"Not much, just-"

But that was the end of their conversation.

"On posts!" a voice cried. "Collision course!"

Bells rang. Sirens shrieked.

In the midst of their shared rage, Willis and Clive turned cursing to seize emergency s.p.a.cesuits and helmets off the cabin walls.

"d.a.m.n, oh, d.a.m.n, oh-d-"

Half-through his last d.a.m.n, Clive gasped. He vanished out a sudden hole in the side of the rocket.

The meteor had come and gone in a billionth of a second. On its way out, it had taken all the air in the ship with it through a hole the size of a small car.

My G.o.d, thought Willis, he's gone forever.

What saved Willis was a ladder he stood near, against which the swift river of air crushed him on its way into s.p.a.ce. For a moment he could not move or breathe. Then the suction was finished, all the air in the ship gone. There was only time to adjust the pressure in his suit and helmet, and glance wildly around at the veering ship which was being bombarded now as in a s.p.a.ce war. Men ran, or rather floated, shouting wildly, everywhere.

Shaw, thought Willis unreasonably, and had to laugh. Shaw.

A final meteor in a tribe of meteors struck the motor section of the rocket and blew the entire ship apart. Shaw, Shaw, oh, Shaw, thought Willis.

He saw the rocket fly apart like a shredded balloon, all its gases only impelling it to more disintegration. With the bits and pieces went wild crowds of men, dismissed from school, from life, from all and everything, never to meet face to face again, not even to say farewell, the dismissal was so abrupt and their deaths and isolation such a swift surprise.

Good-bye, thought Willis.

But there was no true good-bye. He could hear no weeping and no laments over his radio. Of all the crew, he was the last and final and only one alive, because of his suit, his helmet, his oxygen, miraculously spared. For what? To be alone and fall?

To be alone. To fall.

Oh, Mr. Shaw, oh, sir, he thought.

"No sooner called than delivered," whispered a voice.

It was impossible, but . . .

Drifting, spinning, the ancient doll with the wild red beard and blazing blue eyes fell across darkness as if impelled by G.o.d's breath, on a whim.

Instinctively, Willis opened his arms.

And the old party landed there, smiling, breathing heavily, or pretending to breathe heavily, as was his bent.

"Well, well, Willis! Quite a treat, eh?"

"Mr. Shaw! You were dead!"

"Poppyc.o.c.k! Someone bent some wires in me. The collision knocked things back together. The disconnection is here below my chin. A villain cut me there. So if I fall dead again, jiggle under my jaw and wire me up, eh?"

"Yes, sir!"

"How much food do you carry at this moment, Willis?"

"Enough to last two hundred days in s.p.a.ce."

"Dear me, that's fine, fine! And self-recycling oxygen units, also, for two hundred days?"

"Yes, sir. Now, how long will your batteries last, Mr. Shaw?"

"Ten thousand years!" the old man sang out happily. "Yes, I vow, I swear! I am fitted with solar-cells which will collect G.o.d's universal light until I wear out my circuits."

"Which means you will outtalk me, Mr. Shaw, long after I have stopped eating and breathing."

"At which point you must dine on conversation, and breathe past participles instead of air. But, we must hold the thought of rescue uppermost. Are not the chances good?"

"Rockets do come by. And I am equipped with radio signals-"

"Which even now cry out into the deep night: I'm here with ramshackle Shaw, eh?"

I'm here with ramshackle Shaw, thought Willis, and was suddenly warm in winter.

"Well, then, while we're waiting to be rescued, Charles Willis, what next?"

"Next? Why-"

They fell away down s.p.a.ce alone but not alone, fearful but elated, and now grown suddenly quiet.

"Say it, Mr. Shaw."

"Say what?"

"You know. Say it again."

"Well, then." They spun lazily, holding to each other. "Isn't life miraculous? Matter and force, yes, matter and force making itself over into intelligence and will."

"Is that what we are, sir?"

"We are, bet ten thousand bright tin-whistles on it, we are. Shall I say more, young Willis?"

"Please, sir," laughed Willis. "I want some more!"

And the old man spoke and the young man listened and the young man spoke and the old man hooted and they fell around a corner of Universe away out of sight, eating and talking, talking and eating, the young man biting gumball foods, the old man devouring sunlight with his solar-cell eyes, and the last that was seen of them they were gesticulating and babbling and conversing and waving their hands until their voices faded into Time and the solar system turned over in its sleep and covered them with a blanket of dark and light, and whether or not a rescue ship named Rachel, seeking her lost children, ever came by and found them, who can tell, who would truly ever want to know?

A BLADE OF GRa.s.s.

IT HAD BEEN DECIDED ALREADY that Ultar was guilty. The members of the Council sat, luxuriously relaxing as the attendants lubricated and oiled their viselike hands and their slender metal joints.

Kront was most vehement of the seventeen. His steel hand snapped and his round gray visuals flamed red.

