It's funny, but the ulder had nothing in common with a rocket or an airplane; it was more like a magic carpet. The peculiar vehicle first moved vertically, without the least vibration, giving off a long whistle, then it sped horizontally, like a bullet. Again the thing that I had observed once before: acceleration was not accompanied by an increase in inertia. The first time, at the station, I had thought that I might be the victim of an illusion; now, however, I was sure of myself. It is difficult to put into words the feeling that came over me -- because if they had truly succeeded in making acceleration independent of inertia, then all the hibernations, tests, selections, hardships, and frustrations of our voyage turned out to be completely needless; so that, at that moment, I was like the conqueror of some Himalayan peak who, after the indescribable difficulty of the climb, discovers that there is a hotel full of tourists at the top, because during his lonely labor a cable car and amus.e.m.e.nt arcades had been installed on the opposite side. The fact that had I remained on Earth I would probably not have lived to see this amazing discovery was small consolation to me: a consolation would be, rather, the thought that perhaps this contrivance did not lend itself to cosmic navigation. That was, of course, pure egoism on my part, I admitted it, but the shock was too great for me to be able to show the proper enthusiasm.

Meanwhile the ulder flew, now without a sound; I looked down. We were pa.s.sing the Terminal. It moved slowly to the rear, a fortress of ice; on the upper levels, not visible from the city, huge rocket pads showed black. Then we flew fairly close to the needle tower, the one with black and silver stripes; it loomed above the ulder. From the Earth, its height could not be appreciated. It was a bridge of pipe joining the city and the sky, and the "shelves" that protruded from it were crowded with ulders and other, bigger, machines. The people on these landing strips looked like poppy seeds spilled on a silver plate. We flew over white and blue colonies of houses, over gardens; the streets got wider and wider, their surfaces were also colored -- pale pink and ocher predominated. A sea of buildings extended to the horizon, broken occasionally by belts of green, and I feared that this would continue all the way to Clavestra. But the machine picked up speed, the houses became scattered, dispersed among the gardens, there appeared instead enormous loops and straight stretches of roads; these ran at numerous levels, merged, crisscrossed, plunged beneath the ground, converged in star-shaped arrangements, and shot away in strips along a flat gray-green plane beneath the high sun, swarming with gleeders. Then, amid quadrangles of trees, emerged huge structures with roofs in the shape of concave mirrors; in their centers burned something red. Farther along, the roads separated and green prevailed, now and then interrupted by squares of a different vegetation -- red, blue -- they could not have been flowers, the colors were too intense.

Dr. Juffon would be proud of me, I thought. The third day, and already. . . And what a beginning. Not just anyone. A brilliant actress, famous. She had not been afraid, and if afraid, then she had got pleasure from the fear, too. Just keep it up. But why had he spoken of intimacy? Was that what their intimacy looked like? How heroically I jumped into the waterfall.

The n.o.ble gorilla. And then a beauty, worshiped by the ma.s.ses, lavishly rewarded him; how generous of her! My face burned all over. All right, cretin, I said to myself mildly, what exactly do you want? A woman? You've had a woman. You've had everything it's possible to have here, including an offer to appear in the real. Now you will have a house, you will take walks in a garden, read books, look at the stars, and tell yourself, quietly, in your modesty: I was there. I was there and I came back. And even the laws of physics worked in your favor, lucky man, you have half a lifetime ahead of you, and do you remember how Roemer looked, a hundred years older than yourself?

The ulder began its descent, the whistling started up, the ground, crossed by white and blue roads whose surfaces gleamed like enamel, grew larger. Great ponds and small square pools threw up sparks of sun. Houses scattered on the slopes of gentle hills became progressively more real. On the blue horizon stood a chain of mountains with whitened peaks. I saw gravel paths, lawns, flower beds, the cool green of water in cement-rimmed pools, lanes, bushes, a white roof; all this turned slowly, surrounded me, and became motionless, as if it had taken possession.

FOUR.

The door opened. A white-and-orange robot was waiting on the lawn. I stepped out.

"Welcome to Clavestra," it said, and its white belly unexpectedly began to sing: tinkling notes, as though it had a music box inside.

