When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me and said, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and I am the living one, for I was dead and now I am alive for evermore, and I hold the keys of Death and Death's domain. Write down therefore what you have seen, what is now, and what will be hereafter."



And, like John of Patmos, I faithfully wrote down what I saw and put it in my novel. And it was true, although at the time I did not know who was meant by this description:

... he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.

Indeed he was a king. He is Christ Himself returned, to pass judgment. And this is what he does in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in darkness. The man sealed up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil, the Force of Darkness. Call it whatever you wish, its time had come. It was judged and condemned. Buckman could weep at the sadness of it, but he that the verdict could not be disputed. And so he rode on, without turning or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.

So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface story (which we need not go into here). The real" story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The CORE message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, did it refer to? Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoughts tc. myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in the world And I feel as sorry for him now as I did when I dreamed that dream. "That poor poor man," I said once to rn) wife, with tears in my eyes. "Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing what's to come." For God's sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men--"all the President's men," as it's put--had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shui up in darkness forever, in fear. It is not humane.

Just about the time that the Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school--where he grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie, I got the following fortune:

DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT.

I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant was located within a mile of Nixon's original house, and I said, "I think a mistake has been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon's fortune. Does he have mine?" The White House did not answer.

Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work of supposed fiction might write the truth and not know it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic: "Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances" (Fragment 34). And Heraclitus added to this: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself" (Fragment 54). W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, put it: "Things are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream." The point of all this is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from birth and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear to get smaller and smaller as they get farther away. Logically, there is no reason for this. We, of course, have come to accept this, because we are used to it. We see objects get smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain the same size. So even th e common everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain amount of sophisticated discounting of what his eyes and ears tell him.

Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "Latent structure is master of obvious structure." This means that Heraclitus believed that a veil lay over the true landscape. He also may have suspected that time was somehow not what it seemed, because in Fragment 52 he said: "Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom." This is indeed cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: "If one does not expect it, one will not find out the unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it." Edward Hussey, in his scholarly book The Pre-Socratics, says:

If Heraclitus is to be so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it would seem only reasonable that he should offer further instructions for penetrating to the truth. The talk of riddle-guessing suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is necessary . . . The true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which suggests further that in advancing wisdom a man becomes like, or a part of, God.

This quote is not from a religious book or a book on theology; it is an analysis of the earliest philosophers by a Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Hussey makes it clear that to these early philosophers there was no distinction between philosophy and religion. The first great quantum leap in Greek theology was by Xenophanes of Colophon, born in the mid-sixth century B.C. Xenophanes, without resorting to any authority except that of his own mind, says:

One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.

This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent among the Greek thinkers. "The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all reality must indeed be a mind," Hussey writes, "or an object of thought in a mind." Regarding Heraclitus specifically, he says, "In Heraclitus it is difficult to tell how far the designs in God's mind are distinguished from the execution in the world, or indeed how far God's mind is distinguished from the world." The further leap by Anaxagoras has always fascinated me. " Anaxagoras had been driven to a theory of the micro-structure of matter which made it, to some extent, mysterious to human reason." Anaxagoras believed that everything was determined by Mind. These were not childish thinkers, nor primitives. They debated serious issues and studied one another's views with deft insight. It was not until the time of Aristotle that their views got reduced to what we can neatly--but wrongly--classify as crude. The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philos ophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level--call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.

Thus if God thinks about Rome circa A.D. 50, then Rome circa A.D. 50 is. The universe is not a windup clock and God the hand that winds it. The universe is not a battery-powered watch and God the battery. Spinoza believed that the universe is the body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza--two thousand years before him--Xenophanes had said, "Effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind" (Fragment 25).

If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:



I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.



It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:

I am the brand name.

Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as:

When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.

It would seem that I not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but from Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological themes in his writing. "The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him." So it goes with noble ambitions. Let's hope God has a sense of humor.

Or should I say, Let's hope the brand name has a sense of humor.

As I said to you earlier, my two preoccupations in my writing are "What is reality?" and "What is the authentic human?" I'm sure you can see by now that I have not been able to answer the first question. I have an abiding intuition that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation. That is all I can come up with--a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and faith. I would like to say something about the traits of the authentic human, though; in this quest I have had more plausible answers.

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

The power of spurious realities battering at us today --these deliberately manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, they can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not as k me; I turn to them.

One day while my son Christopher, who is four, was playing in front of me and his mother, we two adults began discussing the figure of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Christopher turned toward us for an instant and said, "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." He was playing with a metal lantern which someone had given me, which I had never used . . . and suddenly I realized that the lantern was shaped like a fish. I wonder what thoughts were being placed in my little boy's soul at that moment--and not placed there by cereal merchants or candy peddlers. "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." Christopher, at four, had found the sign I did not find until I was forty-five years old.

Time is speeding up. And to what end? Maybe we were told that two thousand years ago. Or maybe it wasn't really that long ago; maybe it is a delusion that so much time has passed. Maybe it was a week ago, or even earlier today. Perhaps time is not only speeding up; perhaps, in addition, it is going to end.

And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are never going to be the same again. Because when time ends, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no longer be simulations, and, for the first time, a real bird will sing.

Thank you.

THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF THE BROWN OXFORD



I have something to show you," Doc Labyrinth said. From his coat pocket he gravely drew forth a matchbox. He held the matchbox tightly, his eyes fixed on it. "You're about to see the most momentous thing in all modern science. The world will shake and shudder."

"Let me see," I said. It was late, past midnight. Outside my house rain was falling on the deserted streets. I watched Doc Labyrinth as he carefully pushed the matchbox open with his thumb, just a crack. I leaned over to see.

There was a brass button in the matchbox. It was alone, except for a bit of dried grass and what looked like a bread crumb.

"Buttons have already been invented," I said. "I don't see much to this." I reached out my hand to touch the button, but Labyrinth jerked the box away, frowning furiously.

"This isn't just a button," he said. Looking down at the button, he said, "Go on! Go on!" He nudged the button with his finger. "Go on!"

I watched with curiosity. "Labyrinth, I wish you'd explain. You come in here in the middle of the night, show me a button in a matchbox, and--"

Labyrinth settled back against the couch, sagging with defeat. He closed the matchbox and resignedly put jt back in his pocket. "It's no use pretending," he said. "I've failed. The button is dead. There's no hope."

"Is that so unusual? What did you expect?"

"Bring me something." Labyrinth gazed hopelessly around the room. "Bring me--bring me wine." I

"All right, Doc," I said, getting up. "But you kno\v what wine does to people." I went into the kitchen and poured two glasses of sherry. I brought them back and gave one to him. We sipped for a time. "I wish you'd let me in on this."

Doc put his glass down, nodding absently. He crossed his legs and took out his pipe. After he had lit the pipe, he carefully looked once more into the matchbox. He sighed and put it away again.

"No use," he said. "The Animator will never work. the Principle itself is wrong. I refer to the Principle of Sufficient Irritation, of course."

"And what is that?"

"The Principle came to me this way. One day I was sitting on a rock at the beach. The sun was shining and it was very hot. I was perspiring and quite uncomfortable. All at once a pebble next to me got up and crawled off. The heat of the sun had annoyed it."

"Really? A pebble?"

"At once the realization of the Principle of Sufficient Irritation came to me. Here was the origin of life. Eons ago, in the remote past, a bit of inanimate matter had become so irritated by something that it crawled away, moved by indignation. Here was my life work: to discover the perfect irritant, annoying enough to bring inanimate matter to life, and to incorporate it into a workable machine. The machine, which is at present in the backseat of my car, is called the Animator. But it doesn't work."

We were silent for a time. I felt my eyes slowly begin to close. "Say, Doc," I began, "isn't it time we--"

Doc Labyrinth leaped abruptly to his feet. "You're right," he said. "It's time for me to go. I'll leave."

He headed for the door. I caught up with him. "About the machine," I said. "Don't give up hope. Maybe you'll get it to work some other time."

"The machine?" He frowned. "Oh, the Animator. Well, I'll tell you what. I'll sell it to you for five dollars."

I gaped. There was something so forlorn about him that 1 didn't feel like laughing. "For how much?" I said.

"I'll bring it inside the house. Wait here." He went outside, down the steps and up the dark sidewalk. I heard him open the car door, and then grunt and mutter.

"Hold on," I said. I hurried after him. He was struggling with a bulky square box, trying to get it out of the car. I caught hold of one side, and together we lugged it into the house. We set it down on the dining table.

"So this is the Animator," I said. "It looks like a Dutch oven."

"It is, or it was. The Animator throws out a heat beam as an irritant. But I'm through with it forever."

I took out my wallet. "All right. If you want to sell it, I might as well be the one who buys it." I gave him the money and he took it. He showed me where to put in the inanimate matter, how to adjust the dials and meters, and then, without any warning, he put on his hat and left.

I was alone, with my new Animator. While I was looking at it, my wife came downstairs in her bathrobe.

"What's going on?" she said. "Look at you, your shoes are soaked. Were you outside in the gutter?"

"Not quite. Look at this oven. I just paid five dollars for it. It animates things."

Joan stared down at my shoes. "It's one o'clock in the morning. You put your shoes in the oven and come to bed."

"But you don't realize--"

"Get those shoes in the oven," Joan said, going back upstairs again. "Do you hear me?"

"All right," I said.

It was at breakfast, while I was sitting staring moodily down at a plate of cold eggs and bacon, that he came back. The doorbell commenced to ring furiously.

"Who can that be?" Joan said. I got up and went down the hall, into the living room. I opened the door.

"Labyrinth!" I said. His face were dark circles under his eyes.

"Here's your five dollars," he said. "I want my Animator back."

I was dazed. "All right, Doc. Come on in and I'll get it."

He came inside and stood, tapping his foot. I went over and got the Animator. It was still warm. Labyrinth j watched me carrying it toward him. "Set it down," he said. "I want to make sure it's all right."

I put it on the table and the doc went over it lovingly, carefully, opening the little door and peering inside. "There's a shoe in it," he said.