"He's an insufferable experimentalist," said Kront. "I recommend the Rust!"

"The Rust?" exclaimed Ome. "Isn't that too drastic?"

Kront thrust his alloyed skull-case forward.

"No. Not for ones like him. He'll undermine the entire Obot State before he's finished."

"Come now," suggested Lione, philosophically. "It would be better to short-circuit him for a few years, as punishment. Why be so s.a.d.i.s.tic and bitter about it, Kront?"

"In the name of the Great Obot!" said Kront. "Don't you see the danger? Experimenting with protoplasm!"

"I agree," said one of the others. "Nothing is too severe a punishment. If Ultar insists on concluding his present experiments, he may undermine a civilization that has existed for three hundred thousand years. Take Ultar out to sea, unoiled, and fully aware. Drop him in. It will take him many years to Rust, and he will be aware, all of those years, of crumbling and rusting. Be sure that his skull-case is intact, so his awareness will not be short-circuited by water." The others trembled a quiet, metal, hidden trembling.

Kront swayed to his feet, his oblong face gleaming ice-blue and hard. "I want a show of opinion, a vote. The Rust for Ultar. Vote!"

There was an indecisive moment. Kront's fifteen feet of towering, alloyed metal shifted uneasily in the lubrication cell.

Vises came up, arms came up. Six at first. Then four more. Ome and five others declined to vote. Kront counted the vises with an instantaneous flare of his visuals.

"Good. There's an express rocket for Ultar's laboratory in one hundred seconds from Level CV. If we hurry we'll make it!"

Huge, magnetic plates clung to the floor as metal bodies heaved upward with oiled quiet.

They hurried to a wide portal. Ome and the five dissenters followed. He stopped Kront at the portal. "There's a thing I want to ask you, Kront."

"Hurry. We haven't time."

"You've-seen it."

"Protoplasm?"

"Yes. You've looked at it?"

Kront nodded. "Yes. I have seen."

Ome said, "What is it like?"

Kront did not answer for a long moment and then he said, very slowly. "It is enough to freeze the motion of all Obot Things. It is horror. It is unbelievable. I think you had better come and see this for yourself."

Ome deliberated. "I'll come."

"Hurry then. We have fifty seconds."

They followed the others.

The sea lay quietly as a huge, pallidly relaxed hand. In the vein and artery of that vast hand nothing moved but the gray blood tides. Moved silently and with the motion of one lunar tide against another. The deeps were not stirred by any other thing. The sea was lifeless and clear of any gill or eye or fin or any moving thing save the soft sea dust which arose, filtering, when the tides changed. The sea was dead.

The forests were silent. The brush was naked, the trees high and forlorn in a wilderness of quiet. There were no bird songs, or cracklings of sly animal paws in autumnal leaves, there were no loon cries or far off calls of moose or chipmunk. Only the wind sang little songs of memory it had learned three hundred thousand years before from things called birds. The forest and the land under the forest was dead. The trees were dead, turned to stone, upright, shading the hard stony soil forever. There was no gra.s.s and no flowers. The land was dead, as dead as the sea.

Now, over the dead land, in the birdless sky, came a metal sound. The sound of a rocket singing in the dead air.

Then it was gone, leaving a vein of pale gold powder in its wake. Kront and his fellows, on their way to the fortress of Ultar. . . .

A door opened as the ship landed. Kront and the others came forth from the ship.

"I've been waiting for you," said Ultar, standing in the open portal of the laboratory. "I knew you'd bring the Council with you, Kront. Step in, all of you. I can tell by the immediate temperature of your bodies, that I am already condemned to Rust. We shall see. Step in, anyway."

The door rang shut behind the Council. Ultar led the way down a tubular hall which issued forth into a dark room.

"Be seated, Obot Rulers. It is an unusual thing, this reception for the Great. I am flattered."

Kront clicked angrily. "Before you die, you must show us this protoplasm, so it can be judged and destroyed."

"Must I? Must you? Must it?"

"Where is it?"

"Here."

"Where!"

"Patience, Kront."

"I've no patience with blasphemers!"

"That is apparent."

In one corner of the room was a large square box, from which a glow illumined the nearby walls. Over the box hung a yellow cloth which hid the contents from view.

Ultar, with a certain sure sense of the dramatic, moved to this box and made several adjustments of heat-dials. His visuals were glowing. Grasping the yellow cloth, he lifted it up and away from the box.

A hard, rattling tremor pa.s.sed through the group. Visuals blinked and changed color. Bodies made an uneasy whining of metal. What lay before them was not pleasant. They drifted forward until they circled the box and peered into it. What they saw was blasphemous and sacrilegious and more than horrible.

Something that grew.

Something that expanded and built upon itself, changed and reproduced. Something that actually lived and died.

Died.

How silly! No one need die, ever, ever!