Still laughing, I helped it unload my things. Then the rear hatch of the ulder, which lay on the gra.s.s like a small silver zeppelin, opened, and two orange robots rolled out my car. The heavy blue body sparkled in the sun. I had completely forgotten about it. And then all the robots, carrying my suitcases, boxes, and packages, moved in single file toward the house.

The house was a large cube with gla.s.s walls. One entered through a panoramic solarium, and farther on were a hall, a dining room, and a wooden staircase going up; the robot, the one with the music box, did not fail to point out to me this rarity.

Upstairs there were five rooms. I did not pick one with the best -- an eastern -- exposure because in them, particularly in the room with the view of the mountains, there was too much gold and silver, whereas mine had only streaks of green, like crushed leaves on a cream background.

Efficiently and quietly, the robots put all my belongings away in closets while I stood at the window. A port, I thought. A haven. Leaning forward, I could see the blue mist of the mountains. Below lay a flower garden with a dozen or so old fruit trees farther back; they had twisted, tired boughs and probably no longer yielded anything.

Off to the side, toward the road (I had seen it earlier from the ulder, it was obscured by hedges), the tower of a diving board rose above the brush. The pool. When I turned around, the robots had already left. I moved the desk, light as if inflated, over to the window; on it I set my packs of scientific journals, the bags of crystal books, and the reading machine; I arranged the still-unused notebooks and the pen separately. It was my old pen -- under the increased gravity it had started leaking and blotted everything, but Olaf had fixed it. I put covers on the notebooks, labeled them "History," "Mathematics," and "Physics" -- all in a rush, because I was anxious to get into the water. I didn't know if I could go outside in my trunks, I had forgotten a bathrobe. So I went to the bathroom in the corridor, and there, maneuvering a bottle of foam, I produced a horrible monstrosity that bore no resemblance to anything. I tore it off and tried again. The second bathrobe turned out a little better, but even so it was a fright; I cut away the larger irregularities of the sleeves and hem with a knife, and then it was more or less presentable.

I went downstairs, still not sure if anyone was home. The hall was empty. The garden, too. There was only an orange robot tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the gra.s.s by the rosebushes, which were already out of bloom.

I practically ran to the pool. The water gleamed and shimmered. An invisible freshness hung over it. I threw my robe on the golden sand that burned my feet, then pounded up the metal steps and ran to the top of the diving board. It was low, but fine for a start. I kicked off, did a single somersault -- I wouldn't attempt more after such a long time! -- and entered the water like a knife.

I swam happily. I began to pull myself with large strokes, first in one direction, then a turn, the other direction. The pool was about fifty meters long; I did eight laps without slowing down, climbed out dripping like a seal, and lay on the sand, my heart hammering. It was good. Earth had its attractions! In a few minutes I was dry. I stood up, looked around: no one. Splendid. I ran up on the springboard. First I did a back somersault; it came off, although I had kicked too hard: instead of a plank there was a section of plastic, which worked like a spring. Then a double; not too successful, I hit the water with my thighs. The skin reddened for a moment, as though it had been burned. And again. A little better, still not right. On the second turn I did not straighten out in time and screwed up with my feet. But I was stubborn and I had the time, plenty of time! A third dive, a fourth, a fifth. I had begun to feel a buzzing in my ears when -- after one more look around, just in case -- I tried a somersault with a twist. It was a complete bust, a fiasco; the impact knocked the wind out of me, I swallowed water, and, coughing and sputtering, crawled out onto the sand. I sat under the azure ladder of the diving board, mortified and angry, until suddenly I burst out laughing. Then I swam four hundred meters more, took a break, and did another four hundred.

When I returned to the house the world looked different. That was what I had been missing the most, I thought. A white robot was waiting at the door.

"Will you eat in your room or in the dining room?"

"Will I be eating alone?"

"Yes, sir. The others arrive tomorrow."

"The dining room, then."

I went upstairs and changed. I still did not know where to begin my studies. Probably with history; that would be the most sensible, yet I wanted to do everything at once, and most of all to attack the mystery of how gravity had been conquered. A musical tone sounded -- not the telephone -- and because I did not know what it was, I called the house infor.

"Lunch is served," explained a melodious voice.

