Classic Audiobook Collection - The Man Who Hated Mars by Randall Garrett ~ Full Audiobook [scifi]

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

The Man Who Hated Mars by Randall Garrett audiobook. Genre: scifi Ron Clayton has spent fifteen bitter years in exile on Mars - a punishment sold as 'freedom' for criminals Earth no longer wants. Trapped in the thin air, dependent on oxidation pills, and driven half-mad by the planet's relentless cold, Clayton storms into the Terran Rehabilitation Service and begs Lieutenant Phoebe Harris for the one thing he never expected to want: a prison cell back on Earth. She refuses, and Clayton is forced to accept that the system is designed to keep men like him off-world forever. citeturn1view0 When a Space Transport Service ship drops in, opportunity arrives in the form of Herbert 'Parks' Parkinson, a talkative crewman with a nose oxygen rig and a careless streak. One desperate night later, Clayton gambles everything on a stolen uniform, a borrowed identity, and a plan to slip past steel walls, security routines, and suspicious officers. citeturn3view1turn3view2 But survival aboard the ship demands more than hiding his name: Clayton must work, improvise, and keep his fear in check while Mars' harsh rules echo in his muscles and his mind. Tight, tense, and morally thorny, Randall Garrett's classic tale asks what exile does to a man - and whether escape is ever the same as redemption. citeturn0search1 For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:36:23) Chapter 02 (01:26:05) Chapter 03 (01:53:09) Chapter 04 (02:04:31) Chapter 05 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Man Who Hated Morris by Randall Garrett. I want you to put me in prison, the big hairy man said in a trembling voice. He was addressing his request to a thin woman sitting behind a desk that seemed much too big for her. The plaque on the desk said, Lieutenant Phoebe Harris, Terran Rehabilitation Service. Lieutenant Harris glanced at the man before her for only a moment before she returned her eyes to the dossier on the desk, but long enough to verify the impression his voice had given. Ron Clayton was a big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous man.

He said, Well, damn it, say something. The lieutenant raised her eyes again. Just be patient until I've read this. Her voice and eyes were expressionless, but her hand moved beneath the desk. Clayton froze. She's yellow, he thought. She's turned on the trackers.

He could see the pale greenish glow of their little eyes, watching him all around the room. If he made any fast move, they would cut him down with a stun beam before he could get two feet. She had thought he was going to jump her. Little rat, he thought somebody ought to slap her down. He watched her check through the heavy dossier in front of her. of her. Finally, she looked up at him again. Clayton, your last conviction was for strong-arm robbery. You were given a choice between prison on Earth and freedom here on Mars. You picked

Mars. He nodded slowly. He'd been broke and hungry at the time. A sneaky little rat named Johnson had Bill Clayton out of his fair share of the Corey payroll job, and Clayton had been forced to get the money somehow. He hadn't mussed the guy up much. Besides, it was the sucker's own fault. If he hadn't tried to yell, Lieutenant Harris went on, I'm afraid you can't back down now.

But it isn't fair. The most out of God on that frame-up would have been ten years. I've been here fifteen already. I'm sorry, Clayton, it can't be done. You're here, period. Forget about trying to get back. Earth doesn't want you. Her voice sounded choppy as though she were trying to keep it calm.

Clayton broke into a whining rage. You can't do that. It isn't fair. I never did anything to you. I'll go talk to the governor. He'll listen to reason. You'll see. I'll...

Shut up. The woman snapped harshly. I'm getting sick of it. I personally think you should have been locked up. permanently. I think this idea of forced colonization is going to breed trouble for Earth someday, but it is the only way you can get anybody to colonize this frozen hunk of mud. Just keep in mind that I don't like it any better than you do, and I didn't strong-arm anybody to deserve the assignment. Now get out of here. She moved hence, threateningly,

toward the manual controls of the stun beam. Clayton retreated. fast. The trackers ignored anyone walking away from the desk. They were set only to spot threatening movements toward it. Outside the rehabilitation service building, Clayton could feel the tears running down the inside of his face mask. He'd asked again and again God only knew how many times in the past 15 years. Always the same answer.

No. When he'd heard that this new administrator was a woman, he'd hope she might be easier to convince. She wasn't. If anything, she was harder than the others. The heat-sucking fragility of the thin Martian air whispered around him in a feeble breeze. He shivered a little and began walking toward the recreation center. There was a high, thin piping in the air above him, which quickly became a screaming. in the thin air.

He turned for a moment to watch the shipland, squinting his eyes to see the number on the hull. Fifty-two. Space Transport Ship 52. Probably bringing another load of poor suckers to freeze to death on Mars. That was the thing he hated about Mars. The cold! The everlasting damned cold! And the oxidation pills.

Take one every three hours or a smother in the poor thin air. The government could have put up domes. It could have put in building to building tunnels at least. It could have done a hell of a lot of things to make Mars a decent place for human beings. But no, the government had other ideas. A bunch of big-shot scientific characters had come up with the idea nearly twenty-three years before. Platon could remember the words on the sheet he had been given when he was sentenced. Mankind is inherently an adaptable animal.

If we are to colonize the planets of the solar system, we must meet the conditions on those planets as best we can. Financially, it is impracticable to change an entire planet from its original condition to one which will support human life as it exists on Terra. But man, since he is adaptable, can change himself. Modify his structures slightly so that he could live on these planets with only a minimum of change in the environment. So they made you live outside and like it. So you froze and you choked and you suffered.

Clayton hated Mars. He hated the thin air and the cold. More than anything, he hated the cold. Ron Clayton wanted to go. home. The recreation building was just ahead. At least it would be warm inside. He pushed in through the outer and inner doors, and he heard the burst of music from the jukebox. His stomach tightened up into a hard cramp. They were playing Heinland's Green Hills of Earth. There was almost no other sound in the room, although it was full of people. There were plenty of colonists who claimed to like

Mars. But even they were silent when that song was played. Clayton wanted to go over and smash the machine. Make it stop reminding him. He cleansed his teeth and his fists and his eyes and cursed mentally. God, how I hate Mars! When the hauntingly nostalgic last chord faded away, He walked over to the machine and fed it full of enough coins to keep it going on something else until he left. At the bar he ordered a beer and used it to wash down another oxidation tablet. It wasn't good beer. It didn't even deserve the name. The atmospheric pressure was so low as to borrow all the carbon dioxide out of it, so the brewers never put it back in after fermentation.

He was sorry for what he had done, really and truly sorry. If they'd only give him one more chance he'd make good, just one more chance. He'd work things out. He'd promised himself that both times they'd put him up before, but things had been different then. He hadn't really been given another chance, what with parole boards and all. Clayton closed his eyes and finished the beer. he ordered another.

He'd worked in the mines for fifteen years. It wasn't that he minded work, really. But the foreman had it in for him, always giving him a bad time, always picking out the lousy jobs for him. Like the time he'd crawled into a side-boring in Tunnel 12 for a nap during lunch, and the foreman had caught him.

When he promised never to do it again, if the foreman wouldn't put it on report, the guy said, Yeah, sure. Hate to hurt a guy's record. Then he'd put Clayton on report anyway. Strictly a rat. Not that Clayton ran any chance of being fired.

They never fired anybody. But they'd find him a day's pay. A whole day's pay. He tapped his glass on the bar, and the barman came over with another beer. Clayton looked at it, then up at the barman, put a hat on it. The bartender looked at him sourly. I've got some soap suds here, Clayton, and one of these days I'm going to put some in your beer if you keep pulling that gag. That was the trouble with some guys, no sense of humor.

Somebody came in the door, and then somebody else came in behind him, so that both inner and outer doors were open for an instant. A blast of icy breeze struck Clayton's back, and he shivered. He started to say something, then changed his mind. The doors were already closed again, and besides one of the guys was bigger than he was. The iciness didn't seem to go away immediately. It was like the mine. Little old Mars was cold, clear down to her core, or at least down as far as they drilled. The walls were frozen and seemed to radiate a chill that pulled the heat right out of your blood.

Somebody was playing Green Hills again, damned him. Evidently, all his own selections had run out earlier than he thought they would. Hell, that was nothing to do here. He might as well go home. Give me another beer, Mac. He'd go home as soon as he finished this one. He stood there with his eyes closed, listening to the music and hating Mars. A voice next to him said,

I'll have a whiskey. The voice sounded as if the man had a bad cold, and Clayton turned slowly to look at him. After all the sterilization they went through before they left Earth, nobody on Mars ever had a cold. So there was only one thing that would make a man's voice sound like that. Clayton was right. The fellow had an oxygen tube clamped firmly over his nose.

He was wearing the uniform of the Space Transport Service. "'Just get in on the ship?' Clayton asked conversationally. The man nodded and grinned. "'Yeah, four hours before we take off again.' He poured down the whiskey. "'Sure cold out.' Clayton agreed.

"'It's always cold.' He watched enviously as the spaceman ordered another whiskey. Clayton couldn't afford whiskey. He probably could have by this time if the mines had made him a foreman like they should have. Maybe he could talk the spaceman out of a couple of drinks. My name's Clayton, Ron Clayton. The spaceman took the offered hand. Mine's Parkinson, but everybody calls me Parks.

Sure, Parks. Can I buy you a beer? Park shook his head. No, thanks. I started on whiskey. Here, let me buy you one. "'Well, thanks. Don't mind if I do.' They drank them in silence, and Parks ordered two more. "'Been here long?' Parks asked. "'Fifteen years, fifteen long, long years.'

"'Did you—I mean—' Parks looked suddenly confused. Clayton glanced quickly to make sure the bartender was out of airshot. Then he grinned. "'You mean am I a convict?' "'Nah. I came here because I wanted to, but—he lowered his voice. We don't talk about it around here, you know.

He gestured with one hand, the gesture that took in everyone else in the room. Parks glanced around quickly, moving only his eyes. Yeah, I see. He said softly. This your first trip? asked Clayton. First went to Mars, been on the lunar run a long time. Low pressure bother you much? Not much. We only keep it at six pounds in the ships.

Half helium and half oxygen. Only thing that bothers me is the oxy here, or rather the oxy that isn't here. He took a deep breath through his nose tube to emphasize his point. Clayton clamped his teeth together, making the muscles at the side of his jaw stand out. Parks didn't notice. You guys have to take those pills, don't you? Yeah. i had to take them once i got stranded on luna the cat i was in broke down eighty-some miles from aristarchus base and i had to walk back with my oxy low well i figured

clayton listened to parks a story with a great show of attention but he had heard it before this lost on the moon stuff and its variations had been going the rounds for forty years every once in a while it actually did happen to someone just all the first of the moon stuff in its variations had been going the rounds for forty years every once in a while it actually did happen to someone just all often enough to keep the story going. This guy did have a couple of new twists, but not enough to make the story worthwhile. Boy, Clayton said when Parks had finished, you were lucky to come out of that alive. Parks nodded, well pleased with himself, and bought another round of drinks. Something like that happened to me a couple of years ago, Clayton began. I'm supervisor on the third shift in the minds at Zanthi, but at the time I was only a foreman.

One day a couple of guys went to a branch tunnel to... It was a very good story. Clayton had made it up himself, so he knew that Parks had never heard it before. It was gory in just the right places, with a nice effect at the end. So I had to hold up the rocks with my back while the rescue crew pulled the others out of the tunnel

by crawling between my legs. Finally they got some steel beams down there to take the load off and I could let go. I was in the hospital for a week, he finished. Parks was nodding vaguely. Clayton looked up at the clock above the bar and realized that they had been talking for better than an hour. Parks was buying another round.

Parks was a hell of a nice fellow. There was, Clayton found, only one trouble with Parks. He got to talking so loud that the bartender refused to serve either one. of them any more. The bartender said Clayton was getting loud, too, but it was just because he had to talk loud to make Parks hear him. Clayton helped Parks put his mask and Parker on, and they walked out into the cold night. Parks began to sang Green Hills.

About halfway, though, he stopped and turned to Clayton. I'm from Indiana. Clayton had already spotted him as an American by his accent. Indiana, that's nice, real nice. Yeah, you talk about Green Hills. We got Green Hills in Indiana. What time is it? Clayton told him.

Jesus Christ, old spaceship takes off in an hour. To have one more drink first. Clayton realized he didn't like Parks, but maybe he'd buy a bottle. Sharky Johnson worked in fuel section, and he made a nice little sideline of stealing alcohol, cutting it and selling it. He thought it was real funny to call it Martian gin. Clayton said, let's go over to Sharkies. Sharkies will sell us a bottle.

Okay, said Parks. We'll get a bottle. That's what we need. A bottle. It was quite a walk. to the shark's place, it was so cold that even Parks was beginning to sober up a little. He was laughing like hell when Clayton started to sing. We're going over to Sharks to buy a jug of gin for Parks.

Hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-ho, high-ho. One thing about a few drinks, you don't get so cold. You don't feel it too much, anyway. The shark still had his light on when they arrived. Clayton whispered to Parks. I'll go in. He knows me. He wouldn't sell it if you were around.

You got eight credits? Sure, I got eight credits. Just a minute. And I'll give you eight credits. He fished around for a minute inside his parker and pulled out his note case. His gloved fingers were a little clumsy, but he managed to get out of five and three ones in hand them to Clayton. You ain't out here, Clayton said.

He went in through the outer door and knocked on the inner one. He should have asked for ten credits. Sharky only charged five, and that would leave him three for himself. But he could have got ten, maybe more. When he came out with the bottle, Parks was sitting on a rock shivering. Jeez, Christ, he said. It's cold out here. Let's get to some place where it's warm.

Sure, I got the bottle. Want to drink? Parks took the bottle, opened it, and took a good belt out of it. Oh, he breathed. Pretty smooth. As Clayton drank, Parks said. Hey, I better get back to the field. I know.

We can go to the men's room and finish the bottle before the ship takes off. Isn't that a good idea? It's warm there. They started back down the street toward the space field. Yep, I'm from Indiana. Southern part, down around Bloomington, Park said. Give me the jug. Not Bloomington, Illinois, Bloomington, Indiana.

We really got green hills down there. He drank and handed the bottle back to Clayton. Personally, I don't see why anybody'd stay on Mars. Here you are, practically on the equator in the middle of the summer, and it's colder than hell. Oh, now if you were smart, you'd go home where it's warm. Mars wasn't built for people to live on, anyhow. I don't see how you stand it. That was when Clayton decided he really hated Parks.

And when Parks said, "'Why be dumb, friend? Why don't you go home?' Clayton kicked him in the stomach hard. And that, that, Clayton said as Parks doubled over. He said it again as he kicked him in the head and in the ribs. Parks was gasping as he writhed on the ground, but he soon lay still. Then Clayton saw why. Parks' nose tube had come off when Clayton's foot struck his head.

Parks was breathing heavily, but he wasn't getting any oxygen. That was when the big idea hit Ron Clayton. With a nosepiece on like that, you couldn't tell who a man was. He took another drink from the jug and then began to take Parks' clothes off. The uniform fit Clayton fine, and so did the nose mask. He dumped his own clothing on top of Parks' nearly nude body, adjusted the little oxygen tank so that the gas would flow properly through the mask, took the first deep breath of good air he had in fifteen years,

and walked toward the space field. He went into the men's room at the port building, took a drink, and felt in the pockets of the uniform for Parks' identification. He found it and opened the booklet. It read, Parkinson, Herbert J. Stewart Second Class, S-T-S. Above it was a photo and a set of fingerprints. Clayton grinned. They never know it wasn't Parks getting on the ship.

Parks was a steward, too, a cook's helper. That was good. If he'd been a jetman or something like that, the crew might wonder why he wasn't on duty a takeoff. But a steward was different. Clayton sat for several minutes looking through the booklet and drinking from the bottle. He emptied it just before the warning sirens keened through the thin air. Clayton got up and went outside toward the ship.

Wake up. Hey, you! Wake up! Somebody was slapping his cheeks. Clayton opened his eyes and looked at the ship. the blurred face over his own. From a distance another voice said, Who is it? The blurred face said, I don't know. He was asleep behind these cases. I think he's drunk. Clayton wasn't drunk. He was sick. His head felt like hell. Where the devil was he?

Get up, bud. Come on, get up. Clayton pulled himself up by holding to the man's arm. The effort made him dizzy and nauseated. The other man said, Take him down a sick bay, Casey. Get some thiamen into him. Clayton didn't struggle as they let him down to the sick bay. He was trying to clear his head. Where was he?

He must have been pretty drunk last night. He remembered meeting parks and getting thrown out by the bartender. Then what? Oh, yeah. He'd gone to. down to sharks for a bottle. From there on it was mostly gone. He remembered a fight or something, but that was all that registered. The medic in the sick bay fired two shots from a hypo gun into both arms, but Clayton ignored the slight sting. Where am I? Real original. Here, take

these. He handed Clayton a couple of capsules and gave him a glass of water to wash them down with. When the water hit his stomach, there was an immediate reaction. Oh, Christ, the medic said, get a mob somebody. Here, bud, he went to this. He put a basin on the table in front of Clayton. It took them the better part of an hour to get Clayton awake enough to realize what was going on and where he was.

Even then he was plenty groggy. It was the first officer of the STS-52 who finally got to. out the story straight. As soon as Clayton was in condition, the medic and the quartermaster officer who had found him took him up to the first officer's compartment. I was checking through the stores this morning when I found this man. He was asleep, dead drunk behind the crates. He was drunk, all right, supply the medic. I found this in his pocket. He flipped a booklet to the first officer. The first was a young man, not older than twenty-eight, with tough-looking gray eyes.

He looked over the booklet. Where did you get Parkinson's ID booklet and his uniform? Clayton looked down at his clothes and wonder. I don't know. You don't know? That's a hell of an answer. Well, I was drunk, Clayton said defensively. A man doesn't know what he's doing when he's drunk.

He frowned in concentration. He knew he'd have to. think up some story. I kind of remember we made a bet. I bet him I could get on the ship. Sure, I remember now. That's what happened. I bet him I could get on the ship and we traded clothes. Where is he now? At my place sleeping it off, I guess. Without his oxy mask? Oh, I gave him my oxidation pills for the mask. The first shook his head. That sounds like the kind of trick Parkinson's said would pull all right.

I'll have to write it up and turn you both into the authorities when we hit Earth. He eyed Clayton. What's your name? Cartwright, Sam Cartwright. Clayton said without batting an eye. Volunteer or convicted colonists. Volunteer. The first looked at him for a long.

moment disbelief in his eyes. It didn't matter. Volunteer or convict, there was no place Clayton could go. From the officer's viewpoint, he was as safely imprisoned in the spaceship as he would be on Mars or prison on Earth. The first wrote in the logbook and then said, Well, were one man short of the kitchen. You wanted to take Parkinson's place.

Brother, you got it. Without pay. He paused for a moment. You know, of course, he said judiciously, that you'll be shipped back to Mars immediately, and you'll have to work out your passage both ways. It will be deducted from your pay. Clayton nodded. I know, I know.

I don't know what else will happen. If there's a conviction you may lose your volunteer status on Mars, and there may be fines taken out of your pay, too. Well, that's all, Cartwright. You can report to Kissman in the kitchen. The first pressed a button on his desk and spoke into the intercom. Who was on duty at the airlock when the crew came aboard last night? Send him up. I want to talk to him.

Then the quartermaster officer led Clayton out the door and took him to the kitchen. The ship's driver tubes were pushing it along at a steady 500 centimeters per second squared acceleration, pushing her steadily closer to Earth with a little more than half a gravity of drive. There wasn't much for Clayton to do, really. He helped to select the foods that went into the automatics, and he cleaned them out after each meal was cooked. Once each day he had to partially dismantle them for a really thorough going over. And all the time he was thinking. Parkinson must be dead. He knew that.

That meant the chamber, and even if he wasn't, they'd send Clayton back to Mars. luckily there was no way for either planet to communicate with the ship it was hard enough to keep a beam trained on a planet without trying to hit such a comparatively small thing as a ship but they would know about it on earth by now they would pick him up the instant the ship landed and the best he could hope for was they returned to mars no by god he wouldn't go back to that frozen mud ball he'd stay at that on earth where it was warm and comfortable, and a man could live where he was meant to live, where there was plenty of air to breathe and plenty of water to drink, where the beer tasted like beer and not like slop. Earth, good green hills, the like of which exists nowhere else. Slowly, over the days, he evolved a plan.

He watched and waited and checked each little detail to make sure nothing would go wrong. It couldn't go wrong. He didn't want to die, and he didn't want to go back to Mars. Nobody on the ship liked him. They couldn't appreciate his position. He hadn't done anything to them, but they just didn't like him. He didn't know why. He'd tried to get along with him.

Well, if they didn't like him, the hell with him. If things worked out the way he figured, they'd be damn sorry. He was very clever about the whole... plan. When the turnover came, he pretended to get violently space-sick. That gave him an opportunity to steal a bottle of chloral hydrate from the medic's locker, and while he worked in the kitchen, he spent a great deal of time sharpening a big carving-knife. Once, during his off-time, he managed to disable one of the ship's two lifeboats. He was saving the other for himself. The ship was eight hours out from Earth, and still decelerating, when Clayton pulled his getaway.

It was surprisingly easy. He was supposed to be asleep when he sneaked down to the drive compartment with the knife. He pushed open the door, looked in, and grinned like an ape. The engineer and the two jetmen were out cold from the coral hydrate and the coffee from the kitchen. Moving rapidly, he went to the spares locker and began method. to smash every replacement part for the drivers. Then he took three of the signal bombs from the emergency kit, set them for five minutes, and placed them around the driver's circuits.

He looked at the three sleeping men. What if they woke up before the bombs went off? He didn't want to kill them, though. He wanted them to know what had happened and who had done it. He grinned. There was a way. He simply had to drag. them outside and jammed the door lock. He took the key from the engineer, inserted it,

turned it, and snapped off the head, leaving the body of the key still in the lock. Nobody would unjam it in the next four minutes. Then he began to run up the stairwell toward the good lifeboat. He was panting and out of breath when he arrived, but no one had stopped him. No one had even seen him. He clambered into the lifeboat, made everything ready. and waited the signal bombs were not heavy charges their main purposes was to make a flare bright enough to be seen for thousands of miles in space fluoride and magnesium made plenty of light and heat quite suddenly there was no gravity he had felt nothing but he knew that the bombs had exploded he punched the launch switch on the control board of the lifeboat and the little ship leaped out from the side of the greater one Then he turned on the drive, set it at half a G, and watched the STS-52 drop behind him. It was no longer decelerating, so it would miss Earth and drift on into space.

On the other hand, the life-ship would come down very nearly within a hundred miles of the spaceport in Utah, the destination of the STS-52. Landing the life-ship would be the only difficult part of the maneuver, but they were designed. to be handled by beginners. Full instructions were printed on the Simplified Control Board. Clayton studied them for a while, then set the alarm to waking him in seven hours and dozed off to sleep. He dreamed of Indiana. It was full of nice green hills and leafy woods, and Parkinson was inviting him over to his mother's house for chicken and whiskey, and all for free. Beneath the dream was the calm assurance that they would never catch him and send him back.

When the STS 52 failed to show up, they would think he had been lost with it. They would never look for him. When the alarm rang, Earth was a mottled globe looming hugely beneath the ship. Platon watched the dials on the board and began to follow the instructions on the landing sheet. He wasn't too good at it. The accelerometer climbed higher and higher, and he felt as though he could hardly move his hands to the proper switches. He was less than fifteen feet off the ground when his hands slipped. The ship, out of control, shifted, spun, and toppled over on its side, smashing a great hole in the cabin. Clayton shook his head and tried to stand up in the wreckage.

He got to his hands and knees. Dizzy but unhurt and took a deep breath of the fresh air that was blowing in through the hold in the cabin It felt just like home Bureau of Criminal Investigation Regional Headquarters Cheyenne Wyoming 20 January 2102 To space transport service subject life ship to STS 52 Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer Dear Paul

I have on hand the copies of your reports on the rescue of the men on the disabled STS. 52. It is fortunate that the lunar radar stations could compute their orbit. The detailed official report will follow, but briefly this is what happened. The spaceship landed, or rather crashed, several miles west of Cheyenne, as you know, but it was impossible to find the man who was piloting it until yesterday because of the weather. He had been identified as Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled tomorrow, and 15 years ago. Evidently he didn't realize that 15 years of Martian gravity had so weakened his muscles that he could hardly walk under the pull of a full Earth G. As it was, he could only crawl about

a hundred yards from the wrecked life ship before he collapsed. Well, I hope this clears up everything. I hope you're not getting the snowstorms up there like we've been getting them. John B. Reimley, Captain C.B. I. End of The Man Who Hated Mars by Randall Garrett. The Bramble Bush by Randall Garrett. This Libre Vox recording is in the public domain. The story was first published in Analogue August, 1962. There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise.

He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes. Old nursery rhyme. Peter DeHooch was dreaming that the moon, had blown up when he awakened. The room was dark except for the glowing nightlight near the door, and he sat up trying to separate the dream from reality. He focused his eyes on the glowplate. What had awakened him? Something had, he was sure, but there didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary now. The explosion in his dreams had seemed extraordinarily realistic. He could still remember vividly the vibration and the crump of the noise, but there was no sign of what might

have caused the dream sequence. Maybe something fell, he thought. He swung his legs off the bed and padded barefoot over to the light switch. He was so used to walking under the light lunar gravity that he was no longer conscious of it. He pressed the switch and the room was suddenly flooded with light. He looked around. Everything was in place, a place. Apparently, there was nothing on the floor that shouldn't be there. The books were all in their places in the bookshelf. The stuff on his desk seemed undisturbed. The only thing that wasn't as it should be was the picture on the wall.