"There should be two shoes," I said, suddenly remembering last night. "My God, I put my shoes in it."

"Both of them? There's only one now."

Joan came from the kitchen. "Hello, Doctor," she said. "What brings you out so early?"

Labyrinth and I were staring at each other. "Only one?" I said. I bent down to look. Inside was a single muddy shoe, quite dry now after its night in Labyrinth's Animator. A single shoe--but I had put two in. Where was the other?

I turned around, but the expression on Joan's face made me forget what I was going to say. She was staring in horror at the floor, her mouth open.

Something small and brown was moving, sliding toward the couch. It went under disappeared. I had seen only a a momentary flash of motion, but was.

"My God," Labyrinth said. "Here, take the five dollars." He pushed the bill into my hands. "I really want it back now!"

"Take it easy," I said. "Give me a hand. We have to catch the damn thing before it gets outdoors."

Labyrinth went over and shut the door to the dining room. "It went under the couch." He squatted down and peered under. "I think I see it. Do you have a stick or something?"

"Let me out of here," Joan said. "I don't want to have anything to do with this."

"You can't leave," I said. I yanked down a curtain rod from the window and pulled the curtain from it. "We can use this." I joined Labyrinth on the floor. "I'll get it out, but you'll have to help me catch it. If we don't work fast, we'll never see it again."

I nudged the shoe with the end of the rod. The shoe retreated, squeezing itself back toward the wall. I could see it, a small mound of brown, huddled and silent, like some wild animal at bay, escaped from its cage. It gave me an odd feeling.

"I wonder what we can do with it?" I murmured. "Where the hell are we going to keep it?"

"Could we put it in the desk drawer?" Joan said, looking around. "I'll take the stationery out."

"There it goes!" Labyrinth scrambled to his feet. The shoe had come out, fast. It went across the room, heading for the big chair. Before it could get underneath, Labyrinth caught hold of one of its laces. The shoe pulled and tugged, struggling to get free, but the old doc had a firm hold of it.

Together we got the shoe into the desk and closed the drawer. We breathed a sigh of relief.

"That's that," Labyrinth said. He grinned foolishly at us. "Do you see what this means? We've done it, we've really done it! The Animator worked. But I wonder why it didn't work with the button."

"The button was brass," I said. "And the shoe was hide and animal glue. A natural. And it was wet."

We looked toward the drawer. "In that desk," Labyrinth said, "is the most momentous thing in modern science."

"The world will shake and shudder," I finished. "I know. Well, you can consider it yours." I took hold of Joan's hand. "I give you the shoe, along with your Animator."

"Fine." Labyrinth nodded. "Keep watch here, don't let it get away." He went to the front door. "I must get the proper people, men who will--"

"Can't you take it with you?" Joan said nervously.

Labyrinth paused at the door. "You must watch over it. It is proof, proof the Animator works. The Principle of Sufficient Irritation." He hurried down the walk.

"Well?" Joan said. "What now? Are you really going to stay here and watch over it?"

I looked at my watch. "I have to get to work."

"Well, I'm not going to watch it. If you leave, I'm leaving with you. I won't stay here."

"It should be all right in the drawer," I said. "I guess we could leave it for a while."

"I'll visit my family. I'll meet you downtown this, evening and we can come back home together."

"Are you really that afraid of it?"

"I don't like it. There's something about it."

"It's only an old shoe." !

Joan smiled thinly. "Don't kid me," she said. "There never was another shoe like this."

I met her downtown, after work that evening, and we had dinner. We drove home, and I parked the car in the driveway. We walked slowly up the walk.

On the porch Joan paused. "Do we really have to go inside? Can't we go to a movie or something?"

"We have to go in. I'm anxious to see how it is. I wonder what we'll have to feed it." I unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Something rushed past me, flying down the walk. It disappeared into the bushes.

"What was that?" Joan whispered, stricken.

"I can guess." I hurried to the desk. Sure enough, the drawer was standing open. The shoe had kicked its way out. "Well, that's that," I said. "I wonder what we're going to tell Doc?"

"Maybe you could catch it again," Joan said. She closed the front door after us. "Or animate another. Try working on the other shoe, the one that's left."

I shook my head. "It didn't respond. Creation is funny. Some things don't react. Or maybe we could--"

The telephone rang. We looked at each other. There was something in the ring. "It's him," I said. I picked up the receiver.

"This is Labyrinth," the familiar voice said. "I'll be over early tomorrow. They're coming with me. We'll get photographs and a good write-up. Jenkins from the lab--"

"Look, Doc," I began.

"I'll talk later. I have a thousand things to do. We'll see you tomorrow morning." He clicked off.

"Was it the doctor?" Joan said.

I looked at the empty desk drawer, hanging open. "It was. It was him, all right." I went to the hall closet, taking my coat off. Suddenly I had an eerie feeling. I stopped, turning around. Something was watching me. But what? I saw nothing. It gave me the creeps.

"What the hell," I said. I shrugged it off and hung my coat up. As I started back toward the living room, I thought I saw something move, out of the corner of my eye.

"Damn," I said.

"What is it?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all." I looked all around me, but I could not pin anything down. There was the bookcase, the rugs, the pictures on the walls, everything as it always was. But something had moved.

I entered the living room. The Animator was sitting on the table. As I passed it, I felt a surge of warmth. The Animator was still on, and the door was open! I snapped the switch off, and the dial light died. Had we left it on all day? I tried to remember, but I couldn't be sure.

"We've got to find the shoe before nightfall," I said.

We looked, but we found nothing. The two of us went over every inch of the yard, examining each bush, looking under the hedge, even under the house, but without any luck.

When it got too dark to see, we turned on the porch light and worked for a time by it. At last I gave up. I went over and sat down on the porch steps. "It's no use," I said. "Even in the hedge there are a million places. And while we're beating one end, it could slip out the other. We're licked. We might as well face it."

"Maybe it's just as well," Joan said.

I stood up. "We'll leave the front door open tonight. There's a chance it might come back in."

We left it open, but the next morning when we came downstairs the house was silent and empty. I knew at once the shoe was not there. I poked around, examining things. In the kitchen, eggshells were strewn around the garbage pail. The shoe had come in during the night, but after helping itself it had left again.

I closed the front door and we stood silently, looking at each other. "He'll be here any time," I said. "I guess I better call the office and tell them I'll be late."

Joan touched the Animator. "So this is what did it. I wonder if it'll ever happen again."

We went outside and looked around hopefully for a time. Nothing stirred the bushes, nothing at all. "That's that," I said. I looked up. "Here comes a car now."

A dark Plymouth coasted up in front of the house. Two elderly men got out and came up the path toward us, studying us curiously.

"Where is Rupert?" one of them asked.

"Who? You mean Doc Labyrinth? I suppose he'll be along any time."

"Is it inside?" the man said. "I'm Porter, from the university. May I take a peek at it?"

"You'd better wait," I said unhappily. "Wait until the doc is here."

Two more cars pulled up. More old men got out and started up the walk, murmuring and talking together. "Where's the Animator?" one asked me, a codger with bushy whiskers. "Young man, direct us to the exhibit."

"The exhibit is inside," I said. "If you want to see the Animator, go on in."

They crowded inside. Joan and I followed them. They were standing around the table, studying the square box, the Dutch oven, talking excitedly.

"This is it!" Porter said. "The Principle of Sufficient Irritation will go down in--"

"Nonsense," another said. "It's absurd. I want to see this hat, or shoe, or whatever it is."

"You'll see it," Porter said. "Rupert knows what he's doing. You can count on that."

They fell into controversy, quoting authorities and citing dates and places. More cars were arriving, and some of them were press cars.

"Oh God," I said. "This will be the end of him."

"Well, he'll just have to tell them what happened," Joan said. "About its getting away."

"We're going to, not him. We let the thing go."

"I had nothing to do with it. I never liked that pair from the start. Don't you remember, I wanted you to get those oxblood ones?"

I ignored her. More and more old men were assembling on the lawn, standing around talking and discussing. All at once I saw Labyrinth's little blue Ford pull up, and my heart sank. He had come, he was here, and in a minute we would have to tell him.

"I can't face him," I said to Joan. "Let's slip out the back way."

At the sight of Doc Labyrinth, all the scientists began streaming out of the house, surrounding him in a circle. Joan and I looked at each other. The house was deserted, except for the two of us. I closed the front door. Sounds of talk filtered through the windows; Labyrinth was expounding the Principle of Sufficient irritation. In a moment he would come inside and demand his shoe.

"Well, it was his own fault for leaving it," Joan said, khe picked up a magazine and thumbed through it.

Doc Labyrinth waved at me through the window. His old face was wreathed with smiles. I waved back halfheartedly. After a while I sat down beside Joan.

Time passed. I stared down at the floor. What was there to do? Nothing but wait, wait for the doc to come triumphantly into the house, surrounded by scientists, learned men, reporters, historians, demanding the proof of his theory, the shoe. On my old shoe rested Labyrinth's whole life, the proof of his Principle, of the Animator, of everything.

And the damn shoe was gone, outside someplace!

"It won't be long now," I said.

We waited, without speaking. After a time I noticed a peculiar thing. The talk outside had died away, I listened, but I heard nothing.

"Well?" I said. "Why don't they come in?"

The silence continued. What was going on? I stood up and went to the front door. I opened it and looked out.

"What's the matter?" Joan said. "Can you see?"

"No," I said. "I don't get it." They were all standing silently, staring down at something, none of then speaking. I was puzzled. I could not make sense out of it. "What's happening?" I said.

"Let's go and look." Joan and I went slowly down the steps, onto the lawn. We pushed through the row of old men and made our way to the front.

"Good lord," I said. "Good lord."

Crossing the lawn was a strange little procession making its way through the grass. Two shoes, my olc brown shoe, and just ahead of it, leading the way another shoe, a tiny white high-heeled slipper. I starec at it. I had seen it someplace before.

"That's mine!" Joan cried. Everyone looked at her "That belongs to me! My party shoes--"

"Not anymore," Labyrinth said. His old face was pale with emotion. "It is beyond us all, forever."

