Nice Girl With 5 Husbands, by Fritz Leiber

Nice Girl With 5 Husbands

                Adventure is relative to one's previous
               experience. Sometimes, in fact, you can't
             even be sure you're having or not having one!


To be given paid-up leisure and find yourself unable to create is
unpleasant for any artist. To be stranded in a cluster of desert
cabins with a dozen lonely people in the same predicament only makes
it worse. So Tom Dorset was understandably irked with himself and the
Tosker-Brown Vacation Fellowships as he climbed with the sun into the
valley of red stones. He accepted the chafing of his camera strap
against his shoulder as the nagging of conscience. He agreed with the
disparaging hisses of the grains of sand rutched by his sneakers, and
he wished that the occasional breezes, which faintly echoed the same
criticisms, could blow him into a friendlier, less jealous age.

He had no way of knowing that just as there are winds that blow through
space, so there are winds that blow through time. Such winds may be
strong or weak. The strong ones are rare and seldom blow for short
distances, or more of us would know about them. What they pick up is
almost always whirled far into the future or past.

This has happened to people. There was Ambrose Bierce, who walked
out of America and existence, and there are thousands of others who
have disappeared without a trace, though many of these may not have
been caught up by time tornadoes and I do not know if a time gale blew
across the deck of the _Marie Celeste_.

Sometimes a time wind is playful, snatching up an object, sporting
with it for a season and then returning it unharmed to its original
place. Sometimes we may be blown about by whimsical time winds without
realizing it. Memory, for example, is a tiny time breeze, so weak that
it can ripple only the mind.

A very few time winds are like the monsoon, blowing at fixed intervals,
first in one direction, then the other. Such a time wind blows near a
balancing rock in a valley of red stones in the American Southwest.
Every morning at ten o'clock, it blows a hundred years into the future;
every afternoon at two, it blows a hundred years into the past.

Quite a number of people have unwittingly seen time winds in operation.
There are misty spots on the sea's horizon and wavery patches over
desert sands. There are mirages and will o' the wisps and ice blinks.
And there are dust devils, such as Tom Dorset walked into near the
balancing rock.

It seemed to him no more than a spiteful upgust of sand, against which
he closed his eyes until the warm granules stopped peppering the lids.
He opened them to see the balancing rock had silently fallen and lay a
quarter buried--no, that couldn't be, he told himself instantly. He had
been preoccupied; he must have passed the balancing rock and held its
image in his mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

Despite this rationalization he was quite shaken. The strap of his
camera slipped slowly down his arm without his feeling it. And
just then there stepped around the giant bobbin of the rock an
extraordinarily pretty girl with hair the same pinkish copper color.

She was barefoot and wearing a pale blue playsuit rather like a Grecian
tunic. But most important, as she stood there toeing his rough shadow
in the sand, there was a complete naturalness about her, an absence of
sharp edges, as if her personality had weathered without aging, just
as the valley seemed to have taken another step toward eternity in the
space of an instant.

She must have assumed something of the same gentleness in him, for
her faint surprise faded and she asked him, as easily as if he were a
friend of five years' standing, "Tell now, do you think a woman can
love just one man? All her life? And a man just one woman?"

Tom Dorset made a dazed sound.

His mind searched wildly.

"I do," she said, looking at him as calmly as at a mountain. "I think
a man and woman can be each other's world, like Tristan and Isolde or
Frederic and Catherine. Those old authors were wise. I don't see why on
earth a girl has to spread her love around, no matter how enriching the
experiences may be."

"You know, I agree with you," Tom said, thinking he'd caught her
idea--it was impossible not to catch her casualness. "I think there's
something cheap about the way everybody's supposed to run after sex
these days."

"I don't mean that exactly. Tenderness is beautiful, but--" She pouted.
"A big family can be vastly crushing. I wanted to declare today a
holiday, but they outvoted me. Jock said it didn't chime with our mood
cycles. But I was angry with them, so I put on my clothes--"

"Put on--?"

"To make it a holiday," she explained bafflingly. "And I walked here
for a tantrum." She stepped out of Tom's shadow and hopped back. "Ow,
the sand's getting hot," she said, rubbing the grains from the pale and
uncramped toes.

"You go barefoot a lot?" Tom guessed.

"No, mostly digitals," she replied and took something shimmering from
a pocket at her hip and drew it on her foot. It was a high-ankled,
transparent moccasin with five separate toes. She zipped it shut with
the speed of a card trick, then similarly gloved the other foot. Again
the metal-edged slit down the front seemed to close itself.

"I'm behind on the fashions," Tom said, curious. They were walking side
by side now, the way she'd come and he'd been going. "How does that
zipper work?"

"Magnetic. They're on all my clothes. Very simple." She parted her
tunic to the waist, then let it zip together.

"Clever," Tom remarked with a gulp. There seemed no limits to this
girl's naturalness.

"I see you're a button man," she said. "You actually believe it's
possible for a man and woman to love just each other?"

       *       *       *       *       *

His chuckle was bitter. He was thinking of Elinore Murphy at
Tosker-Brown and a bit about cold-faced Miss Tosker herself. "I
sometimes wonder if it's possible for anyone to love anyone."

"You haven't met the right girls," she said.

"Girl," he corrected.

She grinned at him. "You'll make me think you really are a monogamist.
What group do you come from?"

"Let's not talk about that," he requested. He was willing to forego
knowing how she'd guessed he was from an art group, if he could be
spared talking about the Vacation Fellowships and those nervous little
cabins.

"My group's very nice on the whole," the girl said, "but at times they
can be nefandously exasperating. Jock's the worst, quietly guiding the
rest of us like an analyst. How I loathe that man! But Larry's almost
as bad, with his shame-faced bumptiousness, as if we'd all sneaked off
on a joyride to Venus. And there's Jokichi at the opposite extreme,
forever scared he won't distribute his affection equally, dividing it
up into mean little packets like candy for jealous children who would
scream if they got one chewy less. And then there's Sasha and Ernest--"

"Who are you talking about?" Tom asked.

"My husbands." She shook her head dolefully. "To find five more
difficult men would be positively Martian."

Tom's mind backtracked frantically, searching all conversations at
Tosker-Brown for gossip about cultists in the neighborhood. It found
nothing and embarked on a wider search. There were the Mormons (was
that the word that had sounded like Martian?) but it wasn't the Mormon
husbands who were plural. And then there was Oneida (weren't husbands
and wives both plural there?) but that was 19th century New England.

"Five husbands?" he repeated. She nodded. He went on, "Do you mean to
say five men have got you alone somewhere up here?"

"To be sure not," she replied. "There are my kwives."

"Kwives?"

"Co-wives," she said more slowly. "They can be fascinerously
exasperating, too."

       *       *       *       *       *

Tom's mind did some more searching. "And yet you believe in monogamy?"

She smiled. "Only when I'm having tantrums. It was civilized of you to
agree with me."

"But I actually do believe in monogamy," he protested.

She gave his hand a little squeeze. "You are nice, but let's rush now.
I've finished my tantrum and I want you to meet my group. You can fresh
yourself with us."

As they hurried across the heated sands, Tom Dorset felt for the first
time a twinge of uneasiness. There was something about this girl, more
than her strange clothes and the odd words she used now and then,
something almost--though ghosts don't wear digitals--spectral.

They scrambled up a little rise, digging their footgear into the sand,
until they stood on a long flat. And there, serpentining around two
great clumps of rock, was a many-windowed adobe ranch house with a
roof like fresh soot.

"Oh, they've put on their clothes," his companion exclaimed with
pleasure. "They've decided to make it a holiday after all."

Tom spotted a beard in the group swarming out to meet them. Its cultish
look gave him a momentary feeling of superiority, followed by an
equally momentary apprehension--the five husbands were certainly husky.
Then both feelings were swallowed up in the swirl of introduction.

He told his own name, found that his companion's was Lois Wolver, then
smiling faces began to bob toward his, his hands were shaken, his
cheeks were kissed, he was even spun around like blind man's bluff, so
that he lost track of the husbands and failed to attach Mary, Rachel,
Simone and Joyce to the right owners.

