Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

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Showing posts with label Roger D. Aycock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roger D. Aycock. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Today is Forever by Roger D. Aycock


Today is Forever

By ROGER DEE

Illustrated by EMSH

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Boyle knew there was an angle behind the aliens'
generosity ... but he had one of his own!


"These Alcorians have been on Earth for only a month," David Locke said, "but already they're driving a wedge between AL&O and the Social Body that can destroy the Weal overnight. Boyle, it's got to be stopped!"

He put his elbows on Moira's antique conversation table and leaned toward the older man, his eyes hot and anxious.

"There are only the two of them—Fermiirig and Santikh; you've probably seen stills of them on the visinews a hundred times—and AL&O has kept them so closely under cover that we of the Social Body never get more than occasional rumors about what they're really like. But I know from what I overheard that they're carbonstructure oxygen-breathers with a metabolism very much like our own. What affects them physically will affect us also. And the offer they've made Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand of Administrative Council is genuine. It amounts to a lot more than simple longevity, because the process can be repeated. In effect, it's—"

"Immortality," Boyle said, and forgot the younger man on the instant.

The shock of it as a reality blossomed in his mind with a slow explosion of triumph. It had come in his time, after all, and the fact that the secret belonged to the first interstellar visitors to reach Earth had no bearing whatever on his determination to possess it. Neither had the knowledge that the Alcorians had promised the process only to the highest of government bodies, Administrative Council. The whole of AL&O—Administration, Legislation and Order—could not keep it from him.

"It isn't right," Locke said heatedly. "It doesn't fit in with what we've been taught to believe, Boyle. We're still a modified democracy, and the Social Body is the Weal. We can't permit Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand to take what amounts to immortality for themselves and deny it to the populace. That's tyranny!"

The charge brought Boyle out of his preoccupation with a start. For the moment, he had forgotten Locke's presence in Moira's apartment. He had even forgotten his earlier annoyance with Moira for allowing the sophomoric fool visitor's privilege when it was Boyle's week, to the exclusion of the other two husbands in Moira's marital-seven, to share the connubial right with her.

But the opportunity tumbled so forcibly into his lap was not one to be handled lightly. He held in check his contempt for Locke and his irritation with Moira until he had considered his windfall from every angle, and had marshalled its possibilities into a working outline of his coup to come.

He even checked his lapel watch against the time of Moira's return from the theater before he answered Locke. With characteristic cynicism, he took it for granted that Locke, in his indignation, had already shared his discovery with Moira, and in cold logic he marked her down with Locke for disposal once her purpose was served. Moira had been the most satisfactory of the four women in Boyle's marital-seven, but when he weighed her attractions against the possible immortality ahead, the comparison did not sway his resolution for an instant.

Moira, like Locke, would have to go.


"You're sure there was no error?" Boyle asked. "You couldn't have been mistaken?"

"I heard it," Locke said stubbornly.

He clenched his fists angrily, patently reliving his shock of discovery. "I was running a routine check on Administration visiphone channels—it's part of my work as communications technician at AL&O—when I ran across a circuit that had blown its scrambler. Ordinarily I'd have replaced the dead unit without listening to plain-talk longer than was necessary to identify the circuit. But by the time I had it tagged as a Council channel, I'd heard enough from Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand to convince me that I owed it to the Social Body to hear the rest. And now I'm holding a tiger by the tail, because I'm subject to truth-check. That's why I came to you with this, Boyle. Naturally, since you are President of Transplanet Enterprises—"

"I know," Boyle cut in, forestalling digression. Locke's job, not intrinsically important in itself, still demanded a high degree of integrity and left him open to serum-and-psycho check, as though he were an actual member of AL&O or a politician. "If anyone knew what you've overheard, you'd get a compulsory truth-check, admit your guilt publicly and take an imprisonment sentence from the Board of Order. But your duty came first, of course. Go on."

"They were discussing the Alcorians' offer of longevity when I cut into the circuit. Bissell and Dorand were all for accepting at once, but Cornelison pretended indecision and had to be coaxed. Oh, he came around quickly enough; the three of them are to meet Fermiirig and Santikh tomorrow morning at nine in the AL&O deliberations chamber for their injections. You should have heard them rationalizing that, Boyle. It would have sickened you."

"I know the routine—they're doing it for the good of the Social Body, of course. What puzzles me is why the Alcorians should give away a secret so valuable."

"Trojan horse tactics," Locke said flatly. "They claim to have arrived at a culture pretty much like our own, except for a superior technology and a custom of prolonging the lives of administrators they find best fitted to govern. They're posing as philanthropists by offering us the same opportunity, but actually they're sabotaging our political economy. They know that the Social Body won't stand for the Council accepting an immortality restricted to itself. That sort of discrimination would stir up a brawl that might shatter the Weal forever."

Deliberately, Boyle fanned the younger man's resentment. "Not a bad thing for those in power. But it is rough on simple members of the Social Body like ourselves, isn't it?"

"It's criminal conspiracy," Locke said hotly. "They should be truth-checked and given life-maximum detention. If we took this to the Board of Order—"

"No. Think a moment and you'll understand why."

Boyle had gauged his man, he saw, to a nicety. Locke was typical of this latest generation, packed to the ears with juvenile idealism and social consciousness, presenting a finished product of AL&O's golden-rule ideology that was no more difficult to predict than a textbook problem in elementary psychology. To a veteran strategist like Boyle, Locke was more than a handy asset; he was a tool shaped to respond to duty unquestioningly and to cupidity not at all, and therefore an agent more readily amenable than any mercenary could have been.