The dining room was bathed in a light filtered through greenery; the curved panes in the ceiling glittered like crystal. On the table lay one setting. A robot brought the menu.

"No, no," I said, "anything will do."

The first course was like a cold fruit soup. The second was not like anything. I would have to say good-bye to meat, potatoes, and vegetables, apparently.

It was a good thing that I ate alone, because my dessert exploded on me. A slight exaggeration, perhaps; in any case I ended up with cream on my knees and on my sweater. It had been a complicated structure, hard only at the surface, and I had poked it carelessly with my spoon.

When a robot appeared, I asked if I could have coffee in my room.

"Of course," it said. "Now?"

"Please. But a lot of coffee."

I said this because I was feeling a little sleepy, no doubt as a result of my swim, and suddenly I regretted the time that I had been wasting. How completely different it was here from on board the s.p.a.cecraft! The afternoon sun beat down on the old trees, the shadows were short, they joined together at the trunks, the air quivered in the distance, but the room remained cool. I sat at the desk, took up the books. The robot brought me coffee. The transparent thermos held at least three liters. I said nothing. Clearly, it had overcompensated for my dimensions.

I intended to begin with history, but I started in on sociology, because I wanted to learn as much as possible right away. I soon discovered, however, that I was in over my head. The subject was loaded with a difficult -- since specialized -- mathematics, and, what was worse, the authors referred to facts unknown to me. In addition, I did not understand many words and had to look them up in the encyclopedia. So I set up a second opton for myself -- I had three -- then gave this up, because it took too long. I swallowed my pride and opened an ordinary school textbook on history.

Something had got into me and I did not have an ounce of patience -- I, whom Olaf had called the last incarnation of the Buddha. Instead of taking things in order, I turned immediately to the chapter on betrization.

The theory had been worked out by three people: Bennett, Trimaldi, and Zakharov. Hence the name. I was surprised to learn that they were of my generation -- they had announced their discovery a year after our departure. The resistance to it, of course, was tremendous. At first no one even wanted to take the project seriously. Then it reached the forum of the UN. For some time it went from subcommittee to subcommittee -- it seemed that the project would be buried in endless deliberation. In the meantime the research was making rapid progress, improvements were introduced, large-scale experiments were carried out on animals, then on humans (the first to submit to the procedure were the originators themselves -- Trimaldi was paralyzed for some time, the dangers of betrization to adults having not been discovered yet, and this stopped the project for the next eight years). But in the seventeenth year after zero (my personal reckoning: zero was the takeoff of the Prometheus) a resolution for the universal implementation of betrization was pa.s.sed; and this was only the beginning of the struggle for the humanization of mankind (as the textbook put it). In many countries parents refused to have their children treated, and attacks were made on the first betrization centers; fifty or sixty of them were completely destroyed. A period of turmoil, of repression, of coercion and resistance, lasted some twenty years. The textbook pa.s.sed over this with a few generalities, for perfectly obvious reasons. I resolved to consult source materials for more detailed information, but meanwhile continued my reading. The new order became firmly established only when the first betrizated generation had children. About the biological aspect of the process the book said nothing. There were a great many paeans, on the other hand, for Bennett, Zakharov, and Trimaldi. A proposal was made to number the years of the New Era from the time of the introduction of betrization, but was not accepted. The reckoning of dates did not change. The people changed. The chapter concluded with a ringing encomium to the New Epoch of Humanism.

I looked up the monograph on betrization by Ullrich. It, too, was full of mathematics, but I was determined to stick with it. The procedure was not carried out on the hereditary plasm, as I had secretly feared. But, then, had it been, it would not have been necessary to betrizate each new generation. That was encouraging: there remained, at least in theory, the possibility of return. Betrization acted on the developing prosencephalon at an early stage in life by means of a group of proteolytic enzymes. The effects were selective: the reduction of aggressive impulses by 80 to 88 percent in comparison with the nonbetrizated; the elimination of the formation of a.s.sociative links between acts of aggression and the sphere of positive feelings; a general 87-percent reduction in the possibility of accepting personal risk to life. The greatest achievement cited was the fact that these changes did not influence negatively the development of intelligence or the formation of personality, and, what was even more important, that the resulting limitations did not operate on the principle of fear conditioning. In other words, a man refrained from killing not because he feared the act itself. Such a result would have psychoneuroticized and infected with fear all of mankind. Instead, a man did not kill because "it could not enter his head" to do so.