He did notice that Jokichi was an Oriental with a skin as tight as
enameled china, and that Rachel was a tall slim Negro girl. Also
someone said, "Joyce isn't a Wolver, she's just visiting."

He got a much clearer impression of the clothes than the names. They
were colorful, costly-looking, and mostly Egyptian and Cretan in
inspiration. Some of them would have been quite immodest, even compared
to Miss Tosker's famous playsuits, except that the wearers didn't seem
to feel so.

"There goes the middle-morning rocket!" one of them eagerly cried.

Tom looked up with the rest, but his eyes caught the dazzling sun.
However, he heard a faint roaring that quickly sank in volume and
pitch, and it reminded him that the Army had a rocket testing range in
this area. He had little interest in science, but he hadn't known they
were on a daily schedule.

"Do you suppose it's off the track?" he asked anxiously.

"Not a chance," someone told him--the beard, he thought. The assurance
of the tones gave him a possible solution. Scientists came from all
over the world these days and might have all sorts of advanced ideas.
This could be a group working at a nearby atomic project and leading
its peculiar private life on the side.

       *       *       *       *       *

As they eddied toward the house he heard Lois remind someone, "But you
finally did declare it a holiday," and a husband who looked like a gay
pharaoh respond, "I had another see at the mood charts and I found a
subtle surge I'd missed."

Meanwhile the beard (a black one) had taken Tom in charge. Tom wasn't
sure of his name, but he had a tan skin, a green sarong, and a fiercely
jovial expression. "The swimming pool's around there, the landing
spot's on the other side," he began, then noticed Tom gazing at the
sooty roof. "Sun power cells," he explained proudly. "They store all
the current we need."

Tom felt his idea confirmed. "Wonder you don't use atomic power," he
observed lightly.

The beard nodded. "We've been asked that. Matter of esthetics. Why
waste sunlight or use hard radiations needlessly? Of course, you might
feel differently. What's your group, did you say?"

"Tosker-Brown," Tom told him, adding when the beard frowned, "the
Fellowship people, you know."

"I don't," the beard confessed. "Where are you located?"

Tom briefly described the ranch house and cabins at the other end of
the valley.

"Comic, I can't place it." The beard shrugged. "Here come the children."

A dozen naked youngsters raced around the ranch house, followed by a
woman in a vaguely African dress open down the sides.

"Yours?" Tom asked.

"Ours," the beard answered.

"C'est un homme!"

"Regardez des vêtements!"

"No need to practice, kids; this is a holiday," the beard told them.
"Tom, Helen," he said, introducing the woman with the air-conditioned
garment. "Her turn today to companion die Kinder."

One of the latter rapped on the beard's knee. "May we show the stranger
our things?" Instantly the others joined in pleading. The beard shot
an inquiring glance at Tom, who nodded. A moment later the small troupe
was hurrying him toward a spacious lean-to at the end of the ranch
house. It was chuckful of strange toys, rocks and plants, small animals
in cages and out, and the oddest model airplanes, or submarines. But
Tom was given no time to look at any one thing for long.

"See my crystals? I grew them."

"Smell my mutated gardenias. Tell now, isn't there a difference?" There
didn't seem to be, but he nodded.

"Look at my squabbits." This referred to some long-eared white
squirrels nibbling carrots and nuts.

"Here's my newest model spaceship, a DS-57-B. Notice the detail." The
oldest boy shoved one of the submarine affairs in his face.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tom felt like a figure that is being tugged about in a rococo painting
by wide pink ribbons in the chubby hands of naked cherubs. Except
that these cherubs were slim and tanned, fantastically energetic, and
apparently of depressingly high IQ. (What these scientists did to
children!) He missed Lois and was grateful for the single little girl
solemnly skipping rope in a corner and paying no attention to him.

The odd lingo she repeated stuck in his mind: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o,
Gis-so. Gik-lo, I-o...."

Suddenly the air was filled with soft chimes. "Lunch," the children
shouted and ran away.

Tom followed at a soberer pace along the wall of the ranch house. He
glanced in the huge windows, curious about the living and sleeping
arrangements of the Wolvers, but the panes were strangely darkened.
Then he entered the wide doorway through which the children had
scampered and his curiosity turned to wonder.

A resilient green floor that wasn't flat, but sloped up toward the
white of the far wall like a breaking wave. Chairs like giants' hands
tenderly cupped. Little tables growing like mushrooms and broad-leafed
plants out of the green floor. A vast picture window showing the red
rocks.

Yet it was the wood-paneled walls that electrified his artistic
interest. They blossomed with fruits and flowers, deep and poignantly
carved in several styles. He had never seen such work.

He became aware of a silence and realized that his hosts and hostesses
were smiling at him from around a long table. Moved by a sudden
humility, he knelt and unlaced his sneakers and added them to the pile
of sandals and digitals by the door. As he rose, a soft and comic
piping started and he realized that beyond the table the children were
lined up, solemnly puffing at little wooden flutes and recorders. He
saw the empty chair at the table and went toward it, conscious for the
moment of nothing but his dusty feet.

He was disappointed that Lois wasn't sitting next to him, but the food
reminded him that he was hungry. There was a charming little steak,
striped black and brown with perfection, and all sorts of vegetables
and fruits, one or two of which he didn't recognize.

"Flown from Africa," someone explained to him.

These sly scientists, he thought, living behind their security curtain
in the most improbable world!

When they were sitting with coffee and wine, and the children had
finished their concert and were busy at another table, he asked, "How
do you manage all this?"

Jock, the gay pharaoh, shrugged. "It's not difficult."

Rachel, the slim Negro, chuckled in her throat. "We're just people,
Tom."

He tried to phrase his question without mentioning money. "What do you
all do?"

"Jock's a uranium miner," Larry (the beard) answered, briskly taking
over. "Rachel's an algae farmer. I'm a rocket pilot. Lois--"

       *       *       *       *       *

Although pleased at this final confirmation of his guess, Tom couldn't
help feeling a surge of uneasiness. "Sure you should be telling me
these things?"

Larry laughed. "Why not? Lois and Jokichi have been exchange-workers in
China the last six months."

"Mostly digging ditches," Jokichi put in with a smile.

"--and Sasha's in an assembly plant. Helen's a psychiatrist. Oh, we
just do ordinary things. Now we're on grand vacation."

"Grand vacation?"

"When all of us have a vacation together," Larry explained. "What do
you do?"

"I'm an artist," Tom said, taking out a cigaret.

"But what else?" Larry asked.

Tom felt an angry embarrassment. "Just an artist," he mumbled, cigaret
in mouth, digging in his pockets for a match.

"Hold on," said Joyce beside him and pointed a silver pencil at the tip
of the cigaret. He felt a faint thrill in his lips and then started
back, coughing. The cigaret was lighted.

"Please mutate my poppy seeds, Mommy." A little girl had darted to
Joyce from the children's table.

"You're a very dirty little girl," Joyce told her without reproof.
"Hold them out." She briefly directed the silver pencil at the clay
pellets on the grimy little palm. The little girl shivered delightedly.
"I love ultrasonics, they feel so funny." She scampered off.

Tom cleared his throat. "I must say I'm tremendously impressed with the
wood carvings. I'd like to photograph them. Oh, Lord!"

"What's the matter?" Rachel asked.

"I lost my camera somewhere."

"Camera?" Jokichi showed interest. "You mean one for stills?"

"Yes."

"What kind?"

"A Leica," Tom told him.

Jokichi seemed impressed. "That is interesting. I've never seen one of
those old ones."

"Tom's a button man," Lois remarked by way of explanation, apparently.
"Was the camera in a brown case? You dropped it where we met. We can
get it later."

"Good, I'd really like to take those pictures," Tom said.
"Incidentally, who did the carvings?"

"We did," Jock said. "Together."

Tom was grateful that the scamper of the children out of the room saved
him from having to reply. He couldn't think of anything but a grunt of
astonishment.

