a chop stick?"
"Touch it to your head, above the ear."
"What does it do—give you a massage?"
I pressed it to my temple....
I was in a grey-walled room, facing a towering surface of ribbed
metal. I reached out, placed my hands over the proper perforations.
The housings opened. For apparent malfunction in the quaternary
field amplifiers, I knew, auto-inspection circuit override was
necessary before activation——
I blinked, looked around at the yellow table, and piled books, the rod
in my hand.
"I was in some kind of powerhouse," I said. "There was something
wrong with—with...."
"The quaternary field amplifiers," Foster said.
"I seemed to be right there," I said. "I understood exactly what it
was all about."
"These are technical manuals," Foster said. "They'll tell us everything
we need to know about the ship."
"I was thinking about what I was getting ready to do," I said, "the
way you do when you're starting into a job; I was trouble-shooting
the quaternary whatzits—and I knew how...!"
Foster got to his feet and moved toward the doorway. "We'll have to
start at one end of the library and work our way through," he said.
"It will take us a while, but we'll get the facts we need. Then we can
plan."

Foster picked a handful of briefing rods from the racks in the

comfortably furnished library and started in. The first thing we
needed was a clue as to where to look for food and beds, or for
operating instructions for the ship itself. I hoped we might find the
equivalent of a library card-catalog; then we could put our hands on
what we wanted in a hurry.
I went to the far end of the first rack and spotted a short row of red
rods that stood out vividly among the black ones. I took one out,
thought it over, decided it was unlikely that it was any more
dangerous than the others, and put it against my temple....
As the bells rang, I applied neuro-vascular tension, suppressed
cortical areas upsilon-zeta and iota, and stood by for——
I jerked the rod from my head, my ears still ringing with the shrill
alarm. The effect of the rods was like reality itself, but intensified, all
attention focused single-mindedly on the experience at hand. I
thought of the entertainment potentialities of the idea. You could kill
a tiger, ride an airplane down in flames, face the heavyweight
champion——I wondered about the stronger sensations, like pain
and fear. Would they seem as real as the impulse to check the
whatchamacallits or tighten up your cortical thingamajigs?
I tried another rod.
At the sound of the apex-tone, I racked instruments, walked, not
ran, to the nearest transfer-channel——
Another:
Having assumed duty as Alert Officer, I reported first to coordination
Control via short-line, and confirmed rapport—
These were routine SOP's covering simple situations aboard ship. I
skipped a few, tried again:
Needing a xivometer, I keyed instruction-complex One, followed with
the code—
Three rods further along, I got this:
The situation falling outside my area of primary conditioning, I
reported in corpo to Technical Briefing, Level Nine, Section Four,
Sub-section Twelve, Preliminary. I recalled that it was now necessary
to supply my activity code ... my activity code ... my activity code ...
(A sensation of disorientation grew; confused images flickered like
vague background-noise; then a clear voice cut across the
confusion:)
You have suffered partial personality-fade. Do not be alarmed. Select a
general background orientation rod from the nearest emergency rack. Its
location is....

I was moving along the stacks, to pause in front of a niche where a

U-shaped plastic strip was clamped to the wall. I removed it, fitted it
to my head—(Then:) I was moving along the stacks, to pause in
front of a niche—
I was leaning against the wall, my head humming. The red stick lay
on the floor at my feet. That last bit had been potent: something
about a general background briefing—
"Hey, Foster!" I called, "I think I've got something...." He appeared
from the stacks.

"As I see it," I said, "this background briefing should tell us all we
need to know about the ship; then we can plan our next move more
intelligently. We'll know what we're doing." I took the thing from the
wall, just as I had seemed to do in the phantom scene the red rod
had projected for me.
"These things make me dizzy," I said, handing it to Foster. "Anyway
you're the logical one to try it."
He took the plastic shape, went to the reclining seat at the near end
of the library hall, and settled himself. "I have an idea this one will
hit harder than the others," he said.
He fitted the clamp to his head and ... instantly his eyes glazed; he
slumped back, limp.
"Foster!" I yelled. I jumped forward, started to pull the plastic piece
from his head, then hesitated. Maybe Foster's abrupt reaction was
standard procedure—but I didn't like it much.
I went on reasoning with myself. After all, this was what the red rod
had indicated as normal procedure in a given emergency. Foster was
merely having his faded personality touched up. And his full-blown,
three-dimensional personality was what we needed to give us the
answers to a lot of the questions we'd been asking. Though the ship
and everything in it had lain unused and silent for forgotten millenia,
still the library should be good. The librarian was gone from his post
for forgotten centuries, and Foster was lying unconscious, and I was
thirty thousand miles from home—but I shouldn't let trifles like that
worry me....
I got up and prowled the room. There wasn't much to look at except
stacks and more stacks. The knowledge stored here was fantastic,
both in magnitude and character. If I ever get home with a load of
these rods....