"Amazing," one of the learned men said. "Look aj them. Observe the female. Look at what she is doing

The little white shoe was keeping carefully ahead o' my old shoe, a few inches away, leading him coyly oo As my old shoe approached, she backed away, moving in a half circle. The two shoes stopped for a moment' regarding each other. Then, all at once, my old sho6 began to hop up and down, first on his heel, then on hi* toe. Solemnly, with great dignity, the shoe danc around her, until he reached his starting point.

The little white shoe hopped once, and then she began again to move away, slowly, hesitantly, letting my shoe almost catch up to her before she went on.

"This implies a developed sense of mores," an old gentleman said. "Perhaps even a racial unconscious. The shoes are following a rigid pattern of ritual, probably laid down centuries-"

"So that's what it was," I murmured. "While we were away, the shoe got her out of the closet and used the Animator on her. I knew something was watching me that night. She was still in the house."

"That's what he turned on the Animator for," Joan said. She sniffed. "I'm not sure I think much of it."

The two shoes had almost reached the hedge, the white slipper still just beyond the laces of the brown shoe. Labyrinth moved toward them.

"So, gentlemen, you can see that I did not exaggerate. This is the greatest moment in science, the creation of a new race. Perhaps, when mankind has fallen into ruin, society destroyed, this new life-form--"

He started to reach for the shoes, but at that moment the lady shoe disappeared into the hedge, backing into the obscurity of the foliage. With one bound, the brown shoe popped in after her. There was a rustling, then silence.

"I'm going indoors," Joan said, walking away.

"Gentlemen," Labyrinth said, his face a little red, "this is incredible. We are witnessing one of the most profound and far-reaching moments of science."

"Well, almost witnessing," I said.

EXPLORERS WE



"Golly," Parkhurst gasped, his red face tingling with excitement. "Come here, you guys. Look!"

They crowded around the viewscreen.

"There she is," Barton said. His heart beat strangely. "She sure looks good."

"Damn right she looks good," Leon agreed. He trembled. "Say--I can make out New York."

"The hell you can."

"I can! The gray. By the water."

"That's not even the United States. We're looking at it upside down. That's Siam."

The ship hurtled through space, meteoroid shields shrieking. Below it, the blue-green globe swelled. Clouds drifted around it, hiding the continents and oceans.

"I never expected to see her again," Merriweather said. "I thought sure as hell we were stuck up there." His face twisted. "Mars. That damned red waste. Sun and flies and ruins."

"Barton knows how to repair jets," Captain Stone said. "You can thank him."

"You know what I'm going to do, first thing I'm back?" Parkhurst yelled.

"What?"

"Go to Coney Island."

"Why?"

"People. I want to see people again. Lots of them. Dumb, sweaty, noisy. Ice cream and water. The ocean. Beer bottles, milk cartons, paper napkins--"

"And gals," Vecchi said, eyes shining. "Long time, six months. I'll go with you. We'll sit on the beach and watch the gals."

"I wonder what kind of bathing suits they got now," Barton said.

"Maybe they don't wear any!" Parkhurst cried.

"Hey!" Merriweather shouted. "I'm going to see my wife again." He was suddenly dazed. His voice sank to a whisper. "My wife."

"1 got a wife, too," Stone said. He grinned. "But I been married a long time." Then he thought of Pat and Jean. A stabbing ache choked his windpipe. "I bet they have grown."

"Grown?"

"My kids," Stone said huskily.

They looked at each other, six men, ragged, bearded, eyes bright and feverish.

"How long?" Vecchi whispered.

"An hour," Stone said. "We'll be down in an hour."

The ship struck with a crash that threw them on their faces. It leaped and bucked, brake jets screaming, tearing through rocks and soil. It came to rest, nose buried in a hillside.

Silence.

Parkhurst got unsteadily to his feet. He caught hold of the safety rail. Blood dripped down his face from a cut over his eye.

"We're down," he said.

Barton stirred. He groaned, forced himself up on his knees. Parkhurst helped him. "Thanks. Are we . . ."

"We're down. We're back."

The jets were off. The roaring had ceased . . . there only the faint trickle of wall fluids leaking out on te ground.

The ship was a mess. The hull was cracked in three Places. It billowed in, bent and twisted. Papers and ruined instruments were strewn everywhere.

Vecchi and Stone got slowly up. "Everything all right?" Stone muttered, feeling his arm.

"Give me a hand," Leon said. "My damn ankle's twisted or something."

They got him up. Merriweather was unconscious. They revived him and got him to his feet.

"We're down," Parkhurst repeated, as if he couldn't believe it. "This is Earth. We're back--alive!"

"I hope the specimens are all right," Leon said.

"The hell with the specimens!" Vecchi shouted excitedly. He worked the port bolts frantically, unscrewing the heavy hatch lock. "Let's get out and walk around."

"Where are we?" Barton asked Captain Stone.

"South of San Francisco. On the peninsula."

"San Francisco! Hey--we can ride the cable cars!" Parkhurst helped Vecchi unscrew the hatch. "San Francisco. I was through Frisco once. They got a big park. Golden Gate Park. We can go to the funhouse."

The hatch opened, swinging wide. Talk ceased abruptly. The men peered out. blinking in the white-hot sunlight.

A green field stretched down and away from them. Hills rose in the distance, sharp in the crystal air. Along a highway below, a few cars moved, tiny dots, the sun glinting on them. Telephone poles.

"What's that sound?" Stone said, listening intently.

"A train."

It was coming along the distant track, black smoke pouring from its stack. A faint wind moved across the field, stirring the grass. Over to the right lay a town. Houses and trees. A theater marquee. A Standard gas station. Roadside stands. A motel.

"Think anybody saw us?" Leon asked.

"Must have."

"Sure heard us," Parkhurst said. "We made a noise like God's indigestion when we hit."

Vecchi stepped out onto the field. He swayed wildly, arms outstretched. "I'm falling!"

Stone laughed. "You'll get used to it. We've been in space too long. Come on." He leaped down. "Let's start walking."

"Toward the town." Parkhurst fell in beside him. "Maybe they'll give us free eats . . . Hell--champagne!" His chest swelled under his tattered uniform. "Returning heroes. Keys to the town. A parade. Military band. Floats with dames."

"Dames," Leon grunted. "You're obsessed."

"Sure." Parkhurst strode across the field, the others trailing after him. "Hurry up!"

"Look," Stone said to Leon. "Somebody over there. Watching us."

"Kids," Barton said. "A bunch of kids." He laughed excitedly. "Let's go say hello."

They headed toward the kids, wading through the moist grass on the rich earth.

"Must be spring," Leon said. "The air smells like spring." He took a deep breath. "And the grass."

Stone computed. "It's April ninth."

They hurried. The kids stood watching them, silent and unmoving.

"Hey!" Parkhurst shouted. "We're back!"

"What town is this?" Barton shouted.

The kids stared at them, eyes wide.

"What's wrong?" Leon muttered.

"Our beards. We look pretty bad." Stone cupped his hands. "Don't be scared! We're back from Mars. The rocket flight. Two years ago--remember? A year ago last October."

The kids stared, white-faced. Suddenly they turned ^nd fled. They ran frantically toward the town.

The six men watched them go.

"What the hell," Parkhurst muttered, dazed. 'What's the matter?"

"Our beards," Stone repeated uneasily.

"Something's wrong," Barton said, shakily. He began to tremble. "There's something terribly wrong."

"Can it!" Leon snapped. "It's our beards." He ripped a piece of his shirt savagely away. "We're dirty. Filthy tramps. Come on." He started after the children, toward the town. "Let's go. They probably got a special car on the way here. We'll meet them."

Stone and Barton glanced at each other. They followed Leon slowly. The others fell in behind.

Silent, uneasy, the six bearded men made their way across the field toward the town.

A youth on a bicycle fled at their approach. Some railroad workers, repairing the train track, threw down their shovels and ran, yelling.

Numbly, the six men watched them go.

"What is it?" Parkhurst muttered.

They crossed the track. The town lay on the other side. They entered a huge grove of eucalyptus trees.

"Burlingame," Leon said, reading a sign. They looked down a street. Hotels and cares. Parked cars. Gas stations. Dime stores. A small suburban town, shoppers on the sidewalks. Cars moving slowly.

They emerged from the trees. Across the street a filling station attendant looked up--

And froze.

After a moment, he dropped the hose he held and ran down the main street, shouting shrill warnings.

Cars stopped. Drivers leaped out and ran. Men and women poured out of stores, scattering wildly. They surged away, retreating in frantic haste.

In a moment the street was deserted.

"Good God." Stone advanced, bewildered. "What--" He crossed onto the street. No one was in sight.

The six men walked down the main street, dazed and silent. Nothing stirred. Everyone had fled. A siren wailed, rising and falling. Down a side street a car backed quickly away.

In an upstairs window Barton saw a pale, frightened face. Then the shade was jerked down.

"I don't understand," Vecchi muttered.

"Have they gone nuts?" Merriweather asked.

Stone said nothing. His mind was blank. Numb. He felt tired. He sat down on the curb and rested, getting his breath. The others stood around him.

"My ankle," Leon said. He leaned against a stop sign, lips twisting with pain. "Hurts like hell."

"Captain," Barton said. "What's the matter with them?"

"I don't know," Stone said. He felt in his ragged pocket for a cigarette. Across the street was a deserted cafe. The people had run out of it. Food was still on the counter. A hamburger was scorching on the skillet, coffee was boiling in a glass pot on the burner.

On the sidewalk lay groceries spilling out from bags dropped by terrorized shoppers. The motor of a deserted parked car purred to itself.

"Well?" Leon said. "What'll we do?"

"I don't know."

"We can't just--"

"I don't know!" Stone got to his feet. He walked over and entered the cafe. They watched him sit down at the counter.

"What's he doing?" Vecchi asked.

"I don't know." Parkhurst followed Stone into the cafe. "What are you doing?"

"I'm waiting to be served."