It was a reproduction of a painting by Peter De Hooch, which he had always liked, aside from the fact that he had been named after the 17th century Dutch artist. The picture was slightly askew on the wall. He was sleepily trying to figure out the significance of that when the phone sounded. He walked over and picked it up. Yeah. Gus, Gus, get over here quick. Sam Willows' voice came excitedly from the instrument.

What's the matter, puss? He asked, blearily. Number two just blew. We need help Gus fast. I'm on my way, De Hoot said. Take C corridor, Willows warned. A and B are caved in, and the bulkheads have dropped. Make it snappy.

I'm already gone, De Hoot said, dropping the phone back into place. He grabbed his vacuum suit from its hanger and got into it as though his own room had already sprung an air leak. Number two has blown, he thought. That would be the one that Ferguson and Medi were working on. What had they been cooking? He couldn't remember right off the bat. Something touchy, he thought.

something pretty hot. But that wouldn't cause an atomic reactor to blow. It obviously hadn't been a nuclear blow-up of any proportions, or he wouldn't be here right now, zipping up the front of his vac suit. Still, it had been powerful enough to shake the lunar crust a little, or he wouldn't have been wakened by the blast. These new reactors could get us out a lot more power,

and they could do a lot more than the old ones could, but they weren't as safe as the old heavy metal reactors by a long shot. None had blown up yet, quite, but there was still the chance. That's why they were built on Luna instead of on Earth. Considering what they could do, De Hoogh often felt that it would be safer if they were built out on some nice safe asteroid, preferably one in the Jovian Trojan sector. He clamped his fishbowl on tight, opened the door, and sprinted toward corridor C.

The trouble with the Ditt-Mars-Horst reactor was that it lacked any automatic negative feedback system. If a D.H. decided to go wild, it went wild. Fortunately, that rarely happened. The safe limits for reactions was quite wide, wider usually than the reaction limits themselves, so that there was always a margin of safety. and within the limits, a nicety of control existed that made nucleonics almost an esoteric branch of chemistry. Cookbook chemistry practically.

One deuterium? Recipe, T.O.1.00813 grams. Purist hydrogen negative one add slowly and with care, 1.00896 grams, fine-grade neutrons. Cook well until done in a Ditt-March. Harsed Reactor. Yield, 2.1471 grams rare old deuterium plus some 2 million million, million ergs of raw energy. Now you are cooking with gas.

All you had to do was keep the reaction going at a slow enough rate so that the energy could be bled off and there was nothing to worry about. Usually. But control of the feebilizer feels still wasn't perfect. because the fields that enfeebled the reactions and made them easy to control weren't yet too well understood. Peter DeHooch turned into Corridor C and kept on running. There was plenty of air still in this corridor, and there was apparently little likelihood of his needing his vaxuit. But on the moon, nobody responds to an emergency call without a vac suit.

He was troubled about corridors A and B. The explosion must have been pretty violent to have sealed off two of the four corridors leading from the living quarters to the reaction labs. Two corridors went directly to one of the reactors. Two went directly to the second. Two more connected the reactor labs themselves, putting the labs and the living quarters at the corners of an equilateral triangle. Peter had never been able to figure out why A and B corridors led to reactor two, while C and D led to reactor one. Logically, he thought, it should have been the other way around. Oh, well. Going down C meant that he'd have to get to reactor two the long way around.

What had the damage been, he asked himself. Had anyone been hurt or killed? He pushed the questions out of his mind. There was no point in speculating. He'd have the information soon enough. He took the cutoff to the left at a 60-degree angle to corridor C. which led him directly to Corridor E, bypassing Reactor 1. He noticed as he went by that the operations lamp was out. Nobody was working with Reactor 1. As he pounded on down the empty corridor, he suddenly realized that he hadn't seen anyone else running with him.

There were five other men in the reactor station, and, so far, he had seen no one. He knew where Willows was, but where were Ferguson, Mettie, lanyard in Quillan. He pushed those questions out of his mind, too, for the time being. A head popped out of the door at the far end of the corridor. Gus! Hurry, Gus!

De Hooch didn't bother to answer Willows. He was short of breath as it was. He knew besides that no answer was expected. He had known Willows for years and knew how he thought. It was Willows who had first tagged DeHooch with that sillyness. nickname Guzzle. Not because Peter was such a heavy drinker, although he could hold it like a gentleman, but because he had thought Guzzle de Hooch was so uproarously funny. Nobody likes a gusel as well as De Hooch, he'd say with an idiot grin. As a result, everybody

called Peter Guzz now. The head had vanished back into the control room of reactor, too. De Hooch kept on running, his breath ran. rasping loudly in the confines of the fishbowl helmet. Running 400 yards isn't the easiest thing in the world, even if a man is in good physical condition. There was less weight to contend with, but the mass that had to be pushed along remained the same. The notion that running on Luna was an effortless breeze

was one that only earth-huggers clung to. He ran into the control room and stopped, panting heavily. What happened? Sam Willows' normally handsome face looked drawn. Something went wrong. I don't know what. I was finishing up with reactor one when I heard the explosion. They are both—he gestured toward the reactor, both in there.

Still alive? I think so. One of them, anyway. Take a look. De Hooch went over to the periscope and put his eyes to the binoculars. He could see two figures in heavy, dull gray, Radiation-proof suits. They were lying flat on the floor, and neither was moving.

De Hooch said as much. The one on the left was moving his arm, just a little, Willows said. I'll swear he was. Something in the man's voice made De Hooch turn his head away from the periscope's eyepieces. Willow's face was gray, and a thin film of greasy perspiration reflected the light from the overhead plates. The man was on the verge of panic. "'Calm down, Puss,' De Hooch said gently. "'Where's Quillan and Lanyard?'

"'They're in their rooms,' Willow said in a tight voice. "'Trapped. The bulkheads have closed them off in A. "'No air in the corridor. We'll have to dig them out. "'I called them both on the phone. They're all right. But they're trapped.' "'Did you call base?' "'Yes. They haven't got a ship. They sent three moon cats, though. They ought to be here by morning.' De Hooch looked at the chronometer on the wall. O. 112. Greenwich Time.

Morning meant any time between eight and noon. The position of the sun up on the surface had nothing to do with lunar time. As a matter of fact, there was a full earth shining at the moment, which meant that it wouldn't be dawn on the surface for a week yet. If the cats from base get here by noon, we'll be okay, won't we? De Hooch asked. Look at the instruments. Willow said.

De Hooch ran a practice eye over the console and swallowed. What were they running? Mercury 203, Willow said. Half-life, 46.5 days. Beta and gamma emitter. Converts to thallium-203, stable. What did they want with a kilogram of the stuff? Special order.

Shipment to Earth for some reason. Haven't you checked the endpoint? She's building up fast. No, no, I haven't. He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. Check it, said to Hooch. Do any of the controls work? I don't know.

I didn't want to fiddle with him. You start giving them a rundown. I'm going to get into a suit and go pull those two out of there, if they're still alive. He opened the locker and took his radiation-proof suit out. He checked it over carefully and began shucking his Vax suit. A few minutes delay in getting to the men in the reactor's ante-room didn't matter, much. If they hadn't been killed outright and were still alive, they would probably live a good deal longer. The shells of the radiation suits didn't look damaged, and the instruments

indicated very little radiation in the room. Whatever it was that had exploded had done most of its damage at the other end of their reactor. Evidently a fissure had been opened to the surface 40 feet above, a fissure big enough to let all the air out of A and B corridors, and activate the automatic bulkheads to seal off the airless section. What troubled him was Willows. If he hadn't known the man so well, De Hootch would have verbally blasted him where he stood. His reaction to trouble had been typical. De Hooch had already seen Willows in trouble three times,

and each time the reaction had been the same near panic. Every time his first thought had been to scream for help, rather than to do anything himself. Almost anyone else would have made one call and then climbed into a radiation suit to get Ferguson and Medi out of the ante-room. There was certainly no apparent immediate danger. But all that Willows had done

was yell for someone to come and do his thinking and acting for him. He had called base, he had called De Hooch, he had called Quillen and Lanyard, but he hadn't done anything else. Now he had to be handled with kid gloves. If DeHooch didn't act calm if he didn't go about things just right, Willows might very likely go over the line into total panic.

As long as he had someone to depend on, he'd be all right, and DeHooch didn't want to lose the only help he had right now. Fermium 256, said Willows in a tight, flat voice. What? DeHooch asked calmly. "'Firmium 256,' Willow's repeated. "'That's what the stuff is going to start building towards. "'Spontaneous fission, half-life of three hours.' "'He took a deep breath.

"'The reactor won't be able to contain it. "'We haven't got that kind of bleed-off control.' "'No,' to Huge agreed. "'I suggest we stop it.' "'The freezer control isn't functioning,' Willow said. "'I guess that's what they went in there to correct.' "'I doubt it,' De Hoot said carefully. "'They wouldn't have needed suits for that.

"'They must have had something else bothering them. "'I'd be willing to bet they went in to pull a sample and something went wrong.' "'Why, what makes you think so?' "'If there had been trouble, they'd have called for someone to stay here at the console. "'Both of them wouldn't have gone in if there was any trouble.' "'Yeah, yeah, I guess you're right,' he said visibly relieved. What do you suppose went wrong? Look at your meters.

Four of them aren't registering. Willows looked. I hadn't noticed. I thought they were just registering low. You're right, though. Yeah, you're right. The surface bleed off. Hydrogen loss blew a valve is all.

Yeah. He grinned a little. Must have been quite a volcano for a second or two. De Hooch grinned back at him. Yeah, must have. Give me a hand with these clamps. Willows began fastening the clamps on the heavy suit. Do you think Ferguson and Medi are okay, Guz? he asked. De Hooch noticed it was the first time he had used the names of the two men.

Now that there was a chance they were alive, at least in his own mind, he was willing to admit that they were men he knew. Willows didn't want to think that anyone he knew had done such a terrible thing as die. It hit too close to home. The man wasn't thinking, he was willing to grasp at anything that offered him a chance, dream straws. The idea was to keep him busy, keep his mind on trivia, keep him from thinking about what was going on inside that reactor. He should have known automatically that it was building toward Fermium-256. It was the most logical, easiest, and simplest way for a D.H. reactor to go off the deep end. A D.M. Mars-Horced reactor took advantage of the fact

that any number can be expressed as the sum of powers of two, and the number of nucleons in an atomic nucleus was no exception to that mathematical rule. Building atoms by adding nucleons wasn't as simple as putting marbles in a bag because of the energy differential. But the energy derived from the fusion of the elements lighter than iron 56 could be compensated for by using it to pack the nuclei heavier than that. The trick was to find a chain of reactions that gave the least necessary energy transfer. The method by which the reactions were carried out might have driven a mid-20th century physicist a trifle gaga, but most of the reactions themselves would have been recognizable. There were several possible reactions. There were several possible

reactions which Ferguson and Meti could have used to produce HG 203, but to Hooch was fairly sure he knew which one it was. The five-branch double alpha addition scheme was the one that was easiest to use, and the only one that started the damnable doubling chain reaction, where the nuclear weights went up exponentially under the influence of the peculiar conditions within the reactor. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, hydrogen 2 and helium-4 were stable. So were oxygen 16 and sulfur 32. The reaction encountered a sticky spot at Balearium 8, which is highly unstable, with a half-life

of 10 to the minus 16 seconds, spontaneously fissioning back into two helium-4 nuclei. Past sulfur 32, there was a lot of positron emission as the nuclei fought to increase the number of neutrons to maintain a stable balance. Germanium 64 is not at all stable, and neither is neodymium 128. But the instability can be corrected by positive beta emission. When two nuclei of the resulting xenon 128 are forced together, the positron emission begins long before the co-elioration. essence is complete, resulting in fermium 256. But not even a Dittmar's Horst reactor can stand the next step, because matter itself won't stand it, not even in a D.H. reactor. The trouble is that a D.H. reactor tries. Mathematically,

it was assumed that the resulting nucleus did exist, for an infinitesimal instant of time, literally, mathematically, infinitesimal, so close to zero that it would be utterly impossible to measure it. Someone had dubbed the hypothetical stuff Instantium 512. Whether Instantaneum 512 had any real existence is an argument for philosophers only. The results in any case were catastrophic. The whole conglomeration came apart in a grand splatter of neutrons protons, negatrons, positrons, electrons, neutrinos, a whole slew of Greek-lettered mesons of varying charges and masses, and a fine collection of strange and ultra-strange particles.