"But I don't understand," Locke said, puzzled. "Even Administration and Legislation are answerable to Order. It's the Board's duty to bring them to account if necessary."

"Administration couldn't possibly confirm itself in power from the beginning without the backing of Order and Legislation," Boyle pointed out. "Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand would have to extend the longevity privilege to the other two groups, don't you see, in order to protect themselves. And that means that Administrative Council is not alone in this thing—it's AL&O as a body. If you went to the Board of Order with your protest, the report would die on the spot. So, probably, would you."

He felt a touch of genuine amusement at Locke's slack stare of horror. The seed was planted; now to see how readily the fool would react to a logical alternative, and how useful in his reaction he might be.

"I know precisely how you feel," Boyle said. "It goes against our conditioned grain to find officials venal in this day of compulsory honesty. But it's nothing new; I've met with similar occasions in my own Transplanet business, Locke."

He might have added that those occasions had been of his own devising and that they had brought him close more than once to a punitive truth-check. The restraining threat of serum-and-psycho had kept him for the greater part of his adult life in the ranks of the merely rich, a potential industrial czar balked of financial empire by the necessity of maintaining a strictly legal status.

Locke shook himself like a man waking out of nightmare.

"I'm glad I brought this problem to a man of your experience," he said frankly. "I've got great confidence in your judgment, Boyle, something I've learned partly from watching you handle Transplanet Enterprises and partly from talking with Moira."

Boyle gave him a speculative look, feeling a return of his first acid curiosity about Locke and Moira. "I had no idea that Moira was so confidential outside her marital-seven," he said dryly. "She's not by any chance considering a fourth husband, is she?"

"Of course not. Moira's not unconventional. She's been kind to me a few times, yes, but that's only her way of making a practical check against the future. After all, she's aware it can't be more than a matter of—"

He broke off, too embarrassed by his unintentional blunder to see the fury that discolored the older man's face.

The iron discipline that permitted Boyle to bring that fury under control left him, even in his moment of outrage, with a sense of grim pride. He was still master of himself and of Transplanet Enterprises. Given fools enough like this to work with and time enough to use them, and he would be master of a great deal more. Immortality, for instance.

"She's quite right to be provident, of course," he said equably. "I am getting old. I'm past the sixty-mark, and it can't be more than another year or two before the rejuvenators refuse me further privilege and I'm dropped from the marital lists for good."

"Damn it, Boyle, I'm sorry," Locke said. "I didn't mean to offend you."

The potential awkwardness of the moment was relieved by a soft chime from the annunciator. The apartment entrance dilated, admitting Moira.

She came to them directly, slender and poised and supremely confident of her dark young beauty, her ermine wrap and high-coiled hair glistening with stray raindrops that took the light like diamonds. The two men stood up to greet her, and Boyle could not miss the subtle feminine response of her to Locke's eager, athletic youth.

If she's planning to fill my place in her marital-seven with this crewcut fool, Boyle thought with sudden malice, then she's in for a rude shock. And a final one.

"I couldn't enjoy a line of the play for thinking of you two patriots plotting here in my apartment," Moira said. "But then the performance was shatteringly dull, anyway."

Her boredom was less than convincing. When she had hung her wrap in a closet to be aerated and irradiated against its next wearing, she sat between Boyle and Locke with a little sigh of anticipation.

"Have you decided yet what to do about this dreadful immortality scheme of the Councils, darlings?"


Boyle went to the auto-dispenser in a corner and brought back three drinks, frosted and effervescing. They touched rims. Moira sipped at her glass quietly, waiting in tacit agreement with Locke for the older man's opinion.

"This longevity should be available to the Social Body as well as to AL&O," Boyle said. "It's obvious even to non-politicals like Locke and myself that, unless equal privilege is maintained, there's going to be the devil to pay and the Weal will suffer. It's equally obvious that the Alcorians' offer is made with the deliberate intent of undermining our system through dissension."

"To their own profit, of course," Locke put in. "Divide and conquer...."

"Whatever is to be done must be done quickly," Boyle said. "It would take months to negotiate a definitive plebiscite, and in that time the Alcorians would have gone home again without treating anyone outside AL&O. And there the matter would rest. It seems to be up to us to get hold of the longevity process ourselves and to broadcast it to the public."

"The good of the Body is the preservation of the Weal," Locke said sententiously. "What do you think, Moira?"

Moira touched her lips with a delicate pink tongue-tip, considering. To Boyle, her process of thought was as open as a plain-talk teletape; immortality for the Social Body automatically meant immortality for Moira and for David Locke. Both young, with an indefinite guarantee of life....

"Yes," Moira said definitely. "If some have it, then all should. But how, Philip?"

"You're both too young to remember this, of course," Boyle said, "but until the 1980 Truth-check Act, there was a whole field of determinative action applicable to cases like this. It's a simple enough problem if we plan and execute it properly."

His confidence was not feigned; he had gone over the possibilities already with the swift ruthlessness that had made him head of Transplanet Enterprises, and the prospect of direct action excited rather than dismayed him. Until now he had skirted the edges of illegality with painstaking care, never stepping quite over the line beyond which he would be liable to the disastrous truth-check, but at this moment he felt himself invincible, above retaliation.

"This present culture is a pragmatic compromise with necessity," Boyle said. "It survives because it answers natural problems that couldn't be solved under the old systems. Nationalism died out, for example, when we set up a universal government, because everyone belonged to the same Social Body and had the same Weal to consider. Once we realized that the good of the Body is more important than personal privacy, the truth-check made ordinary crime and political machination obsolete. Racial antagonisms vanished under deliberate amalgamation. Monogamy gave way to the marital-seven, settling the problems of ego clash, incompatability, promiscuity and vice that existed before. It also settled the disproportion between the male and female population.

