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William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

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Title: Long Ago, Far Away

Author: William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

Illustrator: Finlay

Release Date: December 18, 2007 [EBook #23892]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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 COMPLETE
 BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL


 LONG AGO,
 FAR AWAY

 By MURRAY LEINSTER


 ILLUSTRATOR FINLAY




CHAPTER 1


The sky was black, with myriads of stars. The ground was white. But it
was not really ground at all, it was ice that covered everything--twenty
miles north to the Barrier, and southward to the Pole itself, past
towering mountains and howling emptiness and cold beyond imagining.

The base was almost buried in snow. Off to one side of the main building
a faint yellowish glow was the plastic dome of the meteor-watch radar
instrument. Inside Brad Soames displayed his special equipment to a girl
reporter flown down to the Antarctic to do human-interest articles for
not-too-much-interested women readers.

[Illustration: The children huddled together to protect themselves and
their ship from the inquisitive strangers.]

All was quiet. This seemed the most unlikely of all possible places for
anything of importance to happen.

There was one man awake, on stand-by watch. A radio glowed beside him--a
short-wave unit, tuned to the frequency used by all the bases of all the
nations on Antarctica--English, French, Belgian, Danish, Russian. The
stand-by man yawned. There was nothing to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

"There's no story in my work," said Soames politely. "I work with this
wave-guide radar. It's set to explore the sky instead of the horizon. It
spots meteors coming in from space, records their height and course and
speed, and follows them down until they burn up in the air. From its
record we can figure out the orbits they followed before Earth's gravity
pulled them down."

The girl reporter was Gail Haynes. She nodded, but she looked at Soames
instead of the complex instrument. She wore the multi-layer cold-weather
garments issued for Antarctica, but somehow she did not look grotesque
in them. Now her expression was faintly vexed. The third person in the
dome was Captain Estelle Moggs, W. A. C., in charge of Gail's journey
and the public-relations angle generally.

"I just chart the courses of meteors," repeated Soames. "That's all.
There is nothing else to it."

Gail shook her head, watching him.

"Can't you give me a human angle?" she asked. "I'm a woman. I'd like to
be interested."

He shrugged, and she said somehow disconsolately:

"What will knowing the orbits of meteors lead to?"

"Finding out some special meteor-orbits," he said drily, "might lead to
finding out when the Fifth Planet blew itself up.--According to Bode's
Law there ought to be a planet like ours between Mars and Jupiter. If
there was, it blew itself to pieces, or maybe the people on it had an
atomic war."

Gail cocked her head to one side.

"Now, that promises!" she said. "Keep on!"

"There ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, in a certain
orbit," he told her. "There isn't. Instead, there's a lot of debris
floating around. Some is as far out as Jupiter. Some is as far in as
Earth. It's mostly between Mars and Jupiter, though, and it's hunks of
rock and metal of all shapes and sizes. We call the big ones asteroids.
There's no proof so far, but it's respectable to believe that there used
to be a Fifth Planet, and that it blew itself up or was blown up by its
inhabitants. I'm checking meteor-orbits to see if some meteors are
really tiny asteroids."

"Hmmm," said Gail. She displayed one of those surprising, unconnected
bits of information a person in the newspaper business picks up. "Don't
they say that the mountains on the moon were made by asteroids falling
on it?"

"It's at least possible that the moon was smashed up by fragments of the
Fifth Planet," agreed Soames. "In fact, that's a more or less accepted
explanation."

She looked at him expectantly. "I have to think of my readers," insisted
Gail. "It's interesting enough, but how can I make it something they'll
be concerned about? When the moon was smashed, why wasn't Earth?"

"It's assumed that it was," Soames told her. "But on Earth we have
weather, and it happened a long, long time ago, back in the days of
three-toed horses and ganoid fish. Undoubtedly once the Earth was
devastated like the moon. But the ring-mountains were worn away by rain
and snow. New mountain-ranges rose up. Continents changed. Now there's
no way to find even the traces of a disaster so long past. But the moon
has no weather. Nothing ever changes on it. Its wounds have never
healed."

Gail frowned in concentration.

"A bombardment like that would be something to live through," she said
vexedly. "An atomic war would be trivial by comparison. But it happened
millions and millions of years ago. We women want to know about things
that are happening now!"

Soames opened his mouth to speak. But he didn't.

The flickering, wavering, silver-plated wave-guide tube of the radar
suddenly steadied. It ceased to hunt restlessly among all places
overhead for a tiny object headed for Earth. It stopped dead. It
pointed, trembling a little as if with eagerness. It pointed somewhere
east of due south, and above the horizon.

"Here's a meteor. It's falling now," said Soames.

Then he looked again. The radar's twin screens should have shown two
dots of light, one to register the detected object's height, and another
its angle and distance. But both screens were empty. They showed nothing
at all. There was nothing where the radar had stopped itself and where
it aimed. But all of the two screens glowed faintly. The graph-pens
wrote wholly meaningless indications on their tape. A radar, and
especially a meteor-tracking radar, is an instrument of high precision.
It either detects something and pin-points its place, or it doesn't,
because an object either reflects radar-pulses or not. Usually it does.

       *       *       *       *       *

The radar here, then, gave an impossible reading. It was as if it did
not receive the reflections of the pulses it sent out, but only parts of
them. It was as if something were intermittently in existence, or was
partly real and partly not. Or as if the radar had encountered an
almost-something which was on the verge of becoming real, and didn't
quite make it.

"What the--"

The inter-base radio screamed. At the same instant the twin
radar-screens flashed bright all over. The twin pens of the tape-writing
machine scrambled crazy lines on the paper. The noise was monstrous. A
screaming, shrieking uproar such as no radio ever gave out. There was
horror in it. And what Soames could not know now was that at this same
instant the same sound came out of every radio and television set in use
in all the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

The noise stopped. Now a bright spot showed on each of the meteor-watch
radar's twin screens. The screen indicating height said that the source
of the dot was four miles high. The screen indicating line and distance
said that it bore 167° true, and was eighty miles distant. The radar
said that some object had come into being from nothingness, out of
nowhere. It had not arrived. It had become. It was twenty thousand feet
high, eighty miles 167° from the base, and its appearance had been
accompanied by such a burst of radio-noise as neither storm nor
lightning nor atomic explosion had ever made before.

And the thing which came from nowhere and therefore was quite
impossible, now moved toward the east at roughly three times the speed
of sound.

All manner of foreign voices came startledly out of the inter-base radio
speaker, asking what could it be? A Russian voice snapped suspiciously
that the Americans should be queried.

And the wave-guide radar followed a large object which had come out of
nowhere at all.

The sheer impossibility of the thing was only part of the problem it
presented. The radar followed it. Moving eastward, far away in the
frigid night, it seemed suddenly to put on brakes. According to the
radar, its original speed was close to mach 3, thirty-nine miles a
minute. Then it checked swiftly. It came to a complete stop. Then it
hurtled backward along the line it had followed. It wabbled momentarily
as if it had done a flip-flop four miles above the ground. It dived. It
stopped dead in mid-air for a full second and abruptly began to rise
once more in an insane, corkscrew course which ended abruptly in a
headlong fall toward the ground.

It dropped like a stone. It fell for long, long seconds. Once it
wavered, as if it made a final effort to continue its frenzy in the air.
But again it fell like a stone. It reached the horizon. It dropped
behind it.

Seconds later the ground trembled very, very slightly. Soames hit the
graph-machine case. The pens jiggled. He'd made a time-recording of an
earth-shock somewhere.

Now he read off the interval between the burst of screaming static and
the jog he'd made by striking the instrument. Earth-shock surface waves
travel at four miles per second. The radar had said the thing which
appeared in mid-air did so eighty miles away. The static-burst was
simultaneous. There was a twenty-second interval between the static and
the arrival of the earth-tremor waves. The static and the appearance of
something from nowhere and the point of origin of the earth-shock
matched up. They were one event. The event was timed with the outburst
of radio noise, not the impact of the falling object, which was a minute
later.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames struggled to imagine what that event could be. The inter-base
radio babbled. Somebody discovered that the static had been on all
wave-lengths at the same time. Voices argued about it.

In the radar-dome Captain Moggs said indignantly:

"This is monstrous! I shall report this to Washington! What was that
thing, Mr. Soames?"

Soames shrugged.

"There isn't anything it could be," he told her. "It was impossible.
There couldn't be anything like that."

Gail cocked her head on one side.

"D'you mean it's something new to science?"

Soames realized how much he liked Gail. Too much. So he spoke with great
formality. The radar had tried to detect and range on something that
wasn't there. The nearest accurate statement would be that the radar had
detected something just before it became something the radar could
detect, which did not begin to make sense.

Planes didn't appear in mid-sky without previously having been somewhere
else; it wasn't a plane. There could be meteors, but it wasn't a meteor
because it went too slowly and changed course and stood still in the air
and went upward. Nor was it a missile. A ballistic missile couldn't
change course, a rocket-missile would show on the radar.

He looked at his watch.

"Six minutes and a half from the static," he said grimly. "Eighty miles.
Sound travels a mile every five seconds. Let's listen. Ten
seconds--eight--six--four--"

Now the wave-guide radar had gone back to normal operation. Its
silver-plated square tube flickered and quivered and spun quickly in
this direction and that, searching all the sky.

There was a booming sound. It was infinitely low-pitched. It was
long-continued. It was so low in frequency that it seemed more a
vibration of the air than a sound.

It died away.

"It's a concussion-wave," said Soames soberly. "It arrived four hundred
odd seconds after the static. Eighty miles.... A noise has to be pretty
loud to travel so far! A ground-shock has to be rather sharp to be felt
as an earth-tremor at eighty miles. Even a spark has to be very, very
fierce to mess up radio and radar reception at eighty miles....
Something very remarkable happened down yonder tonight--something
somebody ought to look into."

Gail said quickly, "How about a spaceship from another world?"

"It would have come in from outer space," said Soames. "It didn't."

"A secret weapon," said Captain Moggs firmly. "I shall report to
Washington and ask orders to investigate."

"I wouldn't," said Soames. "If you ask orders you promise to wait for
them. If you wait for orders, whatever fell will be covered by snow past
discovery by the time your orders come."

Gail looked at him interestedly, confidently.

"What will you do, then?"

"I think," said Soames, "we'll find it and then report.

"You were planning a cosey little article on Housewives of the
Antarctic; The Care and Feeding of One's Penguin Husband. Right?"

Gail grinned suddenly.

"I see. Yes."

"We take off in the 'copter," said Soames. "We start out ostensibly to
gather material for an article on Can This Penguin Marriage Be Saved.
But we'll be blown off course. We'll find ourselves quite accidentally
where the radar said there was the great-grandfather of static bursts,
with a ground-shock and a concussion-wave to boot. We may even be blown
farther, to where something dived downward for four or five miles and
vanished below the horizon."

Captain Moggs said uneasily:

"Most irregular. But it might be wise."

"Of course," said Soames. "It's always safer to report something you've
found than not find something you've reported."

"We start at sunrise," said Captain Moggs authoritatively.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames went back to the radar. As he looked at it, it picked out
something rather smaller than a marble at a height of seventy-nine miles
and followed that unthinkably ancient small wanderer of space down to
its spectacular suicide by fire at a height of thirty-four miles.

He went painstakingly over the radar. It worked perfectly. The taped
record of its observations carried the story of all that Gail and
Captain Moggs had seen when he saw it. Machinery may err, but it does
not have delusions. It would have to be subject to systematic
hallucination to have reported and recorded what this radar insisted was
the truth.

When dawn came, he went out to the helicopter's hangar. There was a
supply-plane on the runway, but the helicopter belonged at the base. He
found himself excessively conscientious in his check-over. Though he
hated to admit it, he knew it was because Gail would be in the plane.

When he headed back toward the main building one of the geophysics gang
beckoned to him. He followed to the small, far-spaced hut--now
snow-buried to its eaves--in which the seismograph ticked away to
itself.

"I think I'm going crazy," said the geophysics man. "Did you ever hear
of a ground-shock starting inside out?"

He pointed to the graph-paper that fed very, very slowly past the
seismograph's pens. The recording did look odd.

"If you put your hand just under the surface of the water in a bathtub,"
said the geophysics man harassedly, "and jerk it downward, you get a
hollow that spreads out with a wave behind it. It's the exact opposite
of dropping a pebble into water, which makes a wave that spreads out
with a hollow--a trough--behind it. But except for that one way of
making it, all waves--absolutely all wave-systems--start out with a
crest and a trough behind it. Everywhere, all the time, unless you do
what I said in a bathtub."

"I'm a shower man, myself," observed Soames. "But go on."

"This," said the geophysics man bitterly, "is like a bathtub wave. See?
The ground was jerked away, and then pushed back. Normal shock-waves
push away and then spring back! An ice-crack, a rock-slide, an explosion
of any sort, all of them make the same kind of waves! All have
compression phases, then rarefaction phases, then compression phases,
and so on. What--" his voice was plaintive--"what in hell is this?"

"Are you saying," Soames asked after a moment, "that ordinary
earth-tremors record like explosion-waves, but that you'd have to have
an implosion to make a record like this?"

"Sure!" said the geophysics man. "But how can you have an implosion that
will make an earth-shock? I'm going to have to take this whole damned
wabble-bucket apart to find out what's the matter with it! But there's
nothing the matter! It registered what it got! But what did it get?"

"An implosion," said Soames. "And if you have trouble imagining that,
I'm right there with you."

He went back to the main building to get Gail and Captain Moggs. They
went out to the 'copter hangar together.

"I've talked to the radar and loran operator," said Soames. "I explained
that you wanted to see some crevasses from the air, and I'd be wandering
around looking for them on the way to the rookery. He will check on us
every fifteen minutes, anyhow."

       *       *       *       *       *

The 'copter went up the long, sloping, bulldozed snow-ramp. Soames
checked his radio contact. He nodded. The engines hummed and roared and
bellowed, and the ship lifted deliberately and floated away over the
icy waste.

The little helicopter was very much alone above a landscape which had
never known a growing thing.

Soames kept in radar contact and when he was ready he told the base,
"I'm going down now, hunting crevasses."

He let the 'copter descend. The waste was featureless, then and for a
seemingly interminable time afterward. Then his estimated position
matched the site of the static-earth-shock-concussion-wave-occurrence.
There seemed nothing about this part of the snow-desert which was
different from any other part. No. Over to the left. A wind-pattern
showed in the snow. It was already being blown away; its edges dulled.
But it was rather far from a probable thing. There were
lines--hollows--where gusts had blown at the snow's surface. They were
spiral lines, tending toward a center. They had not the faintest
resemblance to the crater of an explosion which might have made an
earth-shock.

Soames took a camera out of its place in the 'copter. Gail stared down.

"I've seen something like that," she said puzzledly. "Not a picture.
Certainly not a snow-field. I think it looks like a diagram of some
sort."

"Try a storm-wind diagram," said Soames drily. "The way a cyclone ought
to look from directly overhead. The meteorology boys will break down and
cry when they see this picture!"

He took pictures. The shadows of the wind-made indentations would come
out clearly in the film.

"Unless," said Soames, "unless somebody got a snap of a whirlwind
touching a snow-field and bouncing up again, this will be a photographic
first. It's not an explosion-pattern, you'll notice. Wind and snow
weren't thrown away from the center. They were drawn toward it.
Momentarily. It's an explosion inside out, an implosion-pattern to be
more exact."

"I don't understand," said Gail.

"An explosion," said Soames grimly, "is a bursting-out of a suddenly
present mass of gas. An implosion is a bursting-in of a suddenly present
vacuum. Set off a firecracker and you have an explosion. Break an
electric bulb and you have an implosion. That pattern behind us is an
implosion-pattern."

"But how could such a thing be?"

"If we knew," said Soames wrily, "maybe we'd be running away. Maybe we
should."

The 'copter droned on and on and on. The ice-sheet continued unbroken.

       *       *       *       *       *

"There!" cried Gail, suddenly.

She pointed. Blowing snow hid everything. Then there was a hole in the
whiteness, a shadow. The shadow stirred and an object too dark to be
snow appeared. It vanished again.

"There's a sheltered place!" said Gail, "and there's something dark in
it!"

Soames pulled the microphone to his lips.

"Calling base," he said briefly. "Calling base.... Hello! I'm well
beyond the last radar-fix. I think I'm bearing about one seven oh
degrees from base. Get a loran fix on me. Make it quick. I may have to
land."

He listened, pressing a button to activate the loran-relay which would
transmit a signal on signal from the base, so the bearing and distance
could be computed back at base. It was wiser to have such computations
done aground. He readied the camera again.

Gail looked through the 'copter's binoculars. The peculiar
shadow--hole--opening in the blowing snow reappeared. Something in it
looked like a missile, only it was bright metal and much too large. It
lay askew on the ice. A part of it--a large part--was smashed.

"Spaceship?" asked Gail, "do you think that's it?"

"Heaven forbid!" said Soames.

There was movement. One--two--three figures stared up from beside the
metal shape. A fourth appeared. Soames grimly took pictures. Gail gasped
suddenly:

"They're not men!" she said shakily. "Brad, they're children! Queerly
dressed children, with bare arms and legs! They're out there on the
snow! They'll freeze! We've got to help them!"

"Calling base," said Soames into the microphone. "I'm landing. I have
to. If I don't report in twenty minutes come with caution--repeat with
caution--to see what's happened. I repeat. If I do not report in twenty
minutes come with caution, caution, caution to see what is the matter."

The 'copter made a loud, loud noise as it went skittering down toward
the object--and the children--on the ice.




CHAPTER 2


The snow-mist blew aside and there was plainly a ship lying partly
crushed upon the snow. Half its length was smashed, but he could see
that it had never flown with wings. There weren't any.

"It _looks_ like a spaceship," said Gail breathlessly.

Soames spoke between set teeth.

"That would finish things for all of us!"

And it would, without any qualifications. On a world already squabbling
and divided into two main power-groups and embittered neutrals; on a
world armed with weapons so deadly that only the fear of retaliation
kept the peace.... Contact with a farther-advanced race would not unite
humanity, either for defense or for the advantages such a contact might
reasonably bring. Instead, it would detonate hatred and suspicion into
madness.

A higher civilization could very well tip the scales, if it gave one
side weapons. The world outside the Iron Curtain could not risk that the
Iron Curtain nations become best friends of possible invaders. The
communist leaders could not risk letting the free nations make alliance
with a higher technology and a greater science. So actual contact with a
more-advanced race would be the most deadly happening that could take
place on the world as it was today.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames jumped out. He looked at the ship and felt sick. But he snapped a
quick photograph. It had no wings and had never owned any. It had been
probably a hundred feet long, all bright metal. Now nearly half of it
was crushed or crumpled by its fall. It must have been brought partly
under control before the impact, though, enough to keep it from total
destruction. And Soames, regarding it, saw that there had been no
propellers to support it or pull it through the air. There were no
air-ducts for jet-motors. It wasn't a jet.

There were no rockets, either. The drive was of a kind so far unimagined
by men of here and now.

Gail stood beside Soames, her eyes bright. She exclaimed, "Brad! It
isn't cold here!"

The children looked at her interestedly. One of the girls spoke
politely, in wholly unintelligible syllables. The girls might be
thirteen or thereabouts. The boys were possibly a year older, sturdier
and perhaps more muscular than most boys of that age. All four were
wholly composed. They looked curious but not in the least alarmed, and
not in the least upset, as they'd have been had older companions been
injured or killed in the ship's landing. They wore brief garments that
would have been quite suitable for a children's beach-party in
mid-summer, but did not belong on the Antarctic ice-cap at any time.
Each wore a belt with moderately large metal insets placed on either
side of its fastening.

"Brad!" repeated Gail. "It's warm here! Do you realize it? And there's
no wind!"

Soames swallowed. The camera hung from his hand. It either was or it
could be a spaceship that lay partly smashed upon the ice. He looked
about him with a sort of total grimness. There was a metal girder, quite
separate from the ship, which had apparently been set up slantingly in
the ice since the landing. It had no apparent purpose.