One sentence in Ullrich struck me particularly: "Betrization causes the disappearance of aggression through the complete absence of command, and not by inhibition." Thinking this over, I concluded, however, that it did not explain the most important thing, the thought process of a man subjected to betrization. They were, after all, completely normal people, able to imagine absolutely anything, and therefore murder, too. What, then, made doing it impossible?

I searched for the answer to that question until it grew dark outside. As was usually the case with scientific problems, what seemed clear and simple in an abstract or a summary became more complicated the more precise an explanation I required. The musical signal announced dinner -- I asked that it be brought to my room, but I did not even touch it. The explanations that I found at last did not entirely agree. A repulsion, similar to disgust; a supreme aversion, magnified in a manner incomprehensible to one not betrizated; most interesting were testimonies from people who, eighty years before, as subjects in an experiment at the Tribaldi Inst.i.tute near Rome, had attempted to override the invisible barrier established in their minds. This was the most striking thing that I read. None of them had succeeded, but each gave a different account of the sensations that accompanied his attempt. For some, psychological symptoms predominated: a desire to escape, to avoid the situation in which they had been placed. In this group, continued testing caused severe headaches and, if persisted in, led finally to neurosis, which, however, could be quickly cured. In others, physical symptoms prevailed: shortness of breath, a feeling of suffocation; the condition resembled the manifestations of fear, but these people did not complain of fear, only of their physical discomfort.

The work of Pilgrin showed that 18 percent of those betrizated were able to perform a simulated murder, for example on a dummy, but the belief that they were dealing with an inanimate doll had to take the form of absolute certainty.

The prohibition was extended to all the higher animals, but amphibians and reptiles did not count as such, nor did insects. Of course, those betrizated had no scientific knowledge of zoological taxonomy. The prohibition simply applied according to the degree of similarity to man, as generally accepted. Because everyone, educated or not, considers a dog to be closer to a man than is a snake, the problem was in this way resolved.

As I went through many other papers, I had to agree with those who said that a betrizated individual could be understood introspectively only by one who was himself betrizated. I set aside this reading with mixed feelings. What disturbed me most was the lack of any critical work done in the spirit of opposition, of satire even, the lack of any a.n.a.lysis summarizing the negative aspects of the procedure. For I did not doubt for a minute that such existed, not because I questioned the scientists but simply because this is the nature of all human enterprise: there is never good without evil.

Murwick's brief sociographic sketch provided me with a number of interesting facts about the resistance to betrization in its early days. This appears to have been strongest in countries with a long tradition of conflict and bloodshed, such as Spain and certain Latin-American states. But illegal organizations to combat betrization were formed throughout the world -- in South Africa, in Mexico, on several islands in the Pacific. All kinds of methods were employed, from the forging of medical certificates stating that the operations had been performed, to the a.s.sa.s.sination of the doctors who performed them. The period of large-scale violence was followed by an apparent calm. Apparent, because it was then that the conflict of the generations began. The betrizated young, growing up, rejected a considerable part of humanity's achievement, and customs, traditions, art, the entire cultural heritage underwent a radical re-evaluation. The change included a large number of areas -- s.e.xuality, social mores, the att.i.tude toward war.

Of course, this great division of the people had been antic.i.p.ated. The law was not enacted until five years after its pa.s.sage, because enormous cadres had to be a.s.sembled -- educators, psychologists, various specialists -- to chart the proper course of development for the new generation. Total reform was necessary in schooling, in the content of plays, reading material, films. Betrization -- to convey the scope of the transformation in a few words -- during the first ten years consumed about 40 percent of national revenues throughout the world, in all its ramifications and exigencies.

It was a time of great tragedies. Young people, betrizated, became strangers to their own parents, whose interests they did not share. They abhorred their parents' b.l.o.o.d.y tastes. For a quarter of a century it was necessary to have two types of periodicals, books, plays: one for the old generation, one for the new. But all this had taken place eighty years earlier. Children born now were of the third betrizated generation, and only a handful of the nonbetrizated were still alive; these were people one hundred and thirty years old. The substance of their youth seemed to the new generation as remote as the Paleolithic.