The conversation split into a group of chats about something called a
psych machine, trips to Russia, the planet Mars, and several artists
Tom had never heard of. He wanted to talk to Lois, but she was one of
the group gabbling about Mars like children. He felt suddenly uneasy
and out of things, and neither Rachel's deprecating remarks about her
section of the wood carvings nor Joyce's interesting smiles helped
much. He was glad when they all began to get up. He wandered outside
and made his way to the children's lean-to, feeling very depressed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Once again he was the center of a friendly naked cluster, except for
the same solemn-faced little girl skipping rope. A rather malicious but
not very hopeful whim prompted him to ask the youngest, "What's one and
one?"

"Ten," the shaver answered glibly. Tom felt pleased.

"It could also be two," the oldest boy remarked.

"I'll say," Tom agreed. "What's the population of the world?"

"About seven hundred million."

Tom nodded noncommittally and, grabbing at the first long word that he
thought of, turned to the eldest girl. "What's poliomyelitis?"

"Never heard of it," she said.

The solemn little girl kept droning the same ridiculous chant: "Gik-lo,
I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so."

His ego eased, Tom went outside and there was Lois.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing," he said.

She took his hand. "Have we pushed ourselves at you too much? Has our
jabbering bothered you? We're a loud-mouthed family and I didn't think
to ask if you were loning."

"Loning?"

"Solituding."

"In a way," he said. They didn't speak for a moment. Then, "Are you
happy, Lois, in your life here?" he asked.

Her smile was instant. "Of course. Don't you like my group?"

He hesitated. "They make me feel rather no good," he said, and then
admitted, "but in a way I'm more attracted to them than any people I've
ever met."

"You are?" Her grip on his hand tightened. "Then why don't you stay
with us for a while? I like you. It's too early to propose anything,
but I think you have a quality our group lacks. You could see how you
fit in. And there's Joyce. She's just visiting, too. You wouldn't have
to lone unless you wanted."

Before he could think, there was a rhythmic rush of feet and the
Wolvers were around them.

"We're swimming," Simone announced.

Lois looked at Tom inquiringly. He smiled his willingness, started to
mention he didn't have trunks, then realized that wouldn't be news
here. He wondered whether he would blush.

Jock fell in beside him as they rounded the ranch house. "Larry's been
telling me about your group at the other end of the valley. It's comic,
but I've whirled down the valley a dozen times and never spotted any
sort of place there. What's it like?"

"A ranch house and several cabins."

       *       *       *       *       *

Jock frowned. "Comic I never saw it." His face cleared. "How about
whirling over there? You could point it out to me."

"It's really there," Tom said uneasily. "I'm not making it up."

"Of course," Jock assured him. "It was just an idea."

"We could pick up your camera on the way," Lois put in.

The rest of the group had turned back from the huge oval pool and the
dark blue and flashing thing beyond it, and stood gay-colored against
the pool's pale blue shimmer.

"How about it?" Jock asked them. "A whirl before we bathe?"

Two or three said yes besides Lois, and Jock led the way toward the
helicopter that Tom now saw standing beyond the pool, its beetle body
as blue as a scarab, its vanes flashing silver.

The others piled in. Tom followed as casually as he could, trying to
suppress the pounding of his heart. "Wonder you don't go by rocket," he
remarked lightly.

Jock laughed. "For such a short trip?"

The vanes began to thrum. Tom sat stiffly, gripping the sides of
the seat, then realized that the others had sunk back lazily in the
cushions. There was a moment of strain and they were falling ahead and
up. Looking out the side, Tom saw for a moment the sooty roof of the
ranch house and the blue of the pool and the pinkish umber of tanned
bodies. Then the helicopter lurched gently around. Without warning a
miserable uneasiness gripped him, a desire to cling mixed with an urge
to escape. He tried to convince himself it was fear of the height.

He heard Lois tell Jock, "That's the place, down by that rock that
looks like a wrecked spaceship."

The helicopter began to fall forward. Tom felt Lois' hand on his.

"You haven't answered my question," she said.

"What?" he asked dully.

"Whether you'll stay with us. At least for a while."

He looked at her. Her smile was a comfort. He said, "If I possibly can."

"What could possibly stop you?"

"I don't know," he answered abstractedly.

"You're strange," Lois told him. "There's a weight of sadness in you.
As if you lived in a less happy age. As if it weren't 2050."

"Twenty?" he repeated, awakening from his thoughts with a jerk. "What's
the time?" he asked anxiously.

"Two," Jock said. The word sounded like a knell.

"You need cheering," Lois announced firmly.

Amid a whoosh of air rebounding from earth, they jounced gently down.
Lois vaulted out. "Come on," she said.

Tom followed her. "Where?" he asked stupidly, looking around at the red
rocks through the settling sand cloud stirred by the vanes.

"Your camera," she told him, laughing. "Over there. Come on, I'll race
you."

He started to run with her and then his uneasiness got beyond his
control. He ran faster and faster. He saw Lois catch her foot on a
rock and go down sprawling, but he couldn't stop. He ran desperately
around the rock and into a gust of up-whirling sand that terrified him
with its suddenness. He tried to escape from the stinging, blinding
gust, but there was the nightmarish fright that his wild strides were
carrying him nowhere.

Then the sand settled. He stopped running and looked around him. He was
standing by the balancing rock. He was gasping. At his feet the rusty
brown leather of the camera case peeped from the sand. Lois was nowhere
in sight. Neither was the helicopter. The valley seemed different,
rawer--one might almost have said younger.

Hours after dark he trailed into Tosker-Brown. Curtained lights still
glowed from a few cabins. He was footsore, bewildered, frightened. All
afternoon and through the twilight and into the moonlit evening that
turned the red rocks black, he had searched the valley. Nowhere had he
been able to find the soot-roofed ranch house of the Wolvers. He hadn't
even been able to locate the rock like a giant bobbin where he'd met
Lois.

During the next days he often returned to the valley. But he never
found anything. And he never happened to be near the balancing rock
when the time winds blew at ten and two, though once or twice he did
see dust devils. Then he went away and eventually forgot.

In his casual reading he ran across popular science articles describing
the binary system of numbers used in electronic calculating machines,
where one and one make ten. He always skipped them. And more than once
he saw the four equations expressing Einstein's generalized theory of
gravitation:

He never connected them with the little girl's chant: "Gik-lo, I-o,
Rik-o, Gis-so."

A Pail of Air

                The dark star passed, bringing with it
                eternal night and turning history into
                incredible myth in a single generation!


Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped
it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw
the thing.

You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful
young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the
fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor
just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young
lady before, except in the old magazines--Sis is just a kid and Ma is
pretty sick and miserable--and it gave me such a start that I dropped
the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa
and Ma and Sis and you?

Even at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all
see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from
the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and
huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it
is natural we should react like that sometimes.

When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite
apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,
for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light--a tiny
light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one
of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to
investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt
down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have
the Sun's protection.

I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there
shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on
the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out
of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.

Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so
blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of
air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the
tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back
into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.
But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last
blankets--Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the
heat--and came into the Nest.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the
four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly
rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it
touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've
never seen the real walls or ceiling.

Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools
and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's
very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,
and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.

The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in
which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing
and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of
the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early
days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa--I think of that when she
gets difficult--but now there's me to help, and Sis too.

It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think
of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously
at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often
carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa
tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very
old days--vestal virgins, he calls them--although there was unfrozen
air all around then and you didn't really need one.

He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the
pail from me and bawl me out for loitering--he'd spotted my frozen
helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's
always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut
her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.

Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside
the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck
the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa
put it down close by the fire.

Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.
It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the
fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal
the whole place, but he can't--building's too earthquake-twisted, and
besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.

Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't
something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run
low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind
the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other
things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down
to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it
through a door to outside.

You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first
and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on
top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white
blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.

Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the
same time.

First to drop out was the carbon dioxide--when you're shoveling for
water, you have to make sure you don't go too high and get any of that
stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make
the fire go out. Next there's the nitrogen, which doesn't count one way
or the other, though it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of
that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that
keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing
pure oxygen, but we're used to it and don't notice. Finally, at the
very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff.
All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa
laughingly says, whatever that is.