Captain Moggs said peremptorily:

"Children! We insist on speaking to your parents! At once!"

Gail moved forward. Soames saw, now, a small tripod near the ship.
Something spun swiftly at its top. It had plainly been brought out from
inside the strange vessel. For a hundred yards in every direction there
was no wind or snow. More than that, the calm air was also warm. It was
unbelievable.

"Do you hear me?" demanded Captain Moggs. "Children!"

Gail said in a friendly fashion, smiling at the girls:

"I'm sure you don't understand a word I say, but won't you invite us to
visit?"

Her tone and manner were plainly familiar to the children. One of the
two girls smiled and stood aside for Gail to enter the ship. Soames and
Captain Moggs followed.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was quite as bright inside the ship as out-of-doors. There were no
lights. It was simply bright. A part of the floor had buckled upward,
and the rest was not level, but the first impression was of brilliance
and the second was of a kind of simplicity which was bewildering. And
there was a third. It was of haste. The ship seemed to have been put
together with such urgent haste that nothing had been done for mere
finish or decoration.

"I want to speak to the parents of these children!" said Captain Moggs
firmly. "I insist upon it!"

"I suspect," said Soames grimly, "that in the culture these children
came from, the proper place for parents is the home. This is a
child-size spaceship, you'll notice."

The size of the door and chairs proved it. He saw through a crumpled,
open doorway into the crushed part of the ship. There was machinery in
view, but no shafts or gears or power-leads. He guessed it to be
machinery because it could not be anything else. He saw a dented case of
metal, with an opened top. The boys had apparently dragged it into the
relatively undamaged part of the ship to work upon its contents. He
could see coils of bare metal, and arrangements which might have been
inductances. He took a sort of forlorn pride in guessing that the thing
was some sort of communication-device.

There was a board with buttons on it. It might be a control-board, but
it didn't look like it. There was a metal box with a transparent plastic
front. One could see cryptic shapes of metal inside. Two bright-metal
balls mounted on a side-wall. They had holes in them, about the right
size for the hands of children like these to enter. There was a
two-foot, carefully machined spiral of metal, intruding into and
lessening the living-space of the ship. These things had functions he
could not even guess at. He found himself resentful of things which were
obviously the developments of science, and he could not even guess what
they were for.

But alien? He looked at the boys. They were human children. They had
absolutely nothing of strangeness about them. Their hair, their eyes and
eyelashes were normal. Their noses. Their lips. Their teeth. In every
respect they were as human as he was, or Gail.

He looked to the most urgent problem of the moment. He snapped pictures,
before anything else.

One of the boys turned to the dented metal case. He began to arrange its
contents in a somehow final fashion. Soames guessed that it had been
damaged in the landing, and they'd made a repair.

The second boy touched Soames' elbow and showed him the box with the
clear plastic front. He touched it, and an image appeared in the
plastic. It was an image of the landscape outside. He shifted the box,
and the landscape image flashed sidewise. He touched another control.
The landscape flowed swiftly toward the viewer. It raced. Presently the
ground seemed to drop away and Soames found himself staring at a picture
which showed the ice-sheet and the sky and--very far away--the dark blue
line which was the sea, now a hundred miles distant.

The boy nodded and made delicate adjustments. Then Soames looked at an
image of the Gissell Bay base from which he and the others had set out
an hour before. It was a remarkably clear image. Soames could even see
the supply-plane waiting on the runway until it was time for take-off.
He knew unhappily that the box was something which was not a radar, but
performed all the functions of one and so many others that it was a
different thing entirely.

Then Gail said:

"Brad! Look at this!"

She held out two necklaces that the girls had given her. She showed him
the ornaments at their ends. One was a very tiny horse. It was
beautifully done, and obviously from life. The head was larger than an
ordinary horse's head would be. The body was lightly built. Each of its
tiny feet had three toes.

Gail watched Soames' face.

"You see? How about this?"

The ornament of the other necklace was a tiny metal fish. It had fins
and a tail, but no scales. Instead, its body was protected by bony
armor. It was a ganoid fish, like a sturgeon. But it was not a sturgeon,
though sturgeons are now the main representatives of what once were
innumerable ganoid species.

Soames shook his head, then spoke to Gail and Captain Moggs. "The ship
was built for children to operate, I can't imagine why. But there's
nothing like a weapon in view. I'm going to call Base before they get
alarmed."

       *       *       *       *       *

He made a report which sounded as if there were some minor trouble with
the 'copter and he'd landed. It did not check with his last call
speaking insistently of caution, but he couldn't help it. Other bases
were on the same wave-length. He said he'd call back. He intended to
call for help--in handling the matter of the children--as soon as it
would seem plausible that he needed help to get off the ground again.

But he felt shaky, inside. The radar-report and the static and
earth-shock and concussion-wave of the night before had been improbable
enough. But this was more incredible still. The children's ship must
have appeared in the middle of all those unlikely phenomena. It was
reasonable for it to have crashed amid such violence. But where had it
come from, and why?

They were human and they were members of a culture beside which the
current culture on Earth was barbaric. It could not be an Earth
civilization. On a world where for thousands of years men had killed
each other untidily in wars, and where they now prepared to destroy
themselves wholly in a final one, there was no possibility of such a
civilization existing in secret. But where was it?

Soames stood by the 'copter, staring bemusedly at the ship. The two boys
came out. They went briskly to the shattered part of the ship and picked
up a metal girder neatly matching the one that leaned absurdly where it
was fixed in the icy surface. By the ease of their movements, it could
not be heavy. It would have to be aluminum or magnesium to be so light.
Magnesium alloy, at a guess.

One boy held it upright by the slanting beam. The other produced a small
object Soames could not see. He bent over the ice and moved his hand to
and fro. The new girder sank into the ice. They slanted it to meet the
one already fixed. They held it fast for a moment. They went back to the
wrecked ship. The second girder remained fixed, like the first one.

Soames went to look. The metal beam was deeply imbedded in the ice which
somehow did not chill the air above it.

He heard a small sound. One of the boys, the one in the brown,
tunic-like shirt, swept something across the plating of the crumpled
vessel. The plating parted like wet paper. Soames watched in a sort of
neither believing nor unbelieving detachment. A whole section of plating
came away. The boy in the brown tunic very briskly trimmed plating away
from a strength-member and had a third metal beam. Whatever instrument
he used, it cut metal as if it were butter.

Both boys brought the third beam to where the others leaned to form a
tripod. But this third bit of metal was curved. They lowered it, and the
boy in the brown tunic matter-of-factly sliced through the metal, took
out a V-shaped piece, and obviously made the rest of the metal whole
once more. They raised it again, the boy moved his hand over the ice, it
sank into it, they held it a moment only, and went off to the ship.

Soames went numbly to see what had happened. He picked up scraps of the
trimmed-away metal.

Soames puzzled over the metal scraps. They did not look cut. They had
mirror-bright surfaces, as if melted apart. But there'd been no
flame....

The boys reappeared with the dented case that Soames guessed was a
communication device of some sort. They carried it to the new tripod.
One of them carried, also, a complicated structure of small rods which
could be an antenna-system to transmit radiation of a type that Soames
could not conceive of.

Captain Moggs came towards him from the 'copter.

"I called Base," she said. "Two snow-weasels will start here within the
hour. Another 'copter is due in from an advanced observation post at any
moment. It will be sent here as soon as it arrives."

Soames wondered numbly just how indiscreet she'd been, in a short-wave
conversation that could be picked up by any of the other-nation bases
that cared to listen in. But, just then, Gail came out of the ship.

"Brad," she said anxiously, "what are the boys doing?"

Soames knew only too well. If the dented case contained a communicator,
which would use so complicated an antenna as lay ready for use, there
could only be one answer. And there could be only one thing for him to
do, considering everything.

"They're shipwrecked. They're setting up something to signal for help
with. They've landed on a world of rather primitive savages and they
want somebody to come and take them away."

"It mustn't be permitted!" said Captain Moggs firmly. "The ship must be
examined! In our modern world, with the military situation what it
is...."

Soames looked at her ironically.

       *       *       *       *       *

He had metal scraps in his hand, those he'd picked up to examine as a
savage might examine sawdust. There was a threadlike extension of metal
from one scrap. He twisted it off and put it on his sleeve. He struck a
light with his cigarette lighter. He touched it to the fibre of metal.
There was a burst of flame. His sleeve was singed.

"Mostly magnesium," he said detachedly. "It's possible that they don't
think of fire as a danger. They may not use fire any more. We don't
light our houses with open flames any longer. They may not use flames at
all. But I'm a savage. I do."

He sorted through the bits of silvery metal. Another morsel had a
wire-like projection. He saw the boy with the green tunic laying
something on the snow, from the ship to the tripod.

"A power-line," he said appalled. "They've got to signal nobody knows
how far, with nobody can guess how much power in the signal. And they
use power-leads the size of sewing-thread! But of course the people who
built this ship would have superconductors!" Then he said, "I may be
committing suicide, but I think I ought to, rather than let ..."

He moved forward. His throat was dry. He struck his lighter and touched
the flame to the thread of metal on the second scrap. It flared. He
threw the whole piece just as all the flammable alloy caught fire. In
mid-air it became a ball of savage white incandescence that grew larger
and fiercer as it flew. It was a full yard in diameter when it fell upon
the dented case the boys had brought here.

That burst into flame. The new-made tripod caught. Flame leaped thirty
feet into the air. Soames was scorched and blinded by the glare. Then
the fire died swiftly and snow-white ash-particles drifted down on every
hand.

The boy in the brown tunic cried out fiercely. He held out his hand with
the thing that had cut metal glittering in it.

Soames faced the fourteen-year-old grimly. The boy's face was contorted.
There was more than anger in it. The boy in the green tunic clenched and
unclenched his hands. His expression was purest horror. One of the girls
sobbed. The other spoke in a tone of despair so great and grief so acute
that Soames was almost ashamed.

Then the boy in the brown tunic spoke very, very bitterly to the girl
who'd evidently said something to restrain him. He turned his eyes from
Soames. He went into the ship, stumbling a little.

The whole air of the three remaining children changed utterly. They had
been composed and confident and even zestful. They'd acted as if the
wrecking of their ship were an adventure rather than a catastrophe. But
now they were dazed by disaster. First one of the girls, and then the
second boy, and then the other girl went despairingly into the ship.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames looked at Gail. The boy in the brown tunic had pointed at him
with the object that cut metal plates in half. He'd been stopped, most
likely, by the girl's grief-stricken words. Soames had a profound
conviction that the boy could easily have killed him. He had an equally
strong conviction that it could have been a low price to pay for
preventing the rest of these children's race from finding Earth.

"I suppose," said Gail, "that you feel pretty badly."

"I'm a savage. I've destroyed their signalling device. I may have kept
their civilization from destroying ours. I feel like a murderer," he
told her grimly. "And of children, at that. With luck, I may have kept
them from ever seeing their families again."

After a long time Gail said with a curiously mirthless attempt at humor:

"Do you know, this is the biggest news story that's ever happened? And
do you know that nobody would believe it?"

"But this," said Captain Moggs firmly, "is a matter of such military
importance that nothing must be said about it at all! Nothing!"

Soames made no comment, but he didn't think the matter could be kept
secret.

They waited. The children stayed in the ship.

After a very long time the children appeared again. The girls' faces
were tear-streaked. They brought small possessions and placed them
neatly in the snow. They went back for more.

"At a guess," said Soames, "that super-radar of theirs has shown them a
'copter on the way. They know they can't stay here. I've made it
impossible for them to hope to be found. They've got to let themselves
be taken away and they want to keep these things."

The bringing-out of small objects ended. The boy in the brown tunic went
back in the ship.

When he re-emerged, he said something in the bitterest of bitter voices.
The girls turned their backs to the ship. The girl with brown eyes began
to weep. The boy in the green tunic shifted the small tripod to a new
position. As he carried it, the calmness and the warmth of the air
changed remarkably. There was a monstrous gust of icy wind, and warm
calm, and another gust. But when he put the tripod down again there was
only calm once more.

Soames heard the droning of another 'copter, far away.

The boy in the green tunic held out his hand. It had the glittering tiny
object in it. From a fifty-foot distance, he swept his hand from one end
to the other of the wrecked ship. Flame leaped up. The magnesium-alloy
vessel burned with a brightness that stung and dazzled the eyes. A
monstrous, a colossal flaming flare leaped and soared ... and died. Too
late, Soames fumbled for his camera. There was no longer a wrecked ship
on the ice. There were only a few, smoking, steaming fragments.

When the second 'copter landed beside the first, the four children were
waiting composedly to be taken away.




CHAPTER 3


The world's affairs went on as usual. There were the customary number of
international crises. The current diplomacy preferred blackmail by
threat of atomic war.

Naturally, even Antarctica could be used to create turmoil. The
population of the continent was confined to the staffs of research-bases
established during the International Geophysical Year. In theory the
bases were an object-lesson in co-operation for a constructive purpose,
which splendid spirit of mutual trust and confidence must spread through
the world and some day lead to an era of blissful and unsuspicious
peacefulness.

But that time was not yet.

There'd been an outburst of static of an unprecedented kind.

It had covered the globe on all wave-lengths, everywhere of absolute
maximum volume. It had used millions of times as much power as any
signal ever heard before. No atom bomb could have made it. Science and
governments, together, raised three very urgent questions. Who did it?
How did they do it? And, why did they do it?

Each major nation suspected the others. Scientific progress had become
the most urgent need of every nation, and was expected to be the end of
all of them.

At Gissell Bay, however, the two 'copters came droning in, and settled
down, and Gail and Soames and Captain Moggs got out, and instantly
picked up a boy or a girl and hurried to get them out of the bitter
cold.

The staff reacted immediately to the children. They tried to be
reassuring. They tried to find a language the children could understand.
They failed. Then when the children spoke slowly and carefully, they
searched at least for familiar root-sounds. They found nothing. But
certainly the children felt themselves surrounded by people who wished
them well.

       *       *       *       *       *

The base photographer developed and printed Soames' pictures. The design
of the ship was clear and the children before it gave it scale. The
interior pictures were not so good, wrongly focused. Still, there was
plenty to substantiate Soames' report.

Aside from the pictures there were the things the children had selected
to be brought. There was a cooking-pot. Its substance conducted heat in
one direction only. Heat could enter its outside surface, but not leave
it. Heat could leave its inside surface, but not enter it. Consequently,
when the lid was on, the outer surface absorbed heat from the air around
it and the inner surface released it, and the contents of the pot boiled
merrily without fuel, while the outside became coated with frost.

Some of the physicists went about in a state of shock, trying to figure
out how it happened. Others, starry-eyed, pointed out that if the
cooking-pot had been a pipe, it could be submerged under a running
river, yield live steam by cooling off the water that flowed past it,
and that water would regain normal river temperature in the course of a
few miles of sunlit flow. In such a case, what price coal and petroleum?
In fact, what price atomic power?

The small tripod went up outside the base's main building. Instantly the
spinner began to turn, the wind ceased. In minutes the air ceased to be
biting. In tens of minutes it was warm. Meteorologists, refusing to
believe their senses, explored the boundaries of the calm area. They
came back, frost-bitten, swearing that there was a drop of eighty
degrees beyond the calm area, and a rise of temperature beyond the cold
belt. The tripod-spinner was a different application of the principle of
the cooking-pot. Somehow the spinning thing made an area that heat could
enter but not leave, and wind could not blow through. If the device
could be reversed, deserts would become temperate zones. As it was, the
Arctic and Antarctic could be made to bloom. The gadget was an
out-of-doors heat-pump.

There was the box with the plastic sheet in it. One of the boys, very
composed, operated it. On request, he opened it up. There was nothing in
the case but a few curiously shaped bits of metal. The thing was too
simple to be comprehensible when one did not know the principle by which
it worked.

The same trouble showed up with every device examined.

These were important matters. Captain Moggs visibly grew in her own
estimation. She commandeered a supply plane and took off immediately for
Washington with the news of the event she'd witnessed, prints of Soames'
photographs, and samples of the children's possessions which could be
carried on her person.

       *       *       *       *       *

Back at the base the most urgent problem was communication with the
children. So Gail began gently to teach the taller girl some few English
words. Very shortly she greeted Soames anxiously when he came to see how
the process went.

"Her name," said Gail, "is Zani. The other girl--the one with blue
eyes--is Mal, and the boy in the brown tunic is Fran and the one in the
green is Hod. She understands that there's a language to be learned.
She's writing down words in some sort of writing of her own. She was
bewildered when I handed her a ball-point pen, but she understood as
soon as I demonstrated. They must write with something else.

"But--what happens next? What's going to happen to the children? They've
no friends, no family, nobody to care what happens to them! They're in a
terrible fix, Brad!"

"For which I'm responsible," said Soames grimly, "and about which I'm
already jittering."

"I'm responsible too!" said Gail quickly. "I helped! What are you
worrying about?"

"They burned up their ship," said Soames more grimly still. "Why?"

She shook her head, watching his expression.

"They treated us like harmless savages in the beginning," he said. "Then
I destroyed their only hope of getting in touch with their families and
friends. So one of the boys destroyed their ship. But the others knew,
and got ready for it by bringing some possessions out of it. Why?"

"I'm not sure ..." said Gail.

"If we'd captured their ship intact," Soames told her, "we'd have
studied it. Either we'd have come to understand it, so we could build
one too, or if we couldn't--being savages--we'd have given up entirely.
In either case the children wouldn't matter to us. They'd simply have
been castaways. As it is, they've got us where they want us. I suspect
they've got some trinkets to trade with us, as we might offer beads to
bushmen. Let them or help them signal to their families, they'll say,
and their parents will make us all rich."

Gail considered. Then she shook her head.

"It won't work. We've got newspapers and news broadcasts. People will be
too scared to allow it."

"Scared of four children?" demanded Soames.

"You don't realize what newspapers are," Gail said with a trace of
wryness. "They don't live by printing news. They print 'true' stories,
serials. 'True' crime stories, to be continued tomorrow. 'True'
international-crisis suspense stories, for the next thrilling chapter
read tomorrow's paper or tune in to this station! That's what's printed
and broadcast, Brad. It's what people want and insist on. Don't you
realize how the children will be served up in the news? 'Creatures From
Space in Antarctica! Earth Helpless!'" She grimaced. "There won't be any
demand for human-interest stories by Gail Haynes, telling about four
nicely-raised children who need to be helped to get back to their
parents. The public wouldn't like that so much.

"You'll see," Gail continued, "I'm very much afraid, Brad, that
presently you and I will be the only people in the world who don't think
the children had better be killed, for safety. You did the right thing
for us, in not letting them signal to their families. But you don't need
to worry about too much sympathy for the children!"

"And I got them into it," said Soames, morosely.

"We did," insisted Gail. "And we did right. But I'm going to do what I
can to keep it from being worse for them than I can help. If you'll join
me--"

"Naturally!" said Soames.

       *       *       *       *       *

He went moodily away. He was unaware of Gail's expression as she looked
after him. She turned slowly to the girl with her.

He found the other three children. They were the center of an agitated
group of staff-members, trying to communicate by words and gestures,
while the children tried not to show disturbance at their vehemence. A
cosmic-particle specialist told Soames the trouble. Among the children's
possessions there was a coil of thread-fine copper wire. Somebody had
snipped off a bit of it for test, and discovered that the wire was
superconductive. A superconductor is a material which has no electrical
resistance whatever. In current Earth science tin and mercury and a few
alloys could be made into superconductors by being cooled below 18°
Kelvin, or four hundred odd degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Above that
temperature, superconductivity did not exist. But the children's wire
was a superconductor at room temperature. A thread the size of a cobweb
could carry all the current turned out by Niagara without heating up. A
heavy-duty dynamo could be replaced by a superconductive dynamo that
would almost fit in one's pocket. A thousand-horse-power motor would
need to be hardly larger than the shaft it would turn. It would mean ...

"Let 'em alone!" snapped Soames. "They couldn't tell you how it was
made, even if they could talk English! Give them a chance to learn how
to talk! They've had a bad time anyhow."