"But stability is vulnerable. Since it never changes, it cannot stand against an attack either too new or too old for its immediate experience. So if we're going after this Alcorian longevity process, I'd suggest that we choose a method so long out of date that there's no longer a defense against it. We'll take it by force!"


It amused him to see Moira and Locke accept his specious logic without reservation. Their directness was all but childlike. The thought of engaging personally in the sort of cloak-and-sword adventure carried over by the old twentieth-century melodrama tapes was, as he had surmised, irresistible to them.

"I can see how you came to be head of Transplanet, Boyle," Locke said enviously. "What's your plan, exactly?"

"I've a cottage in the mountains that will serve as a base of operations," Boyle explained. "Moira can wait there for us in the morning while you and I take a 'copter to AL&O. According to your information, Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand will meet the Alcorians in the deliberations chamber at nine o'clock. We'll sleep-gas the lot of them, take the longevity process and go. There's no formal guard at Administration, or anywhere else, nowadays. There'll be no possible way of tracing us."

"Unless we're truth-checked," Locke said doubtfully. "If any one of us should be pulled in for serum-and-psycho, the whole affair will come out. The Board of Order—"

"Order won't know whom to suspect," Boyle said patiently. "And they can't possibly check the whole city. They'd have no way of knowing even that it was someone from this locale. It could be anyone, from anywhere."


When Locke had gone and Moira had exhausted her fund of excited small talk, Boyle went over the entire plan again from inception to conclusion. Lying awake in the darkness with only the sound of Moira's even breathing breaking the stillness, he let his practical fancy run ahead.

Years, decades, generations—what were they? To be by relative standards undying in a world of ephemerae, with literally nothing that he might not have or do....

He dreamed a dream as old as man, of stretching today into forever.

Immortality.


The coup next morning was no more difficult, though bloodier, than Boyle had anticipated.

At nine sharp, he left David Locke at the controls of his helicar on the sun-bright roof landing of AL&O, took a self-service elevator down four floors and walked calmly to the deliberation chamber where Administrative Council met with the visitors from Alcor. He was armed for any eventuality with an electronic freeze-gun, a sleep-capsule of anesthetic gas, and a nut-sized incendiary bomb capable of setting afire an ordinary building.

His first hope of surprising the Council in conference was dashed in the antechamber, rendering his sleep-bomb useless. Dorand was a moment late; he came in almost on Boyle's heels, his face blank with astonishment at finding an intruder ahead of him.

The freeze-gun gave him no time for questions.

"Quiet," Boyle ordered, and drove the startled Councilor ahead of him into the deliberations chamber.

He was just in time. Cornelison had one bony arm already bared for the longevity injection; Bissell sat in tense anticipation of his elder's reaction; the Alcorian, Fermiirig, stood at Cornelison's side with a glittering hypodermic needle in one of his four three-fingered hands.

For the moment, a sudden chill of apprehension touched Boyle. There should have been two Alcorians.

"Quiet," Boyle said again, this time to the group. "You, Fermiirig, where is your mate?"

The Alcorian replaced the hypodermic needle carefully in its case, his triangular face totally free of any identifiable emotion and clasped both primary and secondary sets of hands together as an Earthman might have raised them overhead. His eyes, doe-soft and gentle, considered Boyle thoughtfully.

"Santikh is busy with other matters," Fermiirig said. His voice was thin and reedy, precise of enunciation, but hissing faintly on the aspirants. "I am to join her later—" his gentle eyes went to the Councilors, gauging the gravity of the situation from their tensity, and returned to Boyle—"if I am permitted."

"Good," Boyle said.

He snapped the serum case shut and tucked it under his arm, turning toward the open balcony windows. "You're coming with me, Fermiirig. You others stay as you are."

The soft drone of a helicar descending outside told him that Locke had timed his descent accurately. Cornelison chose that moment to protest, his wrinkled face tight with consternation at what he read of Boyle's intention.

"We know you, Boyle! You can't possibly escape. The Ordermen—"

Boyle laughed at him.

"There'll be no culprit for the Ordermen," he said, "nor any witnesses. You've wiped out ordinary crime with your truth-checks and practicalities, Cornelison, but you've made the way easier for a man who knows what he wants."

He pressed the firing stud of his weapon. Cornelison fell and lay stiffly on the pastel tile. Bissell and Dorand went down as quickly, frozen to temporary rigidity.

Boyle tossed his incendiary into the huddle of still bodies and shoved the Alcorian forcibly through the windows into the hovering aircar.

Locke greeted the alien's appearance with stark amazement. "My God, Boyle, are you mad? You can't kidnap—"

The dull shock of explosion inside the deliberations chamber jarred the helicar, throwing the slighter Alcorian to the floor and staggering Boyle briefly.

"Get us out of here," Boyle said sharply. He turned the freeze-gun on the astounded Locke, half expecting resistance and fully prepared to meet it. "You fool, do you think I'm still playing the childish game I made up to keep you and Moira quiet?"

A pall of greasy black smoke poured after them when Locke, still stunned by the suddenness of catastrophe, put the aircar into motion and streaked away across the city.

Boyle, watching the first red tongue of flame lick out from the building behind, patted the serum case and set himself for the next step.

Immortality.


Locke took the helicar down through the mountains, skirting a clear swift river that broke into tumultuous falls a hundred yards below Boyle's cottage, and set it down in a flagstone court.