       *       *       *       *       *

I was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as
I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my
suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at
the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together--the
hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one,
as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted
to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling.

"And you watched this light for some time, son?" he asked when I
finished.

I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face.
Somehow that part embarrassed me.

"Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor."

"And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or
starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?"

He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world
that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter
would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff
comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for
heat--that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of
lightning--not even Pa could figure where it came from--hit the nearby
steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally
died.

"Not like anything I ever saw," I told him.

He stood for a moment frowning. Then, "I'll go out with you, and you
show it to me," he said.

Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined
in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside
clothes--mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have
plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food
cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a
little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and
so on.

Ma started moaning again, "I've always known there was something
outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years--something
that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the
Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after
us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!"

Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and
reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and
knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up
on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip
and Pa won't let me make it alone.

"Sis," Pa said quietly, "come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,
too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch
another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the
cloth to pick up the bucket."

Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was
told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind
of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail
and the two of us go out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not
afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to
him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a
bit scared.

You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa
heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of
the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we
knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't
be anything human or friendly.

Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,
_cold_ night. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the
old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.
I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being
anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the
dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out
beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther
out all the time.

I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the
dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the
Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa
out on the balcony.

I don't know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it's
beautiful. The starlight lets you see it pretty well--there's quite a
bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa
says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was
air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and
then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to
be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I
pour on the gravy.

Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped
by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only
whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows,
underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a
slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes
and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth.

Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days
of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and
dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the
light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has
swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking
of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself
first and known it wasn't so.

He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me
to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving
around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't
bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around
quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside
he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing
off guard.

I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something
lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready.

Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, "If you see something like
that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these
days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once--it
was when your sister was born--I was ready to give up and die, but your
Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole
week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two
of you, too."

       *       *       *       *       *

"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,
tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold
it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When
it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight--and
hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being
brave."

His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it
didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind--or the
fact that Pa took it seriously.

       *       *       *       *       *

It's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in
the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and
told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,
but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than
he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the
courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what
I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old
days, and how it all happened.

He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like
to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the
fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa
began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from
the shelf and lay it down beside him.

It was the same old story as always--I think I could recite the main
thread of it in my sleep--though Pa always puts in a new detail or two
and keeps improving it in spots.

He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so
steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and
have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,
when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,
this burned out sun, and upsets everything.

You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt,
any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine
people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up.
Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their
nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool
every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to
end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold?

Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's
cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those
folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound
pretty wild. He may be right.

       *       *       *       *       *

The dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and
there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried
to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out,
what with the earthquakes and floods--imagine, oceans of _unfrozen_
water!--and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear
night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they
thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to
get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit
on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either
side, but was going to come very close to the Earth.

Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't
get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a
little while--pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling
over a bone, Pa described it this time--and then the newcomer won and
carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last
minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.

That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times
worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa
calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to
me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been
sitting too far from the fire.

You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and
in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably
in order to take it away.

The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth
was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was
pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and
buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave
great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked
out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that
people keeled over and fainted--though of course, at the same time,
they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones
broke or skulls cracked.

We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they
were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of
leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly
too busy to notice.

You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of
what was going to happen--they'd known we'd get captured and our air
would freeze--and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with
airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big
supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place
got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed
then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest
together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could
lay his hands on.

I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have
any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or
in the Big Freeze that followed--followed very quick, you know, both
because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's
rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten
old nights long.

Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the
frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building,
others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for
coal.

In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and
a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in
a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads
peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is
sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully
toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with
warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but
just like life.

Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when
he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste
a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound,
especially the young lady.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds
off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a
sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see,
I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd
forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.

What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What
if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life
and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its
molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that
moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the
ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few
degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to
life--not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?

That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the
dark star to get us.

Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down
from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do
its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen--the beautiful young
lady and the moving, starlike light.

The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking
eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the
Nest.

I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very
badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said
and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.

We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.
There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.

And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My
skin tightened all over me.

Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the
place where he philosophizes.

"So I asked myself then," he said, "what's the use of going on? What's
the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed
existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done.
The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself--and all of a sudden
I got the answer."

Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain,
shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe.

"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,"
Pa was saying. "The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of
miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might
have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't
matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,
like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers--you've seen
pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel--or the fire's
glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the
last man as the first."

And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the
inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were
burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.

"So right then and there," Pa went on, and now I could tell that he
heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear
them, "right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if
we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all
I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to
enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything
beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the
cold and the dark and the distant stars."

But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright
light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to
the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped
the handle of the hammer beside him.

       *       *       *       *       *

In through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood
there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something
bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her
shoulders--men's faces, white and staring.

Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five
beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's
homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too--and that the
frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that
the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.

The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after
that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.

They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones to
survive; we'd just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three
people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we
found out _how_ they'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.

They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power
from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended
for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had
a regular little airtight city, with air-locks and all. They even
generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa
let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)

But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at
us.

One of the men kept saying, "But it's impossible, I tell you. You
can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply
impossible."

That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air.
Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were
saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she
broke down and cried.

They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to
find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and
plenty of chemical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was
go out and shovel the air blanket at the top _level_. So after they'd
got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd
decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other
survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since
there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth.

Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way
around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving
our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an
instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them
there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate.
Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry
the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before
finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd
wasted some time in the building across the street.

       *       *       *       *       *

By now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating
to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney
and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young
lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women
dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised
it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses
that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at
all and just asked bushels of questions.

In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about
things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked
and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another
bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started
them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little
drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.

Funny thing, though--I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on
to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt
pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.
Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but
now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to
be nice as anything to me.

I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone
and get our feelings straightened out.

And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,
as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the
same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden
and Ma kept telling the young lady, "But I wouldn't know how to act
there and I haven't any clothes."

The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got
the idea. As Pa kept saying, "It just doesn't seem right to let this
fire go out."

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been
decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as
what one of the strangers called a "survival school." Or maybe we will
join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the
uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.

Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a
lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a
hankering to see them for myself.

You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty
thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.

"It's different, now that we know others are alive," he explains to me.
"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that
matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the
human race going, so to speak. It scares a person."

I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air
boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering
light.

"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest," I said, wanting to cry,
kind of. "It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared
at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers."

He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at
the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on,
just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.

"You'll quickly get over that feeling son," he said. "The trouble with
the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended
with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again,
the way it was in the beginning."

I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me
till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.

Who or what was the scoundrel that kept
               these couriers from the swift completion
                 of their handsomely appointed rondos?

THE LAST LETTER
On Tenthmonth 1, 2457 A.D., at exactly 9 A.M. Planetary Federation
Time--but with a permissible error of a millionth of a second either
way--in the fifth sublevel of NewNew York Robot Postal Station 68,
Black Sorter gulped down ten thousand pieces of first-class mail.

This breakfast tidbit did not agree with the mail-sorting machine. It
was as if a robust dog had been fed a large chunk of good red meat with
a strychnine pill in it. Black Sorter's innards went _whirr-klunk_, a
blue electric glow enveloped him, and he began to shake as if he might
break loose from the concrete.

He desperately spat back over his shoulder a single envelope, gave
a great _huff_ and blew out toward the sorting tubes a medium-size
snowstorm consisting of the other nine thousand, nine hundred and
ninety-nine pieces of first-class mail chewed to confetti. Then, still
convulsed, he snapped up a fresh ten thousand and proceeded to chomp
and grind on them. Black Sorter was rugged.

The rejected envelope was tongued up by Red Subsorter, who growled deep
in his throat, said a very bad word, and passed it to Yellow Rerouter,
who passed it to Green Rerouter, who passed it to Brown Study, who
passed it to Pink Wastebasket.