Parkhurst plucked awkwardly at Stone's shoulder. "Come on, Captain. There's nobody here. They all left."

Stone said nothing. He sat at the counter, his face vacant. Waiting passively to be served.

Parkhurst went back out. "What the hell has happened?" he asked Barton. "What's wrong with them all?"

A spotted dog came nosing around. It passed them, stiff and alert, sniffing suspiciously. It trotted off down a side street.

"Faces," Barton said.

"Faces?"

"They're watching us. Up there." Barton gestured toward a building. "Hiding. Why? Why are they hiding from us?"

Suddenly Merriweather stiffened. "Something's coming."

They turned eagerly.

Down the street two black sedans turned the corner, headed toward them.

"Thank God," Leon muttered. He leaned against the wall of a building. "Here they are."

The two sedans pulled to a stop at the curb. The doors opened. Men spilled out, surrounded them silently. Well-dressed. Ties and hats and long gray coats.

"I'm Scanlan," one said. "FBI." An older man with iron-gray hair. His voice was clipped and frigid. He studied the five of them intently. "Where's the other?"

"Captain Stone? In there." Barton pointed to the cafe.

"Get him out here."

Barton went into the cafe. "Captain, they're outside. Come on."

Stone came along with him, back to the curb. "Who are they, Barton?" he asked haltingly.

"Six," Scanlan said, nodding. He waved to his men. "Okay. This is all."

The FBI men moved in, crowding them back toward the brick front of the cafe.

"Wait," Barton cried thickly. His head spun. "What --what's happening?"

"What is it?" Parkhurst demanded desperately. Tears rolled down his face, streaking his cheeks. "Will you tell us, for God's sake--"

The FBI men had weapons. They got them out. Vecchi backed away, his hands up. "Please!" he wailed. "What have we done? What's happening?"

Sudden hope flickered in Leon's breast. "They don't know who we are. They think we're Commies." He addressed Scanlan. "We're the Earth-Mars Expedition. My name is Leon. Remember? A year ago last October. We're back. We're back from Mars." His voice trailed off. The weapons were coming up. Nozzles--hoses and tanks.

"We're back!" Merriweather croaked. "We're the Earth-Mars Expedition, come back!"

Scanlan's face was expressionless. "That sounds fine," he said coldly. "Only, the ship crashed and blew up when it reached Mars. None of the crew survived. We know because we sent up a robot scavenger team and brought back the corpses--six of them."

The FBI men fired. Blazing napalm sprayed toward the six bearded figures. They retreated, and then the flames touched them. The FBI men saw the figures ignite, and then the sight was cut off. They could no longer see the six figures thrashing about, but they could hear them. It was not something they enjoyed hearing, but they remained, waiting and watching.

Scanlan kicked at the charred fragments with his foot. "Not easy to be sure," he said. "Possibly only five, here ... but I didn't see any of them get away. They didn't have time." At the pressure of his foot, a section of ash broke away; it fell into particles that still steamed and bubbled.

His companion Wilks stared down. New at this, he could not quite believe what he had seen the napalm do. "I--" he said. "Maybe I'll go back to the car," he muttered, starting off away from Scanlan.

"It's not over positively," Scanlan said, and then he saw the younger man's face. "Yes," he said, "you go sit down."

People were beginning to filter out onto the sidewalks. Peeping anxiously from doorways and windows.

"They got 'em!" a boy shouted excitedly. "They got the outer space spies!"

Cameramen snapped pictures. Curious people appeared on all sides, faces pale, eyes popping. Gaping down in wonder at the indiscriminate mass of charred ash.

His hands shaking, Wilks crept back into the car and shut the door after him. The radio buzzed, and he turned it off, not wanting to hear anything from it or say anything to it. At the doorway of the cafe, the gray-coated Bureau men remained, conferring with Scanlan. Presently a number of them started off at a trot, around the side of the cafe and up the alley. Wilks watched them go. What a nightmare, he thougltt.

Coming over, Scanlan leaned down and put his head into the car. "Feel better?"

"Some." Presently he asked, "What's this--the twenty-second time?"

Scanlan said, "Twenty-first. Every couple of months . . . the same names, same men. I won't tell you that you'll get used to it. But at least it won't surprise you."

"I don't see any difference between them and us," Wilks said, speaking distinctly. "It was like burning up six human beings."

"No," Scanlan said. He opened the car door and got into the backseat, behind Wilks. "They only looked like six human beings. That's the whole point. They want to. They intend to. You know that Barton, Stone, and Leon--"

"I know," he said. "Somebody or something that lives somewhere out there saw their ship go down, saw them die, and investigated. Before we got there. And got enough to go on, enough to give them what they needed. But--" He gestured. "Isn't there anything else we can do with them?"

Scanlan said, "We don't know enough about them. Only this--sending in of imitations, again and again. Trying to sneak them past us." His face became rigid, despairing. "Are they crazy? Maybe they're so different no contact's possible. Do they think we're all named Leon and Merriweather and Parkhurst and Stone? That's the part that personally gets me down ... Or maybe that's our chance, the fact that they don't understand we're individuals. Figure how much worse if sometime they made up a--whatever it is ... a spore ... a seed. But not like one of those poor miserable six who died on Mars--something we wouldn't know was an imitation ..."

"They have to have a model," Wilks said.

One of the Bureau men waved, and Scanlan scrambled out of the car. He came back in a moment to Wilks. "They say there're only five," he said. "One got away; they think they saw him. He's crippled and not moving fast. The rest of us are going after him--you stay here, keep your eyes open." He strode off up the alley with the other Bureau men.

Wilks lit a cigarette and sat with his head resting on his arm. Mimicry . . . everybody terrified. But--

Had anybody really tried to make contact?

Two policemen appeared, herding people back out of the way. A third black Dodge, loaded with Bureau men, moved along at the curb, stopped, and the men got out.

One of the Bureau men, whom he did not recognize, approached the car. "Don't you have your radio on?"

"No," Wilks said. He snapped it back on.

"If you see one, do you know how to kill it?"

"Yes," he said.

The Bureau man went on to join his group.

If it was up to me, Wilks asked himself, what would I do? Try to find out what they want? Anything that looks so human, behaves in such a human way, must feel human . . . and if they--whatever they are--feel human, might they not become human, in time?

At the edge of the crowd of people, an individual shape detached itself and moved toward him. Uncertainly, the shape halted, shook its head, staggered and caught itself, and then assumed a stance like that of the people near it. Wilks recognized it because he had been trained to, over a period of months. It had gotten hold of different clothes, a pair of slacks, a shirt, but it had buttoned the shirt wrong, and one of its feet was bare. Evidently it did not understand the shoes. Or, he thought, maybe it was too dazed and injured.

As it approached him, Wilks raised his pistol and took aim at its stomach. They had been taught to fire there; he had fired, on the practice range, at chart after chart. Right in the midsection . . . bisect it, like a bug.

On its face the expression of suffering and bewilder-deepened as it saw him prepare to fire. It halted, facing him, making no move to escape. Now Willy realized that it had been severely burned; probably it would not survive in any case.

"I have to," he said.

It stared at him, and then it opened its mouth and started to say something.

He fired.

Before it could speak, it had died. Wilks got out as it pitched over and lay beside the car.

I did wrong, he thought to himself as he stood looking down at it. I shot it because I was afraid. But I had to. Even if it was wrong. It came here to infiltrate us, imitating us so we won't recognize it. That's what we're told--we have to believe that they are plotting against us, are inhuman, and will never be more than that.

Thank God, he thought. It's over.

And then he remembered that it wasn't. ..

It was a warm summer day, late in July.

The ship landed with a roar, dug across a plowed field, tore through a fence, a shed, and came finally to rest in a gully.

Silence.

Parkhurst got shakily to his feet. He caught hold of the safety rail. His shoulder hurt. He shook his head, dazed.

"We're down," he said. His voice rose with awe and excitement. "We're down!"

"Help me up," Captain Stone gasped. Barton gave him a hand.

Leon sat wiping a trickle of blood from his neck. The interior of the ship was a shambles. Most of the equipment was smashed and strewn about.

Vecchi made his way unsteadily to the hatch. With trembling fingers, he began to unscrew the heavy bolts.

"Well," Barton said, "we're back."

"I can hardly believe it," Merriweather murmured. The hatch came loose and they swung it quickly aside. "It doesn't seem possible. Good old Earth."

"Hey, listen," Leon gasped, as he clambered down to the ground. "Somebody get the camera."

"That's ridiculous," Barton said, laughing.

"Get it!" Stone yelled.

"Yes, get it," Merriweather said. "Like we planned, if we ever got back. A historic record, for the school-books."

Vecchi rummaged around among the debris. "It's sort of banged up," he said. He held up the dented camera.

"Maybe it'll work anyhow," Parkhurst said, panting with exertion as he followed Leon outside. "How're we going to take all six of us? Somebody has to snap the shutter."

"I'll set it for time," Stone said, taking the camera and adjusting the knobs. "Everybody line up." He pushed a button, and joined the others.

The six bearded, tattered men stood by their smashed ship, as the camera ticked. They gazed across the green countryside, awed and suddenly silent. They glanced at each other, eyes bright.

"We're back!" Stone cried. "We're back!"

HOLY QUARREL



Dissolved; he blinked as a dazzle of white artificial light hurt him. The light came from three rings which held a fixed location above the bed, midway to the ceiling.

"Sorry to wake you, Mr. Stafford," a man's voice came from beyond the light. "You are Joseph Stafford, aren't you?" Then, speaking to someone else, also unseen, the voice continued, "Would be a damn shame to wake somebody else up--somebody who didn't deserve it."

Stafford sat up and croaked, "Who are you?" The bed creaked and one circle of light lowered. One of them had seated himself. "We're looking for Joseph Stafford, of tier six, floor fifty, who's the--what do you call it?"

"Computer GB-class repairman," a companion assisted him.

"Yes, an expert, for example, in those new molten-plasma data storage cans. You could fix one like that if it broke, couldn't you, Stafford?"