"Out," Boyle ordered.

Moira met them in the spacious living room, her pretty face comical with surprise and dismay.

"Philip, what's happened? You look so—"

She saw the alien then and put a hand to her mouth.

"Keep her quiet while I deal with Fermiirig," Boyle said to Locke. "I have no time for argument. If either of you gives me any trouble...."

He left the threat to Locke's stunned fancy and turned on the Alcorian.

"Let me have the injection you had ready for Cornelison. Now."

The Alcorian moved his narrow shoulders in what might have been a shrug. "You are making a mistake. You are not fitted for life beyond the normal span."

"I didn't bring you here to moralize," Boyle said. "If you mean to see your mate again, Fermiirig, give me the injection!"

"There was a time in your history when force was justifiable," Fermiirig said. "But that time is gone. You are determined?" He shook his head soberly when Boyle did not answer. "I was afraid so."



He took the hypodermic needle out of its case, squeezed out a pale drop of liquid and slid the point into the exposed vein of Boyle's forearm.

Boyle, watching the slow depression of the plunger, asked: "How long a period will this guarantee, in Earth time?"

"Seven hundred years," Fermiirig said. He withdrew the instrument and replaced it in its case, his liquid glance following Boyle's rising gesture with the freeze-gun. "At the end of that time, the treatment may be renewed if facilities are available."

Immortality!

"Then I won't need you any more," Boyle said, and rayed him down. "Nor these other two."

Locke, characteristically, sprang up and tried to shield Moira with his own body. "Boyle, what are you thinking of? You can't murder us without—"

"There's a very effective rapids a hundred yards down river," Boyle said. "You'll both be quite satisfactorily dead after going through it, I think. Possibly unrecognizable, too, though that doesn't matter particularly."

He was pressing the firing stud, slowly because something in the tension of the moment appealed to the sadism in his nature, when an Orderman's freeze-beam caught him from behind and dropped him stiffly beside Fermiirig.


The details of his failure reached him later in his cell, anticlimactically, through a fat and pimply jailer inflated to bursting with the importance of guarding the first murderer in his generation.

"AL&O kept this quiet until the Council killing," the turnkey said, "but it had to come out when the Board of Order went after you. The Alcorians are telepathic. Santikh led the Ordermen to your place in the mountains. Fermiirig guided her."

He grinned vacuously at his prisoner, visibly pleased to impart information. "Lucky for you we don't have capital punishment any more. As it is, you'll get maximum, but they can't give you more than life."

Lucky? The realization of what lay ahead of him stunned Boyle with a slow and dreadful certainty.

A sentence of life.

Seven hundred years.

Not immortality—

Eternity.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Wailing Wall by Roger D. Aycock


Wailing Wall

By ROGER DEE

Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction July 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


An enormous weapon is forcing people to keep
their troubles to themselves—it's dynamite!


Numb with the terror that had dogged him from the moment he regained consciousness and found himself naked and weaponless, Farrell had no idea how long he had been lost in the honeycombed darkness of the Hymenop dome.

The darkness and damp chill of air told him that he was far underground, possibly at the hive's lowest level. Somewhere above him, the silent audience chambers lay shrouded in lesser gloom, heavy with the dust of generations and peopled only by cryptic apian images. Outside the dome, in a bend of lazy silver river, sprawled the Sadr III village with its stoic handful of once-normal Terran colonists and, on the hillside above the village, Gibson and Stryker and Xavier would be waiting for him in the disabled Marco Four.

Waiting for him....

They might as well have been back on Terra, five hundred light-years away.

Six feet away on either side, the corridor walls curved up faintly, a flattened oval of tunneling designed for multiple alien feet, lighted for faceted eyes demanding the merest fraction of light necessary for an Earthman's vision. For two yards Farrell could see dimly, as through a heavy fog; beyond was nothing but darkness and an outlandish labyrinth of cross-branching corridors that spiraled on forever without end.

Behind him, his pursuers—human natives or Hymenop invaders, he had no way of knowing which—drew nearer with a dry minor rustling whose suggestion of imminent danger sent Farrell plunging blindly on into the maze.

—To halt, sweating, when a sound exactly similar came to him from ahead.

It was what he had feared from the beginning. He could not go on, and he could not go back.

He made out the intersecting corridor to his right, then a vague oval opening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He darted into it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice had been forced upon him.

It had been intended from the start that he should take this way. He had been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steady threat of action never quite realized. They had known where he was going, and why.

But there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel's aimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see—

He did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led him into a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whose central area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien and familiar.

He went toward it hesitantly, confused for the moment by a paramnesiac sense of repeated experience, the specious recognition of déjà vu.



It was a Ringwave generator, and it was the thing he had ventured into the dome to find.

His confusion stemmed from its resemblance to the disabled generator aboard the Marco Four, and from the stereo-sharp associations it evoked: Gibson working over the ship's power plant, his black-browed face scowling and intent, square brown body moving with a wrestler's easy economy of motion; Stryker, bald and fat and worried, wheezing up and down the companionway from engine bay to chart room, his concern divided between Gibson's task and Farrell's long silence in the dome.

Stryker at this moment would be regretting the congenital optimism that had prompted him to send his navigator where he himself could not go. Sweating anxiety would have replaced Stryker's pontifical assurance, dried up his smug pattering of socio-psychological truisms lifted from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook....


"So far as adaptability is concerned," Stryker had said an eternal evening before, "homo sapiens can be a pretty weird species. More given to mulish paradox, perhaps, than any alien life-form we're ever likely to run across out here."