Unlike Black Sorter, Pink Wastebasket was very delicate, though highly
intuitive--the machine equivalent of a White Russian countess. She
was designed to scan in 3,137 codes, route special-delivery spacemail
to interplanetary liners by messenger rocket, and distinguish 9s from
upside-down 6s.

Pink Wastebasket haughtily inhaled the offending envelope and almost
instantly turned a bright crimson and began to tremble. After a few
minutes, small atomic flames started to flicker from her mid-section.

White Nursemaid Seven and Greasy Joe both received Pink Wastebasket's
distress signal and got there as fast as their wheels would roll them,
but the high-born machine's malady was beyond their simple skills of
oilcan and electroshock.

       *       *       *       *       *

They summoned other machine-tending-and-repairing machines, ones far
more expert than themselves, but all were baffled. It was clear that
Pink Wastebasket, who continued to tremble and flicker uncontrollably,
was suffering from the equivalent of a major psychosis with severe
psychosomatic symptoms. She spat a stream of filthy ions at Gray
Psychiatrist, not recognizing her old friend.

Meanwhile, the paper blizzard from Black Sorter was piling up in great
drifts between the dark pillars of the sublevel, and flurries had
reached Pink Wastebasket's aristocratic area. An expedition of sturdy
machines, headed by two hastily summoned snowplows, was dispatched to
immobilize Black Sorter at all costs.

Pink Wastebasket, quivering like a demented hula dancer, was clearly
approaching a crisis. Finally Gray Psychiatrist--after consulting with
Green Surgeon, and even then with an irritated reluctance, as if he
were calling in a witch-doctor--summoned a human being.

The human being walked respectfully around Pink Wastebasket several
times and then gave her a nervous little poke with a rubber-handled
probe.

Pink Wastebasket gently regurgitated her last snack, turned dead
white, gave a last flicker and shake, and expired. Black Coroner
recorded the immediate cause of death as tinkering by a human being.

The human being, a bald and scrawny one named Potshelter, picked up the
envelope responsible for all the trouble, stared at it incredulously,
opened it with trembling fingers, scanned the contents briefly, gave
a great shriek and ran off at top speed, forgetting to hop on his
perambulator, which followed him making anxious clucking noises.

The nearest human representative of the Solar Bureau of Investigation,
a rather wooden-looking man named Krumbine, also bald, recognized
Potshelter as soon as the latter burst gasping into his office,
squeezing through the door while it was still dilating. The human
beings whose work took them among the Top Brass, as the upper-echelon
machines were sometimes referred to, formed a kind of human elite, just
one big nervous family.

"Sit down, Potshelter," the SBI Man said. "Hold still a second so the
chair can grab you. Hitch onto the hookah and choose a tranquilizer
from the tray at your elbow. Whatever deviation you've uncovered can't
be that much of a danger to the planets. I imagine that when you leave
this office, the Solar Battle Fleet will still be orbiting peacefully
around Luna."

"I seriously doubt that."

       *       *       *       *       *

Potshelter gulped a large lavender pill and took a deep breath.
"Krumbine, a letter turned up in the first-class mail this morning."

"Great Scott!"

"It is a letter from one person to another person."

"Good Lord!"

"The flow of advertising has been seriously interfered with. At a
modest estimate, three hundred million pieces of expensive first-class
advertising have already been chewed to rags and I'm not sure the Steel
Helms--God bless 'em!--have the trouble in hand yet."

"Judas Priest!"

"Naturally the poor machines weren't able to cope with the letter.
It was utterly outside their experience, beyond the furthest reach
of their programming. It threw them into a terrible spasm. Pink
Wastebasket is dead and at this very instant, if we're lucky, three
police machines of the toughest blued steel are holding down Black
Sorter and putting a muzzle on him."

"Great Scott! It's incredible, Potshelter. And Pink Wastebasket dead?
Take another tranquilizer, Potshelter, and hand over the tray."

Krumbine received it with trembling fingers, started to pick up a big
pink pill but drew back his hand from it in sudden revulsion at its
color and swallowed two blue oval ones instead. The man was obviously
fighting to control himself.

He said unsteadily, "I almost never take doubles, but this news you
bring--Good Lord! I seem to recall a case where someone tried to
send a sound-tape through the mails, but that was before my time.
Incidentally, is there any possibility that this is a letter sent by
one _group_ of persons to another group? A hive or a therapy group or a
social club? That would be bad enough, of course, but--"

"No, just one single person sending to another." Potshelter's
expression set in grimly solicitous lines. "I can see you don't quite
understand, Krumbine. This is not a sound-tape, but a letter written in
letters. You know, letters, characters--like books."

"Don't mention books in this office!" Krumbine drew himself up angrily
and then slumped back. "Excuse me, Potshelter, but I find this very
difficult to face squarely. Do I understand you to say that one person
has tried to use the mails to send a printed sheet of some sort to
another?"

"Worse than that. A written letter."

"Written? I don't recognize the word."

"It's a way of making characters, of forming visual equivalents of
sound, without using electricity. The writer, as he's called, employs
a black liquid and a pointed stick called a pen. I know about this
because one hobby of mine is ancient means of communication."

       *       *       *       *       *

Krumbine frowned and shook his head. "Communication is a dangerous
business, Potshelter, especially at the personal level. With you and
me, it's all right, because we know what we're doing."

He picked up a third blue tranquilizer. "But with most of the
hive-folk, person-to-person communication is only a morbid form of
advertising, a dangerous travesty of normal newscasting--catharsis
without the analyst, recitation without the teacher--a perversion of
promotion employed in betraying and subverting."

The frown deepened as he put the blue pill in his mouth and chewed it.
"But about this pen--do you mean the fellow glues the pointed stick to
his tongue and then speaks, and the black liquid traces the vibrations
on the paper? A primitive non-electrical oscilloscope? Sloppy but
conceivable, and producing a record of sorts of the spoken word."

"No, no, Krumbine." Potshelter nervously popped a square orange tablet
into his mouth. "It's a hand-written letter."

Krumbine watched him. "I never mix tranquilizers," he boasted absently.
"Hand-written, eh? You mean that the message was imprinted on a hand?
And the skin or the entire hand afterward detached and sent through
the mails in the fashion of a Martian reproach? A grisly find indeed,
Potshelter."

"You still don't quite grasp it, Krumbine. The fingers of the hand move
the stick that applies the ink, producing a crude imitation of the
printed word."

"Diabolical!" Krumbine smashed his fist down on the desk so that the
four phones and two-score microphones rattled. "I tell you, Potshelter,
the SBI is ready to cope with the subtlest modern deceptions, but when
fiends search out and revive tricks from the pre-Atomic Cave Era, it's
almost too much. But, Great Scott, I dally while the planets are in
danger. What's the sender's code on this hellish letter?"

"No code," Potshelter said darkly, proferring the envelope. "The return
address is--hand-written."

Krumbine blanched as his eyes slowly traced the uneven lines in the
upper left-hand corner:

    _from_ Richard Rowe
    215 West 10th St. (horizontal)
    2837 Rocket Court (vertical)
    Hive 37, NewNew York 319, N. Y.
    Columbia, Terra

"Ugh!" Krumbine said, shivering. "Those crawling characters, those
letters, as you call them, those _things_ barely enough like print
to be readable--they seem to be on the verge of awakening all sorts
of horrid racial memories. I find myself thinking of fur-clad
witch-doctors dipping long pointed sticks in bubbling black cauldrons.
No wonder Pink Wastebasket couldn't take it, brave girl."

       *       *       *       *       *

Firming himself behind his desk, he pushed a number of buttons and
spoke long numbers and meaningful alphabetical syllables into several
microphones. Banks of colored lights around the desk began to blink
like a theatre marquee sending Morse Code, while phosphorescent
arrows crawled purposefully across maps and space-charts and through
three-dimensional street diagrams.

"There!" he said at last. "The sender of the letter is being
apprehended and will be brought directly here. We'll see what sort
of man this Richard Rowe is--if we can assume he's human. Seven
precautionary cordons are being drawn around his population station:
three composed of machines, two of SBI agents, and two consisting of
human and mechanical medical-combat teams. Same goes for the intended
recipient of the letter. Meanwhile, a destroyer squadron of the Solar
Fleet has been detached to orbit over NewNew York."