Energy? Just oodles and gobs. Peter DeHooch had heard about the results. He had no desire to experience them firsthand. Fortunately, the reaction that led up to them took time. It could be stopped at any time up to the FM-256 stage. According to the instruments, that wouldn't be for another six hours yet. So there was nothing at all to worry about. Even after that, it could be stopped, provided one had a way to get rid of the violently fissioning fermium.

Connections okay? Willows asked. His voice came over the earphones inside the post. ponderous helmet of the radiation suit. Fine, said De Hooch. He adjusted the double periscope so that his vision was clear. Perfect. He tested the controls, moving his arms and legs to see if the suit responded.

The suit was so heavy that, without powered joints, controlled by servo mechanisms, he would have been unable to move even under lunar gravity. With the power on, though, it was no harder than walking underwater in a diving suit. All's well, puss, he said. I'll keep an eye on you, said Willows. Fine, well, here goes Colossus De Hooch. He began walking toward the door that led into the corridor,

which connected the reactor ante-room to the control room. It took time to drag the two inert figures out of the ante-room. All De Hooch could do was grab them under the armpits, apply power and drag them out. He went out the same way he had come in, traversing the separate chambers in reverse order. First came the decontamination chamber, where the radioactive dust that might have settled on the suits

was sluiced off by the detergent sprays. When the radiation detectors registered low enough, De Hootz dragged Ferguson into the outer chamber, then went back and got Medi and put him through the same process. Then he dragged them on into the control room, so that Willows could get them out of the heavy suits. "'Can you help me, Gus?' Willows asked. It was obvious that he didn't want to open the suits.

He didn't want to see what might be inside. De Hooch helped him. They were both alive but unconscious. Bones had been broken, and many appeared to be suffering from concussion. They were badly damaged, but they'd live. De Hooch and Willows made two trips down E and C. corridors, carrying the men on a stretcher to get them in bed. De Hootch splintered the broken bones as best he could and gave each of them a shot of

Narcadine. He had to do the medical work because Quillan, the medic, was trapped in Corridor A. He called Quillan on the phone to tell him what had happened. He described the signs and symptoms of the victims as best he could, and then did what Quillan told him to do. "'They ought to be all right,' Quillan said. dope in them, they'll be out cold for the next twelve hours, and by that time the boys from base will be here.

Just leave them alone and don't move them anymore. Right, I'll call you back later. Right now, Puss and I are going to see what's wrong with the control linkages on number two. Right, bio. De Hooch and Willows walked back to the control room of No. 2 reactor in silence. Once inside the control room, DeHooch said, How were those control circuits? Willows was supposed to have been checking them

while he had been dragging Ferguson and Medi out of the antechamber. Well, I... I'm not sure. I'll show you what I've found so far, Gus. You ought to take a look at them. I... I'd like you to take a look, see. I think... He gestured toward the console. I think they're all right,

except for the freezer vernier and the pressure release control. He doesn't trust his... own work, De Hoot said. Well, that's all right. Neither do I. Painstakingly, the two of them went over the checking circuits. Willows was right. The freezer and pressure controls were inoperable.

Damn, said De Hootch, double damn. They're probably both stuck at the firewall, Willow said. Sure, where else? I'll have to go in there and unstick them. Help me get back into that two-legged tank again. He wished he knew more about what Ferguson and Medi had been doing. He wished he knew why the two men had gone into the ante room in the first place. He wished a lot of things, but wishing was a useless pastime at this stage of the game.

If only one of the two men had been in that condition to talk. He got back into his radiation-proof suit again, took one last look at the instruments on the console and headed for the reactor. Through the first radiation trap, left turn, right turn, right turn, left turn, through the cold room, through the second radiation trap, through the decontamination chamber, and through the third radiation trap into the ante room. Now that Ferguson and Medi were safely out of the way, he could give his attention to the damage that had been done. Had Ferguson and Medi actually come in, to tap off a sample, as he had suggested to Willows?

He looked around in the wreckage of the antechamber. Quite obviously the heavy door of the sample chamber was wide open, and it certainly appeared that the wreckage was scattered from that point. Cautiously, he went over to look at the open sample chamber. It looked all right, except that the bottom was covered with a bright, metallic dust. He rubbed his finger over it and looked at the fingertip. A very fine dust, and yet it hadn't been scattered very much by the explosion.

Heavy, very likely osmium. Osmium 187 was stable, but it wasn't a normally used step toward Mercury 203. For successive alpha captures would give polonium 2003, not mercury. Ditto for an oxygen fusion. It would be iridium or platinum, of course. Whatever it was, the insurance. instruments in his helmet told him it wasn't hot. He had a hunch that Ferguson and Meti had been building Mercury 203 from

hafnium 179 by the process of successive fusions with hydrogen three, and that something had gone wrong with the H-3 production. It appeared that the explosion had been a simple chemical blast caused by the air oxidation of H-2, but the blater vent at the other end of the reactor had apparently kicked at the same time. An enormous amount of unused energy had been released, blowing the entire emergency bleeder system out. Something didn't seem right. Something stuck in his craw, and he couldn't figure out what it was. He opened up the conduit boxes that led through the antechamber from the control console to the reactor beyond the firewall. Everything looked fine. That meant that whatever it was

that had fouled up the controls was on the other side of the firewall. How does it look? Willow's voice came worriedly over the earphones. Have I already said damn? De Hooch asked. You have, Willow said with forced lightness. You even said double damn. Factorial damn, then, said De Hooch. What's the matter? Apparently the foul up is on the other side of the firewall. Are you going in?

I have to. All right. Watch yourself. I will. He went over to the periscope that surveyed the part of the reactor beyond the firewall. Everything looked normal enough. He carefully checked the pressure gauge. Normal.

Check the spectro for me, will you? He asked. Make sure that's just the normal helium atmosphere in there? Sure. A pause. Nothing but helium, guz. What were you expecting? I don't think I'd care to walk into a hydrogen atmosphere at 300 centigrade.

Neither would I, but how could there be hydrogen in there? There shouldn't be, but there's something screwy going on here and I can't put my finger on it. Well, whatever it is, it isn't hydrogen in the reactor room. Okay, stand by. I'm going in. He walked over to the firewall door. On the other side of it was a small chamber where the oxygen and nitrogen of normal air would be swept out before he opened the inner door to go into the inner chamber itself. There was no need for an airlock since small amounts of impurities in the H.E.4 didn't bother anything. It was just as he turned the lever that

undog the firewall door, that he realized his mistake. But it was too late. The door jerked outward, and a hot wind picked him up and slammed him against the far wall. There was a moment of pain, then nothing. There was something familiar about the man who was turning the wheel, but Tohooch couldn't place it. The man was wearing a black hood, as befitted a torturer and exasperated. executioner. Idiot, said the hooded man, giving the wheel of the rack a little more pressure.

Explain the following. If a half plus a half is equal to a whole, why is halfneum plus halfneum not equal to homium? Stretched as he was on the rack, the hootch could not think straight because of the excruciating pain. a half is 8.28% heavier than a hole, said De Hooch. You are an idiot, nonetheless, said the torturer. He gave the wheel another twist. De Hooch wanted to scream, but he couldn't.

Try again, said the torturer. What is a half plus four plus four plus four plus— Stop! Screamed To Hootch. Stop! Stop! at the osmium. Ah, but it didn't stop at the osmium, said the hooded man. It went on and on, and on, plus four, plus four, plus four, plus four, plus four,

until there were so many plus fours in there that the place looked like an old-fashioned golf course. My legs hurt, said to Hooch. The man was no longer wearing a hood. But De Hooch couldn't tell if it was Willows or himself. We will all go together when we go, said the man. De Hooch turned his head away and looked at the ceiling. And realized that it was the ceiling of the antechamber.

Oh, my legs hurt, he repeated. And he could hear the hoarse whisper inside the helmet. He realized that he was lying flat on his back. He had been jarred around quite a bit in the suit. He wondered if he could sit up. He managed to get both arms behind him and push himself into a sitting position. He wriggled his feet. The servos responded.

He hurt all over, but a little experiment told him he was only bruised. Nothing was broken. He hadn't been hit as hard as Ferguson and Medi had been. Willows! He said, Willows! There was no answer from the headphones. He looked at the chronometer dial inside his helmet. O-249.

He had been unconscious less than ten minutes. The same glance brought his eyes to two other dials. The internal radiation of the suit was a little high, but nothing to worry about. But the dial registering the external radiation was plenty high. Without the protection of the suit, he wouldn't have lived through those ten minutes. Where was Willows? And then he knew, and he pushed any thought of further help from that quarter out of his mind. What had to be done would have to be done by Peter DeHooch alone.

He climbed to his feet. His head hurt, and he swayed with nausea and pain. Only the mass of weight of the suit's shoes kept him upright. Then it passed, and he blinked his eyes and shook his head to clear it. He found he was holding his breath, and he let it out. The trouble had been so simple, and yet he hadn't seen it. Oh, yes, he had. He must have subconsciously. Otherwise, how would he have guessed that the stuff in the sampling chamber was osmium 187?

Ferguson and Metty had been trying to make Mercury-Turface, by adding eight successive tritium nuclei to halfnium-179, progressing through tantalone 182, tungsten 185, renium-188, osmium-191, iridium-194, platinum-197, and gold-200, all of which were unstable. But the hydrogen-3 reaction had gone wrong. The doubling had set in, producing helium-4.

Successive additions of alpha particles to hafnium 179 had produced first tungsten 183 and then osmium 187, both of which were stable. Ferguson and Medi, seeing that something was wrong, drew off a sample and then reset the reaction to produce the HG203 they wanted. Then they had come down to pick up the sample. They hadn't realized that the helium production had gone wrong. wild. Much more helium than necessary was being produced, and the bleeder valve had failed. When they opened the sample chamber, they got a blast of high-pressure helium right in the face. The shock of that sudden release had jarred the whole atmosphere inside the reaction chamber, and the bleeder valve had let go. But the violence of the pressure release had caused a fault

to the surface to open up, and had closed the valve again, jammed it probably. There had been enough pressure left in there to blow to hooch up against the nearest wall when he opened the door. Since the pressure indicator system was connected to the release system, when one had failed, the other had failed. That's why the pressure gauge had indicated normal. And, of course, it had been the pressure differential that had caused the controls to stick. Well, they ought to be all right now, then.

He decided he'd better take a look. The firewall door was still open. He walked over to it and stepped into the small chamber that led to the inner reactor room. The inside door, much weaker than the outer firewall door, had been blown off its hinges. He stepped past it and went on in. What he saw made him jerk his glance away from the periscope in his helmet. and check his radiation detectors again.

Not much change. Relief swept over him as he looked back at the reactor itself. The normally dead black walls were glowing a dull red. It was pure thermal heat, but it shouldn't be doing that. Moving quickly he went over to the place where the control cables came in through the firewall. It took him several minutes to assure himself that they would function from the control room now. There was nothing more to do but get out of here and get that reaction damped. He went out again, closing the firewall door behind him and dogging it tight.

There would be no more helium production now. He went through the radiation trap to the decontamination chamber to wash off whatever it was he had picked up. The decontamination room was a mess. De Hooch stared at the twisted pipes and the stream of water that got. gushed out of a cracked valve. The blast had jarred everything loose. Well, he could still scrub himself off. Except that the scrubbers weren't working. He swore under his breath and twisted the valve that was supposed to dispense detergent. It did, thank Heaven. He doused himself good with it and then got under the flowing water. The radiation level remained exactly where it was.

He walked over and pulled one of the brushes off the defunct scrubber and sudsed it up. It wasn't until he started to use it that he got a good look at his arms. He hadn't paid any attention before. He walked over to the mirror to get a good look. You look magnificent, he told his reflection acidly. The radiation-proof armor looked as though it had been chrome-plated. But DeHooch knew better than that. He knew exactly what it happened.

He was nicely plated all over with a film of mercury, which had amalgamated itself with the metallic surface of the suit. He was thoroughly wet with the stuff, and no amount of water and detergent would take it off. There was something wrong with the No. 2 reactor all right. It had leaked out some of the mercury 203 that Ferguson and Medi had been making. He thought a minute. It hadn't been leaking out just before he opened the door in the firewall, because Willows would certainly have noticed the bright mercury line when he checked with the spectroscope.

The stuff must have been released when the pressure dropped. He walked back to the ante-room and looked at the sampling chamber. There were a few droplets of mercury around the inlet. Thus far, the three pressure explosions had wrecked about everything that was wreckable, he thought. No, not quite. There was still the chance that the whole station would go if he didn't get back into the control room and stop that powers of two-chain. The detonation of instantaneous 512 would finish the job by doing what high-pressure helium could never do. He glanced at the thermometer. The temperature behind the firewall had risen to 240 centigrade. It wasn't supposed to be above 200.