He had shifted his bulk comfortably on the grass under the Marco Four's open port, undisturbed by the busy clatter of tools inside the ship where Gibson and Xavier, the Marco's mechanical, worked over the disabled power plant. He laced his fingers across his fat paunch and peered placidly through the dusk at Farrell, who lay on his back, smoking and watching the stars grow bright in the evening sky.

"Isolate a human colony from its parent planet for two centuries, enslave it for half that time to a hegemony as foreign as the Hymenops' hive-culture before abandoning it to its own devices, and anything at all in the way of eccentric social controls can develop. But men remain basically identical, Arthur, in spite of acquired superficial changes. They are inherently incapable of evolving any system of control mechanisms that cannot be understood by other men, provided the environmental circumstances that brought that system into being are known. At bottom, these Sadr III natives are no different from ourselves. Heredity won't permit it."

Farrell, half listening, had been staring upward between the icy white brilliance of Deneb and the twin blue-and-yellow jewels of Albireo, searching for a remote twinkle of Sol. Five hundred light-years away out there, he was thinking, lay Earth. And from Earth all this gaudy alien glory was no more than another point of reference for backyard astronomers, a minor configuration casually familiar and unremarkable.

A winking of lighted windows springing up in the village downslope brought his attention back to the scattered cottages by the river, and to the great disquieting curve of the Hymenop dome that rose above them like a giant above pygmies. He sat up restlessly, the wind ruffling his hair and whirling the smoke of his cigarette away in thin flying spirals.

"You sound as smug as the Reorientation chapter you lifted that bit from," Farrell said. "But it won't apply here, Lee. The same thing happened to these people that happened to the other colonists we've found, but they don't react the same. Either those Hymenop devils warped them permanently or they're a tribe of congenital maniacs."

Stryker prodded him socratically: "Particulars?"

"When we crashed here five weeks ago, there were an even thousand natives in the village, plus or minus a few babes in arms. Since that time they've lost a hundred twenty-six members, all suicides or murders. At first the entire population turned out at sunrise and went into the dome for an hour before going to the fields; since we came, that period has shortened progressively to a few minutes. That much we've learned by observation. By direct traffic we've learned exactly nothing except that they can speak Terran Standard, but won't. What sort of system is that?"

Stryker tugged uncomfortably at the rim of white hair the years had left him. "It's a stumper for the moment, I'll admit ... if they'd only talk to us, if they'd tell us what their wants and fears and problems are, we'd know what is wrong and what to do about it. But controls forced on them by the Hymenops, or acquired since their liberation, seem to have altered their original ideology so radically that—"

"That they're plain batty," Farrell finished for him. "The whole setup is unnatural, Lee. Consider this: We sent Xavier out to meet the first native that showed up, and the native talked to him. We heard it all by monitoring; his name was Tarvil, he spoke Terran Standard, and he was amicable. Then we showed ourselves, and when he saw that we were human beings like himself and not mechanicals like Xav, he clammed up. So did everyone in the village. It worries me, Lee. If they didn't expect men to come out of the Marco, then what in God's name did they expect?"

He sat up restlessly and stubbed out his cigarette. "It's an unimportant world anyway, all ocean except for this one small continent. I think we ought to write it off and get the hell out as soon as the Marco's Ringwave is repaired."

"We can't write it off," Stryker said. "Besides reclaiming a colony, we may have added a valuable marine food source to the Federation. Arthur, you're not letting a handful of disoriented people get under your skin, are you?"

Farrell made an impatient sound and lit another cigarette. The brief flare of his lighter pierced the darkness and picked out a hurried movement a short stone's throw away, between the Marco Four and the village.


"There's one reason why I'm edgy," Farrell said. "These Sadrians may be harmless, but they make a point of posting a guard over us. There's a sentry out there in the grass flats again tonight." He turned on Stryker uneasily. "I've watched on the infra-scanner while those sentries changed shifts, and they don't speak to each other. I've tracked them back to the village, but I've never seen one of them turn in a—"

Down in the village a man screamed, a raw, tortured sound that brought both men up stiffly. A frantic drumming of running feet came to them, unmistakable across the little distance. The fleeing man came up from the dark huddle of cottages by the river and out across the grass flats, screaming.

Pursuit overtook him halfway to the ship. There was a brief scuffling, a shadowy dispersal of silent figures. After that, nothing.

"They did it again," Farrell said. "One of them tried to come up here to us. The others killed him, and who's to say what sort of twisted motive prompted them? They go to the dome together every morning, not speaking. They work all day in the fields without so much as looking at each other. But every night at least one of them tries to escape from the village and come up here—and this is what happens. We couldn't trust them, Lee, even if we could understand them!"

"It's our job to understand them," Stryker said doggedly. "Our function is to find colonies disoriented by the Hymenops and to set them straight if we can. If we can't, we call in a long-term reorientation crew, and within three generations the culture will pass again for Terran. The fact that slave colonies invariably lose their knowledge of longevity helps; they don't get it back until they're ready for it.

"I've seen some pretty foul results of Hymenop experimenting on human colonies, Arthur. There was the ninth planet of Beta Pegasi—rediscovered in 3910, I think it was—that developed a religious fixation on fertility, a mania fostered by the Hymenops to supply expendable labor for their mines. The natives stopped mining when the Hymenops gave up the invasion and went back to 70 Ophiuchi, but they were still multiplying like rabbits when we found them. They followed a cultural conviction something like that observed in Oriental races of ancient Terran history, but they didn't pursue the Oriental tradition of sacrosancts. They couldn't—there were too many of them. By the time they were found, they numbered fourteen billions and they were eating each other. Still it took only three generations to set them straight."