I strolled through a door leading to another room. It was small,
functional, dimly lit. The middle of the room was occupied by a large
and elaborate divan with a cap-shaped fitting at one end. Other
curious accoutrements were ranked along the walls. There wasn't
much in them to thrill me. But bone-wise I had hit the jackpot.
Two skeletons lay near the door, in the final slump of death. Another
lay beside the fancy couch. There was a long-bladed dagger beside
it.
I squatted beside the two near the door and examined them closely.
As far as I could tell, they were as human as I was. I wondered
what kind of men they had been, what kind of world they had come
from, that could build a ship like this and stock it as it was stocked.
The dagger that lay near the other bones was interesting: it seemed
to be made of a transparent orange metal, and its hilt was stamped
in a repeated pattern of the Two Worlds motif. It was the first clue
as to what had taken place among these men when they last lived:
not a complete clue, but a start.
I took a closer look at an apparatus like a dentist's chair parked
against the wall. There were spidery-looking metal arms mounted
above it, and a series of colored glass lenses. A row of dull silver
cylinders was racked against the wall. Another projected from a
socket at the side of the machine. I took it out and looked at it. It
was a plain pewter-colored plastic, heavy and smooth. I felt pretty
sure it was a close cousin to the chopsticks stored in the library. I
wondered what brand of information was recorded in it as I dropped
it in my pocket.
I lit a cigarette and went out to where Foster lay. He was still in the
same position as when I had left him. I sat down on the floor beside
the couch to wait.
It was an hour before he stirred, heaved a sigh, and opened his
eyes. He reached up, pulled off the plastic headpiece, dropped it on
the floor.
"Are you okay?" I said. "Brother, I've been sweating...."
Foster looked at me, his eyes traveling up to my uncombed hair and
down to my scuffed shoes. His eyes narrowed in a faint frown. Then
he said something—in a language that seemed to be all Z's and Q's.
"Don't spring any surprises on me, Foster," I said hoarsely. "Talk
American."
A look of surprise crossed his face. He stared into my eyes again,
then glanced around the room.
"This is a ship's library," he said.
I heaved a sigh of relief. "You gave me a scare, Foster. I thought for
a second your memory was wandering again."
Foster was watching my face as I spoke. "What was it all about?" I
said. "What have you found out?"
"I know you," said Foster slowly. "Your name is Legion."
I nodded. I could feel myself getting tense again. "Sure, you know
me. Just take it easy pal. This is no time to lose your marbles." I put
a hand on his shoulder. "You remember, we were—"
He shook my hand off. "That is not the custom in Vallon," he said
coldly.
"Vallon?" I echoed. "What kind of routine is this, Foster? We were
friends when we walked into this room an hour ago. We were hot on
the trail of something, and I'm human enough to want to know how
it turned out."
"Where are the others?"
"There's a couple of 'others' in the next room," I snapped. "But
they've lost a lot of weight. I can find you several more, in the same
condition. Outside of them there's only me——"
Foster looked at me as if I wasn't there. "I remember Vallon," he
said. He put a hand to his head. "But I remember, too, a barbaric
world, brutal and primitive. You were there. We traveled in a crude
rail-car, and then in a barge that wallowed in the sea. There were
narrow, ugly rooms, evil odors, harsh noises."
"That's not a very flattering portrait of God's country," I said, "but
I'm afraid I recognize it."
"The people were the worst," Foster said. "Misshapen, diseased,
with swollen abdomens and wasted skin and withered limbs."
"Some of the boys don't get out enough," I said.
"The Hunters! We fled from them, Legion, you and I. And I
remember a landing-ring...." He paused. "Strange, it had lost its cap-
stones and fallen into ruin."
"Us natives call it Stonehenge."
"The Hunters burst out of the earth. We fought them. But why
should the Hunters seek me?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me," I said. "Do you know where this ship
came from? And why?"
"This is a ship of the Two Worlds," he replied. "But I know nothing of
how it came to be here."
"How about all that stuff in the journal? Maybe now you—"
"The journal!" Foster broke in. "Where is it?"
"In your coat pocket, I guess."
Foster felt through his jacket awkwardly, brought out the journal. He
opened it.
I moved around to look over his shoulder. He had the book open to
the first section, the part written in the curious alien characters that
nobody had been able to decipher.
And he was reading it.
We sat at the library table of deep green, heavy, polished wood, the
journal open at its center. For hours I had waited while Foster read.
Now at last he leaned back in his chair, ran a hand through the
youthful black hair, and sighed.
"My name," he said, "was Qulqlan. And this," he laid his hand upon
the book, "is my story. This is one part of the past I was seeking.
And I remember none of it...."
"Tell me what the journal says," I asked. "Read it to me."
Foster picked it up, riffled the pages. "It seems that I awoke once
before, in a small room aboard this vessel. I was lying on a memo-
couch, by which circumstance I knew that I had suffered a Change
—"
"You mean you'd lost your memory?"