He took the boys and the other girl away. He led them to his own
quarters. He whistled for his dog, Rex, and showed the children how to
play with him. They began to relax and enjoy the fun heretofore unknown
to them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames left his quarters and held his head. There was much to worry
about. For example, Captain Moggs in Washington, there to pass on
information perfectly calculated to bring about confusion. And at the
base itself a completely natural routine event took place to make the
confusion twice confounded.

The director of the Gissell Bay base made his normal, regular,
short-wave report to the scientific organization which controlled and
co-ordinated the base's activities and kept it supplied and equipped.
The Gissell Bay director was an eminent scientist. He talked comfortably
to an even more eminent scientist in the capital of the United States.
Naturally, the static scream was mentioned in Washington. As naturally,
the discovery of a crashed spaceship came up. It was important. It
should be reported. It was. The Gissell Bay director went into details
about the children and about the gadgets they'd selected to be salvaged
when they destroyed their ship. A complete account preceded Captain
Moggs to Washington, but not to the military. She was in charge of that
angle.

The eminent scientist in Washington naturally discussed the report with
other scientists who would naturally be as much concerned as himself.
Later in the morning, one of those scientists received a reporter. The
reporter asked various routine questions. In all innocence, the
scientist who had been told by the scientist who had been told by the
director at Gissell Bay, told the reporter.

And therefore, as Captain Moggs rode toward the Pentagon she did not
notice the headlines, but they had already been seen in the Pentagon.

 "SPACESHIP LANDS IN ANTARCTICA!
    _Alien Life Forms Aboard_
       Scientists Alarmed."

No newspaper would spoil a good story by underplaying it. Wire services
wasted no time. There were other similar headlines all over the United
States.

It should be added that the first editions of the first newspapers to
print the story did mention that the invaders were in appearance like
human children, but somehow it did not sound plausible. Also, other
sorts of descriptions were more exciting. The description of children as
invaders was classed as a guess. Then as a bad guess. Then as something
so preposterous that it wasn't worth relating. Anyhow the point of the
story was that a ship from off the Earth had landed, with intelligent
beings in it, equipped with marvellous devices. And marvellous devices
would naturally--in the state of the world at that time--be weapons. So
rewrite men expanded the news service dispatches by the sound
business-like rule that the public is entitled to get what it wants. The
public likes to be scared.

A lieutenant-general greeted Captain Moggs at the Pentagon.

"This business is true?" he demanded. "A spaceship from off Earth has
landed? It had a crew? The crew's still alive? Hell and damnation! What
weapons have they got?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Captain Moggs stammered but managed to give answers. They did not give
an impression of a properly complete investigation of the landing of an
alien spaceship. In particular, her statement that the crew of the ship
was human children simply did not register.

"Hah!" said the lieutenant-general, bitterly. "Nothing to go on! You,
Captain whatever-your-name-is, you were there when the ship was found,
you say. Very well. Keep your mouth shut. Get a plane and go back."

He addressed his men, "Bring up all their stuff, the stuff they brought
from their ship. Get the stray unburned parts of their ship. Get our
guided missile men set to work on them and find out how the drive
worked. They ought to come up with something! Round up some
special-weapons men to investigate those fragments too. See what they've
got! Work from these pictures until we've got the samples." He swung
back to Captain Moggs. "You go back and bring those aliens and
everything that can be brought! Bring everything! And in the meantime,"
he looked around his office, "a lid goes on this! Top secret--top-top
secret! The newspapers have to be choked off. Deny everything!"

He waved his hand. She left the office.

Her plane was barely south of Virginia when a spokesman for the Pentagon
assured a news conference that the Defense Department had no information
about an alleged non-terrestrial spaceship landing in Antarctica. The
newspaper reporters pulled newspapers from their pockets. The Pentagon
had been denying things right and left, in obedience to orders. Now the
newspapers printed reproductions of United Nations records, showing that
at the request of the Defense Department four United Nations passports
had been issued. The records said that the passports were for Jane and
John Doe, and Ruth and Richard Roe, who obviously could not enter the
United States without proper documents. The UN information on those
persons was: birthplace, unknown; nationality, unknown; age, unknown;
description, not given; race, unknown; occupation, unknown. And all the
newspapers carried headlines about "SPACESHIP CREW US-BOUND." Or:

      "TAKE US TO YOUR PRESIDENT"--ALIENS

 _Spaceship Crew Demands Top-Level Conference._
              Ultimatum Hinted At

It was not, of course, exclusively an American affair. The London
_Times_ pointed out the remarkable amount of detailed speculation in the
air, as compared with the minute amount of admitted facts. But
elsewhere: _Pravda_ insisted that the aliens had refused to enter into
discussions with America after learning of its capitalistic social
system and tyrannical government. _Ce Soir_ claimed exclusive private
information that the crew of the spaceship--which was twelve hundred
metres long--were winged monsters of repellant aspect. The official
newspaper in Bucharest, to the contrary, said that they were intelligent
reptiles. In Cairo it was believed and printed that the spacecraft was
manned by creatures of protean structure, remarkably resembling
legendary _djinns_.

There were other descriptions, all attributing monstrous qualities and
brutally aggressive actions to the aliens.

And at Gissell Bay the staff became rather fond of four young people
whose names were Zani, Fran, Hod and Mal, because they had been very
well brought up by their parents and were thoroughly nice children.

       *       *       *       *       *

They were tense, and they were desperately anxious and uneasy. But they
displayed a resolute courage that made moderately decent people like
them very much. Most of the research-staff wanted very badly to ask them
questions, but that was impossible, so they studied the rather fuzzy
photographs of the inside of the ship--the base photographer had run
off several sets of extra prints--and poked helplessly at the things the
children had brought with them, and racked their brains to imagine how
such things work. The spinning thing atop the tripod made it quite
pleasant to be out-of-doors around the Gissell Bay base, though there
were forty-mile winds and thermometers read ten below zero two hundred
yards from the thing Hod had set up. The cooking-pot boiled merrily
without fuel, with an increasingly thick layer of frost on its outside.
The thing Soames had called a super-radar allowed a penguin rookery to
be watched in detail without disturbing the penguins, and Fran
obligingly loaned his pocket instrument--the one that cut metal like
butter--to the physicists of the staff.

He had to show them how to use it, though. It was a flat metal case
about the size of a pocket cigarette lighter. It had two very simple
controls, and a highly ingenious gimmick which kept it from turning
itself on by accident.

In an oblique fashion, it was a heat-pump. One control turned it on and
intensified or diminished its effect. The other controlled the area it
worked on. In any material but iron, it made heat flow together toward
the center of its projected field. Pointed at a metal bar, the heat from
both ends flowed to the center, where the pocket device was aimed. The
center became intensely hot. The rest went intensely cold. In seconds a
bronze bar turned red-hot along a line a hundredth of an inch thick.
Then it melted, a layer the thickness of tissue-paper turned liquid and
one could pull the bar apart or slide it sidewise to separate it. But
one needed to hold the bar in thick gloves, because liquid air could
drip off if one were not careful. And it did not work on iron or steel.

Soames took Fran with Mal and Hod, to the improvised schoolroom where
Gail labored to give Zani a minimum vocabulary of English words. Rex
went happily along with the others.

Zani greeted the dog rapturously. She got down on the floor with him and
tussled with him, her face beaming.

Soames' mouth dropped open. The other children hadn't known there was
such a thing as a dog. They'd had to learn to play with Rex. But Zani
knew about dogs and how to play with them on sight.

"I suppose," said Gail, not knowing of Soames' astonishment, "Zani will
help me teach the other children some words."

But the boy Hod had picked up the ball-point pen Gail had needed to show
Zani the use of. He didn't need to be shown. Without a glance at it, he
began to write. A moment later he read off, slowly and clumsily and from
the completely cryptic marks he'd made, the English words that Gail had
taught Zani. Fran and Mal joined him. They painstakingly practiced the
pronunciation of words Gail had taught Zani but not them.

It was another development that did not make sense.




CHAPTER 4


Captain Moggs landed and went directly to the main building of the base.
The children were playing with Rex.

"Children," she said with authority, "go inside and pack up. We are
going back to the United States."

The girl Mal seemed to understand and went to tell the others.

Captain Moggs came upon Soames, feverishly making up bundles of objects
the children had brought out of their ship before Fran--in the brown
tunic--had burned it. Captain Moggs said approvingly:

"You must have anticipated my orders! But I thought it unwise to tell
you by radio on the inter-base wave-length."

Soames said curtly:

"I don't know anything about your orders. They're refuelling your ship
now. We need to get it aloft with Gail and the kids inside of fifteen
minutes.

"We were clearing away a snow-weasel to take to the woods," he growled.
"Not the woods, but the wilds. We've got company coming."

"Impossible!" said Captain Moggs. "I have top-level orders for this
whole affair to be hushed up. The existence of the children is to be
denied. Everybody is to deny everything. Visitors cannot be permitted!
It's absolutely unthinkable!"

Soames grinned mirthlessly.

"It's six hours since the French asked if they might come over for a
social call. We stalled them. The English suggested a conference about
the extrawd'n'ry burst of static the other night. They were stalled off
too. But just about an hour ago the Russians pulled their stunt.
Emergency S.O.S. One of their planes with engine trouble. Can't get
home. It's heading this way for an emergency landing, convoyed by
another plane. Can you imagine us refusing permission for a ship in
trouble to land?"

"I don't believe it's in trouble!" said Captain Moggs angrily.

"Neither do I," said Soames.

He passed a wrapped parcel to one side.

"They must be acting on orders," he said coldly. "And we don't know what
their orders are. Until we realized you'd get here first, we were making
ready to take the kids off in a snow-weasel. If we kept to soft snow, no
plane could land near them. It's just possible somebody could claim the
kids asked protection from us decadent, warmongering Americans, and they
might be equipped to shoot it out. We aren't."

Some of the base specialists appeared to help Soames carry the parcels
to the transport.

Gail appeared, muffled up for travel. Fran and Zani were with her,
similarly clothed. They carried garments for the others.

Captain Moggs fled to the communications room to demand radio contact to
Washington. But the radio was busy. The French, having been stalled off
when they suggested a visit, were now urged to call immediately. The
English, similarly put off, were now invited to drop in for tea. As
Captain Moggs sputtered, the radio went on to organize a full-scale
conference on common observational problems, plus a seminar on Antarctic
scientific research in general. It would be a beautiful example of
whole-hearted co-operation among scientific groups of different
nationalities. It should set a charming example for the rest of the
world. But members of the staff, arranging this swift block of possible
trouble-making by unwelcome visitors, wore the unpleasant expression of
people who are preparing to be very polite to people attempting to put
something over on them. It was notable that the few sporting weapons at
the base were passed out to those who could use them most effectively if
the need arose.

The transport's fuel-tanks were topped. The remaining two children
struggled into flying garments. The boy Hod took down the small tripod
with its spinning thing on top. Instantly the area about the base main
building became bitter cold. The children climbed into the transport
after Gail.

Soames, swearing, climbed in after a still expostulating Captain Moggs.
He did not like the idea of leaving while any chance of trouble stayed
behind. But as a matter of fact, his leaving with the others removed
nearly the last chance of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was, though, the rational thing to do.

Representatives of the other nations would land at the American base,
and assure themselves that there were no extraterrestrials in hiding nor
any signs of a spaceship anywhere about. And there would result a
scientific conference that would do some good. The extraordinary burst
of static would be discussed, with no conclusion whatever. But the
Americans would be able to make an agreement on methods of observation
with the other bases so that observations in the future would yield a
little more information than had been secured before.

Gail kept a quasi-maternal eye on the children until they dozed off. But
she watched Soames' expression, too. She and Soames and Captain Moggs
rode in the passenger section of the transport a few seats behind the
children.

"I wish I could understand," said Gail, in a low tone to Soames. "The
other children know everything I've taught Zani, and there's been no way
for them to know! They know things they weren't in the room to learn,
and Zani didn't have time to tell them! Yet it doesn't seem like
telepathy. If they were telepaths they could exchange thoughts without
speaking. But they chatter all the time!"

"If they'd been telepaths," said Soames, "they'd have known I was going
to burn their signalling apparatus. They could have stopped me, or tried
to, anyhow."

       *       *       *       *       *

Captain Moggs had paid no attention. Now she asked, "Why does the public
insist on details of matters the military think should be kept secret?"

"Because," said Gail briefly, "it's the public that gets drowned by a
tidal wave or killed by a cyclone. If strangers from space discover
Earth, it's the public that will suffer."

"But," said Captain Moggs querulously, "it is necessary for this to be
kept secret!"

"Unfortunately," said Soames. "The story broke before that decision was
made."

He thought how inevitable it was that everybody should see the situation
from their own viewpoint only. Captain Moggs from the military; Gail had
a newspaper-woman's angle tempered with feminine compassion. And he was
fascinated by the innumerable possibilities the technology of the
children's race suggested. He yearned for a few days alone with some
low-temperature apparatus. The hand-tool of Fran's bothered him.

He told Gail.

"What has low temperature to do?" she asked.

"They've got some wire that's a superconductor at room temperature. We
can't have superconductors above 18° Kelvin, which is colder than liquid
hydrogen. But a superconductor acts like a magnetic shield, no, not
exactly. But you can't touch a magnet to one. Induced currents in the
superconductor fight its approach. I'd like to know what happens to the
magnetic field. Does it cancel, or bounce, or what? Could it, for
instance, be focussed?"

"I don't see ..."

"Neither do I," said Soames. "But I've got a hunch that the little
pocket gadget Fran carries has some superconductor in it. I think I
could make something that wouldn't be his instrument, at all--it would
do different things--but that gadget does suggest some possibilities I
fairly ache to try out."

"And I," said Gail, with a faint smile, "I want to try to write
something that nobody would print. I'd like to write the real story as I
see it, the children from a viewpoint nobody will want to see."

He looked at her, puzzled.

"My syndicate wants a story about the children that nobody will have to
think about. No recognition of a problem in plain decency with the
children considered as human as they are, but just a story that
everybody could read without thinking anything but what they wanted to.
They're nice children. Somebody raised them very well. But with most
people nowadays thinking that if children aren't ill-bred they're
frustrated...."

She made a helpless gesture as the plane bellowed onward.

       *       *       *       *       *

Presently the moon shone on Fran's face. He moved in his sleep. After a
little he opened his eyes and gasped a little. He looked startledly
around, an instinct of anyone waking in a strange place. Then he turned
back. He saw the moon.

He uttered a little cry. His face worked. He stared at the misshapen,
incompletely round companion of Earth as if its appearance had some
extraordinary, horrifying meaning for him. His hands clenched.

Behind him, Gail whispered:

"Brad! He's--horrified! Does that mean that he and the other children
need to signal to someone ..."

"I doubt it very much," said Soames. "If his parents and companions had
landed on the moon, and I stopped him from signalling to them, he might
look hopefully at it, or longingly, but not the way he does."

Fran touched the other boy, Hod. Hod waked, and Fran spoke to him in an
urgent whisper. Hod jerked his head about and stared at the moon as Fran
had done. He made a little whimpering noise. Then Mal made a bubbling
sound, as from a bad dream. She waked. Then Zani roused and began to ask
what was obviously a question, and stopped short. They spoke to each
other in hushed voices in that unintelligible language of theirs.

"I've got an idea," said Soames in a flat, unbelieving tone. "Let's
see."

Soames went forward and into the pilot's compartment. He came back with
binoculars. He touched Fran on the shoulder and offered them. Fran
stared up at him with dazed eyes, not really attending to Soames at all.
He looked back at the moon.

He focussed the binoculars. They were excellent glasses. The
ring-mountains at the edge of sunshine on the moon were very, very
distinct. He could see those tiny speckles of light on the dark side of
the terminator which were mountain-tops rising out of darkness into the
sunshine. There was Aristarchus and Copernicus and Tycho. There were the
vast, featureless "mares,"--those plains of once-liquid lava which had
welled out when monstrous missiles the size of counties buried
themselves deep in the moon's substance. The moon could be seen as
battered; shattered, devastated; destroyed.

Soames touched Fran's shoulder again and showed him how one looked
through the binoculars. Fran's hand shook as he took them. He put them
to his eyes.

Zani put her hands over her eyes with a little cry. It was as if she
tried to shut out the sight that Fran saw. Mal began to cry quietly. Hod
made little gasping noises.

Fran lowered the binoculars. He looked at Soames with a terrible hatred
in his eyes.

Soames went back to Gail, leaving the binoculars with the children. He
found himself sweating.

"When," asked Soames harshly, "were the mountains on the moon made? It's
an interesting question. I just got an answer. They were made when there
were three-toed horses and many ganoid fishes on the earth."

       *       *       *       *       *

"The children knew the moon when it--wasn't the way it is now," he said
with some difficulty. "You know what that is! Ring-mountains sometimes
hundreds of miles across, splashings of stone from the impact of
asteroids and moonlets and islands of rock and metal falling from the
sky. The mares are where the moon's crust was punctured and lava poured
out. The streaks are where up-flung stuff was thrown hundreds of miles!

"It was a guess," said Soames. "But it's not a guess any longer. There
was a Fifth Planet, and it either exploded or was blown to bits, heaven
knows how! But the moon was bombarded by the wreckage, and so was Earth!
Mountain-ranges fell from the sky right here on this world, too. There
was destruction on Earth to match that on the moon. Perhaps here and
there some place remained undestroyed, an acre here, perhaps a square
mile a thousand miles away. Some life survived, and now it's all
forgotten. There are rains and winds and frost. Earth's scars wore away
through millions of years. We don't even know where the wounds were! But
there were people in those days!

"And they were civilized," continued Soames. "They had superconductors
and one-way conductors of heat. They had reached the point where they
didn't need fire any more, and they built ships of magnesium alloy. They
saw the Fifth Planet when it flew apart. They knew what must happen to
Earth with the whole solar system filled with a planet's debris. Earth
would be smashed; wrecked; depopulated, made like the moon is now! Maybe
they had ships that went to other planets, but not enough to carry all
the race. And the only other planets they could use were the inner ones,
and they'd be smashed like the Earth and moon? What could they do? There
might be one or two survivors here and there, bound to lapse into
savagery because they were so few. But where could the civilized race
go?"

Gail made an inarticulate sound.

"They might," said Soames in a flat voice, "they might try to go into
the future; into the time beyond the catastrophe, when Earth would have
healed its wounds. They might send someone ahead to see if it were
possible. Yet if they sent one ship first--with everyone left behind
doomed to die--if they sent one ship first, it's reasonable that they'd
give children the chance of survival. It's even reasonable that they'd
send two boys and two girls...."

"They--had a transmitter," Gail said, as if breathing hurt her. "You
destroyed it. They meant to signal, not for help as we thought, but for
their people to join them. M-maybe now they're hoping to get the
material and the power to build another transmitter. Since everything
they use is so simple, the boys might have been taught how. They were
taught to repair the one they had! They did repair it! Maybe they can
make one, and hope we'll help them! They'd have been especially
trained...."

"Nice, isn't it?" asked Soames. "They were sent here in some fashion to
make a beachhead for the landing of their people. A civilization that's
starkly, simply doomed unless it can migrate. No mere conquest, with
tribute to be paid to it. It has to take over a whole planet! It has to
take over Earth, or die!" He winced. "And the kids, now, think of their
parents as waiting for mountains to fall upon them from the sky, and
I've doomed them to keep on waiting. Now the kids must be hoping
desperately that they can get us to give them the means to save
everything and everybody they care about, even though we're destroyed in
the process! Isn't it pretty?

"If anybody else finds out what we know, the children will be hated as
nobody was ever hated before. They'll be known for the deadly danger
they are. We're primitives, beside their civilization! We'll have to
fight, because there's no room for the population of another whole
world, here! There's no food for more people! We can't let them come,
and they must die if they don't come, and the children must be here to
open the way for them to come in hordes.

"The children mustn't be allowed to build anything we don't understand
or that might let them open communication with their people. If they
try, they'll be trying to serve their own race by destroying this. And
they'd have to destroy us and--" his voice was fierce--"I'm not going to
let anything happen to you!"