He took one of Farrell's cigarettes and puffed it placidly.

"For that matter, Earth had her own share of eccentric cultures. I recall reading about one that existed as late as the twentieth century and equaled anything we're likely to find here. Any society should be geared to a set of social controls designed to furnish it, as a whole with a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of discomfort, but these ancient Terrestrial Dobuans—island aborigines, as I remember it—had adjusted to their total environment in a manner exactly opposite. They reversed the norm and became a society of paranoiacs, hating each other in direct ratio to nearness of relationship. Husbands and wives detested each other, sons and fathers—"

"Now you're pulling my leg," Farrell protested. "A society like that would be too irrational to function."

"But the system worked," Stryker insisted. "It balanced well enough, as long as they were isolated. They accepted it because it was all they knew, and an abrupt reversal that negated their accustomed habits would create an impossible societal conflict. They were reoriented after the Fourth War, and succeeding generations adjusted to normal living without difficulty."

A sound from overhead made them look up. Gibson was standing in the Marco's open port.

"Conference," Gibson said in his heavy baritone, and went back inside.


They followed Gibson quickly and without question, more disturbed by the terse order than by the killing in the grass flats. Knowing Gibson, they realized that he would not have wasted even that one word unless emergency justified it.

They found him waiting in the chart room with Xavier. For the thousandth time, seeing the two together, Farrell found himself comparing them: the robot, smoothly functional from flexible gray plastoid body to featureless oval faceplate, blandly efficient, totally incapable of emotion; Gibson, short and dark and competent heavy-browed and humorless. Except for initiative, Farrell thought, the two of them could have traded identities and no one would have been able to notice any difference.

"Xav and I found our Ringwave trouble," Gibson said. "The generator is functioning, but the warp isn't going out. Something here on Sadr III is neutralizing it."

They stared at him as if he had just told them the planet was flat.

"But a Ringwave can't be stopped completely, once it is started," Stryker protested. "You'd have to dismantle it to shut it off, Gib!"

"The warping field can be damped out, though," Gibson said. "Adjacent generators operating at different phase levels will heterodyne at a frequency representing the mean variance between levels. The resulting beat-phase will be too low to maintain either field, and one or the other, or both, will blank out. If you remember, all Terran-designed power plants are set to the same phase for that reason."

"But these natives can't have a Ringwave plant!" Farrell argued. "There's only this one village on Sadr III, Gib, an insignificant little agrarian township! If they had the Ringwave, they'd be mechanized. They'd have vehicles, landing ports...."

"The Hymenops had the Ringwave," Gibson interrupted. "And they left the dome down there, the first undamaged one we've found. Figure it out for yourselves."

They digested the statement in silence. Stryker paled slowly, as if it needed time for apprehension to work its way through his fat bulk. Farrell's uneasiness, sourceless until now, grew to chill certainty.


"I think I've expected this, without realizing it, since my first flight," he said. "It stood to reason that the Hymenops would quit running somewhere, that we'd bump into them eventually out here on the fringes. Twenty thousand light-years back to 70 Ophiuchi is a long way to retreat.... Gib, do you think they're still here?"

Gibson did not shrug, but his voice seemed to. "It won't matter one way or the other unless we can clear the Marco's generator."

From another man it might have been irony. Knowing Gibson, Farrell and Stryker accepted it as a bald statement of fact.

"Then we're up against a Hymenop hive-mind," Stryker said. "And we can't run away from it. Any suggestions?"

"We'll have to find the interfering generator and stop it," Farrell offered, knowing that was the only obvious solution.

"One alternative," Gibson corrected. "If we can determine what phase-level the interfering warp uses, we may be able to adjust the Marco's generator to match it. Once they're in resonance, they won't interfere." He caught Stryker's unspoken question and answered it. "It would take a week. Maybe longer."

Stryker vetoed the alternative. "Too long. If there are Hymenops here, they won't give us that much time."

Farrell switched on the chart room scanning screen and centered it on the village downslope. Scattered cottages with dark tiled roofs and lamp-bright windows showed up clearly. Out of their undisciplined grouping swept the great hemispherical curve of the dome, glinting dully metallic in the starshine.

"Maybe we're jumping to conclusions," he said. "We've been here for five weeks without seeing a trace of Hymenops, and from what I've read of them, they'd have jumped us the minute we landed. Chances are that they left Sadr III in too great a hurry to wreck the dome, and their Ringwave power plant is still running."

"You may be right," Stryker said, brightening. "They carried the fight to us from the first skirmish, two hundred years ago, and they damned near beat us before we learned how to fight them."

He looked at Xavier's silent plastoid figure with something like affection. "We'd have lost that war without Xave's kind. We couldn't match wits with Hymenop hive-minds, any more than a swarm of grasshoppers could stand up to a colony of wasps. But we made mechanicals that could. Cybernetic brains and servo-crews, ships that thought for themselves...."

He squinted at the visiscreen with its cryptic, star-streaked dome. "But they don't think as we do. They may have left a rear guard here, or they may have boobytrapped the dome."

"One of us will have to find out which it is," Farrell said. He took a restless turn about the chart room, weighing the probabilities. "It seems to fall in my department."

Stryker stared. "You? Why?"

"Because I'm the only one who can go. Remember what Gib said about changing the Marco's Ringwave to resonate with the interfering generator? Gib can make the change; I can't. You're—"

"Too old and fat," Stryker finished for him. "And too damned slow and garrulous. You're right, of course."