"In case it becomes necessary to Z-Bomb?" Potshelter asked grimly.

Krumbine nodded. "With all those villains lurking just outside the
Solar System in their invisible black ships, with planeticide in their
hearts, we can't be too careful. One word transmitted from one spy to
another and anything may happen. And we must bomb before they do, so
as to contain our losses. Better one city destroyed than a traitor
on the loose who may destroy many cities. One hundred years ago,
three person-to-person postcards went through the mails--just three
postcards, Potshelter!--and _pft_ went Schenectady, Hoboken, Cicero,
and Walla Walla. Here, as long as you're mixing them, try one of these
oval blues--I find them best for steady swallowing."

Bells jangled. Krumbine grabbed up two phones, holding one to each ear.
Potshelter automatically picked up a third. The ringing continued.
Krumbine started to wedge one of his phones under his chin, nodded
sharply at Potshelter and then toward a cluster of microphones at the
end of the table. Potshelter picked up a fourth phone from behind them.
The ringing stopped.

The two men listened, looking doped, Krumbine with an eye fixed on
the sweep second hand of the large wall clock. When it had made one
revolution, he cradled his phones. Potshelter followed suit.

"I do like the simplicity of the new on-the-hour Puffyloaf
phono-commercial," the latter remarked thoughtfully. "The Bread That's
Lighter Than Air. Nice."

Krumbine nodded. "I hear they've had to add mass to the leadfoil
wrapping to keep the loaves from floating off the shelves. Fact."

       *       *       *       *       *

He cleared his throat. "Too bad we can't listen to more
phono-commercials, but even when there isn't a crisis on the agenda, I
find I have to budget my listening time. One minute per hour strikes a
reasonable balance between duty and self-indulgence."

The nearest wall began to sing:

    Mister J. Augustus Krumbine,
    We all think you're fine, fine, fine, fine.
    Now out of the skyey blue
    Come some telegrams for you.

The wall opened to a small heart shape toward the center and a sheaf of
pale yellow envelopes arced out and plopped on the middle of the desk.
Krumbine started to leaf through them, scanning the little transparent
windows.

"Hm, Electronic Soap ... Better Homes and Landing Platforms ...
Psycho-Blinkers ... Your Girl Next Door ... Poppy-Woppies ...
Poopsy-Woopsies...."

He started to open an envelope, then, after a quick look around and an
apologetic smile at Potshelter, dumped them all on the disposal hopper,
which gargled briefly.

"After all, there _is_ a crisis this morning," he said in a defensive
voice.

Potshelter nodded absently. "I can remember back before personalized
delivery and rhyming robots," he observed. "But how I'd miss them
now--so much more distingué than the hives with their non-personalized
radio, TV and stereo advertising. For that matter, I believe there are
some backward areas on Terra where the great advertising potential of
telephones and telegrams hasn't been fully realized and they are still
used in part for personal communication. Now me, I've never in my life
sent or received a message except on my walky-talky." He patted his
breast pocket.

Krumbine nodded, but he was a trifle shocked and inclined to revise
his estimate of Potshelter's social status. Krumbine conducted his own
social correspondence solely by telepathy. He shared with three other
SBI officials a private telepath--a charming albino girl named Agnes.

"Yes, and it's a very handsome walky-talky," he assured Potshelter a
little falsely. "Suits you. I like the upswept antenna." He drummed
on the desk and swallowed another blue tranquilizer. "Dammit, what's
happened to those machines? They ought to have the two spies here by
now. Did you notice that the second--the intended recipient of the
letter, I mean--seems to be female? Another good Terran name, too, Jane
Dough. Hive in Upper Manhattan." He began to tap the envelope sharply
against the desk. "Dammit, where _are_ they?"

"Excuse me," Potshelter said hesitantly, "but I'm wondering why you
haven't read the message inside the envelope."

       *       *       *       *       *

Krumbine looked at him blankly. "Great Scott, I assumed that at least
_it_ was in some secret code, of course. Normally I'd have asked you to
have Pink Wastebasket try her skill on it, but...." His eyes widened
and his voice sank. "You don't mean to tell me that it's--"

Potshelter nodded grimly. "Hand-written, too. Yes."

Krumbine winced. "I keep trying to forget that aspect of the case." He
dug out the message with shaking fingers, fumbled it open and read:

    _Dear Jane_,

    _It must surprise you that I know your name, for our hives are
    widely separated. Do you recall day before yesterday when your
    guided tour of Grand Central Spaceport got stalled because the
    aide blew a fuse? I was the young man with hair in the tour behind
    yours. You were a little frightened and a groupmistress was
    reassuring you. The machine spoke your name._

    _Since then I have been unable to forget you. When I go to sleep,
    I dream of your face looking up sadly at the mistress's kindly
    photocells. I don't know how to get in touch with you, but my
    grandfather has told me stories his grandfather told him that
    his grandfather told him about young men writing what he calls
    love-letters to young ladies. So I am writing you a love-letter._

    _I work in a first-class advertising house and I will slip this
    love-letter into an outgoing ten-thousand-pack and hope._

    _Do not be frightened of me, Jane. I am no caveman except for my
    hair. I am not insane. I am emotionally disturbed, but in a way
    that no machine has ever described to me. I want only your
    happiness._

    _Sincerely_,

    _Richard Rowe_

Krumbine slumped back in his chair, which braced itself manfully
against him, and looked long and thoughtfully at Potshelter. "Well, if
that's a code, it's certainly a fiendishly subtle one. You'd think he
was talking to his Girl Next Door."

Potshelter nodded wonderingly. "I only read as far as where they were
planning to blow up Grand Central Spaceport and all the guides in it."

"Judas Priest, I think I have it!" Krumbine shot up. "It's a pilot
advertisement--Boy Next Door or--that kind of thing--printed to look
like hand-writtening, which would make all the difference. And the
pilot copy got mailed by accident--which would mean there is no real
Richard Rowe."

At that instant, the door dilated and two blue detective engines
hustled a struggling young man into the office. He was slim, rather
handsome, had a bushy head of hair that had somehow survived evolution
and radioactive fallout, and across the chest and back of his paper
singlet was neatly stamped: "RICHARD ROWE."

When he saw the two men, he stopped struggling and straightened up.
"Excuse me, gentlemen," he said, "but these police machines must have
made a mistake. I've committed no crime."

Then his gaze fell on the hand-addressed envelope on Krumbine's desk
and he turned pale.

       *       *       *       *       *

Krumbine laughed harshly. "No crime! No, not at all. Merely using the
mails to communicate. Ha!"

The young man shrank back. "I'm sorry, sir."

"Sorry, he says! Do you realize that your insane prank has resulted
in the destruction of perhaps a half-billion pieces of first-class
advertising?--in the strangulation of a postal station and the
paralysis of Lower Manhattan?--in the mobilization of SBI reserves, the
de-mothballing of two divisions of G. I. machines and the redeployment
of the Solar Battle Fleet? Good Lord, boy, why did you do it?"

Richard Rowe continued to shrink but he squared his shoulders. "I'm
sorry, sir, but I just had to. I just had to get in touch with Jane
Dough."

"A girl from another hive? A girl you'd merely gazed at because a guide
happened to blow a fuse?" Krumbine stood up, shaking an angry finger.
"Great Scott, boy, where was Your Girl Next Door?"

Richard Rowe stared bravely at the finger, which made him look a trifle
cross-eyed. "She died, sir, both of them."

"But there should be at least six."

"I know, sir, but of the other four, two have been shipped to the
Adirondacks on vacation and two recently got married and haven't been
replaced."

Potshelter, a faraway look in his eyes, said softly, "I think I'm
beginning to understand--"

But Krumbine thundered on at Richard Rowe with, "Good Lord, I can see
you've had your troubles, boy. It isn't often we have these shortages
of Girls Next Door, so that temporarily a boy can't marry the Girl Next
Door, as he always should. But, Judas Priest, why didn't you take your
troubles to your psychiatrist, your groupmaster, your socializer, your
Queen Mother?"