Gail's cheeks were white, but a trace of color came into them then. Yet
she looked remorseful as she glanced forward to where the children
murmured hopelessly together.




CHAPTER 5


The jet transport got new flight orders while it was in the air over
South Carolina. There was a new attitude toward their ship and its
occupants among the military men and the political heads of
governments. The new attitude was the result of mathematics.

It was the burst of static screaming, three whole seconds long, which
made the matter something much more than a thing to maneuver with and
make public pronouncements about. In every nation it eventually occurred
to somebody to compute the power in that meaningless signal. It was
linked with the appearance of the children's ship--which nobody really
believed had contained children--and therefore it was artificial. But
the power, the energy involved was incredible. The computations went to
defense departments and heads of state. They reacted. And in consequence
the jet-plane was ordered to change course and head west.

After many hours the transport landed. A hillside rose before it. A
vast, grass-covered area lifted up. It was a great door. The transport
rolled deliberately into a monstrous, windowless, artificial cavern, and
the hillside closed behind it.

This was a base, too, but not like the one at Gissell Bay. The existence
of this one would be denied. It was hoped that it would be forever
unused for its designed purpose. Soames never saw any part of it that he
was not supposed to see. Nobody ever mentioned to him any function it
could perform except the hiding of children from a spaceship that
happened to have crashed on Antarctica. But he guessed that if atomic
war should ever burst on Earth, that rockets rising from this place and
others like it would avenge the destruction done to America.

       *       *       *       *       *

Presently Gail and the children were installed in a remarkably ordinary
small cottage, and Soames frowned. They'd arrived at the village by
elevator from a tunnel hundreds of feet underground, but the village in
which the cottage stood looked exactly like any other remote and sleepy
settlement. Soames began a protest against Gail being so isolated and so
much alone. But, unsmilingly, he was shown that there was an electrified
fence, with guards, and another a mile beyond, and a third still
farther, with watch-posts beyond that. Nobody would intrude upon the
village. But from the air it would look perfectly commonplace. There was
no indication at all of shafts from deep underground to what appeared an
ordinary country general store. There was no sign of tunnels from the
different houses to that merchandising mart.

Soames went off to be assigned other quarters. He wanted to work on some
items that had come into his mind during the last hours of the flight.
He'd guessed, to Gail, that the children came out of remotest time.
There was evidence for it, but it need not be true. So he'd made a
test.

When the children had breakfasted he drew on a sketch-pad a diagram of
part of the solar system. A dot for the sun, and a circle with a dot on
it for Mercury, the innermost planet. Another dot on a circle for Venus,
the second world out. A third circle and a dot for Earth and its orbit,
and beside the dot indicating Earth he drew a crescent, for the moon.
Alongside the dot standing for Mars he drew two crescents, because Mars
has two tiny moons.

The children discussed the diagram. Zani ended it with a decisive remark
in the language they used. Fran drew a fifth circle, placed a dot to
indicate a fifth planet, and put four crescents beside it, then drew a
sixth circle with a large dot and drew twelve crescents beside that.

Soames drew a deep breath. The twelve-moon planet was certainly Jupiter,
which is now next out from the sun after Mars. The number of moons made
it unmistakable. But Fran put a Fifth Planet, with four moons, where now
there is only planetary debris, the asteroids.

The diagram quite distinctly proved, to Soames' satisfaction, that the
hypothetical Fifth Planet had existed, with four moons, and that the
children had come out of time rather than across space. And he was now
grimly sure about the reason for the children's coming to Earth of here
and now.

Bombardment from space is not unknown. In 1914 there was a meteoric fall
in Siberia which knocked down every tree for fifty miles around. A few
thousand years earlier, eight or ten, Canon Diablo crater was formed in
Colorado by a missile from the heavens which wiped out all life within a
thousand-mile radius. Earlier still a much larger crater was formed in
Canada, and there are yet traces of an even more remote monster-missile
landing in South Africa. The ring-mountain there is largely worn away,
but it was many miles across.

       *       *       *       *       *

The situation of the children's race amounted to an infinitely
speeded-up bombardment instead of a millennial sniping from the sky. The
Fifth Planet was newly shattered into bits. Its fragments plunged upon
Earth and moon as they had weeks earlier battered Mars, and as
fortnights later they would devastate Venus and plunge upon Mercury.
Jagged portions of the detonated planet filled the sky of Earth with
flames.

The ground shook continuously. With a mad imprecision of timing,
mountain-ranges plummeted out of the sky at utterly unpredictable times
and places. Anywhere on Earth, at night-time, living creatures might
look upward and see the stars blotted out in irregularly-shaped, swiftly
enlarging areas which would grow until there was only blackness
overhead. But that could not last. It turned abruptly to white-hot
incandescence as the falling enormity touched atmosphere, and crashed
down upon them.

No living thing which saw the sky all turned to flame lived to remember
it. Not one survived. Obviously! They were turned to wisps of
incandescent gas, exploding past the normal limits of Earth's air. Some
may have seen such plungings from many miles away and died of the
concussion. The ground heaved in great waves which ran terribly in all
directions. Vast chasms opened in the soil, and flames as of hell flowed
out of them. Seashores were overwhelmed by mountainous tidal waves,
caused by cubic miles of seawater turned to steam when islands fell into
the ocean at tens of miles per second.

This was what happened to Earth in the time from which the children
came. Perhaps their elders had foreseen it in time to take some
measures, which would be the children's ship. But that ship had been
built very hastily. It could have been begun before the bombardment
started, or it could have been completed only near the end, when
asteroids already plunged into defenseless Earth and it heaved and
writhed in agony.

Humans caught in such a cosmic trap would be in no mood to negotiate or
make promises, if any sort of beachhead to the future could be set up.
They would pour through and the world of the present must simply
dissolve into incoherence. There could be no peace. It was unthinkable.

       *       *       *       *       *

The investigation-team from the East arrived to learn from Soames all
about the landing of the ship.

He told them, giving them the tape from the wave-guide radar and
speaking with strict precision of every event up to the moment of his
arrival at Gissell Bay with the children and their artifacts. He did not
mention telepathy or time-travel because they seemed so impossible.

When the military men wanted information about instantly available
super-weapons, he told them that he knew nothing of weapons. They'd have
to judge from the gadgets the children had brought. When the
public-relations men asked briskly from what other planet or solar
system the spaceship had come, and when a search-ship might be expected,
looking for the children, he was ironic. He suggested that the children
might give that information if asked in the proper language. He didn't
know it. But the two physicists were men whose names he knew and
respected. They listened to what he said. They'd look at the devices
from the ship and then come back and talk to him.

He went back to his brooding. The children had travelled through time.
Everything pointed to it, from the meteor-watch radar to the children's
reaction at sight of the pock-marked moon and their knowledge that
there should have been a Fifth Planet, to which they assigned four
moons. It had happened. Positively. But there was one small difficulty.
If time-travel were possible, a man travelling about in the past might
by some accident kill his grandfather, or his father, in which case he
could not be born, and hence could not possibly go back in time. But if
he did not go back in time he would be born and could face the
possibility of preventing his own existence--if time-travel was
possible. But this was impossible, so time-travel was impossible.

On a higher technical level, there is just one law of nature which seems
infallibly true, since its latest modification to allow for nuclear
energy. It is the law of the conservation of mass and energy. The total
of energy and matter taken together in the universe as a whole, cannot
change. Matter can be converted to energy and doubtless energy to
matter, but the total is fixed for all time and for each instant of
time. So, if a ship could move from one time-period to another, it would
lessen the total of matter and energy in the time-period it left, and
increase the total when--where--where-when it arrived. And this would
mean that the law of the conservation of mass and energy was wrong. But
it wasn't. It was right.

Soames tried to reconcile what he had to accept with what he knew. He
failed. He provisionally conceded that the children's civilization did
something which in his frame of reference was impossible. They had other
frames of reference than his. He tried to find their frame of reference
in something simpler than time-travel. He picked one impossible
accomplishment and tried to duplicate it, then to approach it, then to
parallel it. He scribbled and diagrammed and scowled and sweated. He had
no real hope, of course. But presently he swore abruptly and stared at
what he had drawn.

       *       *       *       *       *

He'd begun a second set of diagrams when the two physicists of the
investigation-team came back. There was a short man and a thin one. They
looked dazed.

"They are children," said the thin man in a very thin voice, "and they
are human children, and their science makes us ridiculous. They are
centuries ahead of us. I could not understand any device they had. I
could not imagine how any of them worked."

"It is impossible to talk at a distance," said Soames.

"What do you mean?" asked the thin man, still numb from what he'd seen.

"Sound diminishes as the square of the distance," Soames explained. "You
can't make a sound--unless you use a cannon--that can be heard ten miles
away. It's impossible to talk at a distance."

"I feel crazy too," said the short man, "but there are telephones."

"It's not talking at a distance. You talk to a microphone at a few
inches. Someone listens to a receiver held against his ear. You don't
talk to the man, but the microphone. He doesn't listen to you, but a
receiver. The effect is the same as talking at a distance, so you ignore
the fact that it isn't. I've played a game with the things the children
brought. I won it, one game."

Both men listened intently.

"I've been pretending," said Soames, "that I'm a member of the kids'
race, cast away like they are on Earth. As a castaway I know that things
can be done that the local savages--us--consider impossible. But I need
special materials to do them with. My civilization has provided them.
They don't exist here. But I refuse to sink to barbarism. Yet I can't
reconstruct my civilization. What can I do?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The thin physicist suddenly raised his head. The short man looked up.

"I'll take what materials the savages of Earth can supply," said Soames.
"I'll settle for an approximation. And in practice, as a castaway in a
savage environment, I'll wind up with a civilization which isn't that of
the savages, and isn't of my own race, but in some ways is better than
either because it's tailored to fit the materials at hand and the
environment I'm in."

The short physicist said slowly:

"I think I see what you're driving at. But it's just an idea...."

"I tried it on that one-way heat conductor," said Soames. "I can't
duplicate it. But I've designed something that will mean nearly but not
quite what their cooking-pot does. Take a look at this."

He spread out the completed diagram of the first thing he'd worked on.
It was quite clear. He'd helped design the meteor-watch radar at Gissell
Bay, and his use of electronic symbols was normal. There was only one
part of the device that he'd needed to sketch in some detail. The thin
physicist traced the diagram.

"You've designed a coil with extremely low self-induction--"

"Not low," corrected Soames. "Negative. This has less than no
self-induction. It feeds back to instead of fighting an applied current.
Put any current in it, and it feeds back to increase the magnetism until
it reaches saturation. Then it starts to lose its magnetism and that
feeds back a counter-emf which increases the demagnetizing current until
it's saturated with opposite polarity. You get an alternating magnet,
which doesn't evolve heat because of its magnetic instability, but
absorbs heat trying to maintain its stability. This thing will absorb
heat from anywhere--the air, water, sunlight or what have you--and give
out electric current."

The two scientists stared, and traced the diagram again, and stared at
each other.

"It--should!" said the thin man. "It--it has to! This is magnificent!
It's more important than one-way heat conduction! This is ..."

"This is not nearly as convenient as a pot that gets cold on the outside
so it can get hot on the inside," observed Soames. "From a castaway's
standpoint it's crude. But this is what can happen from two
civilizations affecting each other without immediately resorting to
murder. You might try it."

The two physicists blinked. Then the short man said uneasily:

"Can we do it?"

The thin man said more feverishly than before:

"Of course! Look at that weather-making thing! We can't duplicate it
exactly, but when you think-- There's no Hall effect in liquids. Nobody
ever tried to find one in ionized gases. But when you think--"

The short man gulped. Then he said:

"You won't change the temperature, and to make an equation--"

They talked to each other, feverishly. They scribbled. They almost
babbled in their haste. When the other members of the investigating-team
arrived, they had the look of men who walk on clouds.

The military men were not happy. They were empty-handed. They could not
even get statistical information from the children.

They had no useful information. Fran's pocket instrument was cryptic,
and held no promise as a weapon. They could not hope to duplicate what
Soames had called a super-radar. The cooking-pot, if duplicated, might
by modification supply power for ships and submarines, or even planes.
But there were no weapons. None.

       *       *       *       *       *

The public-relations men were frightened. The children's coming must
produce a financial panic. All of Earth's civilization was demonstrably
out of date. Earth technology was so old-fashioned that instantly its
obsolescence was realized, our economic system must fall apart.

Only the two physicists beamed at each other. They'd learned no
scientific facts from the children or their equipment, but they'd picked
up a trick of thinking from Soames.

By that time it was night. Soames went again to the surprisingly
ordinary cottage that Gail occupied with the four children.

"I've had quite a day," said Gail tiredly. "And I'm worried; for the
children. For you. For myself. I'm--I'm terrified, Brad!"

He put out his hands. He steadied her. Then, without intending it, he
held her close. She did not resist. She cried heart-brokenly on his
shoulder from pure nervous strain.

Suddenly Captain Moggs appeared. Gail was immediately composed and
remote. But one hand, holding Soames' sleeve, still quivered a little.

"It's dreadful!" said Captain Moggs. "You'll never be able to believe
what's happened! The Russians have pictures of the spaceship! The
pictures Mr. Soames took! They know everything! They must have gotten
the pictures when their planes landed at Gissell Bay! But how?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames could have answered, and quite accurately. Some enterprising
member of the Russian scientific team had been left alone in the
developing-room at the base.

"They gave copies of the pictures to the UN assembly," wailed Captain
Moggs. "All of them! They say they are pictures of the alien ship which
landed--and they are--and they say that we Americans took the crew to
the United States--which we did--but they say we're now making a treaty
with the non-human monsters who came in the ship! They say that we're
selling out the rest of humanity! That we're making a bargain to betray
the world to horrors out of space, in return for safety for ourselves!
They demand that the United Nations take over the ship and its crew."

Soames whistled softly. The charge was just insane enough to be
credited. There was no longer a ship, too, and the children were far
from monsters. So there was no way to convince anyone that America even
made an honest attempt to satisfy or answer the complaint. The matter of
the children and their ship had been badly handled. But there was no way
to handle it well. The coming of the children was a catastrophe any way
you looked at it.

"There was nothing to be done," mourned Captain Moggs, "but state the
facts. Our delegation said the ship crashed on landing, and its
occupants needed time to recover from the shock and to develop some way
to communicate with us. Our delegation said a complete report hadn't
even been made to our government, but that one will be prepared and made
public immediately."

Gail looked up at Soames in the darkness. He nodded.

"That report," said Soames. "That's us. Particularly you."

"Yes," said Gail confidently. "You write the technical side, and I'll do
a human-interest story for the UN that will make everybody love them!"

Soames felt more than usually a scoundrel.

"Hold it," he said unhappily. "It's all right to make the kids
attractive, but not too much. Do you remember why?"

Gail stopped short.

"They don't come from a comfortably distant solar system," said Soames,
more unhappily still. "They come from Earth, from another time, where
there are mountains falling from the sky. And the children's families
have to stay right where they are until flaming islands turn their sky
to flame and crash down on them to destroy them. Because we can't let
them come here."

Gail stared up at him, and all the life went out of her face.

"Oh, surely!" she said with bitterness. "Surely! That's right! We can't
afford it! I don't know about you or the rest of the world, but I'm
going to hate myself all the rest of my life!"




CHAPTER 6


Soames, remembering Rex, got two puppies for the children next morning.
He was inside the cottage when Captain Moggs turned up. He watched Mal
and Hod, outside on the lawn, playing with the two small dogs. Zani sat
at a table indoors, drawing. Gail had shown her pictures of cities and
provided her with paper and soft pencils. Zani grasped the idea
immediately. She drew, without remarkable skill but with a certain
pleasing directness. Now she drew a city while Gail hovered near.

"I reported to Washington of your willingness to work on the report, Mr.
Soames," said Captain Moggs with gratification. "Your status has been
clarified. The papers are on the way here now."

Soames started a little. From where he stood, he could watch Mal and Hod
out of a window, and by turning his eyes he could see Zani. She could
see nothing that went on where Mal cuddled one puppy, girl-fashion,
while Hod played in quite another fashion with the other. The window was
behind Zani.

Soames had not been too attentive. He realized it.

"What's that, Captain?"

"Your status is clarified," said Captain Moggs, authoritatively. "You
have been appointed a civilian consultant. You had no official status
before. The bookkeeping problem was serious. Now you have a civil
service status, a rating, an assimilated rank and a security
classification."

Soames turned again to watch the children out-of-doors. Fran came around
from the back of the cottage. He carried something in his hands. It was
a white rabbit. He'd brought it to show Mal and Hod. They put down the
puppies and gazed at it in amazement, stroking its fur and talking
inaudibly.

Soames looked swiftly at Zani. Her pencil had ceased to make strokes
upon the paper. She had the expression of someone watching absorbedly,
though her eyes were on the paper before her.

Gail stirred, and Soames made a gesture to her. Puzzled, she came to his
side. He said quietly:

"Watch the kids outside and Zani at the same time."

Fran retrieved the rabbit and went away with it, to give it back to its
owners. Zani returned to her drawing. The two children outside went back
to the puppies. One small dog sprawled triumphantly over the other with
an expression of bland amiability on his face. For no reason at all, he
began to chew meditatively on the other puppy's ear. His victim
protested with no indignation at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

Zani, with her back to the scene, giggled to herself. The two children
outdoors separated the puppies to play with them again, individually.

"Zani knew," said Soames under his breath. "She knew what the others
saw."

"It happens all the time," said Gail in a similar low tone. "I've
noticed, since you pointed it out. But they aren't telepaths! They talk
to each other constantly. If they were telepaths they wouldn't need to."

Captain Moggs exclaimed. She'd gone to look at Zani's drawing:

"Really, Gail, the child draws very nicely! But do you think she should
waste time on pictures like this, when it's so important that she and
the others learn English?"

Gail said quietly:

"She's drawing pictures of her own world. That's a city like her people
build. I thought it would be a good idea to get such pictures from her."

Gail went to look at the drawing, at which Zani labored with a young
girl's complacent absorption in something she knows will be approved by
a grown-up when it's done. With a gesture, Gail invited Soames to look.
He did.

Zani had drawn the sky-line of a city, but it was an odd one. There were
tall buildings, but their walls were draping, catenary curves. There
were splendid towers and soaring highways, which leaped across emptiness
to magnificent landings. There were groups of structures with no
straight line visible anywhere.

"Interesting," said Soames. "That kind of building has been suggested as
ultra-modern architecture. They don't have an external steel frame.
There's a central mast from which all the floors are hung. They have to
be braced by cables, which make catenary curves like suspension-bridges
on end."

Zani went on with her drawing. Gail said:

"It isn't fantasy, then. Look at this. It's a--maybe you'll call it a
car. Only it looks like a sled. Or maybe a motorcycle."

She showed him a finished sketch. With a childish directness, yet a
singular effect of direct observation, Zani had drawn a vehicle. It did
not have wheels. It rested on what looked like two short, thick runners
like skids.

"This isn't fantasy, either," said Soames. "There've been wheelless
vehicles built lately. They're held an inch or so above the ground by
columns of air pouring out. They ride on cushions of air. But they have
to have perfect highways. It isn't likely that a child would draw them
if she hadn't seen them."

In silence, Gail showed other sketches. A man and woman in costumes
somehow related to those the children had worn at the beginning. There
was a picture of a group of people.

"Odd," said Soames. "Everybody wears a belt like the children have on
now. Everybody. As if it were official."

He glanced at Zani. She wore a belt over American-style young-girl's
clothing today. The belt was neither leather nor plastic nor anything
that could have a name put to it. It had two round and two square
medallions placed two on each side of the fastening, which was not a
buckle. The others wore the same. Soames puzzled over it for a moment.

Gail offered him another sheet of paper.

"I'm going to tear this up when you've seen it."

It was a landscape, sketched in with surprisingly bold strokes of the
soft pencil. The time was night. Near the bottom of the picture there
was a city of the strange, catenary-curve architecture. It was drawn so
small, though, that most of the picture was black sky. But there was a
blazing light upon the city, and it came from something monstrous and
jagged and incandescent and vast, plunging upon the city from the sky,
trailing flames behind it.