They let it go at that and put Xavier on guard for the night. The mechanical was infinitely more alert and sensitive to approach than any of the crew, but the knowledge did not make Farrell's sleep the sounder.

He dozed fitfully, waking a dozen times during the night to smoke cigarettes and to speculate fruitlessly on what he might find in the dome. He was sweating out a nightmare made hideous by monstrous bees that threatened him in buzzing alien voices when Xavier's polite monotone woke him for breakfast.


Farrell was halfway down the grassy slope to the village when he realized that the Marco was still under watch. Approaching close enough for recognition, he saw that the sentry this time was Tarvil, the Sadrian who had first approached the ship. The native's glance took in Farrell's shoulder-pack of testing tools and audiphone, brushed the hand-torch and blast gun at the Terran's belt, and slid away without trace of expression.

"I'm going into the dome," Farrell said. He tried to keep the uncertainty out of his voice, and felt a rasp of irritation when he failed. "Is there a taboo against that?"

The native fell in beside him without speaking and they went down together, walking a careful ten feet apart, through dew-drenched grass flats that gleamed like fields of diamonds under the early morning sun. From the village, as they approached, straggled the inevitable exodus of adults and half-grown children, moving silently out to the fields.

"Weird beggars," Farrell said into his audiphone button. "They don't even rub elbows at work. You'd think they were afraid of being contaminated."

Stryker's voice came tinnily in his ear. "They won't seem so strange once we learn their motivations. I'm beginning to think this aloofness of theirs is a religious concomitant, Arthur, a hangover from slave-controls designed to prevent rebellion through isolation. Considering what they must have suffered under the Hymenops, it's a wonder they're even sane."

"I'll grant the religious origin," Farrell said. "But I wouldn't risk a centicredit on their sanity. I think the lot of them are nuts."

The village was not deserted, but so far as Farrell's coming was concerned, it might as well have been. The few women and children he saw on the streets ignored him—and Tarvil—completely.

He met with only one sign of interest, when a naked boy perhaps six years old stared curiously and asked something in a childish treble of the woman accompanying him. The woman answered with a single sharp word and struck the child across the face, sending him sprawling.

Farrell relayed the incident. "She said 'Quiet!' and slapped him down, Lee. They start their training early."

"Their sort of indifference couldn't be congenital," Stryker said. His tinny murmur took on a puzzled sound. "But they've been free for four generations. It's hard to believe that any forcibly implanted control mechanism could remain in effect so long."

A shadow blocked the sun, bringing a faint chill to Farrell when he looked up to see the great rounded hump of the dome looming over him.

"I'm going into the dome now," he said. "It's like all the others—no openings except at ground level, where it's riddled with them."

Tarvil did not accompany him inside. Farrell, looking back as he thumbed his hand-torch alight in the nearest entranceway, saw the native squatting on his heels and looking after him without a single trace of interest.


"I'm at ground level," Farrell said later, "in what seems to have been a storage section. Empty now, with dust everywhere except in the corridors the natives use when they come in, mornings. No sign of Hymenops yet."

Stryker's voice turned worried. "Look sharp for traps, Arthur. The place may be mined."

The upper part of the dome, Farrell knew from previous experience, would have been given over in years past to Hymenop occupation, layer after rising layer of dormitories tiered like honeycombs to conserve space. He followed a spiral ramp downward to the level immediately below surface, and felt his first excitement of discovery when he found himself in the audience chambers that, until the Marco's coming, had been the daily goal of the Sadrian natives.

The level was entirely taken up with bare ten-foot cubicles, each cramped chamber dominated by a cryptic metal-and-crystal likeness of the Hymenop head set into the metal wall opposite its corridor entrance. From either side of a circular speaking-grill, the antennae projected into the room, rasplike and alert, above faceted crystal eyes that glowed faintly in the near-darkness. The craftsmanship was faultless, stylized after a fashion alien to Farrell's imagining and personifying with disturbing realism the soulless, arrogant efficiency of the Hymenop hive-mind. To Farrell, there was about each image a brooding air of hypnotic fixity.

"Something new in Hymenop experiments," he reported to Stryker. "None of the other domes we found had anything like this. These things have some bearing on the condition of the natives, Lee—there's a path worn through the dust to every image, and I can see where the people knelt. I don't like it. I've got a hunch that whatever these damned idols were used for succeeded too well."

"They can't be idols," Stryker said. "The Hymenops would have known how hard it is to displace anthropomorphism entirely from human worship. But I think you're right about the experiment's working too well. No ordinary compulsion would have stuck so long. Periodic hypnosis? Wait, Arthur, that's an angle I want to check with Gibson...."

He was back a moment later, wheezing with excitement.

"Gib thinks I'm on the right track—periodic hypnosis. The Hymenops must have assigned a particular chamber and image to each slave. The images are mechanicals, robot mesmerists designed to keep the natives' compulsion-to-isolation renewed. Post-hypnotic suggestion kept the poor devils coming back every morning, and their children with them, even after the Hymenops pulled out. They couldn't break away until the Marco's Ringwave forced a shutdown of the dome's power plant and deactivated the images. Not that they're any better off now that they're free; they don't know how—"

Farrell never heard the rest of it. Something struck him sharply across the back of the head.


When he regained consciousness, he was naked and weaponless and lost. The rustling of approach, bodiless and dreadful in darkness, panicked him completely and sent him fleeing through a sweating eternity that brought him finally to the dome's lowest level and the Hymenop power plant.