It wasn't too serious, really, because a little heat like that wouldn't bother a Dittemar's Horst reactor, but it indicated that things back there weren't working properly. He turned away and walked back to the decontamination chamber. There must be some way he could get the mercury off the suit, because he couldn't take the suit off until the mercury was gone. First, he tried scrubbing. That was what showed him how upset he really was. He had actually scrubbed the armor on his left arm free of mercury when he realized what he was

doing and threw the brush down in disgust. "' Use your head to hooch,' he told himself. What good would he do to scrub the stuff off the few places he could reach? In the bulky armor he was worse than muscle bound. He couldn't touch any part of his back. He couldn't bend far enough to touch his legs. His shoulders were inaccessible even. Scrubbing was worse than useless.

It was time-wasting. He picked up the brush again and began scrubbing at the other arm. It gave him something to do while he thought. While he was thinking he wasn't wasting time. What would dissolve mercury? Nitric acid. Good old H-N-O-3. Fine.

Except that the hot lab was at the other end of the reactor, where the fissure had let all the air out. The bulkheads had dropped and he couldn't get in, and naturally the nitric acid would be in the lab. For the first time, he found himself hating Willows's guts. If he were around, he could get some acid from the cold lab or even from the other hot lab at number one. If Willows, he stood up and dropped the brush. Don't boob moron idiot.

Not Willows, himself. There was no reason on earth or, Luna, why he couldn't walk over to number one hot lab and get the stuff himself. The habit of never leaving the lab without thorough decontamination was so thoroughly ingrained in him that he had simply never thought about it until that moment. But what did a little contamination with radioactive mercury mean at a time like this? He could take F corridor to number one, use the decontamination chamber and the acid from the lab, shuck off his armor there and come back through E-corridor.

F could be cleaned up later. So simple. He went through the light trap at the next chamber and turned the handle on the sliding door. The door wouldn't budge. It had been warped by the force of the helium blast, and it was stuck in its grooves. Well, there were tools. The thing could be unstuck. Peter DeHooch was a determined man.

a strong man and a smart man. But the door was more determined and stronger than he was, and his intelligence didn't give him much of an edge right then. After an hour's hard work, he managed to get the door open about 18 inches, then it froze fast and refused to move again. All the power and leverage he could bring to bear was useless. The door had opened all it was going to open. Beyond it, he could see the next radiation trap and freedom.

Eighteen inches would have been plenty of space for him to get through if he had not been wearing the radiation-proof suit. But he didn't dare take that suit off. By the time he got out of the suit, the intensely radioactive mercury on its surface would have made his death only a matter of time, and not much time at that. He told himself that if it were simply a matter of running to the control of the control room to shut off the D.H. Reactor, he'd do it. That could have been done before he lost consciousness. But it wasn't that easy. Damping the reaction took time and control. The stuff had to be eased

back slowly. Shutting off the Dittmar's horse would simply blow a hole in the crust of Luna and kill everyone if he did it now. There were four or five men out there who would die if he pulled anything foolish like that. The explosion would not. be as powerful as the instantaneous 512 reaction would be, but it would be none the less deadly for all that. There had to be either a way to scrape the mercury off the suit, or a way to open the door another six inches. Or, he added suddenly, a way to get safely out of the suit. At the end of another twenty minutes he had still thought of nothing. He wandered around the decontamination room, looking at everything, hoping to get safely out of the suit. He hoped to be

he might see something that would give him a clue. He didn't. He went into the antechamber of the reactor and glared at the door in the firewall. The instruments said that things were getting pretty fierce on the other side of that wall. Temperature, 295 and still rising. Pressure? He carefully cracked the inlet of the sampling chamber and got a soft hiss. The helium was expanding from the heat. That was all. Part of the trouble with a reactor, he thought, was the high percentage of oxygen and nitrogen that had mixed in during the ten minutes or so

that the door was open. All hell was fixing to bust loose in there, and he, Peter de Hooch, was right next to it. He walked back into the decontamination chamber. What would dissolve mercury? Mercury would dissolve gold. Would gold dissolve mercury? Very funny. He was like a turtle, De Hooch thought.

Perfectly safe as long as he was in his shell, but take him out of it, and he would die. Hell of a way to spend the night, he thought. A night in shiny armor. That struck him as funny. He began to laugh and laugh. He almost laughed himself sick before he realized that it was fear and despair that were driving him into hysteria, not a sense of humor. He forced himself to calmness.

He must be calm. He must think. Yes. How do you go about getting rid of a radioactive metal that is, in effect, welded to the outside of your suit? The trouble was he was a nucleonics engineer, not a chemist. He remembered quite a bit of his chemistry, of course, but not as much as he would have liked. Could the stuff be neutralized?" Sure, he told himself very simple.

All he had to do was go climb into the reactor and let the reactor do the job. Mercury 203 plus an alpha particle gave nice stable lead-207. Just go climb right into the Dittmar's horse and let the helium-4 do the job. But the thought stuck in his mind. He kept telling himself not to panic as Willows had done. done. And, several minutes later, chuckling to himself in a half-demented fashion, he opened the firewall door and went in to let the helium do the job. It was nearly eight in the morning, Greenwich time, when the three surface vehicles with their wide caterpillar treads lumbered to a

halt near the kiosk that marked the entrance to the underground site of the laboratories. Okay, said one of the men in the first machine. holding a microphone to his lips. Let's go in. If what Willows said is true, the whole place may blow any minute now. But I'm not asking for volunteers. Nobody will be any safer up here than they will down there, and we have to do a job. Besides, Willows wasn't completely rational.

Nobody would put on a vac suit and run away like that if he was in his right mind. So we can discount a lot of what he said when we picked him up on the road. The five of us in this car are going straight to number one reactor to see what can be done to stop whatever is going on. The rest of you start trying to see if you can get those strapped men out of A and B corridors. All right, let's move in. Less than five minutes later, five men went into the control room of No. 1 reactor. They found Peter DeHooch sound asleep in the control chair, and the instruments showed that the Dittmar's hoarse reactor was inactive.

One of the men shook to hooch gently, awakening him in the middle of a snore. What? he said groggily. We're here, Guz. Everything's okay. Sure, everything's okay. Nothing to it. All I did was wait until the temperature got above three, fifty-seven centigrade above the boiling point of mercury. Then I went in and let the hot helium boil. the stuff off me. Nothing to it. Nearly borrow myself alive, but it did the trick. What? asked the man in a puzzled voice, are you talking about? I am a knight in dull armor,

said Peter De Hooch, dozing off again. Then he roused himself a little and said, without opening his eyes, Hi-yo, Criks over away! And he was sound asleep again. And when he saw what he had done with all his might and mane, he jumped back in that bramble bush and scratched them in again. End of The Bramble Bush by Randall Garrett Viewpoint by Randall Garrett This Libre Vox recording is in the public domain. This story was first published in astounding science fiction January 1960. Point by Randall Garrett.

There was a dizzy, sickening whirl of mental blackness, not true blackness, but a mind-enveloping darkness that was filled with a multicolored little sparks of thoughts and memories that scattered through the darkness like tiny glowing mice, fleeing from something unknown, fleeing outwards and away toward a somewhere that was equally unknown, scurrying, moving, changing. each half-recognizable as it passed, but leaving only a vague impression behind.

Memories were shattered into their component data bits, in that maelstrom of not quite darkness, and scattered throughout infinity and eternity. Then the pseudo-dark stopped its violent motion and became still, no longer scattering the fleeting memories, but merely blanketing them. And slowly, ever so slowly. the powerful cohesive forces that existed between the data bits began pulling them back together again as the not blackness faded. The associative powers of the mind began putting the frightened little things together as they drifted back in from vast distances, trying to fit them together again in an ordered hole like a vast jigsaw puzzle in five dimensions,

little clots and patches formed as the bits were snuggled. into place here and there. The process was far from complete when Broom regained consciousness. Broom sat up abruptly and looked around him. The room was totally unfamiliar. For a moment that seemed perfectly understandable. Why shouldn't the room look odd

after he had gone through? What? He rubbed his head and looked around more carefully. It was not just that the room itself was unfamiliar as a whole. The effect was greater than that. It was not the first time in his life he had regained consciousness in unfamiliar surroundings, but always before he had been aware that only the pattern was different, not the details. He sat there on the floor and took stock of himself and his surroundings. He was a big man, six feet tall when he stood up,

and proportionately heavy a big bone frame covered with whole. He was a big bone frame covered with hard, well-trained muscles. His hair and beard were a dark blonde, and rather shaggy because of the time he'd spent in prison. Prison? Yes, he'd been in prison. The rough clothing he was wearing was certainly nothing like the type of dress he was used to. He tried to force his memory to give him the information he was looking for, but it wouldn't

come. A face flickered in his mind for a moment, and a name. "'Cuntarini.' "'He seemed to remember a startled look on the Italian's face, "'but he could neither remember the reason for it nor when it had been. "'But it would come back. "'He was sure of that. "'Meanwhile, where the devil was he?'

"'From where he was sitting he could see that the room was fairly large, "'but not extraordinarily so. "'A door in one wall led into another room of about the room, the same size, but they were like no other rooms he had ever seen before. He looked down at the floor. It was soft, almost as soft as a bed, covered with a thick, even resilient layer of fine material of some kind. It was some sort of carpeting that covered the floor from wall to wall, but no carpet had ever felt like this. He lifted himself gingerly to his feet. He wasn't hurt, at least. He felt fine, except for the gaps in his memory.

The room was well lit. The illumination came from the ceiling, which seemed to be made of some glowing semi-translucent metal that cast a shadowless glow over everything. There was a large, bulky table near the wall away from the door. It looked almost normal, except that the objects on it were like nothing that had ever existed. Their purposes were unknown and their shapes meaningless. He jerked his head away, not wanting to look at the things on the table. The walls at least look familiar. They seemed to be pandled in some fine wood.

He walked over and touched it, and knew immediately that, no matter what it looked like, it wasn't wood. The illusion was there to the eye, but no wood ever had such a hard, smooth, glass-like surface as this. He jerked his fingertips away. He recognized them the emotion that had made him turn away from the objects on the table and pull his hand away from the unnatural wall. It was fear.

Fear? Nonsense. He put his hand out suddenly and slapped the wall with his palm. and held it there. There was nothing to be afraid of. He laughed at himself softly. He'd faced death a hundred times during the war without showing fear. This was no time to start.

What would his men think of him if they saw him getting shaky over the mere touch of a wood-like wall? The memories were coming back. This time he didn't try to probe for them. He just let them flow. He turned around again, and looked deliberately at the big bulky table. There was a faint humming noise coming from it which had escaped his notice before.

He walked over to it and looked at the queerly shaped things that lay on its shining surface. He had already decided that the table was no more wood than the wall, and a touch of a finger to the surface verified the decision. The only thing that looked at all familiar on the table was the sheaf of written material. He picked it up and glanced over the pages, noticing the neat characters so unlike any that he knew. He couldn't read a word of it. He grinned and put the sheets back down on the smooth tabletop. The humming appeared to be coming from a metal box on the other side of the table.

He circled around and took a look at the thing. It had levers and knobs and other projections, but their functions were not immediate discernible. There were several rows of studs with various unrecognizable symbols on them. This would certainly be something to tell in London, when and if he ever got back. He reached out a tentative finger and touched one of the symbol marked studs. There was a loud click in the stillness of the room, and he leaped back from the device. He watched it warily for a moment, but nothing more seemed to be able to.

to be forthcoming. Still, he decided it might be best to let things alone. There was no point in messing with things that undoubtedly controlled forces beyond his ability to cope with or understand. After all, such a long time— He stopped. Time? Time? What had Contarini said about time? Something about its being like a river that flowed rapidly that much he remembered. Oh, yes. And that it was almost impossible to try to swim backwards against the current, or something else. What?

He shook his head. The more he tried to remember what his fellow prisoner had told him, the more elusive it became. He had traveled in time. That much was certain. But how far, and in which direction? Toward the future, obviously. Contarini had made it plain that going into the past was impossible. Then could he, Broome, get back to his own time?

Or was he destined to stay in this place, wherever and whenever it was? Evidently, movement through the Time River had a tendency to disorganize a man's memories. Well, wasn't that obvious anyway. Even normal movement through time, at the rate of a day per day, made some memories fade, and some were lost entirely, while others remain clear and bright. What would a sudden jump of centuries do? His memory was improving, though. If he just let it alone, most of it would come back, and he could orient himself. Meanwhile, he might as well explore his surroundings a little more. He resolved to keep his hands off anything that wasn't readily identifiable. There

was a single, oddly shaped chair by the bulky table, and behind the chair was a heavy curtain which apparently covered a window. He could see a gleam of light coming through the divisions in the curtains. Broom decided he might as well get a good look at whatever was outside the building he was in. He stepped over, parted the curtains, and—and gasped. It was night-time outside, and the sky was clear. He recognized the... familiar constellations up there, but they were dimmed by the life of the city that stretched below him. And what a city!