In the history textbook I finally found information on the second great event of the last century, the harnessing of gravitation. The century was even called the "age of parastatics." My generation had dreamed of conquering gravity in the hope that that would bring about a revolution in s.p.a.ce travel. It turned out differently. The revolution came, but its primary effect was on Earth.

The problem of "peacetime death" caused by transportation accidents had become the menace of my day. I remember how some of the best minds strove, by relieving the perpetual congestion of the roads and highways, to reduce even a little the ever-mounting statistics; each year hundreds of thousands of lives were claimed in disasters, the problem seemed insoluble, like squaring the circle. There was no way to return, it was said, to the safety of traveling on foot; the best airplane, the most powerful automobile or train could slip from human control; automata were more dependable than people, but they, too, broke down; every technology, even the most advanced, had a certain margin, a percentage of error.

Parastatics, gravitation engineering, provided a solution, one as necessary as it was unexpected: necessary because a betrizated world had to be a world of complete safety; otherwise, the virtues of this medical procedure would have been pointless.

Roemer had been right. The essence of the discovery could be expressed only through mathematics -- and, I must add, an infernal mathematics. The general solution, holding "for all possible universes," was given by Emil Mitke, the son of a post-office clerk, a crippled genius who did with the theory of relativity what Einstein had done with Newton. It was a long, unusual story and, like all true stories, improbable, a mixture of matters trivial and momentous, of the ridiculous and the colossal in man, and it culminated at last, after forty years, in the "little black boxes."

Every vehicle, every craft on water or in the air, had to have its little black box; it was a guarantee of "salvation now," as Mitke jokingly put it toward the end of his life; at the moment of danger -- a plane crash, a collision of cars or trains -- the little black box released a "gravitational antifield" charge that combined with the inertia produced by the impact (more generally, by the sudden braking, the loss of speed) and gave a resultant of zero. This mathematical zero was a concrete reality; it absorbed all the shock and all of the energy of the accident, and in this way saved not only the pa.s.sengers of the vehicle but also those whom the ma.s.s of the vehicle would otherwise have crushed.

The black boxes were to be found everywhere: in elevators, in hoists, in the belts of parachutists, in ocean-going vessels and motorcycles. The simplicity of their construction was as astounding as the complexity of the theory that produced them.

Daybreak was reddening the walls of my room when I fell exhausted on my bed.

I was awakened by a robot entering the room with breakfast. It was almost one o'clock. Sitting up in bed, I made sure that nearby was the book I had put aside the previous night -- On Interstellar Flight by Starck.

"You have to eat, Mr. Bregg," the robot said reprovingly. "Otherwise, you will become weak. Also, reading until dawn is inadvisable. Doctors are very much against it."

"I am sure they are, but how do you know this?" I asked.

"It is my duty, Mr. Bregg."

It handed me a tray.

"I will try to mend my ways," I said.

"I hope that you do not misinterpret my good will and think me importunate," it replied.

"Ah, not at all," I said. Stirring the coffee and feeling the lumps of sugar crumble beneath the spoon, I was amazed, in a way both serene and profound, not only by the fact that I was actually on Earth, that I had returned, not only by the reading I had done all night, which still agitated me and fermented in my head, but also simply because I was sitting on a bed, my heart was beating -- I was alive. I wanted to do something in honor of this discovery, but, as usual, nothing particularly sensible came to mind.

"Listen," I addressed the robot, "I have a favor to ask you."

"I am at your command."

"Do you have a moment? Then play me that tune, the one from yesterday, all right?"