He went hesitantly toward the shadowy bulk of the Ringwave cylinder, drawn as much now by its familiarity as driven by the terror behind him. At the base of the towering machine, he made out a control board totally unrecognizable in design, studded with dials and switches clearly intended for alien handling.

The tinny whispering of Stryker's voice in the vaultlike quiet struck him with the frightening feeling that he had gone mad.

He saw his equipment pack then, lying undamaged at the foot of the control board. Stryker's voice murmured from its audicom unit: "We're in the dome, Arthur. Where are you? What level—"

Farrell caught up the audicom, swept by a sudden wild lift of hope. "I'm at the bottom of the dome, in the Ringwave chamber. They took my gun and torch. For God's sake, hurry!"

The darkness gave up a furtive scuffling of sandaled feet, the tight breathing of many men. Someone made a whimpering sound, doglike and piteous; a Sadrian voice hissed sharply, "Quiet!"

Stryker's metallic whisper said: "We're tracking your carrier, Arthur. Use the tools they left you. They brought you there to repair the Ringwave, to give back the power that kept their images going. Keep busy!"

Farrell, only half understanding, took up his instrument case. His movement triggered a tense rustle in the darkness; the voice whimpered again, a tortured sound that rasped Farrell's nerves like a file on glass.

"Give me back my Voice. I am alone and afraid. I must have Counsel...."

Beneath the crying, Farrell felt the terror, incredibly voiced, that weighted the darkness, the horror implicit in stilled breathing, the swelling sense of outrage.

There was a soft rush of bodies, a panting and struggling. The whimpering stopped.

The instrument case slipped out of Farrell's hands. On the heels of its nerve-shattering crash against the metal floor came Stryker's voice, stronger as it came closer.

"Steady, Arthur. They'll kill you if you make a scene. We're coming, Gib and Xav and I. Don't lose your head!"

Farrell crouched back against the cold curve of the Ringwave cylinder, straining against flight with an effort that left him trembling uncontrollably. A spasm of incipient screaming seized his throat and he bit it back savagely, stifling a terror that could not be seen, grasped, fought with.

He was giving way slowly when Xavier's inflectionless voice droned out of the darkness: "Quiet. Your Counsel will be restored."

There was a sudden flood of light, unbearable after long darkness. Farrell had a failing glimpse of Gibson, square face blocked with light and shadow from the actinic flare overhead, racing toward him through a silently dispersing throng of Sadrians.

Then he passed out.


He was strapped to his couch in the chart room when he awoke. The Marco Four was already in space; on the visiscreen, Farrell could see a dwindling crescent of Sadr III, and behind it, in the black pit of space, the fiery white eye of Deneb and the pyrotechnic glowing of Albireo's blue-and-yellow twins.

"We're headed out," he said, bewildered. "What happened?"

Stryker came over and unstrapped him. Gibson, playing chess with Xavier across the chart-room plotting table, looked up briefly and went back to his gambit.

"We reset the Ringwave in the dome to phase with ours and lugged you out," Stryker explained genially. He was back in character again, his fat paunch quivering with the beginning of laughter. "We're through here. The rest is up to Reorientation."

Farrell gaped at him. "You're giving up on Sadr III?"

"We've done all we can. Those Sadrians need something that a preliminary expedition like ours can't give them. Right now they are willing victims of a rigid religious code that makes it impossible for any one of them to express his wants, hopes, ideals or misfortunes to another. Exchanging confidences, to them, is the ultimate sacrilege."

"Then they are crazy. They'd have to be, with no more opportunity for emotional catharsis than that!"

"They're not insane, they're—adapted. Those robot images you found are everything to this culture: arbiters, commercial agents, monitors and confessors all in one. They not only relay physical needs from one native to another; they listen to all problems and give solutions. They're Counselors, remember? Man's gregariousness stems largely from his need to unload his troubles on someone else. The Hymenops came up with an efficient substitute here, and the natives accepted it as the norm."

Farrell winced with sudden understanding. "No wonder the poor devils cracked up right and left. With their Ringwave dead, they might as well have been struck blind and dumb! They couldn't even get together among themselves to figure a way out."

"There you have it," Stryker said. "They knew we were responsible for their catastrophe, but they couldn't bring themselves to ask us for help because we were human beings like themselves. So they went mad one by one and committed the ultimate blasphemy of shouting their misery in public, and their fellows had to kill them or countenance sacrilege. But they'll quiet down now. They should be easy enough to handle by the time the Reorientation lads arrive."

He began to chuckle. "We left their Counselors running, but we disconnected the hypnosis-renewal circuits. They'll get only what they need from now on, which is an outlet for shifting their personal burdens. And with the post-hypnotic compulsion gone, they'll turn to closer association with each other. Human gregariousness will reassert itself. After a couple of generations, the Reorientation boys can write them off as Terran Normal and move on to the next planetary madhouse we've dug up for them."

Farrell said wonderingly, "I never thought of the need to exchange confidences as being so important. But it is; everyone does it. You and I often talk over personal concerns, and Gib—"

He broke off to study the intent pair at the chessboard, comparing Gibson's calm selfsufficiency to the mechanical's bland competence.

"There's an exception for your theory, Lee. Iron Man Gibson never gave out with a confidence in his life!"

Stryker laughed. "You may be right. How about it, Gib? Do you ever feel the need of a wailing wall?"

Gibson looked up briefly from his game, his square face unsurprised.

"Well, sure. Why not? I tell my troubles to Xavier."

When they looked at each other blankly, he added, with the nearest approach to humor that either Farrell or Stryker had ever seen in him: "It's a reciprocal arrangement. Xav confides his to me."