"And this," said Gail, very quietly.

It was a picture of a crater, a ring-mountain, the scene of the impact
of something terrible and huge. It was a chasm with circular, broken
rocky walls. There was a fallen tree in the foreground, near the spot
from which the sketch seemed to have been made.

"You're right not to show anyone else those drawings," said Soames. "The
kids are in a bad enough fix as visitors of a superior race. If it
should be realized that they're not here by accident, but somehow to
open a way for invasion by the population of a whole planet, well, you
can just imagine ..."

       *       *       *       *       *

Zani giggled suddenly, and he jumped. But her eyes were on the paper
before her. Soames glanced out the window. Mal had toppled over, and one
of the puppies had climbed valiantly on her back and was pulling with
all his tiny might at a puppy-mouthful of her hair. His tail wagged
vigorously the while. Hod laughed, and Mal giggled, and inside the
cottage Zani--who could not see what had happened--giggled with them.

"She couldn't see it, but she knew what happened," said Soames. "I
suspect this place is so top-secret that it's a breach of security to
remember it outside. If anybody notices that little trick the kids can
do, they'll be suspected of casually inspecting high-secrecy stuff
while drawing pictures or playing with little dogs."

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames returned to his quarters. He set to work upon the highly
necessary task of pretending that he was a castaway from the children's
civilization in order to improvise conveniences that as a castaway he'd
consider crude, but as an aborigine amazing.

From time to time, though, he wondered sardonically about the
public-relations program on the children. He'd prepared a complete
report about the ship, telling in detail about its arrival and adding
everything he could infer about the civilization that had made it,
except its location on the Earth of aeons ago and its imminent doom.
Gail had written what she considered the best human-interest story of
her life about the children. Neither report was asked for. Nobody knew
where either was to be sent. Soames guessed sardonically at a change of
policy somewhere.

But the problem justified worry, the simple, relatively insignificant
problem of the children here and now, with all thought of flaming skies
and upheaved earth put firmly aside.

The children had to be revealed. But the world would automatically
assume that the crew of an alien spaceship must be in some fashion
monsters. But four nicely raised children? Space-travellers? Spaceships
navigated by boys and girls who liked to play with puppies? Such
innocuous persons to represent the most deadly danger the modern world
had faced?

But they did represent it. There was no way out of the fact. And somehow
the facts had to be put across. The public-relations counsellors who had
interviewed the children pointed out the means. They got the job.

The advance publicity was thoroughly professional. The spaceship's
company was to be revealed in the most stupendous broadcast of all time.
For the second time in history, a trans-Atlantic relay patrol would form
two relay-channels from North America to Europe. It would reach Japan
via the Aleutians and a relay-ship, by wire from Japan to all Asia
and--again relayed--to Australia. South Africa would get the coverage by
land-wire down the continent from the Pillars of Hercules. The
Mediterranean basin, the Near East, Scandinavia, and even Iceland would
see the spectacle. Detailed instructions were given to Gail to give to
the children.

The very top feminine TV personality of America would serve as hostess,
substituting for Gail, who must try to make the children understand.
Miss Linda Beach could establish a personal contact with any audience.
One had only to watch her to respond to her charm, her wholesomeness,
her adroit sincerity. She had sold soap, automobiles, vitamin tablets
and dessicated soup. Obviously, she was the perfect saleswoman for the
children out of space.

"I hope the professionals know what they're doing," Soames had said to
Gail. "I'm a simple soul who'd be inclined to tell the truth without
trimmings. It might not be easy, and it might not be comfortable, but it
would be fact."

       *       *       *       *       *

A small fast transport came to get the children and Gail and Soames. It
took off.

Soames took a seat beside Fran. He took out a pencil and a pad of paper.
He drew a sketch of a boy flying a kite, and added a close-up drawing of
the kite. He drew a boy walking on stilts, and a drawing of how stilts
were made. Soames hadn't actually seen a boy walking on stilts for
years, and it might now be a lost art, but Fran showed interest. Soames
drew a bicycle with a boy on it, and then modified the bike into a
motorcycle. He hoped his sketches would strike Fran as interesting, if
primitive, things a boy might do for his own satisfaction.

Fran was intrigued. Presently he took the pencil and made sketches of
his own. A boy with a belt like his rode something which vaguely
resembled a sledge or a motorcycle. He made a detailed drawing of a
runner. This was an air-sled, such as Zani had pictured in more
elaborate form. Fran sketched the air-column generator, and it was
utterly simple and a boy of fourteen could make it. After painful
scrutiny Soames realized that it was a ram-jet engine which would start
itself and operate in still air. In the modern world, it would make
gas-turbine engines practical for locomotives and motorcars.

The transport landed. A motorcycle escort surrounded the car with drawn
curtains which carried the children from Idlewild into New York. In time
the car dived down into the freight entrance of the new Communications
Building on 59th Street. Secret Service men had cleared all corridors so
the children reached their dressing-rooms unseen.

Linda Beach appeared an hour later and began the rehearsal.

The children gathered the purpose of the thing by watching the monitors.
They chattered together, and the girls went pleasantly through what was
expected of them. Hod seemed quite numb, and Fran scowled. But he was
more gracious when he saw Soames going through similar antics.

The rehearsal ended. There was another long wait. This was to introduce
the children--from a totally unknown and superior civilization--to a
world which considered them strangers from space, when they were
actually from a much more improbable homeland. The world was waiting to
see this. Time dragged.

All over the world people were waiting to get a first glimpse of
creatures whose coming might mean the end of the world.

Presently it began.

The show, naturally, opened with a tremendous fanfare of trumpets,
played from tape.

Then Linda Beach appeared. She introduced Gail and Soames and Captain
Moggs.

This broadcast was supposed to be strictly informative. It was, however,
produced with the attitude and the technique and the fine
professionalism of specialists in the area of subconscious selling. So
it put its audience--the vast majority of it--into the exact mood of
people who surrender themselves to mildly lulling make-believe. When
Captain Moggs told of the finding of the ship, her authoritative manner
and self-importance made people feel, without regard to their thoughts,
that she was an un-funny comedian. The audience remembered with
decreasing concern that some interesting monsters were supposed to be in
the show later and that they were waiting to see them.

The introduction of the children was a disappointment, but a mild one.
When they were produced and identified, the television-watching syndrome
was fully developed. There was a feeling, of course, that the show fell
down in interest and that it did not live up to its advance publicity.
But the television audience is used to that. Its members continued to
watch with slightly dulled eyes, listening with partly attentive ears,
automatically waiting for a commercial when it could get some beer or an
equivalent without missing anything.

Even when tumult and confusion began; when Linda Beach tried to hold the
show together in the teeth of uproar behind her, the tranquillized state
of the audience continued. When Linda Beach's necklace was snatched from
her neck it seemed intended to be funny.

It wasn't until the very end that anything occurred really to break the
mood professionally produced shows are designed to achieve. That
occurrence startled the viewers out of their semi-comatose state, just
as blatant obscenity or intolerable profanity would have done. Linda
Beach, in fine sincerity and in tribute to the children, made a
statement which was utterly explosive. When the show ended, people all
over the world were roused and horrified and enraged.

Only small children, waiting in space-helmets and with ray-guns ready,
complained aggrievedly that there hadn't been any monsters. The adults
felt that there had been. That there were.

They hated the children with a strictly personal hatred based on panic
combined with shame.




CHAPTER 7


Soames' rehearsed part in the broadcast was finished after he and Gail
and Captain Moggs had told the story of the finding of the ship. Their
narratives were deftly guided by Linda Beach's questions.

Soames wanted to get out of sight. He was sunk in gloom. It was a show
instead of what he would have considered a presentation of the facts,
though nearly everything said had been factual. He left the studio.

In an uninhabited room he found himself staring out a window, down at
the crowd before the Communications Building.

It was a restless crowd, now. The ground-floor plate-glass windows had
been filled with television screens, and those near them could see the
broadcast and hear it through out-door loud-speakers. But this crowd was
a special one, in that it hadn't gathered to see the broadcast but
extraterrestrial monsters, in the flesh or fur or scales or however they
might appear. It now knew that the monsters had arrived and there was no
chance of seeing them direct. It had been harangued by orators and
people who already began to call themselves humanity-firsters. It felt
cheated.

There were a large number of teen-agers in the crowd.

At the window, Soames recognized the oddity of the crowd below him. An
ordinary, curiosity-seeking crowd would contain a considerable
percentage of women. This did not. There were shouting voices which
Soames heard faintly. They were orators declaiming assorted emotional
opinions about monsters from space, obviously in the belief that they
were beyond dispute and needed to be acted on at once. There was
competition among these orators. Some had bands of supporters around
them to aid their effectiveness by applause and loud agreement. Soames
saw, too, at least one hilarious group of college-age boys who might
have been organized by a college humor magazine. They waved cardboard
signs. "_Space-Monsters Go Home!_"

The unattended monitor set, placed around some corner in a corridor,
gave out an excellently modulated reproduction of the program going on
the air. An Italian physicist asked questions about the qualifications
of such young children as space navigators. Soames listened
abstractedly. He knew unhappily that if the children weren't convincing
as visitors from space, they'd be much less plausible in their true
roles as fugitives out of time.

       *       *       *       *       *

The collegians surged here and there, making a demonstration in favor of
mirth. There were also youthful members of less innocuous groups,
swaggering, consciously ominous members of organizations known as the
Maharajas and the Comets and the Toppers. Members of these groups eyed
members of other such groups with challenging, level gazes.

Voices harangued. Collegians attempted to sing what must have seemed to
them a deliciously satirical song. But it did not please the
non-collegian Maharajas or Comets or the Toppers.

A Russian scientist took over on the broadcast. He had been flown to the
United States especially for the occasion. He asked elaborate and
carefully loaded questions. They had been prepared as propaganda
stumpers by people who in their way were as skilled in public relations
as the producers of this show. Linda Beach applied the charm which had
sold soap, vitamins, automobiles and dessicated soup. Soames heard the
exchanges from the monitor set.

Outside, in the street, a brick suddenly fell among the collegians. More
bricks fell among those engaged in an impromptu meeting of Humanity
Firsters. Police whistles blew. A plate-glass window crashed. A
collegian suddenly had a bloody face and a flying wedge of Maharajas
scornfully cut through the formerly singing group, wielding belts and
bludgeons for the honor of having started a riot on 57th Street. They
fought past the college crowd and into a band of the Comets. There they
found a rumble ready-made. Haranguing orators found themselves jostled.
Fights broke out among members of groups which had come to stage
demonstrations against extraterrestrials. The fighting spread to
individuals.

Police-car sirens wailed. Squad-cars came careening out of
uptown-traffic streets and converged on the tumult. The sirens produced
violent surgings of the crowd. There was a wild rush in this direction
as a siren sounded from that, and then an equally wild rush in another
direction still as blazing headlights and a moving howl came from
elsewhere. Rushing figures surged against the doors to the lobby of the
Communications Building.

Members of the Toppers and the Comets and the Maharajas and other
fanatics rushed up the stairs. There was a sign "_On the Air_" lighted
from behind outside the studio in which the world-wide broadcast was in
progress. There was a door. They opened it.

The watching world heard the racket as a former Nobel prize-winner's
stilted questions about the children were drowned out. This was not a
planned invasion. It was a totally chaotic rushing-about of people who'd
been half hysterical to start with, who had been crushed in a
senselessly swaying mob, had been pushed bodily into a building-lobby
jammed past endurance, and escaped into a maze from which they'd
blundered into a studio with a broadcast going on. Stagehands and
necktie-less persons rushed to throw them out. But the noise grew
greater while Linda Beach tried gamely to cover it up.

It was not easy. In fact, it was impossible. One of the Toppers found
himself cornered by two stagehands and dashed triumphantly across that
sacrosanct space, the area in a camera's field of vision. He raced
behind Linda Beach, then smiling pleasantly and talking at the top of
her voice to cover the noise behind her. The Topper snatched as he went
by. Linda Beach staggered, and her necklace broke, and this particular
juvenile delinquent plunged into the crowd by the doorway and wormed his
way through to lose himself in the crush outside.

But now the cops from the squad-cars were at work.

       *       *       *       *       *

The lobby began to be partially cleared. Fugitives from panic came down
into the street where they were commanded to get moving and keep moving.
They did.

And Soames arrived at the studio. He'd fought his way there with a sort
of white-hot passion, because Gail was where this lunatic mob might
trample her. He raged, and then he saw her standing with precarious
composure out of the way of everything.

Fran dragged fiercely at his arm. His eyes burned. He thrust something
upon Soames and frantically repeated the one word of his scanty English
vocabulary which seemed to fit. The word was, "Try! Try! Try!" He
reached around Soames' waist and linked a belt about him.

Soames had the abrupt conviction that he was going mad. He stood,
himself, in the studio where the tumult was now almost ended. But he
looked up at himself from the level of his own breast. Also he was down
in the lobby of the Communications Building, mingling with the thinning
mob there, allowing himself to be shepherded out into the street. There
he was surrounded by people taller than himself. That part of his
awareness reached the open air and moved swiftly westward. That part of
him put his hand in his pocket--but Soames had nothing to do with the
action--and felt things there. There was a chain with sharp-edged,
faceted things on it. There was a belt with shaped metallic objects
fastened to it....

"Try!" cried Fran desperately. "Try!"

And suddenly Soames realized. He heard the street-sounds through someone
else's ears. He saw the street through someone else's eyes.
Simultaneously he saw himself in the studio through someone else's eyes,
Fran's. And this explained the behavior of the children with puppies and
English lessons and items of information which all of them seemed to
know when one knew. The children were not telepathic. They could not
read each other's minds. But someone or all of the decorative squares
and circles on their belts enabled them to share each other's
sense-impressions. They were both broadcasters and receivers of sensory
impressions. And therefore it was because Soames had Mal's belt about
him that he could see what Fran saw, and hear what Fran heard, and also
he saw and heard and felt what an oily-haired member of the Toppers saw
and heard and felt with Hod's belt in his pocket beside Linda Beach's
necklace, snatched from her neck even before the camera.

But there was no sign that the oily-haired person saw or heard or felt
what Soames did. Perhaps because he was not wearing the belt, but only
had it crumpled together in his pocket.

"Right!" said Soames harshly. "I'll get it back!"

He plunged toward the studio door. There had been Secret Service men
assigned to guard the children. Soames caught one of them by the
shoulder.

"The kids have been robbed," he snapped in the Secret Service man's ear.
"Secret device! We've got to get it back! I can do it! Come along!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The Secret Service man instantly followed him. And Soames tore through
the scared people still aimlessly wandering about. He plunged down the
stairs. A squad-car cop moved to check his rush, and the Secret Service
man panted an identification and a need. The cop abandoned all other
matters and followed, too.

Soames needed to close his eyes to see what the Topper saw. He blinked
them shut while he ran three paces. The Topper walked, now. He'd been
joined by two friends. Soames heard his voice, he even felt the motions
of his lips and tongue in speech. He boasted that he'd snatched the
beads off Linda Beach's neck, and got a fancy belt one of those
funny-dressed kids was wearing.

Half a block. Two more of the Toppers joined the bragging snatcher. They
also heard of his grand achievement. The Topper drew his loot partly
from his pocket to prove his boast. They looked, and swaggered, and
whooped to others of their fellowship.

Soames pelted around a corner, turning it without warning. The Secret
Service man and the cop lost a dozen paces. Soames raced ahead. There
was a cluster of late-teen-age boys on the sidewalk of Eighth Avenue.
They wanted to see the loot.

Soames plunged into them. Without a word, he tackled and bore to the
ground the one in whose pocket Hod's belt and Linda Beach's necklace
still reposed.

Their reaction was instant. The Toppers were in a close group. Soames
hit it and fell to the ground atop one of their number. The others
instantly attacked him as if by reflex action. They stamped and kicked
viciously.

But there was a cop and a Secret Service man on the way. They struck.
The Toppers turned to fight and fled instead at the sight of two adults
already administering punishment to those within reach and coming on to
reach others.

The two officers pulled Soames to his feet. In seconds he'd been badly
battered. He pulled Hod's belt out from the pocket of the snarling,
now-pallid member of the Toppers, who was half-strangled and shaken. He
got the necklace. Numbly, he felt again and found a stray stone or two.

"All right," he said thickly. "I got it. I'll get back to the kids with
it."

       *       *       *       *       *

The cop took the Topper. Soames and the Secret Service man got back to
the studio. The show was still on. Soames exhaustedly handed Hod his
belt, and stripped off the other belt that Fran had put on him. He gave
it back to Fran. Fran's eyes still burned, but he regarded Soames with
definite respect. Perhaps there was even liking. And Soames held up the
recovered necklace for Linda Beach to see, though she was then still
before the camera.

She was a seasoned performer. Without blinking an eye she changed what
she was saying, called on Gail to have the children demonstrate the
devices they'd brought from the wrecked ship, and came to Soames. She
counted the stones swiftly, and asked questions.

He told her. It would come out, necessarily. The children had, built
into their belts, devices which produced an effect on the order of
telepathy. But it was not telepathy. Undoubtedly the devices could be
turned on or off. Turned on, they linked together the senses of those
who wore them, not the minds, but the senses. Each saw what the others
saw, and heard what the others heard, and felt with the rest. But
thoughts were not shared. Such a device would not be confusing if one
were used to it, and two men working together could co-operate with a
thousand times the effectiveness of men without them. Children playing
together could have a degree of companionship otherwise impossible. And
four children upon a desperate voyage, without adults to reassure them,
would need this close linkage with their fellows. It would give them
courage. They could be more resolute.

Linda Beach went back to camera-position and waited until the
demonstration of the pocket metal-cutting device, by Fran, was ended.
Then she signalled for her own camera and definitely put on the charm.
She showed the necklace. She said it had been stolen. She said that the
children were telepaths, and by the reading of the criminal's mind he
had been tracked down through the crowded streets outside the studio,
and her necklace recovered.

It is always better to say something that is not quite the truth but is
perfectly understandable than something which is true but bewildering.
This is a cardinal rule in television. Never bewilder your audience! So
Linda Beach did not bewilder her audience by accurate statement. She
told them something they would understand. It made the children
convincingly more than merely ordinary children.

It shocked her world-wide audience out of that bemused condition the
professionalism of the broadcast had produced. It lifted them out of
their seats, those who were seated. It tended to lift the hair of the
rest, those who realized that monsters from space who could read human
minds were utterly invincible and infinitely to be dreaded. No matter
what the children looked like, now, they had been declared on an
official fact-revealing broadcast to be extraterrestrial monsters who
could read human minds!

It raised hell.

Once said, it could not be withdrawn. It could be denied, but it would
be believed. In higher echelons of government all over the world it
produced such raging hatred of the children and the United States
together as made all previous tensions seem love-feasts by comparison.
In Russia it was instantly and bitterly believed that all Soviet
military secrets were now in process of being plucked from Russian
brains and given to the American military. Rage came from helplessness
in the face of such an achievement. There could be no way to stop such
espionage, and military action would be hopeless if the Americans knew
all about it before it was tried. In more tranquil nations there was
deep uneasiness, and in some there was terror. And everywhere that men
hated or stole or schemed--which was everywhere--the belief that
everybody's secrets were open to the children filled men with rage.

Of all public-relations enterprises in human history, the world-wide
broadcast about the children was most disastrous.

Soames and Gail could realize the absurdity of the thing, without any
hope of stopping or correcting it.

       *       *       *       *       *

They went swiftly back to the hidden base in the Rockies. Soames stayed
to have certain minor injuries attended to. Also he needed to get in
touch with the two physicists who had seen the children and known
despair, but who now played at being castaways with gratifying results.
In part he was needed for endless, harassing consultations with people
who wanted urgently to disbelieve everything he said, and managed to
hold on to a great deal of doubt.

Meanwhile there came about a sullen and infuriated lessening of
international tension. No nation would dare plan a sneak attack on
America if it could be known in advance. And nobody dared make threats
if the United States could know exactly how much of the threat was
genuine.