"My psychiatrist is being overhauled, sir, and his replacement
short-circuits every time he hears the word 'trouble.' My groupmaster
and socializer are on vacation duty in the Adirondacks. My Queen Mother
is busy replacing Girls Next Door."

"Yes, it all fits," Potshelter proclaimed excitedly. "Don't you see,
Krumbine? Except for a set of mischances that would only occur once in
a billion billion times, the letter would never have been conceived or
sent."

"You may have something there," Krumbine concurred. "But in any case,
boy, why did you--er--written this letter to this particular girl? What
is there about Jane Dough that made you do it?"

"Well, you see, sir, she's--"

       *       *       *       *       *

Just then, the door re-dilated and a blue matron machine conducted
a young woman into the office. She was slim and she had a head of
hair that would have graced a museum beauty, while across the back
and--well, "chest" is an inadequate word--of her paper chemise,
"JANE DOUGH" was silk-screened in the palest pink.

Krumbine did not repeat his last question. He had to admit to himself
that it had been answered fully. Potshelter whistled respectfully. The
blue detective engines gave hard-boiled grunts. Even the blue matron
machine seemed awed by the girl's beauty.

But she had eyes only for Richard Rowe. "My Grand Central man," she
breathed in amazement. "The man I've dreamed of ever since. My man
with hair." She noticed the way he was looking at her and she breathed
harder. "Oh, darling, what have you done?"

"I tried to send you a letter."

"A letter? For me? Oh, darling!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Krumbine cleared his throat. "Potshelter, I'm going to wind this up
fast. Miss Dough, could you transfer to this young man's hive?"

"Oh, yes, sir! Mine has an over-plus of Girls Next Door."

"Good. Mr. Rowe, there's a sky-pilot two levels up--look for the
usual white collar just below the photocells. Marry this girl and
take her home to your hive. If your Queen Mother objects refer her
to--er--Potshelter here."

He cut short the young people's thanks. "Just one thing," he said,
wagging a finger at Rowe. "Don't written any more letters."

"Why ever would I?" Richard answered. "Already my action is beginning
to seem like a mad dream."

"Not to me, dear," Jane corrected him. "Oh, sir, could I have the
letter he sent me? Not to do anything with. Not to show anyone. Just to
keep."

"Well, I don't know--" Krumbine began.

"Oh, _please_, sir!"

"Well, I don't know why not, I was going to say. Here you are, miss.
Just see that this husband of yours never writtens another."

He turned back as the contracting door shut the young couple from view.

"You were right, Potshelter," he said briskly. "It was one of those
combinations of mischances that come up only once in a billion billion
times. But we're going to have to issue recommendations for new
procedures and safeguards that will reduce the possibilities to one
in a trillion trillion. It will undoubtedly up the Terran income tax
a healthy percentage, but we can't have something like this happening
again. Every boy must marry the Girl Next Door! And the first-class
mails must not be interfered with! The advertising must go through!"

"I'd almost like to see it happen again," Potshelter murmured dreamily,
"if there were another Jane Dough in it."

       *       *       *       *       *

Outside, Richard and Jane had halted to allow a small cortege of
machines to pass. First came a squad of police machines with Black
Sorter in their midst, unmuzzled and docile enough, though still
gnashing his teeth softly. Then--stretched out horizontally and borne
on the shoulders of Gray Psychiatrist, Black Coroner, White Nursemaid
Seven and Greasy Joe--there passed the slim form of Pink Wastebasket,
snow-white in death. The machines were keening softly, mournfully.

Round about the black pillars, little mecho-mops were scurrying like
mice, cleaning up the last of the first-class-mail bits of confetti.

Richard winced at this evidence of his aberration, but Jane squeezed
his hand comfortingly, which produced in him a truly amazing sensation
that changed his whole appearance.

"I know how you feel, darling," she told him. "But don't worry about
it. Just think, dear, I'll always be able to tell your friends' wives
something no other woman in the world can boast of: that my husband
once wrote me a letter!"

A Bad Day for Sales

Don't wait to "Get 'em while they're hot."
              By then, it is too late to get them of all!


The big bright doors of the office building parted with a pneumatic
_whoosh_ and Robie glided onto Times Square. The crowd that had been
watching the fifty-foot-tall girl on the clothing billboard get
dressed, or reading the latest news about the Hot Truce scrawl itself
in yard-high script, hurried to look.

Robie was still a novelty. Robie was fun. For a little while yet, he
could steal the show. But the attention did not make Robie proud. He
had no more emotions than the pink plastic giantess, who dressed and
undressed endlessly whether there was a crowd or the street was empty,
and who never once blinked her blue mechanical eyes. But she merely
drew business while Robie went out after it.

For Robie was the logical conclusion of the development of vending
machines. All the earlier ones had stood in one place, on a floor or
hanging on a wall, and blankly delivered merchandise in return for
coins, whereas Robie searched for customers. He was the demonstration
model of a line of sales robots to be manufactured by Shuler Vending
Machines, provided the public invested enough in stocks to give the
company capital to go into mass production.

The publicity Robie drew stimulated investments handsomely. It was
amusing to see the TV and newspaper coverage of Robie selling, but not
a fraction as much fun as being approached personally by him. Those
who were usually bought anywhere from one to five hundred shares, if
they had any money and foresight enough to see that sales robots would
eventually be on every street and highway in the country.

       *       *       *       *       *

Robie radared the crowd, found that it surrounded him solidly, and
stopped. With a carefully built-in sense of timing, he waited for the
tension and expectation to mount before he began talking.

"Say, Ma, he doesn't look like a robot at all," a child said. "He looks
like a turtle."

Which was not completely inaccurate. The lower part of Robie's body was
a metal hemisphere hemmed with sponge rubber and not quite touching the
sidewalk. The upper was a metal box with black holes in it. The box
could swivel and duck.

A chromium-bright hoopskirt with a turret on top.

"Reminds me too much of the Little Joe Paratanks," a legless veteran
of the Persian War muttered, and rapidly rolled himself away on wheels
rather like Robie's.

His departure made it easier for some of those who knew about Robie to
open a path in the crowd. Robie headed straight for the gap. The crowd
whooped.

Robie glided very slowly down the path, deftly jogging aside whenever
he got too close to ankles in skylon or sockassins. The rubber buffer
on his hoopskirt was merely an added safeguard.

The boy who had called Robie a turtle jumped in the middle of the path
and stood his ground, grinning foxily.

Robie stopped two feet short of him. The turret ducked. The crowd got
quiet.

"Hello, youngster," Robie said in a voice that was smooth as that of a
TV star, and was, in fact, a recording of one.

The boy stopped smiling. "Hello," he whispered.

"How old are you?" Robie asked.

"Nine. No, eight."

"That's nice," Robie observed. A metal arm shot down from his neck,
stopped just short of the boy.

The boy jerked back.

"For you," Robie said.

The boy gingerly took the red polly-lop from the neatly fashioned blunt
metal claws, and began to unwrap it.

"Nothing to say?" asked Robie.

"Uh--thank you."

After a suitable pause, Robie continued. "And how about a nice
refreshing drink of Poppy Pop to go with your polly-lop?" The boy
lifted his eyes, but didn't stop licking the candy. Robie waggled his
claws slightly. "Just give me a quarter and within five seconds--"

A little girl wriggled out of the forest of legs. "Give me a polly-lop,
too, Robie," she demanded.

"Rita, come back here!" a woman in the third rank of the crowd called
angrily.

Robie scanned the newcomer gravely. His reference silhouettes were not
good enough to let him distinguish the sex of children, so he merely
repeated, "Hello, youngster."

"Rita!"

"Give me a polly-lop!"

Disregarding both remarks, for a good salesman is single-minded and
does not waste bait, Robie said winningly, "I'll bet you read _Junior
Space Killers_. Now I have here--"

"Uh-uh, I'm a girl. _He_ got a polly-lop."

