The Escape By Poul William Anderson

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The Escape

Poul William Anderson

Published: 1953

Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories

Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/32323 About Anderson:

Poul William Anderson (November 25, 1926–July 31, 2001) was an American science fiction author who wrote during a Golden Age of the genre. Poul Anderson also authored several works of fantasy. He received a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He married the former Karen Kruse in 1953. They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to the science fiction author Greg Bear. He was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. He was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. In addition, he was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. He died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks Anderson:

- The Man Who Came Early (1957)

- Industrial Revolution (1963)

- The Burning Bridge (1960)

- Security (1953)

- The Valor of Cappen Varra (1957)

- Duel on Syrtis (1951)

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Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction September 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

I

The trap had closed at sundown. In the last red light, the rabbit had battered himself against its walls until fear and numbness ached home and he crouched shaken by the flutterings of his heart. Otherwise there was no movement in him as night and the stars came. But when the moon rose, its light was caught icily in his great eyes, and he looked through shadows to the forest.

His vision was not made to focus closely, but after a while it fell on the entrance to the trap. It had snapped down after him when he entered, and then there had been only the flat bruising beat of himself against the wood. Now slowly, straining through the white unreal haze that was the moonlight, he recalled a memory of the gate falling, and he squeaked ever so faintly with terror. For the gate was there now, solid and sullen against the breathing forest, and yet it had been up and had come thunking down, and this now-then doubleness was something the rabbit had never known before.

The moon rose higher, swinging through a sky full of stars. An owl hooted, and the rabbit froze into movelessness as its wings ghosted overhead. There was fear and bewilderment and a new kind of pain in the owl's voice, too. Presently it was gone, and only the many little murmurs and smells of night were around him. And he sat for a long time looking at the gate and remembering how it had fallen.

The moon began to fall too, into a paling western heaven. Perhaps the rabbit wept a little, in his own way. A dawn which was as yet only a mist in the dark limned the bars of the trap against gray trees. And there was a crossbar seated low on the gate.

Slowly, very slowly, the rabbit inched across until he was at the entrance. He shrank from the thing which had clamped him in. It smelled of man. Then he nosed it, feeling dew cold and wet on his muzzle. It did not stir. But it had fallen down.

The rabbit crouched, bracing his shoulders against the crossbar. He strained then, heaving upward, and the wood shivered. The rabbit's breath came fast and sharp, whistling between his teeth, and he tried again. The gate moved upward in its grooves, and the rabbit bolted free.

For an instant he poised wildly. The sinking moon was a blind dazzle in his eyes. The gate smacked back into place, and he turned and fled.

Archie Brock had been out late grubbing stumps in the north forty. Mr. Rossman wanted them all pulled by Wednesday so he could get the plowing started in his new field, and promised Brock extra pay if he would see to it. So Brock took some dinner out with him and worked till it got too dark to see. Then he started walking the three miles home, because they didn't let him use the jeep or a truck.

He was tired without thinking of it, aching a little and wishing he had a nice tall beer. But mostly he didn't think at all, just picked them up and laid them down, and the road slid away behind him. There were dark woods on either side, throwing long shadows across the moon-whitened dust, and he heard the noise of crickets chirring and once there was an owl. Have to take a gun and get that owl before he swiped some chickens. Mr. Rossman didn't mind if Brock hunted. Mr. Rossman was all right.

It was funny the way he kept thinking things tonight. Usually he just went along, especially when he was as tired as now, but—maybe it was the moon—he kept remembering bits of things, and words sort of formed themselves in his head like somebody was talking. He thought about his bed and how nice it would have been to drive home from work; only of course he got sort of mixed up when driving, and there'd been a couple of smashups. Funny he should have done that, because all at once it didn't seem so hard: just a few signals to learn, and you kept your eyes open, and that was all.

The sound of his feet was hollow on the road. He breathed deeply, drawing a cool night into his lungs, and looked upward, away from the moon. The stars were sure big and bright tonight.

Another memory came back to him, somebody had said the stars were like the sun only further away. It hadn't made much sense then. But maybe it was so, like a light was a small thing till you got up close and then maybe it was very big. Only if the stars were as big as the sun, they'd have to be awful far away.