Captain Moggs flew busily back and forth between the east and the hidden
missile base to which the children had been returned. She informed
Soames that the decorated belts had been taken away from the children.
One of them had been opened up and the round and square medallions on it
examined. One decoration was undoubtedly the case for the
sensory-linkage apparatus. There was a way to turn it on and off. It
contained a couple of eccentrically shaped bits of metal. That was all.
Duplicated, the duplicates did nothing whatever. The other medallions
seemed to contain apparatus for purposes yet unguessed-at. One actually
had a minute moving part in it. But what it did was past imagining.

Captain Moggs said authoritatively:

"It will take time but we'll find out what it does. Of course right now
all research is concentrated on the telepathic device. It will be
developed and before long we will be thoroughly informed about the
weapons and the councils of other nations. It will be magnificent! We'll
no longer have reason to be apprehensive of attack, and we can evaluate
every military situation with absolute precision!"

"Dammit!" snapped Soames. "The gadgets aren't telepathic! They don't
transmit thoughts! They only exchange sensory information! And there's
no danger of the children finding out anything by telepathy when they
can only share the sensations of someone wearing a special device! What
would they do with military information if they had it?"

Captain Moggs looked mysterious. She departed, and Soames again cursed
bitterly the situation he'd happened to create. But still he did not see
how he could have done otherwise than to destroy the children's
high-power signalling device when they would have used it back on
Antarctica. Yet he was not happy about the consequences of his act.

       *       *       *       *       *

He found time to get in touch with the physicists who'd come out to the
Rocky Mountain base. They'd found a few others who could put themselves
into the mental state of castaways who knew that a given device could be
made, and then tried to make something which wasn't it but had some of
its properties. In a way it was deliberate self-deception, but it was
deliberate to circumvent a natural habit of the educated mind. A trained
man almost invariably tries to see what can be done with what he has and
knows, instead of imagining what he wants and then trying to make
something more or less like it, even if he has to look for the knowledge
he will need. It took a particular type of mind to use Soames' trick. It
was necessary, for example, to imagine limitations to the operation of a
desired device, or one's starting-point became mere fantasy. And nothing
could be made from fantasy.

But Soames found frustration rampant even among the men who were most
successful with the fantasy-trick. There were new devices. They were
triumphs. They were plainly the beginnings of progress of a brand-new
kind, not derived wholly from the present, and certainly not imitative
of the children's. But the devices couldn't be used. Their existence
couldn't be revealed. Because anything of unprecedented design would
seem to have been learned from the children, and the United States
insisted--truthfully--that so far it had learned nothing from them. But
nobody would believe it if a spate of astonishing technological
improvements began to appear in the United States.

Dislike of America rose to new heights anyhow. But presently some trace
of suspicion began to appear in the actions of the anti-American
nations. Before the broadcast, a dirty trick had been prepared against
America. It developed and succeeded. It was not discovered until too
late. Somebody tried another one. It wasn't anticipated or stopped. A
very lively and extremely tempting idea occurred in quarters where the
United States was much disliked. But nobody dared quite believe it--yet.

Then Fran disappeared. He vanished as if into thin air. At one moment he
was in the heavily guarded surface area over the hidden base in the
Rockies. The next moment he was gone. Three separate lines of
electrified fence protected the area from intrusion, with sentries and
watching-posts besides. But Fran disappeared as if he'd never been. It
was not easy to imagine that he'd run away. His English was still very
limited. His ignorance of American ways was abysmal. He couldn't hope to
hide and find food while accomplishing anything at all. On the other
hand, for him to have been kidnapped out of the top-secret base was
unthinkable. Yet if he had ...

Soames got transportation to the Rocky Mountain installation.

He was shocked when he saw Gail.




CHAPTER 8


She smiled faintly in the darkness after they'd paused on the way to the
cottage, and after Soames had released her.

"When this is all over, we'll have our life together, you know that,
don't you?"

"I'm glad," she said quietly, "that you feel the way you do. I'm
thinner. I'm not very pretty just now. But it's because I'm worried,
Brad."

He muttered angrily. He felt that infuriated rage which was appropriate
because something worried Gail.

"I told the children you were coming," Gail added. "I think they'll be
glad to see you. I've an idea Fran especially liked you, Brad."

"No word of him?"

"N-no," said Gail in an odd tone.

"Did he run away?" demanded Soames. They were walking through a
soft-warm dusk toward the cottage where Gail stayed with the children.

Gail said in a low tone:

"Careful! The idea of telepathy is alarming. Everything's overheard,
Brad. The children are watched every second. I even think there are
microphones...."

Soames scowled.

"It's security," said Gail. "It would be taking too big a gamble to risk
that the children can only receive sensory impressions and only through
those little devices in their belts. Nobody's been able to make the
belt-devices do more than that, but they can't be sure...."

"They took the belts away!" insisted Soames.

"Yes. But it doesn't seem enough. You destroyed their signalling device.
But you don't feel safe. They've taken the devices, but they still don't
feel sure that the children can't do more.

"And, I thought it was wise to tell Captain Moggs about us. To explain
why you might want to come back here. They know I'm rather protective of
the children. An explanation for you to come back seemed wise. The
children aren't popular since they've been thought able to read minds.
So I wanted you to be able to come back without anybody suspecting you
of friendly feelings for them."

"I'd have come back on account of you," growled Soames. "So it mustn't
appear that anybody wants to be decent to them, eh?" Then he said
abruptly, "About Fran...."

"He ran away," said Gail with a hint of defiance. "I'll tell you more
later, maybe."

They reached the cottage, and Soames reminded himself that anything he
said would very probably be overheard and recorded on tape. They went
inside. The boy Hod, and the younger girl Mal lay on their stomachs on
the floor, doggedly working at what would be lessons. Zani sat in a
chair with a book before her and her hand seemingly shielding her eyes.
Her expression was abstracted.

As they entered, Hod made a clicking sound in his throat. Zani put one
hand quickly in her pocket and opened her eyes. They had been closed.
The book was a prop to hide something.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames had a flash of insight. He'd worn a belt with a built-in
quasi-telepathic device just once and for the briefest of times. While
he wore it, too, he'd been fiercely intent upon the use of it to recover
another such device that had been looted in the broadcast studio during
the most disastrous of all public-relations enterprises. He'd had no
time for experiment; no time to accustom himself to the singular feeling
of seeming to inhabit more than one body at a time. He'd had no
opportunity to explore the possibilities of the device. But he'd worked
out some angles since.

And because of it, he knew intuitively what Zani had been doing when he
arrived. With closed eyes, hidden by her hand, she'd been receiving
something that came from somewhere else. The two other children had kept
silent. Hod clicked his tongue as a warning of Gail's and Soames'
approach. And Zani put her hand in her pocket quickly and opened her
eyes. She'd put something away. And Soames knew with certainty that
she'd been receiving a message from Fran, in the teeth of merciless
watching and probably microphonic eavesdropping on every word.

But the children's belt with the sensory-transmitters and receivers had
been taken from them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Little Mal said politely:

"Fran." A pause. "Where is?"

"I'd like to know," Soames told her.

"That's almost the only thing they're ever questioned about, nowadays,"
said Gail. "As a security measure only Captain Moggs and enlisted
personnel without classified information, and the police who're hunting
for Fran, are allowed to talk to them."

"Fran's been gone--how long? A week? Over?" Soames scowled. "How can he
hide? He knows little English! He doesn't even know how to act so he
won't be spotted if he walks down a street!"

Gail said with an odd intonation:

"I'm afraid he's in the wilds somewhere. He won't know how to get food.
He'll be in danger from wild animals. I'm terribly afraid for him!"

Soames looked at her sharply.

"How'd he get away?"

"He roamed around, like boys do," said Gail. "He made friends, more or
less, with the children of a staff sergeant's family. It was thought
there could be no harm in that. And one morning he left here apparently
to go and play with them, and they didn't see him, and he hasn't been
seen since."

Hod was on his stomach again, doggedly working over a book, murmuring
English words as he turned the pages from one picture to another. Mal
and Zani looked from the face of Soames to that of Gail, and back again.

"They understand more than they can speak," said Gail.

Soames searched the walls of the room. Gail had said microphones were
probable. He looked intently at Zani. He duplicated her position when
he'd entered and her actions, the quick movement of her hand to her
pocket and the opening of her eyes. She tensed, staring at him. He shook
his head warningly and put his finger to his lips.

She caught her breath and looked at him strangely. He settled down to
visit. Gail, with the air of someone doing something that did not
matter, had the children display their English. Their accent was good.
Their vocabularies were small. Soames guessed that Gail drilled them
unceasingly in pronunciation so they wouldn't acquire so many words that
they could be expected to answer involved questions. It was a way to
postpone pressure upon them.

But it was not a good idea for Soames to have too parental or too
solicitous an attitude. He said with inner irony:

"I'm disappointed in Fran. He shouldn't have run away. He made some
sketches for me, of things boys his age make, at home. I wanted to get
more such pictures from him. Hmmm.... Did he leave any sketches around
when he disappeared?"

Gail shook her head.

"No. Every scrap of paper the children use is gathered up every night,
for study. They don't like it. It disturbs them. Actually, I believe
language experts are trying to find out something about their language,
but they feel like it's enmity. They're jumpy."

"And with reason," said Soames. He stirred. "I'm disappointed. I'll go
talk to the people who're hunting Fran. Walk back with me to the store,
Gail?"

Gail rose. Zani stared at Soames. She was pale. He nodded to her again.

Gail and Soames went out into the now fully fallen night. Soames said
gruffly:

"We'd better walk closer together.

"When we're married," he said abruptly, "I doubt we'll hide many things
from each other. We'd better start being frank right now. The kids'
belts may have been taken away, but they've got sensory-transmission
gadgets just the same. Zani was using one when we went in the cottage."

Gail's footsteps faltered. "Wh-what are you going to do?"

"Give some good advice," said Soames. "Tell the kids you know about it.
Point out that the Security people have three of the four belts, and
they can wear them and pick up communications. Sooner or later they will
and the kids will be caught. If Fran talks aloud they can pick up and
identify his voice. If Zani writes, and looks at what she's written so
he can read it through her eyes, her hand or her dress in what she sees
could identify her. I'm telling you to remind Zani that communication by
those sensory transmitters can be overheard. Sooner or later it will be.
She must work out ways to avoid being identified. If they think more
people of her race have landed, that's all right. But it may be bad if
she's caught communicating with Fran."

       *       *       *       *       *

Gail said nothing for a long time.

"That's--that's all?"

"Just about. I'm Fran's antagonist in one matter only. I'll do anything
I can to keep him from calling all his race to come here. I hate it, but
I'll do it. Outside of that, I feel that he's here through my fault. I
do not want him to be psychologically vivisected by people who want
everything he knows, and won't believe there are limits to it. So long
as he's at large, there probably won't be frenzied questioning of the
others."

"The--things in the belt are very simple," said Gail unsteadily, "and
the children were scared and jumpy when they were taken away. So Fran
told me, and he'd picked up some scraps of metal. Copper, it was. And I
watched for him."

Soames said nothing.

"He took a straw," said Gail, "and used it as a sort of blowpipe. He
could direct the flame of a candle I made for him. It would be
heat-treatment?"

Soames nodded, in the darkness.

"It would. A pattern of heat-treatment might give a metal all sorts of
properties we haven't guessed at." He added sardonically, "And it could
be so simple that a boy could remember and do it!"

"He made six communicators," said Gail. "I insisted on six. And then I
chose two at random for safety's sake, I suppose. And he and the other
children hid theirs. I tried these two. They work. One is for you. Of
course."

She fumbled something into his hand. It was tiny; hardly larger than a
match.

"You push in the end. It works as long as you push it."

Soames pressed on one end where there was something that felt like the
head of a pin. It probably was. It gave a little, and instantly he saw
what Gail saw and felt what she felt, his hand clasping hers. He
released the tiny object and again was only himself.

"Turn yours off," he said harshly. "Remind the kids that this sort of
thing can be intercepted."

"I'll tell them," said Gail.

"They're much worse off than they were," he told her. "A little while
ago all the world wanted to learn from the kids. Now it's afraid they'll
learn from it, about the people in it. I think everybody'd be quite
willing to forego all possible benefits from their coming, if only
something would happen to them."

"But they can't pry into secrets!" protested Gail. "You know they can't
read minds! They can't!"

"But they have the reputation and have to suffer for it," said Soames.

They were then very close to the pseudo general store. Gail put her hand
lightly on Soames' arm. "Brad, please be careful."

       *       *       *       *       *

He went into the store. He went through to the stock-room behind,
pressed a button, and an elevator door opened in a rather surprising
manner. He stepped inside and the elevator lowered him three hundred
feet into the earth.

On the way out from the East he'd sunk into gloomy meditation about the
situation of the children and for that matter of the world, since their
arrival. Fran had an urgent mission he felt he must perform at any risk.
He couldn't do it on the missile base.

Fran felt the hatred surrounding all of them from the conclusion of the
broadcast. He knew that nobody, anywhere, would help him do something he
had to do. So he fled in order to try somehow to send the signal Soames
had prevented from beside the wrecked spaceship.

But why must Fran send it? Why hadn't an automatic device been used?
Something which could be so ruggedly built that it could not possibly
smash....

And suddenly there was an explanation.

Up to this moment Soames had doggedly accepted the idea that the
children came out of a past so remote that numbers of years simply had
no meaning. The evidence was overwhelming even though the law of the
conservation of mass and energy denied the possibility of time-travel.
Now, abruptly, Soames saw the infinitely simple answer. Time-travel was
possible, provided certain conditions were met. Those conditions would
at first instance inevitably produce a monstrous burst of static and an
implosion to cause an earth-shock and a concussion wave audible at
eighty miles distance. Once communication between time-frames had been
established, however ...

The flight of Fran instantly became something so much more alarming than
mere danger to Fran, that there was only one thing Soames could possibly
do. He'd said he was not Fran's enemy. But he must do anything to keep
Fran from carrying out the mission he'd been sent to accomplish.

So when Soames got out of the elevator from the village store, he went
directly to a security officer.

"I'm worried about the boy Fran, who ran away," he observed. "Can you
tell me what happened?"

"I'd like somebody to tell me!" said the security officer morbidly. "If
he ran, he had wings on his shoes. And now he's out he's got me scared!
You know those telepathic gadgets in the belts the children wore? We
took 'em away. We opened one of 'em up, but we left the others in
working order. We tried them. When two men wear them, with both turned
on, they sort of half-way read each other's minds. Each man knows what
the other is doing and seeing. But one man by himself can't do a thing.
Two men can do a lot. It's been suggested that if they knew the trick of
it, three men could do all the telepathy they wanted, read minds and all
that. We haven't found out the trick, though."

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames nodded, marvelling at the ability of the human race to find
reasons to believe anything it wanted to, whether for sweet vanity's
sake or for the sake of scaring itself to death.

"When we first got the belts from the kids," pursued the security
officer, "we figured there might be some other folks of the kids' race
on Earth, figuring on ways to get 'em loose. We had a belt worn night
and day. Nothing. So we stopped monitoring. Then this Fran got away and
we started monitoring all over again, trying to pick up any working of
belts like these that we didn't know about. And we started picking up
stuff right away!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames stared. Zani'd been using one such instrument.

"A man's got one of those belts on," said the security man, frowning,
"and it's like he didn't. Nothing happens at all. But after maybe hours,
maybe a day or two, suddenly, with his eyes closed, he sees a page of
outlandish writing. The kind of writing those kids do. It can't be
photographed, because it's only inside your head that you see it. You
can't make sense of it. The alphabet isn't ours. The words are the
language they talk among themselves. I figure there's a ship somewhere,
broadcasting a call to the kids. The call's printed. If the kids had
their belts on, and turned on, they could read it. But we got their
belts. So this Fran, he broke away to try to make some kind of way to
answer that call!"

Soames said nothing. But he was unhappily amused, at himself as well as
the security officer. He'd gone to some pains to tell Gail how the
children might communicate with Fran without being caught at it. But
they knew. They'd produced this theory of a hovering ship of space,
broadcasting to Earth to four children hidden somewhere on it. There was
no ship. There was only Fran, desperate to perform the task he'd been
sent here to do, keeping in touch with the other three children by a
tiny unit he'd made out of scrap copper and a straw and a candle-flame.
And it was so natural that the fact wasn't guessed!

"How's he managing to eat?" asked Soames. "He's no money and next to no
English, and he doesn't know how to act...."

"He's smart!" said the security officer grimly. "He's hiding by day. At
night.... People don't usually tell the cops about a bottle of milk
missing from their doorsteps. A grocer doesn't report one loaf of bread
missing from the package left in front of his store before daybreak.
He'd pick a loaf of bread today, and a bottle of milk tomorrow.
Sometimes he'd skip. But we figured it out. We got every town in five
hundred miles to check up. Bread-truck drivers asked grocery stores. Any
bread missing? Milk-men asked their customers. Has anybody been pinching
your milk? We found where he was, in Bluevale, close to the Navajo Dam,
you know. We set cops to watch. Almost got him yesterday morning. He
was after a loaf of bread. A cop fired five shots at him, but he got
away. Dropped the loaf of bread, too."

Soames wanted to be sick. Fran was possibly fourteen years old and
desperate because his whole civilization depended on him to save them
from the destruction falling out of the sky. He was a fugitive on a
strange world.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then Soames' mouth went dry as he realized. Fran had been shot at in
Bluevale, which was near the Navajo Dam. The Navajo Dam generated almost
as much electric power as Niagara.

"I had a hunch," said the security officer with some grimness, "the kid
got past three electric fences, and we don't know how. He must know
plenty about electricity. So I began to wonder if he might be hoping to
answer that broadcast signal with a signal of his own. He was in
Bluevale. We checked up. A roofer lost some sheet copper a couple of
days ago. Somebody broke in a storehouse and got away with forty or
fifty feet of heavy-gauge copper wire. A man'd have stolen the whole
roll. It would be only a kid that'd break off as much as he could carry.
See?

"He's getting set to make something, and we know he's near Bluevale.
He'll need tools. I've got Bluevale crammed with cops and
plainclothesmen. That whole town is one big trap for that kid right now.
And the cops will shoot! Because we don't know what that kid will make.
If those kids had something that'll read your mind, made by grownups,
maybe he'll make something that'll burn it out! He looks human, but he
came out of space from Godknowswhere. Maybe he'll make deathrays!"

Soames swallowed. He knew what Fran would want to make. A mere local
projector of deathrays would be trivial beside the consequences of what
Fran was desperately resolved to do for his own people.

He heard himself say something relatively soothing.

"Maybe," he observed, "he's not that dangerous. You're worried about how
he passed those electrified fences. He used stilts. He knew about them.
They interested him. So he must have made a pair some seven or eight
feet high, and learned to walk on them. And then he simply went to a
tree near the fence, climbed up it and mounted the stilts, and then
walked to the fence and stepped over it. At his age he wouldn't realize
the danger. He'd do it and worm his way past watchers.... He could have
done that!"

The security officer swore.

"Yes! Dammit, yes! We should've watched him closer."

"I want to get back East," said Soames.

"When do you want to head East?" asked the officer.

"Now," said Soames. "We've got a project started that's more or less
linked to the kids' gadgets, even though we don't understand them. The
sooner I can get back, the better."

The security officer used the telephone. He found there was a plane due
to take off shortly. Soames could get passage on that plane, not to the
East, but to a military airfield outside Denver where a cab could be had
to take him to the commercial airport to make connections East.

Before starting on this trip he'd suspected that he might need to take
part in the search for Fran. He'd cleaned out his bank account and had
the cash in his pocket. In half an hour he was on board the outbound
plane.

In two hours Soames was in Denver. In three he was lost beyond all
discovery. He'd taken an inter-urban bus instead of a plane out of
Denver, and gotten off at a tiny town whose name he did not even notice.
During the night, with closed eyes and in a silent hotel room in the
little town, he pressed one end of the miniature device that Fran had
made and Gail had given him.