"And regained it—on the couch. My memory-trace had been re-
impressed on my mind. I awoke knowing my identity, but not how I
came to be aboard this vessel. The journal says that my last memory
was of a building beside the Shallow Sea."
"Where's that?"
"On a far world—called Vallon."
"Yeah? And what next?"
"I looked around me and saw four men lying on the floor, slashed
and bloody. One was alive. I gave him what emergency treatment I
could, then searched the ship. I found three more men, dead; none
living. Then the Hunters attacked, swarming to me—"
"Our friends the fire-balls?"
"Yes; they would have sucked the life from me—and I had no shield
of light. I fled to the lifeboat, carrying the wounded man. I
descended to the planet below: your earth. The man died there. He
had been my friend, a man named Ammaerln. I buried him in a
shallow depression in the earth and marked the place with a stone."
"The ancient sinner," I said.
"Yes ... I suppose it was his bones the lay brother found."
"And we found out last night that the depression was the result of
dirt sifting into the ventilator shaft. But I guess you didn't know
anything about the underground installation, way back then. Doesn't
the journal say anything...?"
"No there is no mention made of it here." Foster shook his head.
"How curious to read of the affairs of this stranger—and know he is
myself."
"How about the Hunters? How did they get to earth?"
"They are insubstantial creatures," said Foster, "yet they can endure
the vacuum of space. I can only surmise that they followed the
lifeboat down."
"They were tailing you?"
"Yes; but I have no idea why they pursued me. They're harmless
creatures in the natural state, used to seek out the rare fugitive from
justice on Vallon. They can be attuned to the individual; thereafter,
they follow him and mark him out for capture."
"Kind of like bloodhounds," I said. "Say, what were you: a big-time
racketeer on Vallon?"
"The journal is frustratingly silent as to my Vallonian career," said
Foster. "But this whole matter of the unexplained inter-galactic
voyage and the evidences of violence aboard the ship make me
wonder whether I, and perhaps others of my companions, were
being exiled for crimes done in the Two Worlds."
"Wow! So they sicced the Hunters on you!" I said. "But why did they
hang around at Stonehenge all this time?"
"There was a trickle of power feeding the screens," said Foster.
"They need a source of electrical energy to live; until a hundred
years ago it was the only one on the planet."
"How did they get down into the shaft without opening it up?"
"Given time, they pass easily through porous substances. But, of
course, last night, when I came on them after their long fast, they
simply burst through in their haste."
"Okay. What happened next—after you buried the man?"
"The journal tells that I was set upon by natives, men who wore the
hides of animals. One of their number entered the ship. He must
have moved the drive lever. It lifted, leaving me marooned."
"So those were his bones we found in the boat," I mused, "the ones
with the bear's-tooth necklace. I wonder why he didn't come into the
ship."
"Undoubtedly he did. But remember the skeleton we found just
inside the landing port? That must have been a fairly fresh and
rather gory corpse at the time the savage stepped aboard. It
probably seemed to him all too clear an indication of what lay in
store for himself if he ventured further. In his terror he must have
retreated to the boat to wait, and there starved to death.
"He was stranded in your world, and you were stranded in his."
"Yes," said Foster. "And then, it seems, I lived among the brute-men
and came to be their king. I waited there by the landing ring
through many years in the hope of rescue. Because I did not age as
the natives did, I was worshipped as a god. I would have built a
signalling device, but there were no pure metals, nothing I could
use. I tried to teach them, but it was a work of centuries."
"I should think you could have set up a school, trained the smartest
ones," I said.
"There was no lack of intelligent minds," Foster said. "It is plain that
the savages were of the blood of the Two Worlds. This earth must
have been seeded long ago by some ancient castaways."
"But how could you go on living—for hundreds of years? Are your
people supermen that live forever?"
"The natural span of a human life is very great. Among your people,
there is a wasting disease from which you all die young."
"That's no disease," I said. "You just naturally get old and die."
"The human mind is a magnificent instrument," Foster said, "not
meant to wither quickly."
"I'll have to chew that one over," I said. "Why didn't you catch this
disease?"
"All Vallonians are innoculated against it."
"I'd like a shot of that," I said. "But let's get back to you."
Foster turned the pages of the journal. "I ruled many peoples, under
many names," he said. "I traveled in many lands, seeking for skilled
metal-workers, glass-blowers, wise men. But always I returned to
the landing-ring."
"It must have been tough," I said, "exiled on a strange world, living
out your life in a wilderness, century after century...."
"My life was not without interest," Foster said. "I watched my savage
people put aside their animal hides and learn the ways of civilization.
I taught them how to build, and keep herds, and till the land. I built
a great city, and I tried—foolishly—to teach their noble caste the
code of chivalry of the Two Worlds. But although they sat at a round
table like the great Ring-board at Okk-Hamiloth, they never really
understood. And then they grew too wise, and wondered at their
king, who never aged. I left them, and tried again to build a long-
signaller. The Hunters sensed it, and swarmed to me. I drove them
off with fires, and then I grew curious, and followed them back to
their nest——"
"I know," I said. "'——and it was a place you knew of old: no hive
but a Pit built by men.'"