At first it was difficult for his eyes to convey their impressions intelligently to his brain. What they were recording was so unfamiliar that his brain could not decode the messages they sent. There were broad, well-lit streets that stretched on and on as far as he could see, and beyond them, flittering fairy bridges rose into the air and arched into the distance, and the buildings towered over everything. He forced himself to look down, and it made him dizzy. The building he was in was so high that it would have projected through the clouds if there

had been any clouds. Broome backed away from the window and let the curtain close. He'd had all of that he could take for right now. The inside of the building, his immediate surroundings, looked almost homey after seeing that monstrous endless city outside. He skirted the table with its still humming machine and walked toward the door that led to the other room. A picture hanging on a nearby wall caught his eye, and he stopped. It was a portrait of a man in unfamiliar, outlandish clothing, but Broom had seen otter clothing in his travels. but the thing that had stopped him

was the amazing reality of the picture. It was almost as if there were a mirror there reflecting the face of a man who stood invisibly before it. It wasn't, of course, it was only a painting. But the lifelike somber eyes of the man were focused directly on him. Broome decided he didn't like the effect at all

and hurried into the next room. There were several rows of, of the bulky tables in there, each with its own chair. Broome's footsteps sounded loud in the room, the echoes rebounding from the walls. He stopped and looked down. The floor wasn't covered with the soft carpeting. It had a square mosaic pattern, as though it might be composed of tile of some kind, and yet, though it was harder than the carpet, it had a kind of queer resiliency of its own.

The room itself was larger than the one he had just quitted, but not as well lit. For the first time he thought of the possibility that there might be someone else here besides himself. He looked around, wishing that he had a weapon of some kind. Even a knife would have made him feel better. But there had been no chance of that, of course. Prisoners of war are hardly allowed to carry weapons with him, so none had been available. He wondered what sort of men live. in this fantastic city.

So far he had seen no one. The streets below had been filled with moving vehicles of some kind, but it had been difficult to tell whether there had been anyone walking down there from this height. Continieri had said that it would be—how had he said it? Like sleeping for hundreds of years and waking up in a strange world? Well, it was that all right. Did anyone know he was here? He had the uneasy feeling that hidden, unseen eyes were watching his every move, and yet he could detect nothing.

There was no sound except the faint humming from the device in the room behind him, and a deeper, almost inaudible, rushing, rumbling sound that seemed to come from far below. His wish for a weapon came back stronger than before. The very fact that he had seen no one set his nerves on edge, even more. than the sight of a known enemy would have done. He was suddenly no longer interested in his surroundings. He felt trapped in this strange, silent room. He could see a light shining through a door at the far end of the room.

Perhaps it was the way out. He walked toward it, trying to keep his footsteps as silent as possible as he moved. The door had a pane of translucent glass in it, and there were more of the unreadable character. on it. He wished fervently that he could decipher them they might tell him where he was. Carefully, he grasped the handle of the door, twisted it, and pulled. And careful as he had been, the door swung inward with surprising rapidity. It was a great deal thinner and lighter than he had supposed. He looked down at it, wondering if there was any way the door could be locked.

There was a tiny vertical slit set in a small metal panel in the door, but it was much too tiny to be a keyhole. Still—it didn't matter. If necessary, he could smash the glass to get through the door. He slipped out into what was obviously a hallway beyond the door. The hallway stretched away to either side, lined with doors similar to the one he had just come through. How did a man get out of this place anyway? The door behind him was pressing against his hand with a patient insistence as though it wanted to close itself.

He almost let it close, but at the last second he changed his mind. Better the devil we know than the devil we don't, he thought to himself. He went back into the office and looked around for something to prop the door open. He found a small, beautifully formed porcelain dish on a little, beautifully formed porcelain dish on one of the desks, picked it up and went back to the door. The dish held the door open an inch or so. That was good enough. If someone locked the door, he could still smash the glass if he wanted to, but the absence of the dish when he returned would tell him that he was not alone in this mysterious place. He started down the hallway

to his right checking the doors as he went. They were all locked. He knew that he could break into any of them, but he had a feeling that he would find no exit through any of them. They all looked as though they concealed more of the big rooms. None of them had any lights behind them. Only the one door that he had come through showed the tell-tale glow from the other side. Why? He had the terrible feeling that he had been drawn across time to this place for a purpose, and yet he could think of no rational reason.

reason for believing so. He stopped as another memory came back. He remembered being in the stone-walled dungeon with its smelly straw beds, lit only by the faint shaft of sunlight that came from the barred window high overhead. Contarini, this short, wiry little Italian, who was in the next cell, looked at him through the narrow opening. "'I think it can be done, my friend. It is the mind and the mind alone that sees the flow of time.

The body experiences but does not see. Only the soul is capable of knowing eternity. Broom outranked the little Italian, but prison can make brothers of all men. You think it's possible, then, to get out of a place like this simply by thinking about it? Contrini nodded. Why not? did not the saints do so? And what was that?

Contemplation of the eternal, my comrade, contemplation of the eternal. Broom held back a grin. Then why, my Venetian friend, have you not left this place long since? I try, Contarini had said simply, But I cannot do it. You wish you know why? It is because I am afraid. Afraid?

Broome raised an eyebrow. He had seen Contarini on the battlefield, dealing death in hand-to-hand combat, and the Italian hadn't impressed him as a coward. "'Yes,' said the Phoenician, afraid. "'Oh, I am not afraid of men, I fight. Someday I may die, will die. This does not frighten me, death. I am not afraid of what men may do to me.'

He stopped and frowned. but of this I have a great fear. Only a saint can handle such things, and I am no saint. I hope, my dear Contarini, Broom said dryly, that you are not under the impression that I am a saint? No, perhaps not, Contrini said. Perhaps not. But you are braver than I.

I am not afraid of any man living. But you are afraid of neither the living nor the dead. nor of man nor devil, which is a great deal more than I can say of myself. Besides, there is the blood of kings in your veins, and has not a king protection that even a man of noble blood such as myself does not have? I think so. Oh, I have no doubt that you could do it if you but would. And then perhaps when you are free you would free me for teaching you all I know to accomplish this. My fear holds me chained here, but you have no chains of fear.

Broom had thought that over for a moment, then grinned. All right, my friend, I'll try it. What's your first lesson? The memory faded from Broom's mind. Had he really moved through some segment of eternity to reach this place? Had he—he felt a chill run through him. What was he doing here? How could he have taken it all so calmly? Afraid of man or devil, no.

But this was neither. He had to get back. The utter alienness of this bright, shining, lifeless wonderland was too much for him. Instinctively he turned and ran back toward the room he had left. If he got back to the place where he had appeared in this world, perhaps somehow some force would return. turn him to where he belonged. The door was, as he had left it, the porcelain dish still in place.

He scooped up the dish in one big hand and ran on into the room, letting the door shut itself behind him. He ran on through the large room with its many tables, into the brightly lighted room beyond. He stopped. What could he do now? He tried to remember the things that the Italian had told him. him to do, and he could not for the life of him remember them.

His memory still had gaps in it. Gaps he did not know were there because he had not yet probed for them. He closed his eyes in concentration, trying to bring back a memory that would not come. He did not hear the intruder until the man's voice echoed in the room. Broom's eyes opened, and instantly every muscle and nerve, in his hard-trained body tensed for action. There was a man standing in the doorway of the office. He was not a particularly impressive man, in spite of the queer cut of his clothes.

He was not as tall as broom, and he looked soft and overfed. His punch protruded roundly from the open front of the shortcoat, and there was a fleshiness about his face that betrayed too much good living. and he looked even more frightened than Broom had been a few minutes before. He was saying something in a language that Broom did not understand, and the tenseness in his voice betrayed his fear. Broom relaxed. He had nothing to fear from this little man.

"'I won't hurt you,' Broom said. "'I had no intention of intruding on your property, but all I ask is help. The little man was blinking and backing away as though he was. were going to turn and bolt at any moment. Broom laughed. You have nothing to fear from me, little man. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Richard Broom, known as he stopped, and his eyes widened.

Total memory flooded over him as he realized fully who he was and where he belonged. And the fear hit him again in a raging flood, sweeping over his mind. and blotting it out. Again, the darkness came. This time the blackness faded quickly. There was a face, a worried face, looking at him through an aperture in the stone wall. The surroundings were so familiar that the bits of memory which had been scattered again during the passage through centuries of time came back more quickly and settled back into their accustomed pattern more easily. The face was that of the Italian Contarrius. He was looking both worried and disappointed.

"'You were not gone long, my Lord King,' he said. "'But you were gone. Of that there can be no doubt. Why did you return?' Richard Broome sat up on his pallet of straw. The scene in the strange building already seemed dreamlike, but the fear was still there. "'I couldn't remember,' he said softly. I couldn't remember who I was nor why I had gone to that place, and when I remembered I came back. Contarini nodded sadly. It is as I have heard.

The memory ties one too strongly to the past to one's own time. One must return as soon as the mind had adjusted. I am sorry, my friend. I had hoped we could escape. But now it appears that we must wait. until our ransoms are paid. And I much fear that mine will never be paid. Nor mine, said the big man, dully.

My faithful blonde didn't found me, but he may not have returned to London. And even if he has, my brother John may be reluctant to raise the money. What? Would England hesitate to ransom the brave king, who has fought so gallantly in the Holy Crusades? Never. You will be free, my friend. But Richard Planted Jeanette just stared at the little dish that he still held in his hand, the fear still in his heart. Men would still call him lion-hearted, but he knew that he would never again deserve the title. And nearly eight centuries away in time and thousands of miles away in space,

a Mr. Edward Jasperson was speaking hurriedly into the telephone that stood by the electric typewriter on his desk. "'That's right, officer. "'Sweet 8601, Empire State Building. "'I was working late, and I left the lights on to my office "'when I went out to get a cup of coffee. "'When I came back, he was here. "'A big bearded man wearing a thing that looked like a monk's robe "'made out of gunny sack.

"'What? No, I locked the door when I left. "'What? Well, the only thing that's missing, "'as far as I can tell, is a ceramic ash-tray from one of the desks. He was holding that in his hand when I saw him. What? Oh, where did he go? Mr. Jasperson paused in his rush of words. Well, I must have gotten a little dizzy. I was pretty shocked, you know. To be honest, I didn't see where he went. I must have fainted.

But I think you can pick him up if you hurry. With that get-up on, he can't get very far away. All right, thank you, officer. He cradled the phone, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and dabbed at his damp forehead. He was a very frightened little man, but he knew he'd get over it by morning. End of. Viewpoint by Randall Garrett. Time fuse by Randall Garrett. This Libre-Vox recording is in the public domain. Time fuse by Randall Garrett.

This story was first. published in If Worlds of Science Fiction March, 1954. Commander Benedict kept his eyes on the rear plate as he activated the intercom. All right, cut the power. We ought to be safe enough here. As he released the intercom, Dr. Lighter of the astronomical staff stepped up to his side. Perfectly safe, he nodded. Although even at this distance a star-going Nova ought to be quite a display.

play. Benedict didn't shift his gaze from the plate. Do you have your instruments set up? Not quite, but we have plenty of time. The light won't reach us for several hours yet. Remember, we were outracing it at ten lights. The commander finally turned, slowly letting his breath out in a soft sigh. Dr. Lighter, I would say that this is just about the foulest coincidence that could happen to the first interstellar vessel ever to leave the solar system. Lighter shrugged. One way of thinking, yes, it is certainly true that we will never know now whether Alpha Centauri

A ever had any planets. But in another way it is extremely fortunate that we should be so near a stellar explosion because of the wealth of scientific information we can obtain. As you say, it is a coincidence and probably one that happens only once in a billion years. The chances of any particular star going Nova are small, that we should be so close when it happens as of a vanishingly small order of probability. Commander Benedict took off his cap and looked at the damp stain in the sweatband. Nevertheless, Doctor, it is damned unnerving to come out of Ultra Drive a couple of hundred

million miles from the first star ever visited by man and have to turn tail and run because the damn thing practically blows up in your face." Lighter could see that Benedict was upset. He rarely used the same profanity twice in one sentence. They had been downright lucky at that. If Lighter hadn't seen the star begin to swell and brighten, if he hadn't known what it meant, or if Commander Benedict hadn't been quick enough in shifting the ship back into to Ultra Drive.