He felt a queer sensation. He inhabited two bodies at once. It was
eerie. The other body did nothing. It only breathed and waited. Someone
at the hidden base from which he had come wore one of the children's
belts and patiently waited to eavesdrop on any communication that might
be made by similar devices.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames waited for morning. Very early, again with closed eyes and with
his body made comfortable so that he felt no distinct sensation from it,
he pressed the end of the miniature instrument. He saw writing of the
kind the children used for memoranda about their English lessons. He
released the turn-on switch, which was probably the head of a pin. He
turned on a light. He opened a notebook. Its first page showed two
sketches. One was of the runner of a boy-made air-sled. Fran had
sketched it for Soames on the plane headed for New York and the
disastrous broadcast. The other was a sketch of a boy on stilts. Soames
had drawn that for Fran. Nobody but Soames would have looked at such
drawings for Fran to see through his eyes. They were at once a call and
an identification of Soames as a person using a device like a tiny
copper firecracker, with the head of a pin where a fuse would belong.

He turned on the device again while looking at the sketches. He felt
that he shared the physical sensations of two other bodies, no, three.
He was momentarily convinced of a third. All three now kept their eyes
tightly closed. All three saw only through his eyes, saw rough sketches
which would have meaning only to two. Soames felt that he heard a
smothered noise which only he would have known was a suppressed giggle.

Then he felt one of the other bodies shaking hands with itself. That
would be Fran, acknowledging the message of the drawings that only
Soames would know about. He shook hands with himself for Soames to
experience. Then he patted his knee as one would pat a dog, and
scratched his knee as one scratches a dog, as he did with Rex on
Antarctica. He had identified himself. There was the stirring of another
of the bodies with which Soames was linked. That would be the security
officer, wearing a belt which brought him these sensations. He could
have no idea, however, who was communicating with whom, and pattings and
scratchings would have no meaning at all. He could only know that the
weird experience stopped when someone shook hands with himself and that
was all.

But Soames rose and dressed with many forebodings. Fran would not meet
him. Soames had given warning of traps and close hunting. But Fran would
not meet him. It looked bad.

He bought a second-hand motorcycle at ten o'clock in the morning. He
knew motorcycles. By three in the afternoon he threaded through the
traffic of Bluevale. To him, on the watch for such matters, there seemed
an unusual preponderance of men on the streets of that small town. Fran
wouldn't notice it. Soames did. But he wasn't noticed. He'd bought a
leather jacket and a cap. He rode a battered motorbike. He didn't even
faintly resemble Fran.

He rode casually through Bluevale and along the wide, smooth highway to
the much smaller village of Navajo Dam--at the edge of the big lake the
dam had backed up behind it--and then at a leisurely pace along the same
highway as it went over the crest of that massive structure. The lake to
his right rose within feet of the highway. To the left there was a
chasm, with a winding truck-road going down to the generator buildings
at the dam's foot.

Soames jittered. He went two miles on and into forest, dragging the
motorcycle out of sight from the road. He made himself as comfortable as
possible, to avoid transmitting any information about his whereabouts.
He stuffed his ears to mute the sounds of open country. From four
o'clock to eight, at irregular intervals, he turned on the
sensory-linkage device for a second or two at a time. He came to
recognize the physical sensations of the man who, back in the hidden
missile base, wore a child's belt and monitored for sensory
communications. Between seven and eight the identity of that man
changed. Someone else took the place of the first.

At ten o'clock there was the briefest possible sensation of a third
body. Soames knew it was Fran. He shook hands with himself, quickly.
Fran would recognize it as a greeting. Soames had contrived a way to
offer argument, but he only felt a boy's small, smooth hands shaking
each other in reply, and Fran was gone out of communication.

He did not come back.

       *       *       *       *       *

At midnight Soames got his motorcycle out of the woods and onto the
highway. He rode slowly back toward Bluevale. He stopped at a hot-dog
stand outside the town and waited there for another signal.

At one, nothing had happened. Soames was close enough to the town to
have heard any tumult, certainly any shots.

At two and three--nothing.

At four o'clock, without warning, there was a flash of intolerably vivid
blue-green light. It came from the chasm below the Navajo Dam. The
lights across the dam's curving crest went out. The street-lights of
Bluevale and the little village of Navajo Dam went out. The world went
dark, while a mountainous blue-green flame shed intolerably bright light
toward the stars.

It went out, too.

Soames, cold with fear, pressed the end of the sensory device. He felt
pain, lancing, excruciating pain. He heard Fran's voice gasping
hopelessly:

"_Try! Try! Try!_"

He felt Fran's body turn in pain, and he saw that Fran's eyes looked up
at stars, and the stars were cut off at one side by the curving bulk of
the monstrous concrete dam.

Soames shook hands with himself. He let go the button. He started the
motorcycle. He raced toward the dam. He did not again press on the
sensory device until he'd gone frantically through the village and
hair-raisingly down the truck-road to the generator buildings. There he
cut off the motor, and he heard men's voices, profane and agitated and
alarmed. He saw the small flickerings of flashlights.

He found Fran, crumpled on the ground and trying desperately not to make
sounds of pain. Soames knew where the hurt was. He'd experienced it as
Fran did. He'd guessed its cause and seriousness. He knew he had to move
quickly.

He put Fran swiftly on the saddle behind his own on the motorcycle. He
gave the motorcycle all the gas it would take and went racketing up the
truck-road from the chasm below the dam.

He made it. The motorcycle, its lights turned off, was across the dam
and streaking for the first curve beyond before the flickerings of car
headlights began to show on the road from Bluevale.

Fran held on fiercely. But presently Soames felt the quiverings behind
him. He stopped the motorcycle where the road was empty. Fran ground his
teeth and stared at him defiantly in the reflected light of the now
functioning single headlight.

"If I were you," said Soames, not expecting to be understood, but
speaking as one man to another, "If I were you I wouldn't be ashamed of
crying. I feel pretty much like it myself, from relief that your
signalling device blew out."




CHAPTER 9


The color of the blue-green flame which had flared so fiercely outside
the generator-buildings was no mystery at all. It was the color of
vaporized copper, the same coloring found in burning driftwood in which
copper nails have rusted. Its cause was no mystery, either. There'd been
a gigantic short-circuit where the main power-leads left the
dynamo-rooms to connect with cross-country power lines.

Soames and Fran knew directly, and some few security officers guessed,
that Fran had caused the short. There was melted-down, cryptic metal
below the place where the short appeared. Fran had undoubtedly placed
it. How he escaped electrocution the security officers did not try to
figure out. But they knew he'd tried to do something with apparatus that
burned itself out without operating, and that he'd tumbled down a
ten-foot drop while fleeing from the searing green arc, and even that
he'd appealed for help with the words, "Try! Try! Try!" And they knew
that somebody had helped him get away from the scene of his exploit and
injury. But they didn't know how, nor that it was Soames.

Soames was assumed to be on his way East to confer with a group of
scientists who now had added certain skilled instrument-makers to their
number and triumphantly worked themselves to twitching exhaustion.

Fran's part in the affair was naturally a secret. Lights and power in
five Colorado counties went off and stayed off. Local newspapers printed
indignant editorials.

Theirs was a strictly local view. In high official quarters the feeling
was quite different. The reaction there was more like paralyzed horror.
Fran was known to be behind the breakdown of the plant. He'd caused it
by trying to tap its lines for a monstrous amount of power. He'd been
trying to signal to so great a distance that tens of thousands of
kilowatts were required. He'd failed, but the high brass knew with
absolute certainty that he'd tried to signal to his own race. And to the
high brass this meant that he'd tried to summon a space-fleet with
invincible weapons to the conquest of Earth.

So there were two directives from the highest possible policy-making
levels. First, Fran must be caught at any cost in effort, time, money,
and man-power. Second, the rest of the world must not know that one of
the four spaceship's crew members was at large.

So the hunt for Fran intensified to a merciless degree.

Soames headed north. He wore a leather jacket, and he rode a battered,
second-hand motorcycle, and on the saddle behind him an obvious kid
brother rode, leather-jacketed as Soames was, capped as he was, scowling
as Soames did, and in all ways imitating his elder. Which was so
familiar a sight that nobody noticed Fran at all. He was visibly a tough
younger brother of the kind of young man who goes in for battered
motorcycles because he can't afford anything better. Naturally no one
suspected him of being a telepathic monster, a creature of space, or the
object of a desperate search.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was helpful that Soames was not missed at first and was not searched
for. It was a full day after the Navajo Dam breakdown before anybody
thought to have him check on the melted-down apparatus. It was two days
before anybody was concerned about him, and three before flights out of
Denver had been checked futilely for his name.

But on the fourth day after a green flame reached up toward the sky,
Soames and a silent, scowling, supposed younger brother occupied a
fishing-shack on the shores of Calumet Lake. They were seven hundred
miles from Denver, and the way they'd come was much longer than that.
They were far removed from the tumult of the world. They'd made bivouacs
in the open on the journey, and this would be the first time they'd
settled anywhere long enough to take stock.

"Now," said Soames, as sunset-colorings filled the sky beyond the lake's
farther edge, "now we figure out what we're going to do. We ought to be
able to do something, though I don't yet know what. And first we act the
parts we're playing. We came here to catch some fish. You shouldn't be
able to wait. So we go out and catch fish for our dinner."

He led the way to a tiny wharf where a small boat lay tied. He carried
fishing-rods and bait.

He untied the boat and rowed out to the middle of the lake. He surveyed
his surroundings and dropped anchor. He baited a hook, with Fran
watching intently.

Soames handed him the rod. Fran waited. He imitated Soames' actions when
Soames began to fish. He watched his line as closely as the deepening
dusk permitted.

"Hmmm," said Soames. "Your ankle's doing all right. Lucky it was a
wrench instead of a break or a sprain. Four days of riding and no
walking have fixed it pretty well. It's fairly certain nobody knows
where you are, too. But where do we go from here?"

Fran listened.

"You came out of time," said Soames vexedly. "But time-travel can't be
done. The natural law of the conservation of matter and energy requires
that the total of substance and force in the cosmos, taken together, be
the same at each instant that it was in the instant before and the one
after. It's self-evident. That rules out travelling in time."

       *       *       *       *       *

He jerked at his fishing-rod. He did not hook his fish.

"I don't think you understand me," he observed.

"No," said Fran matter of factly.

"It doesn't matter," Soames told him. "I'm saying that you can't put a
gallon of water in a full keg of wine. And you can't, unless you draw
off wine as fast as you add water. Unless you exchange. So you can't
shift an object from time-frame A to time-frame B without shifting a
corresponding amount of matter and energy from time-frame B to
time-frame A. Unless you keep the amount of matter and energy unchanged
in each. Unless you exchange. So you came to here and now from there and
then--your home time-frame, let's say--by a process of swapping. By
transposition. By replacement. Transposition's the best word. The effect
was time-travel but the process wasn't, like a telephone has the effect
of talking at a distance but the method is distinctly something else."

Fran jerked his fishing-rod. A nine-inch lake-trout flapped in the
boat's bottom.

"I'm supposed to be teaching you how to fish!" said Soames.

He watched as Fran rather gingerly extracted the hook and rebaited as
he'd seen Soames do.

Soames continued, "Your ship was transposed from your time into mine.
Simultaneously, gram molecular weight for gram molecular weight,
something had to be transposed into yours. Since you were to come into
my time twenty thousand feet high and there was nothing else handy to be
transposed into your time--why--air had to leave here and turn up there.
To make up the mass and energy of your ship and you and the other
children."

As if to indicate that he listened, Fran said:

"Zani, Mal and Hod."

"Right!" Soames jerked his rod and brought up a fingerling which he
silently unhooked and threw back overboard. "Considering the thinness of
the air where you came out, maybe half a cubic mile of it had to
transpose into your time to let your ship come into this."

He dropped the line overboard again.

"Which means that there was an implosion of anywhere from a quarter to
half a cubic mile of vacuum. It made an earth-shock and a concussion
wave, and it battered your ship until it went out of control. It would
seem to make sense that the tumult and the shouting would appear here,
where plain force was operating without much guidance, but not in your
time where the machinery and the controls were operating. Your people
had to handle more energy there--and consequently acted upon more energy
here--than my people could produce with all the engines now on Earth
hooked together."

He fished, frowning thoughtfully.

"I suspect," said Soames, after a long interval, "that with machinery
and controls at this end as well as the other, instead of at one end
only, that time-transposition would be a fairly tranquil process. It
would be under accurate control. It'd probably need infinitely less
power. A ship would vanish from your time and simultaneously a
mass-and-energy equivalent would take its place. And a ship would appear
in this time and simultaneously a mass-and-energy equivalent would
vanish to appear in your time. But I think it must have been because the
whole business was done from one end that the business was so
spectacular, with lightning, earthquake, and all the rest. With
equipment at both ends, there should be no static, no earth-shock, no
concussion, nothing but a very peaceful transfer."

Soames' expression became sardonic.

"Which I am prepared to prevent at any cost," he added. "Yet I've some
responsibility to you, Fran. I think I'm getting an idea of a kind of
bluff that we might pull off, if we could get the other kids safe away.
It would be a bluff, and the biggest in history. But we might just get
away with it...."

Fran caught a three-quarter-pound lake-trout. Soames caught one weighing
half a pound. They caught two smaller ones before full darkness fell.
Then Soames put up his fishing-rod and picked up the oars. He began to
row toward the shore.

"I'll show you how to clean and cook the fish," he observed. "I think
you'll like the flavor."

He pulled hard on one oar, and swung the boat around, and caught one of
the small piles of the wharf. Fran climbed up and Soames handed him the
fish.

He followed Fran shoreward toward the rickety little week-end cottage
he'd rented. There he showed Fran how fish with scales are cleaned, and
then how they can be cooked over an open fire.

       *       *       *       *       *

After Fran had gone to bed, it occurred to Soames that he hadn't heard
the news of the world for four days. On the run, as he and Fran had
been, they hadn't seen a newspaper or heard a news broadcast. Now Soames
turned on the small radio that went with the fishing cottage, to give
advance information on the weather.

News came on immediately. It was all bad.

The United States had shown no signs of having profited by the
telepathic powers of Fran and his companions. No spies were seized. A
submarine installation that could lob missiles into New York from the
edge of the hundred-fathom line was not depth-bombed. There were other
failures to act on information obtained through the children. No nation
could imagine another allowing spies to operate if it could detect them.

So a raging guess began to spread among the anti-American peoples of the
world. The guess was that the broadcast was a lie. Nobody doubted the
landing of a spaceship, of course. The static and the earth-shock were
evidence, and the Russians had photographs. But the children were too
suspiciously like human children. They could be child actors, coached to
impersonate aliens who could not be produced. And there was an easy
answer to the question of why the true aliens weren't revealed. They
could be dead. Earth's atmosphere might be fatal to them. They could
have died of some infection against which they had no defense.

The politicians and the rulers of the world suspected the United States
of bad faith and trickery. They were not certain. But there were ways of
making sure.

When Soames tuned in to the news at Calumet Lake, the United States had
been forced to use a veto in the United Nations for the first time. A
resolution passed, calling on the United States to turn over "the crew
of an extraterrestrial space vessel" to a committee to be appointed by
the UN assembly. The United States vetoed it. Ironically, with Fran run
away and not found again, the United States could not have complied with
the resolution in any case.

But the veto lent plausibility to suspicions. There was intensified
distrust. The Nato countries asked to share in technical information
obtained from outer space. There wasn't any. They asked to study the
devices salvaged by the children. This could have been done, but recent
political developments inside Nato made it certain that anything one
particular nation learned would immediately be known to Russia. This was
to be avoided if possible.

       *       *       *       *       *

The mess went farther. South America was so deeply suspicious of the
colossus of the north that various Latin nations sought engagements by
European countries to defend them against aggression by the United
States. There had been two great concentrations of military power on
Earth. Russia headed one group of nations, and the United States the
other. Now it looked like there would soon be three. Russia would head
one. A second would be a group detached from the United States. The
third would be the United States standing alone.

It was an absolutely perfect set-up for flaming total war to be begun
at any instant.

The news Soames picked up on a cheap radio on a Calumet Lake fishing
shack was enough to make any man heartsick.

When Fran waked in the morning, an unsmiling Soames greeted him.

"We're going to ride again, Fran. I'm going to make a long-distance
call."

       *       *       *       *       *

They rode two hundred miles before noon, and Soames got silver from a
filling-station where he bought gas. At one of the out-of-door
phone-booths lately a part of the American scene, he put through a call
to New York. He got the tall physicist who'd come West to the hidden
missile base.

"This is Soames," he said very distinctly. "I've got a tip for you.
Pretend that you want to make something like the gadget that stops winds
and warms places. You know the thing."

The tall physicist's voice babbled.

"I know!" said Soames bitterly, "I'm supposed to be dead or a traitor or
something. But listen to me! You're a castaway and savages snipe at you.
You want to make something like the thing that stops wind, but you want
it to stop arrows instead. It's quite a job. Perhaps the only useful
thing you've got on this savage world is a way to make magnetic fields
with minus self-induction. That's got to stop the arrows. You can assume
the arrowheads are metal. Do you follow me?"

A pause. Then a tinny voice, singularly calm and astonished at the same
time:

"_Why--yes! A very interesting approach! In fact, we've got some very
surprising results lately. One of them will fit in beautifully! Yes!
Beautifully!_"

"If you make it designed for large enough areas," said Soames, "you'll
know where to use it, and how. And--" Soames' voice was sardonic indeed,
"If you do get it, this is one thing that shouldn't be kept secret! Get
it broadcast! Get it everywhere! Give it to the Russians and the Greeks
and the Chinese and the French and everybody else! Understand? The more
who know about it the better."

The tinny voice said:

"_We just developed a thing to refine metals_ in situ.... _An induction
furnace that sets up the heating field at almost any distance from the
elements that handle the power. It will fit in perfectly! Of course!
Certainly! This is magnificent, Soames!_"

"If you can get it working and in production before hell breaks loose,"
said Soames, "you may deserve well of the republic."

"_Where are you, Soames? We need you on several matters--_"

Soames hung up. His call, of course, could be traced. He'd travelled two
hundred miles so that tracing it would do no good. He returned to where
Fran dangled his legs from the back saddle of the motorbike, and they
headed back to Calumet Lake for a few more days of peace and quiet.




CHAPTER 10


Soames made his long-distance call on a Monday, when war seemed likely
to come perhaps within hours. All day Monday the tension continued.
Traffic jams became the normal thing outside the larger cities, which
would be logical targets for long-range missiles. Every means of travel
away from the great population centers was loaded far beyond capacity.

On Tuesday afternoon national guard troops had been called out in ten
states to keep traffic moving.

At Calumet Lake, however, there was no notable change. Soames and Fran
still went fishing. In the boat Fran sometimes shut his eyes and pressed
the end of one of the tiny sensory-perception communicators he had made.
He turned it on for no longer than a second at a time. If he made
contact with one of the other children he was prepared to speak
swiftly--so they could hear his voice as he did--to assure them that he
was safe and to ask for news of Zani and Mal and Hod, and Gail. He could
do it very quickly indeed. Soames had insisted on only instants of
communicator-use.

"Maybe those gadgets can be directionally spotted," he said. "Security
wants you, Fran. If there's a way to get a directional fix on you,
they'll find it! So, make it short!"

On Thursday morning all broadcasts broke off to report that the DEW line
of radars across Canada had reported objects in the air moving across
the North Pole toward the United States. America clenched its fists and
waited for missiles to strike or be blasted by counter-missiles, as fate
or chance might determine. Twenty minutes later a correction came. The
radar-detected objects had not been missiles, but aircraft flying in
formation. They'd changed course and returned to their bases. They were
probably foreign fighter-planes patrolling far beyond their usual range.

Soames had held his breath with the rest of the country. He was just
beginning to breathe freely again when Fran came running from the
week-end-shack. His eyes shone.

"I got--" he swallowed--"Zani. I said"--he swallowed again, "we will
come." He added: "Our language."

Soames looked at him sharply.

"Maybe you do read minds. Was anybody listening in? Anybody else beside
Zani?"

"Two men," said Fran. "Two. They talked. Fast. English."

"One man would be a monitor," said Soames grimly. "Two means a
directional fix. Let's go!"