He stopped dead, feeling a sudden cold run through him. Good Lord! How far up the stars were!

The earth seemed to fall away underfoot, he was hanging on to a tiny rock that spun crazily through an everlasting darkness, and the great stars burned and roared around him, so far up that he whimpered with knowing it.

He began to run.

Jimmy Cobden rose early, even if it was summer and no school and breakfast wouldn't be for a while yet. The street and the town outside his windows looked very clean and bright in the young sunshine, and not many people were out yet. A single truck clattered down the road and a man in blue denim walked toward the creamery carrying a lunch pail, otherwise it was as if he had the whole world to himself. His father was already off to work, and Mom liked to go back to bed for a while after fixing his breakfast, and Sis was still asleep, so Jimmy was all alone in the house.

Sam Thomson was coming over and they'd go fishing, but Jimmy wanted to get some more done on his model plane. He washed as thoroughly as you could ask a ten-year-old to, snatched a roll from the pantry, and went back to his room and the littered table there. The plane was going to be a real beauty, a Shooting Star with a CO2 cartridge to make a jet. Only somehow, this morning it didn't look as good as it had last night. He wished he could buy a real jet motor for it.

He sighed, pushing the work away, and took a sheet of paper. He'd always liked to doodle around with numbers, and Miss Trench had taught him a little about algebra. Some of the fellows had called him teacher's pet for that, till he licked them, but it was real interesting, not just like learning multiplication tables. Here you made the numbers and letters do something. Miss Trench said if he really wanted to build spaceships when he grew up, he'd have to learn lots of math.

He started drawing some graphs. The different kinds of equations made different pictures. It was fun to see how x = ky + c made a straight line while x2 + y2 = c was always a circle. Only how if you changed one of the x's, made it equal 3 instead of 2? What would be happening to the y in the meantime? He'd never thought of that before!

He grasped the pencil tightly, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. You had to kind of sneak up on the x and the y, change one of them just a weeny little bit, and then …

He was well on the way to inventing differential calculus when his mother called him down to breakfast.

II

Peter Corinth came out of the shower, still singing vigorously, to find Sheila busy frying bacon and eggs. He ruffled her soft brown hair up, kissing her on the neck, and she turned to smile at him.

"She looks like an angel and cooks like an angel," he said.

"Why, Pete," she answered. "You never—"

"Never could find words," he agreed. "But it's gospel truth, me love." He bent over the pan, inhaling the crisp odor with a contented sigh. "I have a hunch this is one of those days when everything will go right," he said. "A bit of hubris for which the gods will doubtless visit a nemesis on me. Ate: Gertie, the slut, will burn out a tube. But you'll amend it all."

"Hubris—nemesis-ate." A tiny frown creased her broad clear forehead. "You've used those words before, Pete. What do they mean?"

He blinked at her. Two years after marriage, he was still far gone in love with his wife, and as she stood there his heart turned over within him. She was kind and merry and beautiful and she could cook—but she was nothing of an intellectual, and when his friends came over she sat quietly back, taking no part in the conversation. "What do you care?" he asked.

"I was just wondering," she said.

He went into the bedroom and began dressing, leaving the door open so he could explain the basis of Greek tragedy. It was much too bright a morning to dwell on so somber a theme, but she listened closely, with an occasional question. When he came out, she smiled and went over to him.

"You dear clumsy physicist," she said. "You're the only man I ever knew who could put on a suit straight from the cleaners and make it look like you'd been fixing a car in it." She adjusted his tie and pulled down the rumpled coat. He ran a hand through his black hair, immediately reducing it to unkemptness, and followed her to the kitchenette table. A whiff of steam from the coffeepot fogged his horn-rimmed glasses, and he took them off and polished them on his necktie. His lean, broken-nosed face looked different without them—younger, perhaps only the thirty years which was his actual age.

"It came to me just when I woke up," he said as he buttered his toast. "I must have a well-trained subconscious after all."

"You mean the solution to your problem?" asked Sheila.

