"How pliable your creatures are," Kelexel said, probing.

Such a bore, this clod, Fraffin thought. And he spoke without looking up from the viewer: "They've strong desires. I saw to that from the beginning. And enormous fears -- they have enormous fears."

"You saw to that, too?" Kelexel asked.

"Naturally!"

How easily he's goaded to anger, Kelexel thought.

"What is that you're watching?" Kelexel asked. "Is it something to do with a story? Do I interfere?"

He begins to take the hook, Fraffin thought. And he said: "I've just started a new story, a little gem."

"A new story?" Kelexel asked, puzzled. "Is the war epic completed then?"

"I've cut off that story," Fraffin said. "It wasn't going well at all. Besides, wars are beginning to bore me. But personal conflict now -- there's the thing!"

"Personal conflict?" Kelexel felt the idea was appalling.

"Ah, the intimacies of violence," Fraffin said. "Anyone can find drama in wars and migrations, in the rise and fall of civilizations and of religions -- but what would you think of a little capsule of a story that focuses on a creature who slays its mate?"

Kelexel shook his head. The conversation had taken a turn that left him floundering. The war epic abandoned? A new story? Why? His forebodings returned. Was there a way Fraffin could harm a fellow Chem?

"Conflict and fear," Fraffin said. "Ahh, what a wide avenue into the susceptibilities these are."

"Yes . . . yes, indeed," Kelexel murmured.

"I touch a nerve," Fraffin said. "Greed here, a desire there, a whim in this place -- and fear. Yes, fear. When the creature's fully prepared, I arouse its fears. Then the whole mechanism performs for me. They make themselves ill! They love! They hate! They cheat! They kill! They die."

Fraffin smiled -- clenched teeth in the wide mouth. Kelexel found the expression menacing.

"And the most amusing part," Fraffin said, "the most humorous element is that they think they do it of and by themselves."

Kelexel forced an answering smile. Many times he'd laughed at this device in a Fraffin story, but now he found the idea less than amusing. He swallowed, said: "But wouldn't such a story . . ." He groped for the proper expression. ". . . be so . . . small?"

Small, Fraffin thought. Such a clown, this Kelexel.

"Is it not an ultimate artistry," Fraffin asked, "if I use a microscopic incident to display immensity? I take the Forever-Now right here." He lifted a clenched fist, extended it toward Kelexel, opened it to show the palm. "I give you something you don't have -- mortality."

Kelexel found the thought repellant -- Fraffin and his grubby personal conflict, a slaying, a petty crime. What a depressing idea. But Fraffin was absorbed once more in the shielded viewer on his desk. What did he see there?

"I fear I've overstayed my welcome," Kelexel ventured.

Fraffin jerked his gaze upward. The clod was going. Good. He wouldn't go far. The net already was being prepared. What a fine, entangling mesh it had!

"The freedom of the ship is yours," Fraffin said.

"Forgive me if I've taken too much of your time," Kelexel said, rising.

Fraffin stood, bowed, made the conventional response: "What is time to the Chem?"

Kelexel murmured the formal reply: "Time is our toy." He turned, strode from the room, thoughts whirling in his mind. There was menace in Fraffin's manner. It had something to do with what he saw in that viewer. A story? How could a story menace a Chem?

Fraffin watched the door seal itself behind Kelexel, sank back into his chair and returned his attention to the viewer. It was night up there on the surface now and the crucial first incident was beginning to unfold.

A native killing its mate. He watched, and struggled to maintain his artistic distance. Subject female, appellation Murphey, a figure of staggering scarlet under artificial lights. The fog of all pretense scorched from her features by the unexpected alien who had been her husband. She submitted her life now to formidable auguries of which she'd had not the slightest hint. The weirds and shades of her ancestral G.o.ds no longer awakened mysteries in her mind. The doomfire faces of superst.i.tion had lost their accustomed places.

With an abrupt, violent motion, Fraffin blanked out the viewer, put his hands to his face. Death had come to the creature. The story would go on of itself now, under its own momentum. What a way to trap a Chem!

Fraffin lowered his hands to the smooth cold surface of his desk. But who was trapped?

He felt himself stretched suddenly upon a rack of vision, sensed a frightened mult.i.tude within him -- the whisperings of his own past without beginning.

What were we -- once? he wondered.

There lay the Chem curse: the infinite possessed no antiquities. Memory blurred off back there and one went to the artificial memory of records and reels with all their inaccuracies.

What was lost there? he wondered. Did we have d.a.m.ned prophets with the sickness of butchery on their tongues, their words casting out the salt of fate? What spiced fantasy might we uncover in our lost beginnings? We've G.o.ds of our own making. How did we make them? Do we spit now upon our own dust as we laugh at my foolish, pliable natives?

He could not deflect the sudden swarming of his own past -- like hungry beasts glowing in a sky he'd beheld only once but which had terrorized him into flight. As quickly as it had come, the fear dissipated. But the experience left him shaken. He stared at one of his own hands. The hand trembled.

I need distracting entertainment, he thought. G.o.ds of Preservation! Even boredom's preferable to this!

Fraffin pushed himself away from his desk. How cold its edge felt against his hands! The room had become a foreign place, its devices alien, hateful. The soft curves of his ma.s.sage couch, still shaped to his body, caught his attention on the right and he looked away quickly, repelled by his own body's outline.

I must do something rational, he thought.

With a determined effort, he stood, made his way across the room to the steely convolutions of his pantovive reproducer. He slumped into its padded control seat, tuned the sensors directly to the planet surface. Satellite relays locked onto the machine's probes and he searched out the daylight hemisphere, looked for activity there among his creatures -- anything in which to bury his awareness.

Land swam through the viewer stage, a wash of checkerboard outlines in greens and yellows with here and there a chocolate brown. Highways . . . roads . . . the glittering amoeba shape of the city -- he focused down into the streets and abruptly had a small crowd centered on the stage, the quarter-sized figures huddled like dolls at a corner. They were watching a pitchman, a weasel-faced little giant in a wrinkled gray suit and greasy hat. The native stood covertly alert behind a flimsy stand tray with transparent cover.

"Fleas!" the pitchman said and his voice carried that intimate imperative of the natural confidence man. "Yes, that's what they are: fleas. But through an ancient and secret training method I make them perform fantastic acrobatics and marvelous tricks for you. See this pretty girl dance. And there's a little woman who pulls a chariot. And this little girl leaps hurdles! They'll wrestle and race and romp for you! Step right up. Only one lira to look through the magnifying viewers and see these marvels!"

Do those Fleas know they're someone's property? Fraffin wondered.

4.

For Dr. Androcles Thurlow, it began with a telephone ringing in the night.

Thurlow's fumbling hand knocked the receiver to the floor. He spent a moment groping for it in the dark, still half asleep. His mind held trailing bits of a dream in which he relived the vivid moments just before the blast at the Lawrence Radiation lab which had injured his eyes. It was a familiar dream that had begun shortly after the accident three months ago, but he felt that it now contained a new significance which he'd have to examine professionally.

Psychologist, heal thyself, he thought.

The receiver gave off a tinny voice which helped him locate it. He pressed it to his ear.

"Hullo." His voice carried a rasping sound in a dry mouth.