"With pleasure," it answered. To the merry sound of the music box I drank my coffee in three gulps; as soon as the robot left the room, I changed and ran to the pool. I cannot say why I was in such a constant hurry. Something drove me, as if I sensed that at any moment this peace would come to an end, undeserved as it was and unbelievable. In any case, my endless urgency made me cut across the garden at a run, without looking around me, and in a few bounds I was at the top of the diving-board tower; I had already kicked off when I noticed two people coming out from behind the house. For obvious reasons I could not study them closely. I did a somersault, not the best, and dove to the bottom. I opened my eyes. The water was like shimmering crystal, green, with the shadows of waves dancing on the sunlit bottom. I swam low above it, in the direction of the steps, and when I surfaced there was no one in the garden. But my skilled eyes had fixed a picture in my mind, perceived upside down and in a fraction of a second -- of a man and a woman. Apparently I had neighbors now. I debated whether to swim one more length, but Starck won out. The introduction to the book -- where he spoke of flights to the stars as a mistake of the early days of astronautics -- had so angered me that I was ready to close it and not return to it. But I forced myself. I went upstairs, changed; coming down, I saw on the hall table a bowl full of pale pink fruit somewhat similar to pears; I stuffed the pockets of my gardening overalls with them, then found a secluded spot surrounded on three sides by hedges, climbed an old apple tree, selected a fork in the branches that could take my weight, and there set about studying this obituary on my life's work.

After an hour, I was not so sure of myself. Starck employed arguments difficult to refute. He based them on the meager data brought back by the two expeditions that had preceded ours; we had called them the "pinp.r.i.c.ks," for they were probes over a distance of only several light years. Starck drew up statistical tables of the probability distribution or "habitation density" of the entire galaxy. The probability of encountering intelligent beings, he concluded, was one in twenty. In other words, for every twenty expeditions -- within a radius of a thousand light years -- one expedition had a chance of discovering an inhabited planet. This conclusion, however, odd as it may sound, was considered by Starck to be quite encouraging; he demolished the idea of establishing cosmic contacts in a later part of his exposition.

I bridled, reading what an author, unknown to me, had written about expeditions like OURS -- that is, initiated before the discovery of the Mitke effect and the phenomenon of parastatics -- because he regarded them as absurd. But I learned from him, in black and white, that, in principle at least, it was possible to construct a ship that could reach an acceleration on the order of 1,000, perhaps even 2,000 g's. The crew of such a craft would feel no acceleration or braking; on board, the gravitation would be constant, equal to a fraction of Earth's. Thus, Starck admitted that flights to the ends of the galaxy, and even to other galaxies -- the transgalactodromia of which Olaf had dreamed -- were possible, and possible in the span of a single lifetime. At a speed a tiny fraction of a percent less than the speed of light, a crew would age by several or a couple of dozen months in the time it took to reach the depths of the metagalaxy and return to Earth. But in that time not hundreds but millions of years would have elapsed on Earth. The civilization found by those who returned would not be able to a.s.similate them. It would be easier for a Neanderthal to adapt to life in our time. That was not all. The fate of a group of people was not the issue here. They were the envoys of humanity. Humanity posed -- through them -- a question, to which they were to bring back an answer. If the answer concerned problems connected with the level of development of the civilization, then humanity would surely obtain it before their return. Because from the posing of the question to the arrival of the answer, millions of years would have pa.s.sed. The answer, moreover, would be out of date, defunct, for they would be bringing news of the state of the other civilization at the time when they had reached that far sh.o.r.e of the stellar sea. During their journey back, however, that other world would not be standing still, it would move forward a million, two million, three million years. The questions and answers, then, would miss one another, would suffer hundred-century delays, which would nullify them and make any exchange of experiences, values, and ideas impossible. Futile. The astronauts were thus purveyors of dead information, and their work an act of utter and irreversible separation from human history; s.p.a.ce expeditions were an unprecedented and expensive -- the most expensive possible -- desertion of the realm of historical change. And for such a fantasy, a never profitable, always futile madness, Earth was to labor with the utmost effort and give up her best people?

The book ended with a chapter on the possibilities of exploration with the aid of robots. Robots, too, would transmit dead information, but this approach would at least avoid human sacrifices.

And there was a three-page appendix, an attempt to answer the question of the possible existence of travel faster than light, and even of the so-called instantaneous cosmic conjunction, that is, the crossing of s.p.a.ce with little or no pa.s.sage of time, thanks to still-undiscovered properties of matter and s.p.a.ce, through a sort of "hyperjump"; this theory, or, rather, speculation, not based on any facts to speak of, had a name -- teletaxis. Starck believed that he had an argument to cancel this last remaining hope. If such a thing existed, he maintained, undoubtedly it would have been discovered by one of the more highly developed civilizations of our or another galaxy. In which case, the representatives of that civilization would have been able, in an incredibly short time, to visit in succession every planetary system and sun, including our own. But Earth had not experienced any such visit so far, which was proof that this lightning-fast method of penetrating the cosmos could be imagined but never turned into reality.