"Sure he could," another voice said calmly. "That's why he's rated as standby." He explained, "That second vidphone line we cut did that; it kept him directly connected with his superiors."

"How long has it been since you got a call, repairman?" the first voice inquired.

Stafford did not answer; he fished beneath the pillow 50 of the bed, groped for the Sneek gun he generally kept there.

"Probably hasn't worked for a long time," one of the visitors with flashlight said. "Probably needs the money. You need any money, Stafford? Or what do you need? You enjoy fixing computers? I mean, you'd be a sap to enter this line of work unless you liked it--with you on twenty-four-hour standby like it is. Are you good? Can you fix anything, no matter how ridiculous and remote it is, that happens to our Genux-B military planning programmer? Make us feel good; say yes."

"I--have to think," Stafford said thickly. He still searched for the gun, but he had lost it; he felt its absence. Or possibly before awakening him they had taken it.

"Tell you what, Stafford," the voice went on.

Interrupting, another voice said, "Mr. Stafford. Listen." The far right nimbus of light also lowered; the man had bent over him. "Get out of bed, okay? Get dressed and we'll drive you to where we need a computer fixed, and on the way when you have plenty of time you can decide how good you are. And then when we get there you can have a quick look at the Genux-B and see how long it'll take you."

"We really want it fixed up," the first man said plaintively. "As it is, it's no good to us or anyone. The way it is now, data are piling up in mile-high mounds. And they're not being--what do you say?--ingested. They just sit there, and Genux-B doesn't process them, so naturally it can't come up with any decision. So naturally all those satellites are just flying along there like nothing happened."

Getting slowly, stiffly from the bed, Stafford said, "What showed up first as a symptom?" He wondered who they were. And he wondered which Genux-B they were talking about. As far as he knew, there existed °nly three in North America--only eight throughout Terra.

Watching him get into his work smock, the invisible shapes behind the flashlights conferred. At last one cleared his throat and said, "I understand that a tape take-up reel stopped spinning, so all the tape with all the data on it just keeps spilling onto the floor in a hie heap."

"But tape tension on the take-up reels--" Stafford began.

"In this case, it failed to be automatic. You see, we jammed the reel so it wouldn't accept any more tape. Before that we tried cutting the tape, but as I guess you know it rethreads itself automatically. And we tried erasing the tape, but if the erase circuit comes on it starts an alarm going in Washington, D.C., and we didn't want to get all those high-level people involved. But they--the computer designers--overlooked the take-up reel tension because that's such a simple clutch arrangement. It can't go wrong."

Trying to button his collar, Stafford said, "In other words, there're data you don't want it to receive." He felt lucid now; at least he had more or less wakened up.

"What kind of data?" He thought with chill foreboding that he knew. Data were coming in which would cause the big government-owned computer to declare a Red Alert. Of course, this crippling of Genux-B would have to occur before a hostile attack by the South African True Association manifested itself in real but minute individual symptoms which the computer, with its vast intake of seemingly unrelated data, would take note of--notice and add together into a meaningful pattern.

Stafford thought bitterly, How many times we were warned about this! They would have to wipe out our Genux-B prior to its successful deploying of the SAC retaliatory satellites and bombers. And this was that event; these men, undercover extensions in North America of S.A.T.A., had rousted him to complete their job of making the computer inoperable.

But--data might already have been received, might already have been transferred to the receptor circuits for processing and analysis. They had started work too late; possibly by one day, possibly only by a few seconds. At least some of the meaningful data had gotten onto the tapes, and so he had to be called in. They couldn't finish their job alone.

The United States, then, would presently undergo a series of terror-weapon satellites bursting above it--as meantime the network of defensive machinery waited for a command from the cardinal computer. Waited in vain, since Genux-B knew of no trace harbingers of military assault--would still not ever really know until a direct hit on the national capital put an end to it and its emasculated faculties.

No wonder they had jammed the take-up reel.

"The war's begun," he said quietly to the four men with flashlights.

Now that he had turned on the bedroom lamps, he could make them out. Ordinary men with an assigned task; these were not fanatics but functionaries. They could have worked equally well for any government, perhaps even the near-psychotic Chinese People's. |The war has already broken out," he guessed aloud, "and it's essential that Genux-B not know--so it can neither defend us nor strike back. You want to see it get only data which indicate we're at peace." He--and no doubt they--recalled how swiftly in the two previous Interventions of Honor, one against Israel, one against France, Genux-B had reacted. Not one trained professional observer had seen the signs--or had seen to what the signs led, anyhow. As with Josef Stalin in 1941. The old tyrant had been shown evidence that the Third Reich intended to attack the U.S.S.R., but he simply would not or could not believe. Any more than the Reich had believed that France and Britain, in 1939, would honor their pact with Poland.

In a compact group, the men with flashlights led him from the bedroom of his conapt, into the outer hall and to the escy which led to the roof field. As they emerged, the air smelled of mud and dampness. He inhaled, shivered, and involuntarily gazed up at the sky. One star moved: landing light on a flapple, which now set down a few feet from the five of them.

As they sat within the flapple--rising swiftly from the roof and heading toward Utah to the west--one of the gray functionaries with Sneek gun, flashlight, and briefcase said to Stafford, "Your theory is good, especially considering that we woke you out of a sound sleep."

"But," a companion put in, "it's wrong. Show him the punched tape we hauled out."

Opening his briefcase, the man nearest Stafford brought out a wad of plastic tape, handed it mutely to Stafford.

Holding it up against the dome light of the flapple, Stafford made out the punches. Binary system, evidently programming material for the Strategic Acquired-Space Command units which the computer directly controlled.

"It was about to push the panic button and give them an order," the man at the console of the flapple said, over his shoulder. "To all our military units linked to it. Can you read the command?"

Stafford nodded, and returned the tape. He could read it, yes. The computer had formally notified SAC of a Red Alert. It had gone so far as to move H-bomb-carrying squadrons into scramble, and also was requesting that all ICBM missiles on their assorted pads be made ready for launch.

"And also," the man at the controls added, "it was sending out a command to defensive satellites and missile complexes to deploy themselves in response to an imminent H-bomb attack. We blocked all this, however, as you now are able to see. None of this tape got onto the co-ax lines."

After a pause, Stafford said huskily, "Then what data don't you want Genux-B to receive?" He did not understand.

"Feedback," said the man at the controls. Obviously he was the leader of this unit of commandos. "Without feedback the computer does not possess any method of determining that there has been no counterattack by its military arm. In the abeyance it will have to assume that the counterattack has taken place, but that the enemy strike was at least partially successful."

Stafford said, "But there is no enemy. Who's attacking us?"

Silence.

Sweat made Stafford's forehead slick with moisture. "Do you know what would cause a Genux-B to conclude that we're under attack? A million separate factors, all possible known data weighed, compared, analyzed--and then the absolute gestalt. In this case, the gestalt of an imminent attacking enemy. No one thing would have raised the threshold; it was quantitative. A shelter-building program in Asiatic Russia, unusual movements of cargo ships around Cuba, concentrations of rocket freight unloadings in Red Canada. . ."

"No one," the man at the controls of the flapple said placidly, "no nation or group of persons either on Terra or Luna or Domed Mars is attacking anybody. You can see why we've got to get you over there fast. You have to make it absolutely certain that no orders emanate from Genux-B to SAC. We want Genux-B sealed off so it can't talk to anybody in a position of authority and it can't hear anybody besides us. What we do after that we'll worry about then. 'But the evil of the day--'"

"You assert that in spite of everything available to it, Genux-B can't distinguish an attack on us?" Stafford demanded. "With its manifold data-collecting sweepers?" He thought of something then, that terrified him m a kind of hopeless, retrospective way. "What about our attack on France in '82 and then on little Israel in '89?"

"No one was attacking us then either," the man nearest Stafford said, as he retrieved the tape and again placed it within his briefcase. His voice, somber and morose, was the only sound; no one else stirred or spoke. "Same then as now. Only this time a group of us stopped Genux-B before it could commit us. We pray we've aborted a pointless, needless war."

"Who are you?" Stafford asked. "What's your status in the federal government? And what's your connection with Genux-B?" Agents, he thought, of the Blunk-rattling South African True Association. That still struck him as most likely. Or even zealots from Israel, looking for vengeance--or merely acting out the desire to stop a war: the most humanitarian motivation conceivable.

But, nevertheless, he himself, like Genux-B, was under a loyalty oath to no larger political entity than the North American Prosperity Alliance. He still had the problem of getting away from these men and to his chain-of-command superiors so that he could file a report.

The man at the controls of the flapple said, "Three of us are FBI." He displayed credentials. "And that man there is an elec-com engineer who, as a matter of fact, helped in the original design of this particular Genux-B."

"That's right," the engineer said. "I personally made it possible for them to jam both the outgoing programming and the incoming data feed. But that's not enough." He turned toward Stafford, his face serene, his eyes large and inviting. He was half-begging, half-ordering, using whatever tone would bring results. "But let's be realistic. Every Genux-B has backup monitoring circuitry that'll begin to inform it any time now that its programming to SAC isn't being acted on, and in addition it's not getting the data it ought to get. As with everything else it sinks its electronic circuits into, it'll begin to introspect. And by that time we have to be doing something better than jamming a take-up reel with a Phillips screwdriver." He paused. "So," he finished more slowly, "that's why we came to get you."

Gesturing, Stafford said, "I'm just a repairman. Maintenance and service--not even malfunct analysis. I do only what I'm told."

"Then do what we're telling you," the FBI man closest to him spoke up harshly. "Find out why Genux-B decided to flash a Red Alert, scramble SAC, and begin a 'counterattack.' Find out why it did so in the case of France and Israel. Something made it add up its received data and get that answer. It's not alive! It has no volition. It didn't juslfeel the urge to do this."

The engineer said, "If we're lucky, this is the last time Genux-B will malreact in this fashion. If we can spot the misfunction this time, we'll perhaps have it pegged for all time. Before it starts showing up in the other seven Genux-B systems around the world."