       *       *       *       *       *

At the word "girl," Robie broke off. Rather ponderously, he said, "I'll
bet you read _Gee-Gee Jones, Space Stripper_. Now I have here the
latest issue of that thrilling comic, not yet in the stationary vending
machines. Just give me fifty cents and within five--"

"Please let me through. I'm her mother."

A young woman in the front rank drawled over her powder-sprayed
shoulder, "I'll get her for you," and slithered out on six-inch
platform shoes. "Run away, children," she said nonchalantly. Lifting
her arms behind her head, she pirouetted slowly before Robie to show
how much she did for her bolero half-jacket and her form-fitting slacks
that melted into skylon just above the knees. The little girl glared at
her. She ended the pirouette in profile.

At this age-level, Robie's reference silhouettes permitted him to
distinguish sex, though with occasional amusing and embarrassing
miscalls. He whistled admiringly. The crowd cheered.

Someone remarked critically to a friend, "It would go over better if he
was built more like a real robot. You know, like a man."

The friend shook his head. "This way it's subtler."

No one in the crowd was watching the newscript overhead as it
scribbled, "Ice Pack for Hot Truce? Vanadin hints Russ may yield on
Pakistan."

Robie was saying, "... in the savage new glamor-tint we have christened
Mars Blood, complete with spray applicator and fit-all fingerstalls
that mask each finger completely except for the nail. Just give me five
dollars--uncrumpled bills may be fed into the revolving rollers you see
beside my arm--and within five seconds--"

"No, thanks, Robie," the young woman yawned.

"Remember," Robie persisted, "for three more weeks, seductivizing Mars
Blood will be unobtainable from any other robot or human vendor."

"No, thanks."

Robie scanned the crowd resourcefully. "Is there any gentleman
here ..." he began just as a woman elbowed her way through the front
rank.

"I told you to come back!" she snapped at the little girl.

"But I didn't get my polly-lop!"

"... who would care to...."

"Rita!"

"Robie cheated. Ow!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, the young woman in the half bolero had scanned the nearby
gentlemen on her own. Deciding that there was less than a fifty per
cent chance of any of them accepting the proposition Robie seemed about
to make, she took advantage of the scuffle to slither gracefully back
into the ranks. Once again the path was clear before Robie.

He paused, however, for a brief recapitulation of the more magical
properties of Mars Blood, including a telling phrase about "the
passionate claws of a Martian sunrise."

But no one bought. It wasn't quite time. Soon enough silver coins would
be clinking, bills going through the rollers faster than laundry, and
five hundred people struggling for the privilege of having their money
taken away from them by America's first mobile sales robot.

But there were still some tricks that Robie had to do free, and one
certainly should enjoy those before starting the more expensive fun.

So Robie moved on until he reached the curb. The variation in level was
instantly sensed by his under-scanners. He stopped. His head began to
swivel. The crowd watched in eager silence. This was Robie's best trick.

Robie's head stopped swiveling. His scanners had found the traffic
light. It was green. Robie edged forward. But then the light turned
red. Robie stopped again, still on the curb. The crowd softly _ahhed_
its delight.

It was wonderful to be alive and watching Robie on such an exciting
day. Alive and amused in the fresh, weather-controlled air between the
lines of bright skyscrapers with their winking windows and under a sky
so blue you could almost call it dark.

(But way, way up, where the crowd could not see, the sky was darker
still. Purple-dark, with stars showing. And in that purple-dark, a
silver-green something, the color of a bud, plunged down at better than
three miles a second. The silver-green was a newly developed paint that
foiled radar.)

Robie was saying, "While we wait for the light, there's time for
you youngsters to enjoy a nice refreshing Poppy Pop. Or for you
adults--only those over five feet tall are eligible to buy--to enjoy
an exciting Poppy Pop fizz. Just give me a quarter or--in the case of
adults, one dollar and a quarter; I'm licensed to dispense intoxicating
liquors--and within five seconds...."

But that was not cutting it quite fine enough. Just three seconds
later, the silver-green bud bloomed above Manhattan into a globular
orange flower. The skyscrapers grew brighter and brighter still, the
brightness of the inside of the Sun. The windows winked blossoming
white fire-flowers.

The crowd around Robie bloomed, too. Their clothes puffed into petals
of flame. Their heads of hair were torches.

       *       *       *       *       *

The orange flower grew, stem and blossom. The blast came. The winking
windows shattered tier by tier, became black holes. The walls bent,
rocked, cracked. A stony dandruff flaked from their cornices. The
flaming flowers on the sidewalk were all leveled at once. Robie was
shoved ten feet. His metal hoopskirt dimpled, regained its shape.

The blast ended. The orange flower, grown vast, vanished overhead
on its huge, magic beanstalk. It grew dark and very still. The
cornice-dandruff pattered down. A few small fragments rebounded from
the metal hoopskirt.

Robie made some small, uncertain movements, as if feeling for broken
bones. He was hunting for the traffic light, but it no longer shone
either red or green.

He slowly scanned a full circle. There was nothing anywhere to
interest his reference silhouettes. Yet whenever he tried to move, his
under-scanners warned him of low obstructions. It was very puzzling.

The silence was disturbed by moans and a crackling sound, as faint at
first as the scampering of distant rats.

A seared man, his charred clothes fuming where the blast had blown out
the fire, rose from the curb. Robie scanned him.

"Good day, sir," Robie said. "Would you care for a smoke? A truly cool
smoke? Now I have here a yet-unmarketed brand...."

But the customer had run away, screaming, and Robie never ran after
customers, though he could follow them at a medium brisk roll. He
worked his way along the curb where the man had sprawled, carefully
keeping his distance from the low obstructions, some of which writhed
now and then, forcing him to jog. Shortly he reached a fire hydrant.
He scanned it. His electronic vision, though it still worked, had been
somewhat blurred by the blast.

"Hello, youngster," Robie said. Then, after a long pause, "Cat got your
tongue? Well, I have a little present for you. A nice, lovely polly-lop.

"Take it, youngster," he said after another pause. "It's for you. Don't
be afraid."

His attention was distracted by other customers, who began to rise
up oddly here and there, twisting forms that confused his reference
silhouettes and would not stay to be scanned properly. One cried,
"Water," but no quarter clinked in Robie's claws when he caught the
word and suggested, "How about a nice refreshing drink of Poppy Pop?"

The rat-crackling of the flames had become a jungle muttering. The
blind windows began to wink fire again.

       *       *       *       *       *

A little girl marched, stepping neatly over arms and legs she did
not look at. A white dress and the once taller bodies around her had
shielded her from the brilliance and the blast. Her eyes were fixed on
Robie. In them was the same imperious confidence, though none of the
delight, with which she had watched him earlier.

"Help me, Robie," she said. "I want my mother."

"Hello, youngster," Robie said. "What would you like? Comics? Candy?"

"Where is she, Robie? Take me to her."

"Balloons? Would you like to watch me blow up a balloon?"

The little girl began to cry. The sound triggered off another of
Robie's novelty circuits, a service feature that had brought in a lot
of favorable publicity.

"Is something wrong?" he asked. "Are you in trouble? Are you lost?"

"Yes, Robie. Take me to my mother."

"Stay right here," Robie said reassuringly, "and don't be frightened.
I will call a policeman." He whistled shrilly, twice.

Time passed. Robie whistled again. The windows flared and roared. The
little girl begged, "Take me away, Robie," and jumped onto a little
step in his hoopskirt.

"Give me a dime," Robie said.

The little girl found one in her pocket and put it in his claws.

"Your weight," Robie said, "is fifty-four and one-half pounds."

"Have you seen my daughter, have you seen her?" a woman was
crying somewhere. "I left her watching that thing while I stepped
inside--_Rita!_"

"Robie helped me," the little girl began babbling at her. "He knew I
was lost. He even called the police, but they didn't come. He weighed
me, too. Didn't you, Robie?"

But Robie had gone off to peddle Poppy Pop to the members of a rescue
squad which had just come around the corner, more robotlike in their
asbestos suits than he in his metal skin.