By that night they were hundreds of miles from Calumet Lake.

The highways were crowded with the people who'd evacuated the cities.
The high population of remote places was a protection for Soames and
Fran. He worried, though, about Gail, her situation, and that of the
three other children, was far from enviable. In the present increasing
confusion and tension they were hardly likely to have any improvement in
their state.

"I think," Soames told Fran reflectively, "that at night, and with the
kind of disorganization that seems to be increasing, you can get away
with talking to the kids again. Nobody'll try a parachute drop in these
mountains in the darkness." They were then a hundred miles south of
Denver. "They couldn't get organized before daybreak, and I doubt that
they could block the highways. See if you can make contact, eh? And find
out how they're getting along?"

Fran nodded. He moved so that the heat of their fire would not fall on
him, to tell that he camped out-of-doors. He found a place to lie down
in comfort, so that there would be no distracting sensation. He closed
his eyes. Soames saw him press the end of his tiny communicator and
release it quickly. After an instant's pause he pressed it again. He
held the communicator on for several seconds, half a minute. He released
it and sat up.

"You try," he said in a puzzled fashion. "You try!"

Soames closed his eyes. He pressed the little pin-head button at the end
of the instrument which was hardly larger than a match-stick. He felt
the sensations of another body. That other body opened its eyes. Soames
saw who it was, Gail's face was reflected in a mirror. She was pale. Her
expression was drawn and harried. But she smiled at her reflection,
because she knew Soames would see what she saw.

He spoke, so she'd hear his voice as he did.

"Gail!"

He felt a hand--which was her hand--spill something on a levelled
surface before her. It smoothed the spilled stuff. It was face-powder,
spread on a dressing-table top. A finger wrote. She looked down at what
was written there.

"_Help Fran_," he read. "_You Must!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

He felt her hand swiftly smoothing the message away. Rage swept over
him. Instantly he knew what had happened. Fran's escape from Calumet
Lake had proved that he knew that his communications were intercepted
and directionally analyzed. Therefore the other children were no longer
a means by which he might be trapped. So their communicators had been
taken away from them for the second time, and now they were watched with
an unceasing closeness. Every glance, every word, every gesture was
noted.

"This has to be quick," said Soames coldly, for her to hear. "I would
help him, but he'd want to get in touch with his people."

Gail opened her eyes again. Her image in the mirror nodded.

"And if he did," said Soames as coldly as before, "they'd come here and
conquer us. And I'd rather that we killed each other off than that the
most kindly-disposed of conquerors enslaved us."

He felt her hand again smoothing the spilled face-powder. She wrote in
it. He knew what she had written before she dropped her eyes to it. He
couldn't believe it. She'd written three words, no, two words and a
numeral. Soames felt an almost physical shock. He was incredulous. If
this was true ...

Then he felt a hand closed firmly on Gail's shoulder. Captain Moggs
spoke, authoritative and stern and reproachful:

"_Gail! How could you! You have one of those horrible telepathic things
too! This is a very grave matter, Gail!_"

Then the contact was broken. Captain Moggs had snatched away Gail's
communicator.

Raging, Soames took Fran and left that spot which was undoubtedly
pin-pointed by now. As they sped away he tried to consider the meaning
of the two words and the numeral which was completely unbelievable at
first thought.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shortly after sunrise he bought a two-day-old newspaper. It was the
latest he could find for sale. He rode a certain distance and stopped
where the highway made an especially dramatic turn and there was a
turn-out for tourists to park in while they admired the view. He stopped
there and deliberately read the news affecting war and peace and the
children and therefore Gail. At the end he folded the newspaper
painstakingly and with careful self-control tore it to bits. Then he
said angrily:

"Fran, a question it never occurred to me to ask you before."

He posed the question. Fran could have answered it with two English
words and a numeral, and the same words and numeral that Gail had used.
But he didn't have the words. Especially, he did not have the number.
Fran's way of writing numbers was as complex as the system used in
ancient Rome, and Soames had no key. It took a long time to grasp the
quantity Fran had in mind. Then Soames had to make sure he had it right.

Then, abruptly, he knew that it was true. He knew why it was true. It
increased his anger over the situation and the treatment of Gail and the
children.

"According to this paper," he said icily, "my fellow-countrymen have
decided to pay a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, and to sell
you down the river. They suggest an international UN committee to
receive custody of you children. That committee could then set to work
on you to find out where you came from, why, and when you are likely to
be searched for. Now, you know and so do I that part of what they found
out they wouldn't accept. Time-travel is impossible. So when you
children told them where you come from they wouldn't believe it. They'd
try to pry back behind what they'd consider a lie. They'd use different
techniques of inquiry. They'd use inhibition-releasing drugs.
They'd ..."

       *       *       *       *       *

Fran's expression did not change. Yet it was not passive.

"Which will not happen," said Soames in sudden fury, "except over my
dead body! Gail feels the same way. So let's go! We've got to plan a
really king-size monkey-wrench to throw into these works!"

He stepped on the motorbike pedal. He swung on down the winding mountain
road for the lowlands. He went into a relatively small town. He bought a
pup-tent, pliers, a small camp-stove; a camp-lantern; food; blankets;
matches.

They went back into the foothills and settled down to the strangest
scientific conference in history. The scene of the conference was a
remote and strictly improvised encampment by the side of a
briskly-flowing trout-stream. They fished. They talked. They drew
diagrams at each other.

Fran's English had improved remarkably, but this was a highly technical
discussion. It was two days before Soames had the information he needed
firmly in his mind. He made a working drawing of what had to be built.
He realized that the drawing itself was a simplification of a much more
sophisticated original device. It was adapted to be made out of locally
available materials. It was what Fran had made and tried at Navajo Dam.

"Which," said Soames, frowning, "proved not to work. You didn't realize
the local resources. This thing works, obviously, because a terrifically
strong electric field is cut off abruptly and collapses instantly. The
original apparatus--the one I burnt--no doubt had a very fine gimmick to
break a heavy current flow without making an arc. The trouble at Navajo
Dam was that it did arc--and how! That was a mess!"

He paused, considering. Since Soames was not looking at him, Fran
regarded him with infinite respect.

"The problem," said Soames, thinking hard, "is a glorified job of
turning off an electric light without making a spark at the switch.
That's all. It doesn't matter how long the current flows. The thing is
that it must stop instantly. So we turn the whole business inside out.

"Instead of making a terrific steady current and cutting it off, I'm
going to start with it not flowing and use a strobe-light pack. Every
amateur photographer has one. They give a current of eight hundred
amperes and twenty-five hundred volts for the forty-thousandth of a
second. The juice doesn't flow long enough to burn anything out. It cuts
itself off. There's nothing to maintain an arc.

"The really tricky part," he said uncomfortably, "may be the stealing of
a helicopter. But I guess I can manage it."

       *       *       *       *       *

He left Fran fishing and went down to the nearest town again to buy
eccentric items of equipment. Copper foil. Strobe-light packs, two of
them. He could use foil instead of large-area heat-dissipating units,
because the current would flow so briefly. He would get a terrific
current, of course. Two strobe-light packs in series would give him four
million watts of power for part of the wink of an eyelid.

When he got back to the camp, Soames called to Fran. "We've got to get
to work. I don't think we've got much time. I had hopes of a
castaway-gadget coming up, but it hasn't."

He began to assemble the device which would substitute for the larger,
heavier, much more massive apparatus he'd destroyed on the Antarctic
ice-sheet. The work went swiftly. Soames had re-designed the outfit, and
a man can always build a thing of his own design more easily than
something from another man's drawings.

Before sunset the thing was done. Fran was very respectful. This
apparatus was less than a quarter the size of the one his own people had
prepared for the same purpose. And it was self-powered, too; it was
independent of outside power-supply.

"I'd like to talk to your people about this," said Soames grimly. "I do
think things can be transposed in space, and this should work that way
as well as in time. But starting at one end has me stymied."

He abandoned the pup-tent and equipment.

"Either we won't need them," he said, "or we won't be able to use them."

The battered, ancient motorcycle took them into the night. Soames had
studied road-maps and he and Fran had discussed in detail the route to
Navajo Dam--using stilts to cross electrified fences--from the hidden
missile base. Soames was sure that with Fran's help he could find the
pseudo-village where Gail and the children remained. It would call for a
helicopter. But before that there was a highly necessary operation which
would also go best with a helicopter to help. So when they left that
pup-tent camp they headed toward a very minor, local airfield where
Soames had once landed. It had hangars for half a dozen cheap private
planes and for two helicopters used mostly for crop-dusting.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the airfield Soames laid the motorcycle beside the edge of the clear
area, and left Fran with it, to wait. He moved quietly through the
darkness toward close-up buildings with no lights anywhere except in
one room reserved for a watchman.

Fran waited, breathing fast. He heard night-insects and nothing else. It
seemed a horribly long time--before he heard the grinding noise of a
motor being cranked. It caught immediately. There was a terrific roaring
tumult inside a building. The large door of a hangar tilted and went
upward, and a door opened from the watchman's lighted room and he came
shouting outside.

The roaring of motors changed. The door of the hangar was quite open. A
bellowing thing came moving out, whirling huge black vanes against the
sky. It boomed more loudly still, and lifted, and then drifted with
seeming clumsiness across the level airfield while the night watchman
shouted after it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fran turned on the motorcycle headlight as he'd been told, and picked up
the apparatus Soames had made to use strobe-light packs in. The 'copter
swept toward him, six feet above-ground. It came down and Fran swarmed
up into its cabin. Then the motors really thundered and the 'copter
climbed for the sky.

Soames drove without lights and headed southward.

A transcontinental highway appeared below. It was plainly marked by the
headlights of more than usually heavy traffic on it. He followed that
highway.

Fran rode in a sort of stilly rapture. Soames said:

"Not worried, Fran?"

Fran shook his head. Then, boy-like, he turned on the transistor radio
to show his nonchalance. A voice spoke. He'd have shifted to music but
Soames caught a word or two.

"Hold it!" he commanded. "Put it so I can hear!"

Fran raised the volume and held the small radio so Soames could hear it
above the motor-noise.

What he heard, at this moment, was the official United States broadcast
announcing the ending of all real menace of atomic attack. By a
fortunate freak of fate, somebody in authority realized that it was more
important to get the news out than to make a professionalized production
of it. So a tired but confident voice said very simply that American
technicians seemed to have solved the problem of defense attack by
atomic bombs and guided missiles. There had been, the voice said
steadily, recent marked improvements in electric induction furnaces. The
basic principle of an induction furnace was the evolution of heat in the
material it was desired to melt, instead of merely in a container for
the stuff that was to be melted. Within the past four days induction
furnaces of a new type had proved able to induce heat in chosen objects
up to miles. It had been expected to smelt metal ore in the veins in
which it was found, and to make mines yield their product as metal
without digging up and puttering with useless rock. But now this
apparatus had been combined with radar.

When a radar detected a missile or an enemy plane, the broadcast said
carefully, an induction furnace of the new type was turned upon the
plane or missile. The effect was exactly that of enclosing the missile
in a burning blast-furnace. It melted. The most careful tests assured
America, then, that any city protected by radar-controlled
remote-induction furnaces was safe against atomic attack and its dread
destruction.

And at the time of this broadcast, every major center of population in
the United States was already protected by the new defense-system. The
cities which had been most vulnerable were now the safest places in the
nation. And it was found, added the contented voice, that atomic bombs
were not detonated by the induction fields. The induced currents seemed
to freeze firing mechanisms. It appeared impossible to design a
detonating device which would blow up a bomb before it melted.

The broadcast ended in a matter-of-fact statement that plans for the
defense-system had been given to all the allies of the United States,
that London was already protected and Paris would be within hours, and
that within days the nations which were not allies would be assisted to
establish defenses, so that atomic war need not be feared in the future.

Soames listened with an odd expression on his face.

"That," he said, "started out as a gadget for a castaway to stop arrows
that savages were sniping at him with. I'm very pleased."

There was no more for him to say. The pleasure he felt, of course, would
be the only reward he was likely to get. At the moment he was bent upon
an enterprise his fellow-Americans would have regarded with horror.

       *       *       *       *       *

Far, far below and surrounded by the blackness of tree-covered ground in
starlight, there was an irregular shape of brightness. It was miles
long. It reflected the stars. It was the flood-control reservoir behind
the Polder Dam. There was no power-plant here. This reservoir merely
took the place of some hundreds of thousands of acres of timbered-off
forest which once had controlled floods more effectively.

Without a word, Soames slanted the 'copter down. Presently it hovered
delicately over the dam's crest and at its very center. It touched. The
rotor ceased to whirl. The motor stopped. There was a great silence.

Fran scrambled down. Soames swung after him. Together, they set up the
device which was a time-transposition unit, with its complicated small
antenna aimed out at the waters of the reservoir.

"I've gambled," said Soames, "that we understand each other. Now you
pull the string."

There was a cord which would discharge the strobe-packs through the
apparatus itself. The discharge would cease with absolute abruptness.
The packs would then recharge themselves from the special batteries
included in the device.

Fran pulled the cord.

There was no noise except a small and inadequate "snap." It seemed that
nothing happened. But there was suddenly a hole in the surface of the
reservoir. It was a large hole.

Something came up out of it. It glittered in ghostly fashion in the
starlight. It rose up and up and up. It was a cylinder with a rounded
top and a diameter of fifty feet or so. It rose and rose, very
deliberately. Then a rounded lower end appeared. It floated in the air.

Fran jerked the cord again. Another hole in the lake. Another round
metal thing rising slowly, one would even say peacefully into the
starlight. Fran, grinning happily, jerked the cord again and yet
again....

There were eight gigantic shining cylinders in the air when he stopped
and stood back, his eyes shining. A vast metal thing floated ponderously
near. A port opened and a voice called down in the language the children
used among themselves. Fran spoke back, remembering to turn on his
sensory communicator.

Fran talked briskly as if to himself. But it was standard
sensory-communication practice. After a long time he turned to Soames.

"My people say--" a pause--"thank you--" another pause, "and ask for
Zani and Mal and Hod."

"Tell them to make a column of themselves and float right here, going up
to ten thousand feet or so. Radars will pick them out. Planes will come
in the night to see what they are. They'll guess. I doubt very much that
they'll attack. Tell your people simply to keep them worried until we
come back."

Fran zestfully swarmed back into the helicopter. Soames told him:

"Turn off your communicator. You'll be listened in on. But maybe the
monitoring men are having their hair stand on end from the welter of
communications from the ships!"

Fran wriggled with excitement as the 'copter rose once more.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soames had an odd feeling that all this could not be true. But it was,
down to the last least detail which had made it thinkable for him to
defy all his fellow-men to keep faith with four children whose lives and
errand he'd interfered with. The matter had been a very natural
oversight, at first.

Of course Soames had assumed that the children's civilization had been
one of very millions of people. A small city cannot establish or
maintain a great technological civilization. He had been right. He'd
assumed, even, that Fran's people were able to travel between planets.
Again he'd been right. But the thing he hadn't thought of was that the
development of transposition in time--and transposition in space would
come later--wouldn't occur to anybody unless there was absolutely no
other possible solution to the problem the Old Race faced. They wouldn't
have tried to solve it until the Fifth Planet burst and the doom of the
world they lived on was self-evident. They wouldn't have worked at it
until they realized that Venus and Mercury were due to be shattered
after Earth, just as Mars was bombarded before it.

So the struggle to escape through time was begun in the fifty-ninth
minute of the last hour. Cities struggled to build time-ships and get a
pioneer vessel through to future time. Asteroids plunged down upon them,
wiping them out. Cities struggled on, passing to each other--to the
thinning number of those who remained--such solutions to such problems
as they developed. But there were fewer and fewer.... The city from
which the children came had fallen in ruins from earth-shocks, and only
a fraction of its population continued frantically to labor on....

But Soames hadn't thought of this. It was Gail who found it out from the
children with her. And she'd told Soames that he must help Fran at any
cost, and told the reason in two words and a number. Speaking of Fran's
people, she'd told Soames,

"_Only 2,000 left._"

It was true. It checked with the number of ships that came through to
modernity. Only two thousand people remained of Fran's race. They could
not conquer two billions of humankind. They could not rule them. They
could only take refuge among them, and share what knowledge they could
with them.

Fran leaned happily against Soames' shoulder. The 'copter swung away
from a broad wide valley.

Fran pointed. Two valleys came together here. He, who had come away from
the missile base on foot, was an authority on how to get back to it in a
helicopter.

The 'copter flew on.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fran said:

"There!"

And there were small lights, the color of kerosene lamps. But they were
not lamps, but electric lights. Soames sent the 'copter sweeping toward
the remarkably convincing Rocky Mountain village. The ship barely
cleared an electrified fence, the last of three. But if there were
sentries who might have fired on it, they had already heard of the
arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships. Nothing so human as a helicopter
could be an enemy when an invading fleet from who-knows-where was just
reported....

The 'copter settled to ground with a whistling noise. Soames cut off the
motors. Then Fran was calling joyously, and Zani squealed from a window,
and Hod came tumbling out of a window and Mal popped out of nowhere and
came running. There were shouts in the village. Then Gail was coming,
also.

"Pile aboard!" commanded Soames. "Your families are here, kids, and
they're waiting for you. And, Gail, there's going to be the most
thoroughly scared gang at the UN and elsewhere that you ever saw, now
that what they think's a space-fleet is actually here! We've been decent
to the kids, and they think they haven't, so we'll hold out for
authority to argue...."

       *       *       *       *       *

A door slammed. Fran said happily:

"Let's go!"

Motors boomed. The helicopter lifted. It rushed over the village,
bellowing. Tree-branches thrashed violently in the down draught. It
swept splendidly away down a valley leading to another valley and under
a precipitous cliff and down more valleys. There was a place where eight
silvery spacecraft floated composedly above the Earth, with the few
survivors of a great civilization peering out, waiting for dawn so they
could see a new world, a fresh world healed of all scars, waiting....

Soames pulled Gail to him. "I've got to make friends with these people,
Gail!" His voice trembled with excitement. "You see? They've got a
wonderful science, but we've got to get to work on it! They need a
modern viewpoint! That time-transposing system they've used to save
their lives, it's bound to work as a space-transposer too! I've got to
work it out with their engineers! We've got to get enough power together
to send some sort of miniature transposer out to Centaurus and
Aldebaran, and then have regular interstellar transposition routes and a
spate of worlds for everybody to move to who feels like it.... Taking
what these people have, and adding our stuff to it ... we'll really go
places!"

They swept over the reflecting waters which were the reservoir behind
the Polder Dam. Fran spoke aloud, for someone somewhere else to hear. He
spoke again. He was using his own, home-made sensory communicator. Then
he suddenly touched Soames' arm.

"My people say--" pause "you talk for them." He grinned. "Let's go!"

And the 'copter touched solidity and a great silvery cylinder touched
very delicately close by, and the children ran, squealing, to be with
people they'd feared they would never see again. And Soames and Gail
walked a little bit diffidently toward the same opened, lowered door.
There were some rather nice people waiting for them. They'd raised fine
children. They needed Soames and Gail to help them make friends.

Somehow it did not occur to Soames that he was the occasion, if not the
cause, that on this one day and within hours, the danger of atomic war
on Earth was ended, and the human race was headed for the stars instead
of annihilation. But it was true. The people of the Old Race, of course,
would not try to rule Earth. They were too few. They wouldn't want to go
to another planet and be alone. Again they were too few. They were the
last survivors of a very magnificent civilization, but they could not
maintain it unless they shared it with the people of Earth of now. They
could only join the sprawling younger branch of the human race as
citizens.

But humans, now, had a new destiny. With Gail close beside him, Soames
waited for the greetings of the children and their parents to end. He
looked at Gail. Her eyes were shining.

Soames felt very good. It was a perfect solution to the troubles of
Earth, both past and future.

The stars were waiting.


THE END

PRINTED IN U.S.A.




Transcriber's Note:

    This etext was produced from _Amazing Science Fiction Stories_
    September 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
    the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling
    and typographical errors have been corrected without note.





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