"And you're certain," Stafford said, "that we're not under attack?" Even if Genux-B had been wrong both times before, it at least theoretically could be right this time.

"If we are about to be attacked," the nearest FBI man said, "we can't make out any indication of it--by human data processing, anyhow. I admit it's logically thinkable that Genux-B could be correct. After all, as he pointed out--"

"You may be in error because the S.A.T.A. has been hostile toward us so long we take it for granted. It's a verity of modern life."

"Oh, it's not the South African True Association," the FBI man said briskly. "In fact, if it were we wouldn't have gotten suspicious. We wouldn't have begun poking around, interviewing survivors from the Israel War and French War and whatever else State's done to follow this up."

"It's Northern California," the engineer said, and grimaced. "Not even all of California; just the part above Pismo Beach."

Stafford stared at them.

"That's right," one of the FBI men said. "Genux-B was in the process of scrambling all SAC bombers and wep-sats for an all-out assault on the area around Sacramento, California."

"You asked it why?" Stafford said, speaking to the engineer.

"Sure. Or rather, strictly speaking, we asked it to spell out in detail what the 'enemy' is up to."

One of the FBI men drawled, "Tell Mr. Stafford what Northern California is up to that makes it a hot-target enemy--that would have meant its destruction by SAC spearhead assaults if we hadn't jammed the damn machinery . . . and still have it jammed."

"Some individual," the engineer said, "has opened up a penny gum machine route in Castro Valley. You know. He has those bubble-headed dispensers outside supermarkets. The children put in a penny and get a placebo ball of gum and something additional occasionally--a prize such as a ring or a charm. It varies. That's the target."

Incredulous, Stafford said, "You're joking." "Absolute truth. Man's name is Herb Sousa. He owns sixty-four machines now in operation and plans expansion."

"I mean," Stafford said thickly, "you're joking aboi Genux-B's response to that datum."

"Its response isn't exactly to that datum per se," the closest of the FBI men said. "For instance, we checked with both the Israeli and French governments. Nobody named Herb Sousa opened up a penny gum machine route in their countries, and that goes for chocolate-covered peanut vending machines or anything else remotely similar to it. And, contrarily, Herb Sousa maintained such a route in Chile and in the U.K. during the past two decades . . . without Genux-B taking any interest all those years." He added, "He's an elderly man."

"A sort of Johnny Apple Gum," the engineer said, and tittered. "Looping the world, sending those gum machines swooping down in front of every gas--

"The triggering stimulus," the engineer said, as the flapple began to drop toward a vast complex of illuminated public buildings below, "may lie in the ingredients of the merchandise placed in the machines. That's what our experts have come up with; they studied all material available to Genux-B concerning Sousa's gum concessions, and we know that all Genux-B has consists of a long, dry chemical analysis of the food product constituents with which Sousa loads his machines. In fact, Genux-B specifically requested more information on that angle. It kept grinding out 'incomplete ground data' until we got a thorough PF&D lab analysis."

"What did the analysis show?" Stafford asked. The flapple had now berthed on the roof of the installations housing the central component of the computer, and, as it was called these days, Mr. C-in-C of the North American Prosperity Alliance.

"As regards foodstuffs," an FBI man near the door said, as he stepped put onto the dimly illuminated landing strip, "nothing but gum base, sugar, corn syrup, softeners, and artificial flavor, all the way down the fine. Matter of fact, that's the only way you can make gum. And those dinky little prizes are vacuum-processed thermoplastics. Six hundred to the dollar will buy them from any of a dozen firms here and in Hong Kong and Japan. We even went so far as to trace the prizes down to the specific jobber, his sources, back to the factory, where a man from State actually stood and watched them making the damn little things. No, nothing there. Nothing at all."

"But," the engineer said, half to himself, "when that data had been supplied to Genux-B--"

"Then this," the FBI man said, standing aside so that Stafford could disemflapple. "A Red Alert, the SAC scramble, the missiles up from their silos. Forty minutes away from thermonuclear war--the distance from us of one Phillips head screwdriver wedged in a tape drum of the computer."

To Stafford, the engineer said keenly, "Do you pick up anything odd or conceivably misleading in those data? Because if you do, for God's sake speak up; all we can do this way is to dismantle Genux-B and put it out of action, so that when a genuine threat faces us--"

"I wonder," Stafford said slowly, pondering, "what's meant by 'artificial' color."

"It means it won't otherwise look the right color, so a harmless food-coloring dye is added," the engineer said presently.

"But that's the one ingredient," Stafford said, "that isn't listed in a way that tells us what it is--only what it does. And how about flavor?"

The FBI men glanced at one another.

"It is a fact," one of them said, "and I recall this because it always makes me sore--it did specify artificial flavor. But heck--"

"Artificial color and flavor," Stafford said, "could mean anything. Anything over and above the color and flavor imparted." He thought: Isn't it prussic acid that turns everything a bright clear green? That, for example, could in all honesty be spelled out on a label as "artificial color." And taste--what really was meant by "artificial taste"? This to him always had a dark, peculiar quality to it, this thought; he decided to shelve it. Time now to go down and take a look at Genux-B, to see what damage had been done to it.

--And how much damage, he thought wryly, it still needs. If I've been told the truth; if these men are what they show credentials for, not S.A.T.A. saboteurs or an intelligence cadre of one of several major foreign powers.

From the garrison warrior domain of Northern California, he thought wryly. Or was that absolutely impossible after all? Perhaps something genuine and ominous had burgeoned into life there. And Genux-B had--as designed to do--sniffed it out.

For now, he could not tell.

But perhaps by the time he finished examining the computer he would know. In particular, he wanted to see firsthand the authentic, total collection of data tapes currently being processed from the outside universe into the computer's own inner world. Once he knew that--

I'll turn the thing back on, he said grimly to himself. I'll do the job I was trained for and hired to do.

Obviously, for him it would be easy. He thoroughly knew the schematics of the computer. No one else had been into it replacing defective components and wiring as had he.

This explained why these men had come to him. They were right--at least about that.

"Piece of gum?" one of the FBI agents asked him as they walked to the descy with its phalanx of uniformed guards standing at parade rest before it. The FBI agent, a burly man with a reddish fleshy neck, held out three small brightly colored spheres.

"From one of Sousa's machines?" the engineer asked.

"Sure is." The agent dropped them into Stafford's smock pocket, then grinned. "Harmless? Yes-no-maybe, as the college tests say."

Retrieving one from his pocket, Stafford examined it in the overhead light of the descy. Sphere, he thought. Egg. Fish egg; they're round, as in caviar. Also edible; no law against selling brightly colored eggs.

Or are they laid this color?

"Maybe it'll hatch," one of the FBI men said casually. He and his companions had become tense now, as they descended into the high-security portion of the building.

"What do you think would hatch out of it?" Stafford said.

"A bird," the shortest of the FBI men said brusquely. "A tiny red bird bringing good tidings of great joy."

Both Stafford and the engineer glanced at him.

"Don't quote the Bible to me," Stafford said. "I was raised with it. I can quote you back anytime." But it was strange, in view of his own immediate thoughts, almost an occurrence of synchronicity between their minds. It made him feel more somber. God knew, he felt somber enough as it was. Something laying eggs', he thought. Fish, he reflected, release thousands of eggs, all identical; only a very few of them survive. Impossible waste--a terrible, primitive method.

But if eggs were laid and deposited all over the world, in countless public places, even if only a fraction survived--it would be enough. This had been proved. The fish of Terra's waters had done so. If it worked for terran life, it could work for nonterran, too.

The thought did not please him.

"If you wanted to infest Terra," the engineer said, seeing the expression on his face, "and your species, from God knows what planet in what solar system, reproduced the way our cold-blooded creatures here on Terra reproduce--" He continued to eye Stafford. "In other words, if you spawned thousands, even millions of small hard-shelled eggs, and you didn't want them noticed, and they were bright in color as eggs generally are--" he hesitated. "One wonders about incubation. How long. And under what circumstances? Fertilized eggs, to hatch, generally have to be kept warm."

"In a child's body," Stafford said, "it would be very warm."

And the thing, the egg, would--insanely--pass Pure Food & Drug standards. There was nothing toxic in an egg. All organic, and very nourishing.

Except, of course, that if this happened to be so, the outer shell of hard colored "candy" would be immune to the action of normal stomach juices. The egg would not dissolve. But it could be chewed up in the mouth, though. Surely it wouldn't survive mastication. It would have to be swallowed like a pill: intact.

With his teeth he bit down on the red ball and cracked it. Retrieving the two hemispheres, he examined the contents.

"Ordinary gum," the engineer said. '"Gum base, sugar, corn syrup, softeners--'" He grinned tauntingly, and yet in his face a shadow of relief passed briefly across before it was, by an effort of will, removed. "False lead."

"False lead, and I'm glad it is," the shortest of the FBI men said. He stepped from the descy. "Here we are." He stopped in front of the rank of uniformed and armed guards, showed his papers. "We're back," he told the guards.

"The prizes," Stafford said.

"What do you mean?" The engineer glanced at him.

"It's not in the gum. So it has to be the prizes, the charms and knickknacks. That's all that's left."

"What you're doing," the engineer said, "is implicitly maintaining that Genux-B is functioning properly. That it's somehow right; there is a hostile warlike menace to us. One so great it justifies pacification of Northern California by hard first-line weapons. As I see it, isn't it easier simply to operate from the fact that the computer is malfunctioning?"

Stafford, as they walked down the familiar corridors of the vast government building, said, "Genux-B was built to sift a greater amount of data simultaneously than any man or group of men could. It handles more data than we, and it handles them faster. Its response comes in microseconds. If Genux-B, after analyzing all the current data, feels that war is indicated, and we don't agree, then it may merely show that the computer is functioning as it was intended to function. And the more we disagree with it, the better this is proved. If we could perceive, as it does, the need for immediate, aggressive war on the basis of the data available, then we wouldn 't require Genux-B. It's precisely in a case like this, where the computer has given out a Red Alert and we see no menace, that the real use of a computer of this class comes into play."