Lightcher had a vision of an incandescent cloud of gaseous metal that had once been a spaceship." The intercom buzzed. The commander answered. "'Yes.' "'Sir, would you tell Dr. Lighter that we have everything set up now?' Lighter nodded in turn to leave. "'I guess we have nothing to do now, but wait.' When the light from the Nova did come.

Benedict was back at the plate again, the forward one this time, since the ship had been turned around in order to align the astronomy lab in the nose with the star. Alpha Centauri A began to brighten and spread. It made Benedict think of a light bulb connected through a rheostat, with someone turning that rheostat, turning it until the circuit was well overloaded. The light began to hurt Benedict's eyes, even at that distance. and he had to cut down the receptivity in order to watch. After a while he turned away from the plate,

not because the show was over, but simply because it had slowed to a point beyond which no change seemed to take place to the human eye. Five weeks later, much to Leitcher's chagrin, Commander Benedict announced that they had to leave the vicinity. The ship had been provisioned to go to Alpha Centauri, scout the system without landing on any of the planets and return. At ten lights, top speed for the ultra-drive, it would take better than three months to get back.

I know you'd like to watch it go through the complete cycle, Benedict said, but we can't go back home as a bunch of starved skeletons. Lecher resigned himself to the necessity of leaving much of his work unfinished, and although he knew it was a case of sour grape, consoled himself with a thought that he could at least get most of the remaining information from the 500-inch telescope on Luna four years from then. As the ship slipped into the not-quite space through which the Ultra Drive propelled it, Lightcher began to consolidate the material he had gathered.

Commander Benedict wrote in the log. Fifty-four days out from Saul, Alpha Centauri has long since faded back into its pre-blown-up state, since we have far out distanced the light from its explosion. It now looks as it did two years ago. It— "'Pardon me, Commander,' Lightcher interrupted. "'But I have something interesting to show you.' Mnodick took his fingers off the keys and turned around in his chair.

"'What is it, Doctor?' Lacher frowned at the papers in his hands. "'I've been doing some work on the probability of that experiment. explosion happening just as it did, and I've come up with some rather frightening figures. As I said before, the probability was small. A little calculation has given us some information which makes it even smaller. For instance, with a possible error of plus or minus two seconds, Alpha Centauri A began to explode the instant we came out of Ultra Drive.

Now, the probability of that occurring comes out so small that it should happen only once in ten to the four hundred sixty-seven seconds. It was Commander Benedict's turn to frown. So? Commander, the entire universe is only about ten to the seventeenth seconds old. But to give you an idea, let's say that the chances of it happening are once in millions of trillions of, of years. Benedict blinked. The number, he realized, was totally beyond his comprehension or anyone else's.

Well, so what. Now it has happened that one time. That simply means that it will almost certainly never happen again. True, but, Commander, when you balk odds like that and win, the thing to do is look for some factor that is cheating in your favor. If you took a pair of dice and started throwing sevens one right after another for the next couple of thousand years, you'd begin to suspect they were loaded. Benedict said nothing.

He just waited expectantly. There was only one thing that could have done it, our ship. Lighter said it quietly, without emphasis. What we know about the hyperspace or superspace or whatever it is we move through. in Ultra Drive is almost nothing. Coming out of it so near to a star might set up some sort of shockwave in normal space, which would completely disrupt that star's internal balance, resulting in the liberation of unimaginably vast amounts of energy, causing that star to go Nova. We can only assume that we ourselves were the fuse that set off that Nova."

Benedict stood up slowly. When he spoke, his voice was a choking whisper. You mean the son, Saul, might... Lightcher nodded. I don't say that it definitely would, but the probability is that we were the cause of the destruction of Alpha Centauri A, and therefore might cause the destruction of Saul in the same way. Minnetik's voice was steady again.

That means that we can't go back again, doesn't it? Even if we're not positive, we can't take the chance. Not necessarily. We can get fairly close before we cut our drive and come in the rest of the way at sublight speed. It'll take longer, and we'll have to go on half or one-third rations, but we can do it. How far away? I don't know what the maximum distance is, but I do know how we can gauge a distance.

remember neither Alpha Centauri B or C were detonated. We'll have to cut our drive at least as far away from Saul as they are from A. I see. The commander was silent for a moment, then. Very well, Dr. Lygeria. If that's the safest way, that's the only way. Benedict issued the orders, while Leiter figured the exact point at which they must cut out the drive, and how long the trip would take.

The rations would have to be cut down accordingly. Commander Benedict's mind whirled around the monstrousness of the whole thing, like some dizzy bee around a flower. What if there had been planets around Centauri A? What if they had been inhabited? Had he all unwittingly killed entire races of living, intelligent beings? But how could he have known? The drive had never been tested before.

It couldn't be tested inside the solar system. It was too fast. He and his crew had been volunteers, knowing that they might die when the drive went on. Suddenly, Benedict gasped and slammed his fist down on the desk before him. Lighter looked up. What's the matter, Commander? Suppose, came the answer. Just suppose.

that we have the same effect on a star when we go into ultra-drive as we do when we come out of it. Lightyear was silent for a moment, stunned by the possibility. There was nothing to say anyway. They could only wait. A little more than half a light year from Saul, when the ship reached the point where its occupants could see the light that had left their home sun more than seven months before, they watched it become suddenly horribly brighter, a hundred thousand times brighter. End of Time Fuse by Randall Garrett. Heist Job on Thysar by Randall Garrett.

This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Heist Job on Thysar by Randall Garrett. This story was first published in Amazing Stories, October, 1996. Anson Drake sat quietly in the Flamebird Room of the Royal Grandal Hotel, listening to the alien but soothing strains of the native orchestra and sipping a drink. He knew perfectly well that he had no business displaying himself in public on the planet Thysar. There were influential Thysarians who held no. no love for a certain earthman named Anson Drake.

It didn't particularly bother Drake. Life was danger, and danger was life to him, and Anson Drake was known on half a hundred planets as a man who could take care of himself. Even so he wouldn't have bothered to come if it had not been for the fact that Viren Belgazad was a pompous braggard. Belgazod had already suffered at the hands of Anson, Drake. Some years before, a narcotics gang had been smashed high, wide, and handsome on Thysar. Three men had died from an overdose of their own thionite drug, and fifty thousand

credits of illicit gain had vanished into nowhere. The Thysarian police didn't know who had done the job, and they didn't know who had financed the ring. But Belgazad knew that Anson Drake was the farmer, and Drake knew that Viren Belgasad was the latter, and each one was waiting his chance to get the other. A week before, Drake had been relaxing happily on a beach at Celadon 2, 12 light years from Thaisar, reading a news fax. He had become interested in an article which told of the sentencing of a certain lady to seven years in Celadon Prison when his attention was attracted by another headline.

Viron Belgazad buys Al-Gall necklace. Faisar, GNS. Vyron Belgazad, wealthy Thysarian financier, has purchased the fabulous necklace of Al-Gol. It was announced today. The necklace made of matched star diamonds is estimated to be worth more than a million credits, although the price paid by Belgazad is not known. Such an interesting bit seemed worthy of further investigation, so Drake had immediately booked passage on the first spaceship to Thysar. And thus it was that an immaculately dressed, broad-shouldered, handsome young man,

sat quietly in the flame-bird room of Thysar's flushiest hostery, surveying his surroundings with steady green eyes, and wondering how he was going to get his hands on the necklace of Algal. The police couldn't touch Belcazad, but Anson Drake could and would. Hello, Drake, set a cold voice at his elbow. Drake turned and looked up into the sardonically smiling face of Jomis Dobigel, the heavyset, dark-faced Thysarian, who worked with Belgazod. "'Well, well,' Anson said, smiling.

"'If it is it, little Bo Peep, how is the dope business? And how is the big dope himself?' Dobiegel smile soured. "'You're very funny, Earthmen, but we don't like Earthmen here.' "'Do sit down, Dobie, and tell me all about it. The last I heard, which was three hours ago, the government of Thysar was perfectly happy to have me here, In fact, they were good enough to stamp my passport to prove it."

Dobigel pulled out a chair and sat down, keeping his hands beneath the table. "'What are you doing here, Drake?' he asked in a cold voice. "'I couldn't help it,' Drake said blandly. "'I was drawn back by the memory of the natural beauties of your planet. The very thought of the fat, flabby face of old Belgazade, with a bulbous nose that is renowned throughout the galaxy was irresistible, so here I am." Dobigel's dark face grew even darker. "'I know you, Drake, and I know why you're here.

Tomorrow is the date for the coronation of his serenity, the Sean of Fysar.' "'True,' Drake agreed, "'and I wouldn't miss it for all the loot in Andromeda. A celebration like that is worth traveling Parsex to see. Dobigel leaned across the table. Bel-Gazad is a noble of the realm, he said slowly. He'll be at the coronation. You know he's going to wear the necklace of Al-Gal as well as anyone, and you—

Suddenly he leaned forward a little farther, his right hand stabbing out toward Drake's leg beneath the table. But Anson Drake was ready for him. Dobigel's hand was a full three inches from Drake's thigh when a set of fingers grasped his wrist in a vice-like hold. Steely fingers bit in, pressing nerves against bone. With a gasp, Dobigel opened his hand. A small metallic cylinder dropped out. Drake caught it with his free hand and smiled. That's impolite, Dobie.

it isn't proper to try to give your host an injection when he doesn't want it. Casually, he put the cylinder against his arm, which he still held, and squeezed the little metal tube. There was a faint pop. Drake released the arm and handed back the cylinder. Dobichel's face was white. I imagine that was a twelve-hour poison, Drake said kindly. If you hurry, old Belgazade will give you the antidote. It will be painful, but—he shrugged.

And by the way, brother Dobigel, he continued, let me give you some advice. The next time you try to get near a victim with one of those things, don't do it by talking to him about things he already knows. It doesn't distract him enough. Dobigel stood up, his fists clenched. I'll get you for this, Drake. Then he turned and stalked off through the crowd.

No one had noticed the little by-play. Drake smiled seraphically and finished his drink. Dobigel was going to be uncomfortable for a while. Twelve-hour poison was a complex protein substance that could be varied in several thousand different ways, and only an antidote made from the right variation would work for each poison. If the antidote wasn't given, the victim died within 12 hours. And even if the antidote wasn't given,

given, getting over poison wasn't any fun at all. Reflecting happily on the plate of Jomas Dobigel, Anson Drake paid his bill, tipped the waiter liberally, and strolled out of the flamebird room and into the lobby of the Royal Gondyl Hotel. The coronation would begin early tomorrow, and he didn't want to miss the beginning of it. The Shahn's coronation was the affair of Thysar. He went over to the robot news vendor and dropped a coin in the slot. The reproducer hummed and a freshly printed newsfax dropped out.

He headed for the lift tube which whisked him up to his room on the 81st floor. He inserted his key in the lock and pressed the button on the tip. The electronic lock opened and the door slid into the wall. Before entering, Drake took a look at the detector on his wrist. There was no sign of anything having entered the room since he had left it. Only then did he go inside. With one of the most powerful financiers on Thysar out after his blood, there was no way of knowing what might happen and therefore no reason to take chances.

There were some worlds where Ensign Drake would no more have stayed in a public hotel, then he would have jumped into an atomic furnace, especially if his enemy was a man as influential as Belgazad. But Thysor was a civilized and reasonably well-policed planet. The police were honest and the courts were just. Even Belcazad couldn't do anything openly. Drake locked his door, sang to himself in a pleasant baritone while he bathed, put on his pajamas and lay down on his bed to read the paper.

It was mostly full of coronation news. Noble so-and-so would wear such and such, the archbishop would do thus and so. There was another item about Belcazade. His daughter was ill and would be unable to attend. Bloody shame, thought Drake. Too bad Belgasad isn't sick or dying. There was further mention of the necklace of Algal. It was second only to the crown jewels of the Sean himself. The precautions being taken were fantastic, at a quick guess about half the crowd would be policemen. The door announcer chimed. Drake sat up and punched the door TV. The screen showed the face of a girl standing at his door. Drake smiled in appreciation.

She had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a smooth-tanned complexion. It was a beautiful beautiful face, and it showed promise of having a body to match. Who, may I ask, is calling on a gentleman at this ungodly hour, and thus compromising her reputation and fair name?" The girl smiled, showing even white teeth, and her eyes sparkled, showing flickers of little golden flames against the brown. "'I see, I found the right room,' she said. That voice couldn't belong to anyone but Anne's and Drake.

Then she lowered her voice and said softly, "'Let me in. I'm Norma Knight.' Drake felt a tangle of psychic electricity flow over his skin. There was a promise of danger and excitement in the air. Norma Knight was known throughout this whole sector of the galaxy as the cleverest jewel thief the human race had ever spawned. Drake had never met her, but he had definitely heard of her.