I went back to the house stunned, with the almost childish feeling that I had been personally injured. Starck, a man whom I had never met, had dealt me a blow as no one else ever had. My clumsy summary does not convey the ruthless logic of his reasoning. I do not know how I got to my room, how I changed my clothes -- at one point I felt like having a cigarette and realized that I was smoking one already, sitting hunched on my bed as if I were waiting for something. True: lunch. Lunch for three. The fact was, I was afraid of people. I had not admitted this to myself, but that was why I had agreed so hurriedly to share the villa with strangers; perhaps antic.i.p.ation of their arrival was even the reason for my unnatural haste, as if I had been working to get ready for their presence, to initiate myself, through the books, into the mysteries of the new life. I would not have considered this in the morning of that day, but after Starck's book my nervousness suddenly fell away from me. From the reading apparatus I removed the seedlike bluish crystal, and in awe placed it on the table. This was what had sent me reeling. For the first time since my return I thought of Thurber and Gimma. I would have to see them. Maybe the book was right, but we represented a different truth. No one had the whole truth. That was not possible. I was roused from my trance by the musical signal. I straightened my sweater and went downstairs, in control of myself, already calmer. The sun streamed through the vines of the veranda; the hall, as always in the afternoon, was filled with a diffuse greenish glow. On the table in the dining room lay three settings. As I entered, the door opposite opened and they appeared. They were tall by present standards. We met in the middle of the room, like diplomats. I gave my name, we shook hands and sat at the table.

A numbness possessed me, like that of a boxer who has picked himself up off the floor after a technical knockout. From my depression, as from a theater box, I looked at the young couple. The girl was probably not even twenty. I was to conclude, later, that she did not lend herself to description; she certainly would not resemble a photograph of herself -- and even on the second day I had no idea what kind of nose she had, straight or upturned. The way she held out her hand for a plate delighted me like something precious, a surprise that did not happen every day; she smiled rarely and with composure, as if slightly distrustful of herself, as if she felt she was insufficiently self-possessed, too merry by nature or maybe too willful, and she judiciously tried to remedy this, but her strictness toward herself was constantly being undermined, she knew of it, and it even amused her.

She drew my gaze, and I had to fight this. Every moment I was staring at her, at her hair, which challenged the wind; I bowed my head over my plate, I glanced furtively, reaching for a dish, so that twice I nearly knocked over a vase of flowers; in other words, I made a perfect a.s.s of myself. But it was as if they did not see me at all. Their eyes were only for each other, and invisible threads of comprehension linked them. During the entire time I am sure we exchanged no more than twenty words, about how the weather was good, the place was nice, perfect for a vacation.

Marger was no more than a head shorter than I but was as slender as a boy, although he must have been thirty. He wore dark clothing, was blond, and had a long face and a high forehead. At first he seemed exceptionally handsome, but that was only when he kept his face immobile. He hardly said a word to his wife; when he did, usually with a smile, the conversation consisted of allusions and hints, completely cryptic to an outsider, and he became almost ugly. Not ugly, exactly. It was as if his facial proportions deteriorated; the mouth bent a little to the left and lost its expression, and even his smile became neutral, although he had beautiful white teeth. And when he was animated, the eyes were too blue, the jaw too p.r.o.nounced, and altogether he was like an impersonal model of masculine charm, out of a fashion magazine.

In other words, from the first I felt an aversion to him.

The girl -- I could not think of her as his wife, no matter how I tried -- did not have pretty eyes or lips, or unusual hair; she had nothing unusual. She was in her entirety unusual. With one like her, carrying a tent on her back, I could cross the Rockies twice, I thought. Why mountains, exactly? I didn't know. She brought to mind nights spent in pine forests, the labor of scaling a cliff, the seash.o.r.e, where there is nothing but the sand and the waves. Was this only because she wore no lipstick? I felt her smile, felt it across the table, even when she was not smiling at all. Then, in a sudden rush of boldness, I decided to look at her neck -- as if committing a theft. This was near the end of the meal. Marger turned to me unexpectedly; I believe I blushed.