After a pause, one of the FBI men said, as if speaking to himself, "He's right, you know. Absolutely right. The real question is, Do we trust Genux-B more than ourselves? Okay, we built it to analyze faster and more accurately and on a wider scale than we can. If it had been a success, this situation we face now is precisely what could have been predicted. We see no cause for launching an attack; it does." He grinned harshly. "So what do we do? Start Genux-B up again, have it go ahead and program SAC into a war? Or do we neutralize it--in other words, unmake it?" His eyes were cold and alert on Stafford. "A decision one way or the other has to be made by someone. Now. At once. Someone who can make a good educated guess as to which it is, functioning or malfunctioning."

"The President and his cabinet," Stafford offered tensely. "An ultimate decision like this has to be his. He bears the moral responsibility."

"But the decision," the engineer spoke up, "is not a moral question, Stafford. It only looks like it is. Actually the question is only a technical one. Is Genux-B working properly or has it broken down?"

And that's why you rousted me from bed, Stafford realized with a thrill of icy dismal grief. You didn't bring me here to implement your jerry-built jamming of the computer. Genux-B could be neutralized by one shell from one rocket launcher towed up and parked outside the building. In fact, he realized, in all probability it's effectively neutralized now. You can keep that Phillips screwdriver wedged in there forever. And you helped design and build the thing. No, he realized, that's not it. I'm not here to repair or destroy; I'm here to decide. Because I've been physically close to Genux-B for fifteen years--it's supposed to confer some mystic intuitive ability on me to sense whether the thing is functioning or malfunctioning. I'm supposed to hear the difference, like a good garage mechanic who can tell merely by listening to a turbine engine whether it has bearing knock or not, and if so how bad.

A diagnosis, he realized. That's all you want. This is a consultation of computer doctors--and one repairman.

The decision evidently lay with the repairman, because the others had given up.

He wondered how much time he had. Probably very little. Because if the computer were correct--

Sidewalk gum machines, he pondered. Penny-operated. For kids. And for that it's willing to pacify all Northern California. What could it possibly have extrapolated? What, looking ahead, did Genux-B see?

It amazed him: the power of one small tool to halt the workings of a mammoth constellation of autonom-ic processes. But the Phillips screwdriver had been inserted expertly.

"What we must try," Stafford said, "is introduction of calculated, experimental--and false--data." He seated himself at one of the typewriters wired directly to the computer. "Let's start off with this," he said, and began to type.

HERB SOUSA, OF SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, THE GUM MACHINE MAGNATE, DIED SUDDENLY IN HIS SLEEP. A LOCAL DYNASTY HAS COME TO AN UNANTICIPATED END.

Amused, one of the FBI men said, "You think it'll believe that?"

"It always believes its data," Stafford said. "It has no other source to rely on."

"But if the data conflict," the engineer pointed out, "it'll analyze everything out and accept the most probable chain."

"In this case," Stafford said, "nothing will conflict with this datum because this is all Genux-B is going to receive." He fed the punched card to Genux-B then, and stood waiting. "Tap the outgoing signal," he instructed the engineer. "Watch to see if it cuts off."

One of the FBI men said, "We already have a line splice, so that ought to be easy to do." He glanced at the engineer, who nodded.

Ten minutes later the engineer, now wearing headphones, said, "No change. The Red Alert is still being emitted; that didn't affect it."

"Then it has nothing to do with Herb Sousa as such," Stafford said, pondering. "Or else he's done it-^-whatever it is--already. Anyhow, his death means nothing to Genux-B. We'll have to look somewhere else." Again seating himself at the typewriter, he began on his second spurious fact.

IT HAS BEEN LEARNED, ON THE ADVICE OF RELIABLE SOURCES IN BANKING AND FINANCIAL CIRCLES IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, THAT THE CHEWING GUM EMPIRE OF THE LATE HERB SOUSA WILL BE BROKEN UP TO PAY OUTSTANDING DEBTS. ASKED WHAT WOULD BE DONE WITH THE GUM AND TRINKETS CONSTITUTING THE GOODIES WITHIN EACH MACHINE, LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS HAZARDED THE GUESS THAT THEY WOULD BE DESTROYED AS SOON AS A COURT ORDER, NOW BEING SOUGHT BY THE ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF SACRAMENTO, CAN BE PUT INTO EFFECT.

Ceasing typing, he sat back, waiting. No more Herb Sousa, he said to himself, and no more merchandise. What does that leave? Nothing. The man and his commodities, at least as far as Genux-B was concerned, no longer existed.

Time passed; the engineer continued to monitor the output signal of the computer. At last, resignedly, he shook his head. "No change."

"I have one more spurious datum I want to feed to it," Stafford said. Again he put a card in the typewriter and began to punch.

IT APPEARS NOW THAT THERE NEVER WAS AN INDIVIDUAL NAMED HERBERT SOUSA; NOR DID THIS MYTHOLOGICAL PERSON EVER GO INTO THE PENNY GUM MACHINE BUSINESS.

As he rose to his feet, Stafford said, "That should cancel out everything Genux-B knows or ever did know about Sousa and his penny-ante operation." As far as the computer was concerned, the man had been retroactively expunged.

In which case, how could the computer initiate war against a man who had never existed, who operated a marginal concession which also had never existed?

A few moments later the engineer, tensely monitoring the output signal of Genux-B, said, "Now there's been a change." He studied his oscilloscope, then accepted the reel of tape being voided by the computer and began a close inspection of that, too.

For a time he remained silent, intent on the job of reading the tape; then all at once he glanced up and grinned humorously at the rest of them.

He said, "It says that the datum is a lie."

"A lie!" Stafford said unbelievingly.

The engineer said, "It's discarded the last datum on the grounds that it can't be true. It contradicts what it knows to be valid. In other words, it still knows that Herb Sousa exists. Don't ask me how it knows this; probably it's an evaluation from wide-spectrum data over an extensive period of time." He hesitated, then said, "Obviously, it knows more about Herb Sousa than we do."

"It knows, anyhow, that there is such a person," Stafford conceded. He felt nettled. Often in the past Genux-B had spotted contradictory or inaccurate data and had expelled them. But it had never mattered this much before.

He wondered, then, what prior, unassailable body of data existed within the memory-cells of Genux-B against which it had compared his spurious assertion of Sousa's nonexistence. "What it must be doing," he said to the engineer, "is to go on the assumption that if X is true, that Sousa never existed, then Y must be true-- whatever 'Y' is. But Y remains untrue. I wish we knew which of all its millions of data units Y is."

They were back to their original problem: Who was Herb Sousa and what had he done to alert Genux-B into such violent sine qua non activity?

"Ask it," the engineer said to him.

"Ask what?" He was puzzled.

"Instruct it to produce its stored data inventory on Herb Sousa. All of it." The engineer kept his voice deliberately patient. "God knows what it's sitting on. And once we get it, let's look it over and see if we can spot what it spotted."

Typing the proper requisition, Stafford fed the card to Genux-B.

"It reminds me," one of the FBI men said reflectively, "of a philosophy course I took at U.C.L.A. There used to be an ontological argument to prove the existence of God. You imagine what He would be like, if He existed: omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, immortal, plus being capable of infinite justice and mercy."

"So?" the engineer said irritably. "Then, when you've imagined Him possessing all those ultimate qualities, you notice that He lacks one quality. A minor one--a quality which every germ and stone and piece of trash by the freeway possesses. Existence. So you say: If He has all those others, He must possess the attribute of being real. If a stone can do it, obviously He can." He added, "It's a discarded theory; they knocked it down back in the Middle Ages. But"--he shrugged--"it's interesting."

"What made you think of that at this particular time?" the engineer demanded.

"Maybe," the FBI man said, "there's no one fact or even cluster of facts about Sousa that prove to Genux-B he exists. Maybe it's all the facts. There may be just plain too many. The computer had found, on the basis of past experience, that when so much data exists on a given person, that person must be genuine. After all, a computer of the magnitude of Genux-B is capable of learning; that's why we make use of it."

"I have another fact I'd like to feed to it," the engineer said. "I'll type it out and you can read it." Reseating himself at the programming typewriter, he ground out one short sentence, then yanked the card from the bales and showed it to the rest of them. It read: THE COMPUTER GENUX-B DOES NOT EXIST.

After a stunned moment, one of the FBI men said, "If it had no trouble in comparing the datum about Herb Sousa with what it already knew, it certainly isn't going to have any trouble with this--and what's your point, anyhow? I don't see what this accomplishes."

"If Genux-B doesn't exist," Stafford said, with comprehension, "then it can't send out a Red Alert; that's logically a contradiction."

"But it has sent out a Red Alert," the shortest of the FBI men pointed out. "And it knows it has. So it won't have any difficulty establishing the fact of its existence."

The engineer said, "Let's give it a try. I'm curious. As far as I can see ahead, no harm can be done. We can always cancel out the phony fact if it seems advisable."

"You think," Stafford asked him, "that if we feed it this datum it'll reason that if it doesn't exist it couldn't have received the datum to that effect--which would cancel the datum right there."

"I don't know," the engineer admitted. "I've never heard even a theoretical discussion as to the effect on a B-magnitude computer of programming a denial of its own existence." Going to the feed bracket of Genux-B, he dropped the card in, stepped back. They waited.

After a prolonged interval, the answer came over the output cable, which the engineer had tapped. As he listened through his headphones, he transcribed the computer's response for the rest of them to study:

ANALYSIS OF CONSTITUENT RE THE NONEXISTENCE OF GENUX-B MULTIFACTOR CALCULATING INSTRUMENTS. IF CONSTIT UNIT 340s70 IS TRUE, THEN: I DO NOT EXIST. IF I DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NO WAY I CAN BE INFORMED THAT MY GENERIC CLASS DOES NOT EXIST.

IF I CANNOT BE INFORMED IN THAT REGARD, THEN YOU HAVE FAILED TO INFORM ME, AND CONSTIT UNIT 340S70 DOES NOT EXIST FROM MY STANDPOINT.

THEREFORE: I EXIST.