He nodded, too absorbed to consider what her query meant. She usually just let him run on, saying "yes" and "no" in the right places but not really listening. To her, his work was altogether mysterious. He had sometimes thought she lived in a child's world, with nothing very well known but all of it bright and strange.

"I've been trying to build a phase analyzer for intermolecular resonance bonds in crystal structure," he said. "Well, no matter. The thing is, I've been plugging along for the past few weeks, trying to design a circuit which would do what I want, and was baffled. Then I woke up just this morning with an idea that might work. Let's see—" His eyes looked beyond her, and he ate without tasting. Sheila laughed, very softly.

"I may be late tonight," he said at the door. "If this new idea of mine pans out, I may not want to break off work till—Lord knows when. I'll call you."

"Okay, honey. Good hunting."

When he was gone, Sheila stood for a moment smiling after him. Pete was a—well, she was just lucky, that was all. She'd never really appreciated how lucky, but this morning seemed different, somehow. Everything stood out sharp and clear, as if she were up in the Western mountains her husband loved so well.

She hummed to herself as she washed the dishes and straightened up the apartment. Memory slid through her, the small-town Pennsylvania girlhood, the business college, her coming to New York four years ago to take a clerical job at the office of a family acquaintance. Dear God, but she had been unsuited for that kind of life! One party and boy friend after another, everybody fast-talking, jerky-moving, carefully hard-boiled and knowing, the expensive and market-wise crowd where she always had to be on her guard—All right, she'd married Pete on the rebound, after Bill walked out calling her a stupid—never mind. But she'd always liked the shy, quiet man, and she had been on the rebound from a whole concept of living.

So I'm stodgy now, she told herself, and glad of it, too.

An ordinary housewifely existence, nothing more spectacular than a few friends in for beer and talk, going to church now and then while Pete, the agnostic, slept late; vacation trips in New England, the Rocky Mountains; plans of having a kid soon—who wanted more? Her friends before had always been ready for a good laugh at the shibboleth-ridden boredom which was bourgeois existence; but when you got right down to it, they had only traded one routine and one set of catchwords for another, and seemed to have lost something of reality into the bargain.

Sheila shook her head, puzzled. It wasn't like her to go daydreaming this way. Her thoughts even sounded different.

She finished the housework and looked about her. Normally she would have relaxed for awhile before lunch, maybe reading one of the pocket mysteries which were her prime vice; afterward there was some shopping to do, maybe a stroll in the park, maybe a visit to or from some woman friend, and then supper to fix and Pete to expect. But she didn't feel like it today.

She walked over to the crowded bookshelf which filled one wall. Pete went in for literature, though he never called it by any such name. She had honestly tried to read it, but—well, you went to sleep. It was her one sorrow, that so much of her husband's life should lie beyond the edge of her own.

You know, she thought, I feel energetic today. I think I'll try some of his beloved Joseph Conrad again.

She picked up the worn copy of Lord Jim and took it to an armchair. It was mid-afternoon before she remembered that she had forgotten all about lunch.

Corinth met Felix Mandelbaum in the elevator going down. They were that rare combination, neighbors in a New York apartment building who had become friends. Sheila, with her small-town background, had insisted on getting to know everyone on their own floor at least, and Corinth had been glad of it in the case of the Mandelbaums. Sarah was a plump, quiet, retiring hausfrau sort, pleasant but not colorful; her husband was a horse of quite another shade.

Fifty years old, Felix Mandelbaum had begun in the noise and dirt and sweatshops of the lower East Side, and life had been kicking him around ever since; but he kicked back, and enjoyed it hugely. He'd been everything from itinerant fruit-picker to skilled machinist and O.S.S. operative overseas during the war——where his talent for languages and people must have come in handy. His career as a labor organizer ran parallel, from the old Wobblies to the comparative respectability of his present job; officially executive secretary of a local union, actually a roving trouble-shooter with considerable voice in national councils. Not that he had been a radical since his twenties: he said he'd seen radicalism from the inside, and that was enough for any sane man. Indeed, he claimed to be one of the last true conservatives—only to conserve, you had to prune and graft and adjust. He was self-educated but widely read, with more capacity for life than anyone else of Corinth's circle except possibly Nat Lewis. Fun to know.