He touched the admission stud, and the door slid silently aside. There was no doubt about it. Her body did match her face. Do come in, Norma, he said. She stepped inside, and Drake touched the closing button. The door slid shut behind her. She stood there for a moment, looking at him, and Drake took the end.

opportunity to study the girl more closely. At last, she said, "'So you're Anne Cendrake. You're even better looking than I've heard you were. Congratulations.' "'I have a good press agent,' Drake said modestly. "'What's on your mind?' He waved his hand at a nearby chair. "'The same thing that's on yours, I suspect,' she said. "'Do you have a drink to spare?'

Drake unlimbered himself from the bed, selected a bottle from the menu and dialed. The robot bellhop whirred, a shoot opened in the wall, then a bottle slid out. Drake poured, handed the tumbler to the girl and said, This is your party. What do you have in mind? The girl took a sip of her drink before she answered. Then she looked up at Drake with her deep brown eyes. Two things. One, I have no intention nor desire to compete with Anson Drake for the necklace of Algal.

Both of us might end up in jail with nothing for our pains. Two, I have a foolproof method of getting the necklace, but none for getting it off the planet. I think you probably have a way. Drake nodded. I dare say I could swing it. How does it happen that you don't have an avenue of disposal? will plan? She looked bleak for a moment.

The man who was to help me decided to back out at the last minute. He didn't know what the job was, and I couldn't tell him because I didn't trust him. And you trust me? Her eyes were very trustful. I've heard a lot about you, Drake, and I happen to know you never double-cross anyone unless they double-crossed you first. Trade about is fair play. to quote an ancient maxim. Drake said grinning.

And I'm a firm believer in fair play. But that's neither here nor there. The point is, what do you have to offer? Why shouldn't I just pinch the gems myself and do a quick flit across the galaxy that would give me all the loot? She shook her head. Belgazade is on to you, you know.

He knows you're here. His own private police and the Shahn's own guard will be at the coronation to protect all that jewelry. She cocked her pretty head to one side and looked at him. What's between you and Belgazad anyway? I stole his toys when he was a child, said Drake, and he hasn't trusted me since. How do you propose to get the necklace of Algal if I can't? She smiled and shook her head slowly.

That would be telling. You let me take care of my part, and I'll let you take care of my part, and I'll let you take care of yours. Drake shook his head, not so slowly. Absolutely not. We either work together or we don't work at all. The girl frowned in thought for a moment and then reached into the belt pouch at her side and pulled out a square of electro-engraved plastic.

She handed it to Drake. Underneath all the flowery verbiage it boiled down to an invitation to attend the post-coronation reception. It was addressed to Miss Caroline Smith, and was signed and sealed by the Sean of Thazar himself. I am Caroline Smith, she said. I've managed to get in good with the family of Belgazade, and he wrangled the invitation.

Now, the plan is this. Right after the invocation, while the new Sean is being prepared in his special coronation robes, The nobles will have to change their uniforms from red to green. Belgazad will go into his suite in the palace to change. He'll be accompanied by two guards. One will stay on the outside, the other will help Belgazad dress. I've got the room next to his, and I've managed to get the key that unlocks the door between them.

I'll use this, she pulled a small globe of metal from her belt pouch. It's a sleep gas bomb. It'll lock them out for at least twenty minutes. No one will come in during that time, and I'll be able to get the necklace and get out of the palace before they wake up. They'll know you did it, Drake pointed out. If you're still missing when they come to, the thief's identity will be obvious. She nodded. That's where you come in.

I'll simply go out into the garden and throw it over the wall to you. We'll meet here afterwards. drake thought it over and smiled devilishly it sounds fine now let's coordinate everything they went over the whole plot again this time with the chart of the palace to mark everything out and a time schedule was arranged then they toasted to success and the girl left when she was gone anson drake smiled ruefully to himself and opened a secret compartment in his suitcase from it he removed a long strand of glittering jewels a perfect imitation drake said and you're very pretty it's a shame i won't be able to hang you around the neck of belcazade in place of the real necklace of algal But his original plan had been more dangerous than the present one, and Anson Drake was always ready to desert a good plan for a better one. Coronation Day dawned bright and clear, and the festivities began early. There were speeches

and parades and dancing in the streets. A huge fleet of high-flying rockets rumbled high in this stratosphere, filling the sky with the white traceries of their exhausts. For all of Thysar was on a holiday, a day of rejoicing and happiness. Cheers for the shone filled the streets, and strains of music came from the speakers of the public communication system. Anson Drake missed most of the fun. He was too busy making plans. The day passed as he worked.

The Tsar's son began to set as the hour for the actual crowning of the Shan approached. At the proper time, Drake was waiting at the shadows outside the palace walls. There were eyes watching him, and he knew it, but he only smiled softly to himself and waited. It was the girl on the other side of the wall. I'm here, whispered Drake. Something that glittered faintly in the soft light of the twin. moon's of Thysar arced over the wall. Drake caught it in his hands, the necklace of Algal. He slipped it into a small plastic box he was carrying, and then glanced at the detector

on his wrist. The screen showed a pale blue pip, which indicated that someone was hidden in the shadows a few yards to his right. Drake didn't even glance toward the spy. He put the plastic box containing the necklace into his belt pouch and strode away from the palace. He had, he figured, about twenty minutes. He headed directly for the spaceship terminal. Never once did he look back, but the detector on his wrist told him that he was being closely followed. Excellent.

Inside the terminal, he went directly to the baggage lockers. He found one that was empty, inserted a coin, and an end. opened it. From his pouch he took a plastic box, put it in the locker, switched on the lock with his key, and strolled away. He glanced again at the detector. He was no longer being followed by the same man. Another had taken up the trail. It figured. It figured. He went straight to the Hotel Gondell, making sure that his tail didn't lose him. Not until they were in the lobby did he make any attempt to shake the man who was following. him. He went into the bar, ordered a drink, and took a sip. He left his change and the

drink on the bar and headed out the door in the direction of the men's room. Whoever was following him wouldn't realize for a minute or two that he was leaving for good. A man doesn't usually leave change in an unfinished drink in a bar. Drake took the lift tube up to his room, attended to some unfinished business, and waited. Less than three minutes later the door was opened. In walked Viren Belgazade and his lieutenant, Jarnis Dobigel. Both of them looked triumphant, and they were surrounded by a squad of royal police. There he is, said Dobigel, arrest him.

A police officer stepped forward. And Sandrake, I arrest you in the name of the Sean, he said. Drake grinned. On what charge? The theft of the necklace of Algal. Drake looked directly at Belgazad. Did old fart face here say I took it? You can't talk that way, Dobigel snarled, stepping forward.

Who says so ugly? At that, Dobigel stepped forward and threw a hard punch from his shoulder straight at Drake's face. It never landed. Drake sidestepped it and brought a smashing uppercut up from his knees. It lifted Dobigel off his feet and sent him crashing back against old Belgazad, toppling them both to the floor. The policeman had all drawn their guns, but Drake was standing placidly in the middle of the room, his hands high above his head regarding this scene calmly.

I'll go quietly, he said, I've got no quarrel with the police. One of the officers led him out into the hall while the other searched his room. Belgazad was sputtering incoherently. Another policeman was trying to wake up Dobigil. If you're looking for the necklace of Algol, Drake said, you won't find it there. The captain of the police squad said, We know that, Mr. Drake. We're merely looking for other evidence.

We already have the necklace. He reached in his belt pouch and took out a small plastic. box. He opened it disclosing a glittering rope of jewels. You were seen depositing this in a baggage locker at the spaceship terminal. We have witnesses who saw you, and we had a removed under police supervision. Viren Belguzad smiled nastily. This time you won't get away, Drake. Stealing anything from the palace of the Shan carries a minimum penalty of twenty years in Thysar prison. Drake said nothing as they took him off to the Royal Police Station and locked him in a cell. It was late afternoon of the next day when the prosecutor of the Sean visited Drake's cell.

He was a tall, imposing man, and Drake knew him by reputation as an honest, energetic man. Mr. Drake, he said as he sat down in a chair in the cell, You have refused to speak to anyone but me. I am, of course, perfectly willing to be of any assistance, but I am afraid I must warn you that any statement made to me will be used against you at the trial. Drake leaned back in his own chair. One thing nice about Thysar, he reflected, they had comfortable jails.

My lord prosecutor, he said, I'd like to make a statement. As I understand it, Belgazad claims he was gassed along with a police guard who was with him. When he woke up, the necklace was gone. He didn't see his assailant. That is correct, said the prosecutor. Drake grinned. That was the way it had to be. Belgazad couldn't possibly have bribed the cop, so they both had to be gassed.

If he didn't see his assailant, how does he know who it was? You were followed from the palace by Jomas Dobigel, who saw you put the necklace into the baggage locker. There are several other witnesses to that. Drake leaned forward. Let me point out, my lord, prosecutor, that the only evidence you have that I was anywhere near the palace is the word of Jomis Dobigel, and he didn't see me inside the palace. I was outside the wall. The prosecutor shrugged.

We admit the possibility of an assistant inside the walls of the palace, he said. We are investigating that now. But even if we never find your accomplice, we have proof that you were implicated and that is enough. What proof do you have? Drake asked blandly. Why? The necklace itself, of course?

The prosecutor looked as though he suspected Drake of having taken leave of his senses. Drake shook his head. That necklace is mine. I can prove it. It was made for me by a respectable jeweler on Celadon, too. It's a very good imitation, but it's a phony. They aren't diamonds. They're simply well-cut crystals of titanium dioxide.

Check them if you don't believe. me. The Lord Prosecutor looked dumbfounded. But what? Why? Drake looked sad. I brought it to give to my good friend the noble Belcazade. Of course it would be a gross insult to wear them at the Sean's coronation, but he could wear them at other functions. And how does my good friend repay me by having me arrested? My Lord Prosecutor, I am a wronged man. The prosecutor swallowed heavily and stood up. The necklace has naturally been impounded by the police. I shall have the stones tested.

You'll find their phonies, Drake said. And that means one of two things. Either they are not the one stolen from Belgazade, or else Belgazot has mortally insulted his shone by wearing false jewels to the coronation. Well, we shall see about this. said the Lord Prosecutor. Anson Drake, free as a lark, was packing his clothes in his hotel room when the announcer chimed. He punched the TV pickup and grinned.

It was the girl. When the door slid aside she came in, smiling, You got away with it, Drake, wonderful! I don't know how you did it, but did what? Drake looked innocent. Get away with a necklace, of course. I don't know how it happened that Dobujo was there, but—but, but, but, Drake said spiling. You don't seem to know very much at all, do you?

What do you mean? Drake put his last article of clothing in his suitcase and snapped it shut. I'll probably be searched pretty thoroughly when I get to the spaceport. He said coolly, but they won't find anything on an innocent man. Where is the necklace? she asked in a throaty voice. Drake pretended not to hear her. It's a funny thing, he said.

Oh, Belgazade would never let the necklace out of his hands except to get me. He thought he'd get it back by making sure I was followed, but he made two mistakes. The girl put her arms around his neck. His mistakes don't matter, as long as we have the necklace, do they? Anson Drake was never a man to turn down in the invitation like that. He held her in his arms and kissed her long and lingeringly. When he broke away, he went on as though nothing had happened. Two mistakes.

The first one was thinking up such an obviously silly plot. If it were as easy to steal jewels from the palace as all that, nothing would be safe on thys are. The second mistake was sending his daughter to trap me. The girl gasped and stepped back. It was very foolish of you, Miss Belgazad. He went on calmly. You see, I happened to know that the real Normanite was sentenced to seven years in Celadon

prison over a week ago. Unfortunately, the news hasn't reached Thysar yet. I knew from the first that the whole thing. would be a frame-up. It's too bad that your father had to use the real necklace. It's a shame he lost it. The girl's eyes blazed. You, you thief, you...

She used words which no self-respecting lady is supposed to use. Drake waited until she had finished and then said, Oh, no, Miss Belgazade, I'm no thief. Your father then consider the loss of that necklace as a fine for running non-octrine. narcotics. And you can tell him that if I catch him again, it will be worse. I don't like his kind of slime, and I'll do my best to get rid of them. That's all, Miss B. It was nice knowing you. He walked out of the room, leaving her to stand there in helpless fury. His phony necklace had come

in handy after all. The police had thought they had the real one, so they had never bothered to check the Galactic Mail service for a small package mail to Celadon, too. All he had to do was drop it into the mail chute from his room and then cool his heels in jail, while the Galactic Males got rid of the loot for him. The necklace of Al-Gol would be waiting for him when he got to Celadon, too. End of, Heist Job on Thysar. End of The Man Who Hated Mars. Kendall Garrett.