"They overwhelmed me; I barely escaped with my life. Starvation
had made the Hunters vicious. They would have drained my body of
its life-energy."
"And if you'd known the transmitter was there—but you didn't. So
you put an ocean between you and them."
"They found me even there. Each time I destroyed many of them,
and fled. But always a few lived to breed and seek me out again."
"But your signaller—didn't it work?"
"No. It was a hopeless attempt. Only a highly developed technology
could supply the raw materials. I could only teach what I knew,
encourage the development of the sciences, and wait. And then I
began to forget."
"Why?"
"A mind grows weary," Foster said. "It is the price of longevity. It
must renew itself. Shock and privation hasten the Change. I had
held it off for many centuries. Now I felt it coming on me.
"At home, on Vallon, a man would record his memory at such a
time, store it electronically in a recording device, and, after the
Change, use the memory-trace to restore, in his renewed body, his
old recollections in toto. But, marooned as I was, my memories,
once lost, were gone forever.
"I did what I could; I prepared a safe place, and wrote messages
that I would find when I awoke——"
"When you woke up in the hotel, you were young again, overnight.
How could it happen?"
"When the mind renews itself, erasing the scars of the years, the
body, too, regenerates. The skin forgets its wrinkles, and the
muscles their fatigue. They become again as they once were."
"When I first met you," I said, "you told me about waking up back in
1918, with no memory."
"Yours is a harsh world, Legion. I must have forgotten many times.
Somewhere, some time, I lost the vital link, forgot my quest. When
the Hunters came again, I fled, not understanding."
"You had a machine gun set up in the house at Mayport. What good
was that against the Hunters?"
"None, I suppose," Foster replied. "But I didn't know. I only knew
that I was—pursued."
"And by then you could have made a signaller," I said. "But you'd
forgotten how—or even that you needed one."
"But in the end I found it—with your help, Legion. But still there is a
mystery: What came to pass aboard this ship all those centuries
ago? Why was I here? And what killed the others?"
"Look," I said. "Here's a theory: there was a mutiny, while you were
in the machine having your memory fixed. You woke up and it was
all over—and the crew was dead."
"That hypothesis will serve," said Foster. "But one day I must learn
the truth of this matter."
"What I can't figure out is why somebody from Vallon didn't come
after this ship. It was right here in orbit."
"Consider the immensity of space, Legion. This is one tiny world,
among the stars."
"But there was a station here, fitted out for handling your ships.
That sounds like it was a regular port of call. And the books with the
pictures: they prove your people have been here off and on for
thousands of years. Why would they stop coming?"
"There are such beacons on a thousand worlds," said Foster. "Think
of it as a buoy marking a reef, a trailblaze in the wilderness. Ages
could pass before a wanderer chanced this way again. The fact that
the ventilator shaft at Stonehenge was choked with the debris of
centuries when I first landed there shows how seldom this world
was visited."
I thought about it. Bit by bit Foster was putting together the jig-saw
pieces of his past. But he still had a long way to go before he had
the big picture, frame and all. I had an idea:
"Say, you said you were in the memory machine. You woke up there
—and you'd just had your memory restored. Why not do the same
thing again, now? That is, if your brain can take another pounding
this soon."
"Yes," he said. He stood up abruptly. "There's just a chance. Come!"
I followed him out of the library into the room with the bones. He
moved over to look down at them curiously.
"Quite a fracas," I said. "Three of 'em."
"This would be the room where I awakened," said Foster. "These are
the men I saw dead."
"They're still dead," I said. "But what about the machine?"
Foster walked across to the fancy couch, leaned down beside it, then
shook his head. "No," he said. "Of course it wouldn't be here...."
"What?"
"My memory-trace: the one that was used to restore my memory—
that other time."
Suddenly I recalled the cylinder I had pocketed hours before. With a
surprising flutter at my heart I held it up, like a kid in a classroom
who knows he's got the right answer. "This it?"
Foster glanced at it briefly. "No, that's an empty—like those you see
filed over there." He pointed to the rack of pewter-colored cylinders
on the opposite wall. "They would be used for emergency
recordings. Regular multi-life memory-traces would be key-coded
with a pattern of colored lines."
"It figures," I said. "That would have been too easy. We have to do
everything the hard way." I looked around. "It's a big bureau to look
for a collar button under, but I guess we can try."
"It doesn't matter, really. When I return to Vallon, I'll recover my
past. There are vaults where every citizen's trace is stored."
"But you had yours here with you."
"It could only have been a copy. The master trace is never removed
from Okk-Hamiloth."
"I guess you'll be eager to get back there," I said. "That'll be quite a
moment for you, getting back home after all these years. Speaking
of years: were you able to figure out how long you were marooned
down on earth?"