"Hello," said the physicist. "You're late today."

"Not exactly." Mandelbaum's voice was a harsh New York tone, fast and clipped. He was a small, wiry, gray-haired man, with a gnarled beaky face and intense dark eyes. "I woke up with an idea. A reorganization plan. Amazing nobody's thought of it yet. It'd halve the paper work. So I've been outlining a chart."

Corinth shook his head dolefully. "By now, Felix, you should know that Americans are too fond of paper work to give up one sheet," he said.

"You haven't seen Europeans," grunted Mandelbaum.

"You know," said Corinth, "it's funny you should've had your idea just today. I woke up with the solution to a problem that's been bedeviling me for the past month."

"Hm?" Mandelbaum pounced on the fact, you could almost see him turning it over in his hands, sniffing it, and laying it aside. "Odd." It was a dismissal.

The elevator stopped and they parted company. Corinth took the subway as usual. He was currently between cars; in this town, it just didn't pay to own one. He noticed vaguely that the train was quieter than ordinarily. People were less hurried and unmannerly, they seemed thoughtful. He glanced at the newspapers, wondering with a gulp if it had started, but there was nothing sensational. Fighting here and there throughout the world, a strike, a Communist demonstration in Rome, another rocket sent to the new space station, four killed in an auto crash—words, as if rotary presses squeezed the blood from everything that went through them.

Emerging in lower Manhattan, he walked three blocks to the Rossman Institute, limping a trifle. The same accident which had broken his nose years ago had injured his right knee and kept him out of military service; though being yanked directly from his youthful college graduation into the Manhattan Project might have had something to do with that.

He winced at the trailing memory. Hiroshima and Nagasaki still lay heavily on his conscience. He'd quit immediately after the war, and it was not only to resume his studies or to escape the red tape and probing and petty intrigue of government research for the underpaid sanity of academic life; it had been a flight from guilt. So had his later activities, he supposed—the Atomic Scientists, the United World Federalists, the Progressive Party. When he thought how those had withered away or been betrayed, and recalled the brave clichés which had stood like a shield between him and the Soviet snarl there for any to see who had eyes, he wondered how sane the professors were after all.

Only was his present retreat into pure research and political passivity—voting a discouraged Democratic ticket and doing nothing else—any more balanced? Nathan Lewis, blast his reactionary hide, was a local Republican committeeman, an utter and cheerful pessimist who still tried to salvage something; and Felix Mandelbaum, no less realistic than his chess and bull session opponent Lewis, had more hope and energy, even looked forward to the ultimate creation of a genuine American Labor Party. Between them, Corinth felt rather pallid.

And I'm younger than either one!

He sighed. What was the matter with him? Thoughts kept boiling up out of nowhere, forgotten things, linking themselves into new chains that rattled in his skull. And just when he had the answer to his problem, too.

That reflection drove all others out. Again, it was unusual; ordinarily he was slow to change any train of thought. He stepped forward with a renewed briskness.

The Rossman Institute was a bulk of stone and glass, filling half a block and looking almost shiny among its older neighbors. It was known as a scientist's heaven. Able men from all places and all disciplines were drawn there, less by the good pay than by the chance to do unhampered research of their own choosing, with first-rate equipment and no deadlines. It had the inevitable politicking and backbiting, but in lesser degree than the average college; it was the Institute for Advanced Study, less abstruse and more energetic, perhaps, and certainly with much more room. Lewis had once cited it to Mandelbaum as proof of the cultural necessity for a privileged class. "D'you think any government would ever endow such a thing and then, what's more, have the sense to leave it to itself?"

"Brookhaven does all right," Mandelbaum had said, but for him it was a feeble answer.

Corinth nodded to the girl at the newsstand in the lobby, and fumed at the slowness of the elevator. "Seventh," he said automatically when it arrived.

"I should know that, Dr. Corinth," grinned the operator. "You've been here—let's see—almost six years now, isn't it?"

The physicist blinked. The attendant had always been part of the machinery to him; they had exchanged the usual pleasantries, but it hadn't meant a thing. Suddenly Corinth saw him as a human being, a living and unique organism, part of an enormous impersonal web which ultimately became the entire universe, and yet bearing his own heart within him. Now why, he asked himself amazedly, should I think that?