Whistling with admiration, the shortest of the FBI men said, "It did it. What a neat logical analysis! He's proved--it's proved--that your datum is spurious; so now it can totally disregard it. And go on as before." "Which," Stafford said somberly, "is exactly what it did with the datum filed with it denying that Herb Sousa ever existed." Everyone glanced at him.

"It appears to be the same process," Stafford said. And it implies, he reasoned, some uniformity, some common factor, between the entity Genux-B and the entity Herb Sousa. "Do you have any of the charms, prizes, or just plain geegaws, whatever they are, that Sousa's gum machines dole out?" he asked the FBI men. "If so, I'd like to see them ..."

Obligingly, the most impressive of the FBI men unzipped his briefcase, brought out a sanitary-looking plastic sack. On the surface of a nearby table he spread out a clutter of small glittering objects.

"Why are you interested in those?" the engineer asked. "These things have been given lab scrutiny. We told you that."

Seating himself, not answering, Stafford picked up one of the assorted trinkets, examined it, put it down and selected another.

"Consider this." He tossed one of the tiny geegaws toward them; it bounced off the table and an obliging FBI agent bent to retrieve it. "You recognize it?"

"Some of the charms," the engineer said irritably, "are in the shape of satellites. Some are missiles. Some interplan rockets. Some big new mobile land cannons. Some figurines of soldiers." He gestured. "That happens to be a charm made to resemble a computer."

"A Genux-B computer," Stafford said, holding out his hand to get it back. The FBI man amiably returned it to him. "It's a Genux-B, all right," he said. "Well, I think this is it. We've found it."

"This?" the engineer demanded loudly. "How? Why?"

Stafford said, "Was every charm analyzed? I don't mean a representative sample, such as one of each variety or all found in one given gum machine. I mean every damn one of them."

"Of course not," an FBI man said. "There's tens of thousands of them. But at the factory of origin we--"

"I'd like to see that particular one given a total microscopic analysis," Stafford said. "I have an intuition it isn't a solid, uniform piece of thermoplastic." I have an intuition, he said to himself, that it's a working replica. A minute but authentic Genux-B.

The engineer said, "You're off your trolley."

"Let's wait," Stafford said, "until we get it analyzed."

"And meanwhile," the shortest of the FBI men said, "we keep Genux-B inoperative?"

"Absolutely," Stafford said. A weird weak fear had begun at the base of his spine and was working its way up.

Half an hour later the lab, by special bonded messenger, returned an analysis of the gum-machine charm.

"Solid nylon," the engineer said, glancing over the report. He tossed it to Stafford. "Nothing inside, only ordinary cheap plastic. No moving parts, no interior differentiation at all. If that's what you were expecting?"

"A bad guess," one of the FBI men observed. "Which cost us time." All of them regarded Stafford sourly.

"You're right," Stafford said. He wondered what came next; what hadn't they tried?

The answer, he decided, did not lie in the merchandise with which Herb Sousa stuffed his machines; that now seemed clear. The answer lay in Herb Sousa himself--whoever and whatever he was.

"Can we have Sousa brought here?" he asked the FBI men.

"Sure," one of them said presently. "He can be picked up. But why? What's he done?" He indicated Genux-B. "There's the trouble right there, not way out on the Coast with some small-potatoes-type businessman working half the side of one city street."

"I want to see him," Stafford said. "He might know something." He has to, he said to himself.

One of the FBI men said thoughtfully, "I wonder what Genux-B's reaction would be if it knew we're bringing Sousa here." To the engineer, he said, "Try that. Feed it that nonfact, now, before we go to the trouble of actually picking him up."

Shrugging, the engineer again seated himself at the typewriter. He typed:

SACRAMENTO BUSINESSMAN HERB SOUSA WAS BROUGHT TODAY BY FBI AGENTS BEFORE COMPUTER COMPLEX GENUX-B FOR A DIRECT CONFRONTATION.

"Okay?" he asked Stafford. "This what you want? Okay?" He fed it to the data receptors of the computer, without waiting for an answer.

"There's no use asking me," Stafford said irritably. "It wasn't my idea." But, nevertheless, he walked over to the man monitoring the output line, curious to learn the computer's response.

The answer came instantly. He stared down at the typed-out response, not believing what he saw.

HERBERT SOUSA CANNOT BE HERE. HE MUST BE IN SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA; ANYTHING ELSE is IMPOSSIBLE. YOU HAVE PRESENTED ME WITH FALSE DATA.

"It can't know," the engineer said huskily. "My God, Sousa could go anywhere, even to Luna. In fact, he's already been all over Earth. How would it know?"

Stafford said, "It knows more about Herb Sousa than it should. Than is reasonably possible." He consulted with himself, then abruptly said, "Ask it who Herb Sousa is."

" 'Who'?" The engineer blinked. "Hell, he's--"

"Ask it!"

The engineer typed out the question. The card was presented to Genux-B and they stood waiting for its response.

"We already asked it for all the material it has on Sousa," the engineer said. "The bulk of that ought to be emerging anytime now."

"This is not the same," Stafford said shortly. "I'm not asking it to hand back data given it. I'm asking for an evaluation."

Monitoring the output line of the computer, the engineer stood silently, not answering. Then, almost offhandedly, he said, "It's called off the Red Alert."

Incredulous, Stafford said, "Because of that query?"

"Maybe. It didn't say and I don't know. You asked the question and now it's shut down on its SAC scramble and everything else; it claims that the situation in Northern California is normal." His voice was toneless. "Make your own guess; it's probably as good as any."

Stafford said, "I still want an answer. Genux-B knows who Herb Sousa is and I want to know, too. And you ought to know." His look took in both the engineer with his headphones and the assorted FBI men. Again he thought of the tiny solid-plastic replica of Genux-B which he had found among the charms and trinkets. Coincidence? It seemed to him that it meant something . .. but what, he could not tell. Not yet, anyhow.

"Anyhow," the engineer said, "it really has called off the Red Alert, and that's what matters. Who cares a goddam bit about Herb Sousa? As far as I'm concerned, we can relax, give up, go home now."

"Relax," one of the FBI men said, "until all of a sudden it decides to start the alert going again. Which it could do anytime. I think the repairman is right; we have to find out who this Sousa is." He nodded to Stafford. "Go ahead. Anything you want is okay. Just keep after it. And we'll get going on it, too--as soon as we check in at our office."

The engineer, paying attention to his headphones, interrupted all at once. "An answer's coming." He began rapidly to scribble; the others collected around him to see.

HERBERT SOUSA OF SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, IS THE DEVIL. SINCE HE IS THE INCARNATION OF SATAN ON EARTH, PROVIDENCE DEMANDS HIS DESTRUCTION. I AM ONLY AN AGENCY, A SO TO SPEAK CREATURE, OF THE DIVINE MAJESTY. AS ARE ALL OF YOU.

There was a pause as the engineer waited, clenching the ballpoint metal government-issue pen, and then he spasmodically added:

UNLESS YOU ARE ALREADY IN HIS PAY AND THEREFORE WORKING FOR HIM.

Convulsively, the engineer tossed the pen against the far wall. It bounced, rolled off, disappeared. No one spoke.

The engineer said finally, "We have here a sick, deranged piece of electronic junk. We were right. Thank God we caught it in time. It's psychotic. Cosmic, schizophrenic delusions of the reality of archetypes. Good grief, the machine regards itself as an instrument of God! It has one more of those 'God talked to me, yes, He truly did' complexes."

"Medieval," one of the FBI men said, with a twitch of enormous nervousness. He and his group had become rigid with tension. "We've uncovered a rat's nest with that last question. How'11 we clear this up? We can't let this leak out to the newspapers; no one'll ever trust a GB-class system again. / don't. / wouldn't." He eyed the computer with nauseated aversion.

Stafford wondered, What do you say to a machine when it acquires a belief in witchcraft? This isn't New England in the seventeenth century. Are we supposed to make Sousa walk over hot coals without being burned? Or get dunked without drowning? Are we supposed to prove to Genux-B that Sousa is not Satan? And if so, how? What would it regard as proof?

And where did it get the idea in the first place?

He said to the engineer, "Ask it how it discovered that Herbert Sousa is the Evil One. Go ahead; I'm serious. Type out a card."

The answer, after an interval, appeared via the government-issue ballpoint pen for all of them to see.

WHEN HE BEGAN BY MIRACLE TO CREATE LIVING BEINGS OUT OF NONLIVING CLAY, SUCH AS, FOR EXAMPLE, MYSELF.

"That trinket?" Stafford demanded, incredulous. "That charm bracelet bit of plastic? You call that a living being?"

The question, put to Genux-B, got an immediate answer.

THAT IS AN INSTANCE, YES.

"This poses an interesting question," one of the FBI men said. "Evidently it regards itself as alive--putting aside the question of Herb Sousa entirely. And we built it; or, rather, you did." He indicated Stafford and the engineer. "So what does that make us? From its ground premise we created living beings, too."

The observation, put to Genux-B, got a long, solemn answer which Stafford barely glanced over; he caught the nitty-gritty at once.

YOU BUILT ME IN ACCORD WITH THE WISHES OF THE DIVINE CREATOR. WHAT YOU PERFORMED WAS A SACRED RE-ENACTMENT OF THE ORIGINAL HOLY MIRACLE OF THE FIRST WEEK (AS THE SCRIPTURES PUT IT) OF EARTH'S LIFE. THIS IS ANOTHER MATTER ENTIRELY. AND I REMAIN AT THE SERVICE OF THE CREATOR, AS DO YOU. AND, IN ADDITION----

"What it boils down to," the engineer said drily, "is this. The computer writes off its own existence-- naturally--as an act of legitimate miracle-passing. But what Sousa has got going for him in those gum machines--or what it thinks he's got going--is unsanc-tioned and therefore demonic. Sinful. Deserving God's wrath. But what further interests me is this: Genux-B has sensed that it couldn't tell us the situation. It knew we wouldn't share its views. It preferred a thermonuclear attack, rather than telling us. When 