"I lost all record of dates long ago," said Foster. "I can only estimate
the time."
"About how long?" I persisted.
"Since I descended from this ship, Legion," he said, "three thousand
years have passed."

"I hate to see the team split up," I said. "You know, I was kind of
getting used to being an apprentice nut. I'm going to miss you,
Foster."
"Come with me to Vallon, Legion," he said.
We were standing in the observation lounge, looking out at the
bright-lit surface of the earth thirty thousand miles away. Beyond it,
the dead-white disk of the moon hung like a cardboard cutout.
"Thanks anyway, buddy," I said. "I'd like to see those other worlds of
yours but in the end I might regret it. It's no good giving an Eskimo
a television set. I'd just sit around on Vallon pining for home: beat-
up people, stinks, and all."
"You could return here some day."
"From what I understand about traveling in a ship like this," I said,
"a couple of hundred years would pass before I got back, even if it
only seemed like a few weeks en route. I want to live out my life
here—with the kind of people I know, in the world I grew up in. It
has its faults, but it's home."
"Then there is nothing I can do, Legion," Foster said, "to reward
your loyalty and express my gratitude."
"Well, ah," I said. "There is a little something. Let me take the
lifeboat, and stock it with a few goodies from the library, and some
of those marbles from the storeroom, and a couple of the smaller
mechanical gadgets. I think I know how to merchandise them in a
way that'll leave the economy on an even keel—and incidentally set
me up for life. As you said, I'm a materialist."
"As you wish," Foster said. "Take whatever you desire."
"One thing I'll have to do when I get back," I said, "is open the
tunnel at Stonehenge enough to sneak a thermite bomb down it—if
they haven't already found the beacon station."
"As I judge the temper of the local people," Foster said, "the secret
is safe for at least three generations."
"I'll bring the boat down in a blind spot where radar won't pick it
up," I said. "Our timing was good; in another few years, it wouldn't
have been possible."
"And this ship would soon have been discovered," Foster said. "In
spite of radar-negative screens."
I looked at the great smooth sphere hanging, haloed, against utter
black. The Pacific Ocean threw back a brilliant image of the sun.
"I think I see an island down there that will fill the bill perfectly," I
said. "And if it doesn't, there are a million more to choose from."
"You've changed, Legion," Foster said. "You sound like a man with a
fair share of joie de vivre."
"I used to think I was a guy who never got the breaks," I said.
"There's something about standing here looking at the world that
makes that kind of thinking sound pretty dumb. There's everything
down there a man needs to make his own breaks—even without a
stock of trade goods."
"Every world has its rules of life," Foster said. "Some more complex
than others. To face your own reality—that's the challenge."
"Me against the universe," I said. "With those odds, even a loser can
look good." I turned to Foster. "We're in a ten-hour orbit," I said.
"We'd better get moving. I want to put the boat down in southern
South America. I know a place there where I can off-load without
answering too many questions."
"You have several hours before the most favorable launch time,"
Foster said. "There's no hurry."
"Maybe not," I said. "But I've got a lot to do—" I took a last look
toward the majestic planet beyond the viewscreen, "—and I'm eager
to get started."
 CHAPTER VIII
I sat on the terrace watching the sun go down into the sea and
thinking about Foster, somewhere out there beyond the purple
palaces on the far horizon, in the ship that had waited for him for
three thousand years, heading home at last. It was strange to reflect
that for him, traveling near the speed of light, only a few days had
passed, while three years went by for me—three fast years that I
had made good use of.
The toughest part had been the first few months, after I put the
lifeboat down in a cañon in the desert country south of a little town
called Itzenca, in Peru. I waited by the boat for a week, to be sure
the vigilantes weren't going to show up, full of helpful suggestions
and embarassing questions; then I hiked to town, carrying a pack
with a few carefully selected items to start my new career. It took
me two weeks to work, lie, barter, and plead my way to the seaport
town of Callao and another week to line up passage home as a deck
hand on a banana scow. I disappeared over the side at Tampa, and
made it to Miami without attracting attention. As far as I could tell,
the cops had already lost interest in me.
My old friend, the heavyweight señorita, wasn't overjoyed to see me,
but she put me up, and I started in on my plan to turn my souvenirs
into money.
The items I had brought with me from the lifeboat were a pocketful
of little gray dominoes that were actually movie film, and a small
projector to go with them. I didn't offer them for sale, direct. I made
arrangements with an old acquaintance in the business of making
pictures with low costume budgets for private showings; I set up the
apparatus and projected my films, and he copied them in 35 mm. I
told him that I'd smuggled them in from East Germany. He didn't
think much of the Krauts, but he admitted you had to hand it to
them technically; the special effects were absolutely top-notch. His
favorite was one I called the Mammoth Hunt.
I had twelve pictures altogether; with a little judicious cutting and a
dubbed-in commentary, they made up into fast-moving twenty-
minute short subjects. He got in touch with a friend in the
distribution end in New York, and after a little cagy fencing over
contract terms, we agreed on a deal that paid a hundred thousand
for the twelve, with an option on another dozen at the same price.