"You know, sir," said the attendant, "I been wondering. I woke up this morning and wondered what I was doing this for and if I really wanted more out of it than just my job and my pension, and—" He paused awkwardly as they stopped to let off a third-floor passenger. "I envy you. You're going somewhere."

The elevator reached the seventh floor. "You could, well, you could take a night course if you wanted to," said Corinth.

"I think maybe I will, sir. If you'd be so kind as to recommend—well, later. I got to go now." The doors slid smoothly across the cage, and Corinth went down hard marble ways to his laboratory.

He had a permanent staff of two, Johansson and Grunewald, intense young men who probably dreamed of having labs of their own some day. They were already there as he entered and took off his coat.

"Good morning … 'Morning … 'Morning."

"I've been thinking, Pete," said Grunewald suddenly, as the chief went over to his desk. "I've got an idea for this circuit that may work—"

"Et tu, Brute," murmured Corinth. He sat down on a stool, doubling his long legs under him. "Let's have it."

Grunewald's gimmick seemed remarkably parallel to his own. Johansson, usually silent and competent and no more, chimed in eagerly as thoughts occurred to him. Corinth took over leadership in the discussion, and within half an hour they were covering paper with the esoteric symbols of electronics.

Rossman might not have been entirely disinterested in establishing the Institute, though a man with his bank account could afford altruism. Pure research helped industry, and Corinth's study of crystal bonds could mean a good deal to metallurgy. Grunewald fairly gloated over the prospect of what success would do to their professional reputations. Before noon, they had set up a series of partial differential equations which would go to the computer at their regularly scheduled time to use it, and were drawing up elements of the circuit they wanted.

The phone rang. It was Lewis, suggesting lunch together. "I'm on a hot trail today," said Corinth. "I thought maybe I'd just have some sandwiches sent up."

"Well, I'm not," said Lewis gloomily. "Something's gone very, very wrong for me, and I wish you'd let me weep on your shoulder."

"Oh, all right. Commissary do?"

"If you merely want to fill your belly, I suppose so." Lewis went in for three-hour lunches complete with wine and violins, a habit he had picked up during his years in pre-Anschluss Vienna. "One o'clock do? The peasantry will have gorged by then."

"Okay." Corinth hung up and lost himself again in the cool ecstasy of his work. It was 1:30 before he noticed the time, and he hurried off swearing.

Lewis was just seating himself at a table when Corinth brought his tray over. "I figured from your way of talk you'd be late," he said. "What'd you get? The usual cafeteria menu, I suppose: mice drowned in skim milk, fillet of sea urchin, baked chef's special, baked chef—well, no matter." He sipped his coffee and winced.

He didn't look delicate: a short square man of forty-eight, getting a little plump and bald now, sharp eyes behind thick rimless glasses. He was, indeed, a hearty soul at table or saloon. But eight years in Europe did change tastes, and he insisted that his post-war visits had been purely gastronomical.

"What you need," said Corinth with the smugness of a convert, "is to get married."

"I used to think so, when I began leaving my libertine days behind. But then I'd get to thinking of a rainy day in Paris, and the dearest little tart I ever—well, never mind. Too late now." Lewis attacked a minute steak, which he always pronounced as if the adjective were synonymous with "tiny," and scowled through a mouthful. "I'm more interested in the histological aspect of biology just now."

"You said you were having trouble—"

"Uh-huh. You know my work? I'm studying neurones—nerve cells. Trying to culture them in artificial media. Young Roberts thinks it may eventually lead to a way of replacing damaged nerve tissue, but he's an incurable romantic. Anyway, I had me a nice string of cells, still living in an excised section of tissue. Lindbergh-Carrel technique, with modifications. I was studying their measurable characteristics: elasticity, electrical properties, and so on. They vary somewhat with different media, and I'm trying to correlate the variations with—Koch knows what. Yesterday I had a beautiful set-up, everything measured. This morning Roberts ran the tests again and the results came out different."