He had been speaking for some time before I caught the sense of what he was saying: that the house had only one gleeder, that he, unfortunately, had to take it, because he was going to the city. Therefore, if I, too, intended to go and did not want to wait until evening, perhaps I would accompany him? He could, of course, send me another gleeder from the city, or. . .

I interrupted him. I started to say that I had no intention of going anywhere, but I checked myself, as if I had remembered something, then heard my own voice saying that indeed I had planned to travel to the city and if he didn't mind. . .

"Well, then, that is perfect," he said. We got up from the table. "What time would be most convenient for you?"

We stood on ceremony awhile, then I got him to admit that he was in something of a hurry, and I said that I could go at any time. We agreed to leave in half an hour.

I went back upstairs, confounded by this turn of events. He meant nothing to me. And there was absolutely nothing that called me to the city. What, then, was the point of this escapade? I had the impression, besides, that his politeness toward me was a bit exaggerated. Anyway, if I had really been in a hurry to get to the city, the robots certainly would have seen to it. I would not have had to go on foot. Did he want something from me? But what? He didn't know me from Adam. I was puzzling over this, again for no good reason, when the agreed-upon time arrived and I went downstairs.

His wife was nowhere to be seen, nor did she appear at the window to say good-bye to him once more. Inside the s.p.a.cious machine we were silent at first, watching curves appear as the road snaked among the hills. Slowly a conversation was struck up. I learned that Marger was an engineer.

"Today I have to inspect the city selex-station," he said. "You, too, I understand, are a cyberneticist?"

"From the Stone Age," I replied. "Excuse me. . . but how did you know that?"

"The travel office told me. I was naturally curious about who our neighbor would be."

"Aha."

We said nothing for a while; the increasing density of colored plastic outgrowths indicated our approach to the suburbs.

"If you don't mind. . . I wanted to ask you if you, the crew, had any problems with your automata," he said suddenly; it was not so much from the question itself as from his tone that I realized my answer was important to him. Was this what he was after? But what exactly did he want?

"You mean malfunctions? We had hundreds. But that was only natural; our models, in comparison with yours, were so primitive. . ."

"No, not malfunctions," he hastened to reply. "Rather, performance fluctuation in such variable conditions. . . Today, unfortunately, we do not have the opportunity to test automata in so thorough a way."

It boiled down to a purely technical question. He was interested merely in certain function parameters of electronic brains, how these behaved in the context of powerful magnetic fields, in nebulae, in funnels of gravitational perturbation, and he thought that this information might belong to expedition records temporarily withheld from publication. I told him what I knew, and for data more specialized I advised him to contact Thurber, who had been the a.s.sistant to the scientific director of the voyage.

"And might I give your name. . . ?"

"Of course."

He thanked me warmly. I was a little disappointed. So that was all? But the conversation had established a professional bond between us, and I asked him, in turn, about his work. What was this selex-station that he had to inspect?

"Ah, nothing very interesting. A sc.r.a.p dump. . . What I would really like to do is devote myself to theoretical work; this is in the nature of practical experience, and not terribly useful experience, at that."

"Practical experience? Work in a sc.r.a.p dump? How can that be? After all, you are a cyberneticist. . ."

"It is cybernetic sc.r.a.p," he explained with a wry smile. And added, somewhat contemptuously, "For we are very thrifty, you see. The idea is that nothing should go to waste. At my inst.i.tute I could show you one or two interesting things, but here -- well. . ."

He shrugged; the gleeder pulled off the main road, pa.s.sed through a high metal gate, and entered the large yard of a factory; I saw rows of conveyors, gantries, something like a modernized furnace.

"Now you can have this machine," said Marger. From an opening in the wall near which we had stopped, a robot leaned out and said something to him. Marger got out, I saw him gesticulating, then he turned to me, annoyed.

"Wonderful," he said. "Gloor is sick. That's my colleague -- I'm not permitted to work on my own -- now what am I supposed to do?"