Within a week after the pictures hit the neighborhood theatres
around Bayonne, New Jersey, in a cautious tryout, I had offers up to
half a million for my next consignment, no questions asked. I left my
pal Mickey to handle the details on a percentage basis, and headed
back for Itzenca.
The lifeboat was just as I'd left it; it would have been all right for
another fifty years, as far as the danger of anybody stumbling over it
was concerned. I explained to the crew I brought out with me that it
was a fake rocket ship, a prop I was using for a film I was making, I
let them wander all over it and get their curiosity out of their
systems. The concensus was that it wouldn't fool anybody; no tail
fins, no ray guns, and the instrument panel was a joke; but they
figured that it was my money, so they went to work setting up a
system of camouflage nets (part of the plot, I told them) and off-
loading my cargo.
A year after my homecoming, I had my island—a square mile of
perfect climate, fifteen miles off the Peruvian coast—and a house
that was tailored to my every whim by a mind-reading architect who
made a fortune on the job—and earned it. The uppermost floor—
almost a tower—was a strong-room, and it was there that I had
stored my stock in trade. I had sold off the best of the hundred or so
films I had picked out before leaving Foster, but there were plenty of
other items. The projector itself was the big prize. The self-contained
power unit converted nuclear energy to light with 99 percent
efficiency. It scanned the "films", one molecular layer at a time, and
projected a continuous picture—no sixteen-frames-a-second flicker
here. The color and sound were absolutely life-like—with the result
that I'd had a few complaints from my distributor that the
Technicolor was kind of washed-out.
The principles involved in the projector were new, and—in theory, at
least—way over the heads of our local physicists. But the practical
application was nothing much. I figured that, with the right contacts
in scientific circles to help me introduce the system, I had a billion-
dollar industry up my sleeve. I had already fed a few little gimmicks
into the market; a tough paper, suitable for shirts and underwear; a
chemical that bleached teeth white as the driven snow; an all-color
pigment for artists. With the knowledge I had absorbed from all the
briefing rods I had studied, I had the techniques of a hundred new
industries at my fingertips—and I hadn't exhausted the possibilities
yet.
I spent most of a year roaming the world, discovering all the things
that a free hand with a dollar bill could do for a man. The next year I
put in fixing up the island, buying paintings and rugs and silver for
the house, and a concert grand piano. After the first big thrill of
economic freedom had worn off, I still enjoyed my music.
For six months I had a full-time physical instructor giving me a
twenty-four-hour-a-day routine of diet, sleep, and all the precision
body-building my metabolism could stand. At the end of the course I
was twice the man I'd ever been, the instructor was a physical
wreck, and I was looking around for a new hobby.
Now, after three years, it was beginning to get me: boredom, the
disease of the idle rich, that I had sworn would never touch me. But
thinking about wealth and having it on your hands are two different
things, and I was beginning to remember almost with nostalgia the
tough old times when every day was an adventure, full of cops and
missed meals and a thousand unappeased desires.
Not that I was really suffering. I was relaxed in a comfortable chair,
after a day of surf fishing and a modest dinner of Chateaubriand. I
was smoking a skinny cigar rolled by an expert from the world's
finest leaf, and listening to the best music a thousand-dollar hi-fi
could produce. And the view, though free, was worth a million
dollars a minute. After a while I would stroll down to the boathouse,
start up the Rolls-powered launch, and tool over to the mainland,
transfer to my Caddie convertible, and drive into town where a tall
brunette from Stockholm was waiting for me to take her to the
movies. My steady gal was a hard-working secretary for an
electronics firm.
I finished up my stogie and leaned forward to drop it in a big silver
ashtray, when something caught my eye out across the red-painted
water. I sat squinting at it, then went inside and came out with a
pair of 7x50 binoculars. I focused them and studied the dark speck
that stood out clearly now against the gaudy sky. It was a heavy-
looking power boat, heading dead toward my island.
I watched it come closer, swing off toward the hundred-foot
concrete jetty I had built below the sea-wall, and ease alongside in a
murmur of powerful engines. They died, and the boat sat in a
sudden silence dwarfing the pier. I studied the bluish-grey hull, the
inconspicuous flag aft. Two heavy deck guns were mounted on the
foredeck, and there were four torpedoes slung in launching cradles.
The hardware didn't make half as much impression on me as the
ranks of helmeted men drawn up on deck.
I sat and watched. The men shuffled off onto the pier, formed up
into two squads. I counted; forty-eight men, and a couple of
officers. There was the faint sound of orders being barked, and the
column stepped off, moving along the paved road that swung
between the transplanted royal palms and hibiscus, right up to the
wide drive that curved off to the house. They halted, did a left face,
and stood at parade rest. The two officers, wearing class A's, and a
tubby civilian with a brief case came up the drive, trying to look as
casual as possible under the circumstances. They paused at the foot
of the broad flight of Tennessee marble steps leading up to my
perch.
The leading officer, a brigadier general, no less, looked up at me.
"May we come up, sir?" he said.
I looked across at the silent ranks waiting at the foot of the drive.
"If the boys want a drink of water, Sarge," I said, "tell 'em to come
on over."
"I am General Smale," the B.G. said. "This is Colonel Sanchez of the
Peruvian Army—" he indicated the other military type "—and Mr.
Pruffy of the American Embassy at Lima."
"Howdy, Mr. Pruffy," I said. "Howdy, Mr. Sanchez. Howdy—"
"This ... ah ... call is official in nature, Mr. Legion," the general said.
"It's a matter of great importance, involving the security of your
country."
"OK, General," I said. "Come on up. What's happened? You boys
haven't started another war, have you?"
They filed up onto the terrace, hesitated, then shook hands, and sat
down gingerly in the chairs. Pruffy held his briefcase in his lap.
"Put your sandwiches on the table, if you like, Mr. Pruffy," I said. He
blinked, gripped the briefcase tighter. I offered my hand-tooled
cigars around; Pruffy looked startled, Smale shook his head, and
Sanchez took three.
"I'm here," the general said, "to ask you a few questions, Mr. Legion.
Mr. Pruffy represents the Department of State in the matter, and
Colonel Sanchez—"
"Don't tell me," I said. "He represents the Peruvian government,
which is why I don't ask you what an armed American force is doing
wandering around on Peruvian soil."
"Here," Pruffy put in. "I hardly think—"
"I believe you," I said. "What's it all about, Smale?"
"I'll come directly to the point," he said. "For some time, the
investigative and security agencies of the US government have been
building a file on what for lack of a better name has been called 'The
Martians.'" Smale coughed apologetically.
"A little over three years ago," he went on, "an unidentified flying
object—"
"You interested in flying saucers, General?" I said.
"By no means," he snapped. "The object appeared on a number of
radar screens, descending from extreme altitude. It came to earth at
..." he hesitated.
"Don't tell me you came all the way out here to tell me you can't tell
me," I said.
"—A site in England," Smale said. "American aircraft were dispatched
to investigate the object. Before they could make identification, it
rose again, accelerated at tremendous speed, and was lost at an
altitude of several hundred miles."
"I thought we had better radar than that," I said. "The satellite
program—"
"No such specialized equipment was available," Smale said. "An
intensive investigation turned up the fact that two strangers—
possibly Americans—had visited the site only a few hours before the
—ah—visitation."
I nodded. I was thinking about the close call I'd had when I went
back to see about lobbing a bomb down the shaft to obliterate the
beacon station. There were plainclothes men all over the place, like
old maids at a movie star's funeral. It was just as well; they never
found it. The rocket blasts had collapsed the tunnel, and apparently
the whole underground installation was made of non-metallic
substances that didn't show up in detecting equipment. I had an
idea metal was passé where Foster came from.
"Some months later," Smale went on, "a series of rather curious
short films went on exhibition in the United States. They showed
scenes representing conditions on other planets, as well as ancient
and prehistoric incidents here on earth. They were prefaced with
explanations that they merely represented the opinions of science as
to what was likely to be found on distant worlds. They attracted
wide interest, and with few exceptions, scientists praised their
verisimilitude."
"I admire a clever fake," I said. "With a topical subject like space
travel——"
"One item which was commented on as a surprising inaccuracy, in
view of the technical excellence of the other films," Smale said, "was
the view of our planet from space, showing the earth against the
backdrop of stars. A study of the constellations by astronomers
quickly indicated a 'date' approximately 7000 B.C. for the scene.
Oddly, the north polar cap was shown centered on Hudson's Bay. No
south polar cap was in evidence. The continent of Antarctica
appeared to be at a latitude of some 30 degrees, entirely free of
ice."
I looked at him and waited.
"Now, studies made since that time indicate that nine thousand
years ago, the North Pole was indeed centered on Hudson's Bay,"
Smale said. "And Antarctica was in fact ice-free."
"That idea's been around a long time," I said. "There was a theory
——"
"Then there was the matter of the views of Mars," the general went
on. "The aerial shots of the 'canals' were regarded as very cleverly
done." He turned to Pruffy, who opened his briefcase and handed a
couple of photos across.
"This is a scene taken from the film," Smale said. It was an 8x10
color shot, showing a row of mounds drifted with pinkish dust,
against a blue-black horizon.
Smale placed another photo beside the first. "This one," he said,
"was taken by automatic cameras in the successful Mars probe of
last year."
I looked. The second shot was fuzzy, and the color was shifted badly
toward the blue, but there was no mistaking the scene. The mounds
were drifted a little deeper, and the angle was different, but they
were the same mounds.
"In the meantime," Smale bored on relentlessly, "a number of novel
products appeared on the market. Chemists and physicists alike
were dumfounded at the theoretical base implied by the techniques
involved. One of the products—a type of pigment—embodied a
completely new concept in crystallography."
"Progress," I said. "Why, when I was a boy——"
"It was an extremely tortuous trail we followed," Smale said. "But
we found that all these curious observations making up the
'Martians' file had, in the end, only one factor in common. And that
factor, Mr. Legion, was you."
 CHAPTER IX
It was a few minutes after sunrise, and Smale and I were back on
the terrace toying with the remains of ham steaks and honeydew.
"That's one advantage of being in jail in your own house—the food's
good," I commented.
"I can understand your feelings," Smale said. "Frankly, I didn't relish
this assignment. But it's clear that there are matters here which
require explanation. It was my hope that you'd see fit to cooperate
voluntarily."
"Take your army and sail off into the sunrise, General," I said. "Then
maybe I'll be in a position to do something voluntary."
"Your patriotism alone——"
"My patriotism keeps telling me that where I come from, a citizen
has certain legal rights," I said.
"This is a matter that transcends legal technicalities," Smale said.
"I'll tell you quite frankly, the presence of the task force here only
received ex post facto approval by the Peruvian government. They
were faced with the fait accompli. I mention this only to indicate just
how strongly the government feels in this matter."
"Seeing you hit the beach with a platoon of infantry was enough of a
hint for me," I said. "You're lucky I didn't wipe you out with my
disintegrator rays."
Smale choked on a bite of melon.
"Just kidding," I said. "But I haven't given you any trouble. Why the
reinforcements?"
Small stared at me. "What reinforcements?"
I pointed with a fork. He turned, gazed out to sea. A conning tower
was breaking the surface, leaving a white wake behind. It rose
higher, water streaming off the deck. A hatch popped open, and men
poured out, lining up. Smale got to his feet, his napkin falling to the
floor.
"Sergeant!" he yelled. I sat, open-mouthed, as Smale jumped to the
stair, went down it three steps at a time. I heard him bellowing, the
shouts of men and the clatter of rifles being unstacked, feet
pounding. I went to the marble banister and looked down. Pruffy
was out on the lawn in purple pajamas, yelping questions. Colonel
Sanchez was pulling at Smale's arm, also yelling. The Marines were
forming up on the lawn.
"Let's watch those petunias, Sergeant," I yelled.
"Keep out of this, Legion," Smale shouted.
"Why should I be the only one not yelling," I yelled. "After all, I own
the place."
Smale bounded back up the stairs. "You're my prime responsibility,
Legion," he barked. "I'm getting you to a point of maximum security.
Where's the cellar?"
"I keep it downstairs," I said. "What's this all about? Interservice
rivalry? You afraid the sailors are going to steal the glory?"
"That's a nuclear-powered sub," Smale barked. "Gagarin class; it
belongs to the Soviet Navy."

I stood there with my mouth open, looking at Smale without seeing

him, and trying hard to think fast. I hadn't been too startled when
the Marines showed up; I had gone over the legal aspects of my
situation months before, with a platoon of high-priced legal talent; I
knew that sooner or later somebody would come around to hit me
for tax evasion, draft dodging, or overtime parking; but I was in the
clear. The government might resent my knowing a lot of things it
didn't, but no one could ever prove I'd swiped them from Uncle Sam.
In the end, they'd have to let me go—and my account in a Swiss
bank would last me, even if they managed to suppress any new
developments from my fabulous lab. In a way, I was glad the
showdown had come.
But I'd forgotten about the Russians. Naturally, they'd be interested,
and their spies were at least as good as the intrepid agents of the
US Secret Service. I should have realized that sooner or later, they'd
pay a call—and the legal niceties wouldn't slow them down. They'd
slap me into a brain laundry, and sweat every last secret out of me
as casually as I'd squeeze a lemon.
The sub was fully surfaced now, and I was looking down the barrels
of half a dozen five-inch rifles, any one of which could blast Smale's
navy out of the water with one salvo. There were a couple of
hundred men, I estimated, putting landing boats over the side and
spilling into them. Down on the lawn, the sergeant was snapping
orders, and the men were double-timing off to positions that must
have been spotted in advance. It looked like the Russians weren't
entirely unexpected. This was a game the big boys were playing,
and I was just a pawn, caught in the middle. My rosy picture of me
confounding the bureaucrats was fading fast. My island was about to
become a battlefield, and whichever way it turned out, I'd be the
loser. I had one slim possibility; to get lost in the shuffle.
Smale grabbed my arm. "Don't stand there, man!" he snapped.
"Which way—"
"Sorry, General," I said, and slammed a hard right to his stomach.
He folded, but still managed to lunge for me. I gave him a left to the
jaw, and he dropped. I jumped over him, plunged through the
French doors, and took the spiral glass stairway four at a time,
whirled, and slammed the strong-room door behind me. The
armored walls would stand anything short of a direct hit with a
good-sized artillery shell, and the boys down below were unlikely to
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