"Hm?" Corinth raised his eyebrows and chewed quietly for a minute. "Well, what of it? So something has changed. The solution you're keeping them in, maybe. Did your Roberts get careless?"

"I thought so at first, and chewed him out for it. He invited me to check the whole set-up. I did. Nothing changed—except the cells themselves. A small but significant difference. You know how a neurone works? Like a digital computer. It's stimulated by a—a stimulus, fires a signal, and is thereafter inactive for a short time. The next neurone gets the signal, fires, and is also briefly inactivated. Well, it turns out that everything is screwy today. The resistance of the synapses has gone down, the inactivation time is a good many microseconds less, the—oh, hell, let's just say the whole system reacts significantly faster than normally. And the signals are also more intense."

Corinth digested the information briefly. "Looks like you may have stumbled onto something big."

"Onto what? The medium, the apparatus—it's all the same as before. Nothing has changed, I tell you. I got my staff busy and ran routine checks on other samples. They're speeded up too!"

Lewis struck a clenched fist against his temple. "And just when I'd gotten an idea for a testing rig that'd take half the time!"

"I don't see what you're complaining about," said Corinth slowly. "It's not everybody who's lucky enough to find a really new phenomenon. Only—it's odd you should have gotten your bright idea just this morning. Everybody seems to be abnormally smart today."

"Hm?" Lewis glanced sharply up, and Corinth related his casual encounters.

"Odd, yes," nodded the biologist. He rubbed his chin. "Most odd. I wonder—there haven't been any big thunderstorms around here lately, have there? It's pretty well established that ozone stimulates both physical and mental functioning. No—still, we'd better check the atmosphere. Though that doesn't account for my cultures; they're sealed in glass."

Corinth looked around. "Hullo, there's Dagmar. Wonder what's made her so late? Hi, there!" He stood up, waving across the room, and Dagmar Arnulfsen bore her tray over to their table and sat down.

She was a tall, rangy, handsome woman, her long blonde hair drawn tightly around the poised head, but something in her manner—an impersonal energy, an aloofness, perhaps only the unfeminine crispness of speech and dress—made her less attractive than she should have been. She'd changed since the old days, right after the war, thought Corinth. He'd been taking his doctorate at Minnesota, where she was studying journalism, and they'd had fun together; though he'd been too much and too hopelessly in love with his work and another girl to think seriously about her. Afterward they had corresponded, and he had gotten her a secretarial post at the Institute, two years before. She was chief administrative assistant now, and did a good job of it.

"Whew! What a day!" She ran a strong slim hand across her hair, sleeking it down, and smiled wearily at them. "Everybody and his Uncle Oscar is having trouble, and all of them are wishing it on me. When Gertie threw a tantrum—"

"Huh?" Corinth regarded her in some dismay. He'd been counting on the big computer to solve his equations that day. "What's wrong?"

"Only God and Gertie know, and neither one is telling. Allanbee ran a routine test this morning, and it came out wrong. Not much, but enough to throw off anybody that needed precise answers. He's been digging into her ever since, trying to find the trouble, so far without luck. And I have to reschedule everybody!"

"Very strange," murmured Lewis.

"Then different instruments, especially in the physics and chemistry sections, are a little crazy. Murchison's polarimeter has an error of—oh, something horrible like one-tenth of one per cent, I don't know."

"Izzat so?" Lewis leaned forward, thrusting his jaw out above the dishes. "Maybe it's not my neurones but my instruments that're off whack—no, can't be. Not that much. Nevertheless, I'll have to test them all—" He broke into vigorous German profanity, using terms normally reserved for socialists.

"Me, too," said Corinth.

Dagmar's smile softened. "You looked so hopeful, Pete," she said.

"I had a lovely new approach, but this—Count me in on your remarks, Nat."

"Lots of the boys have come up all at once with brave new projects, too," said Dagmar. "They want immediate use of things like the big centrifuge—well, well, let's just keep plugging."

"All today, eh?" Corinth pushed his dessert aside and took out a cigarette. "'Curiouser and curiouser,' said Alice." His eyes widened. "Nat, I wonder—"

"A general phenomenon?" Lewis nodded. There was a grimness about his mouth. "Could be, could be. We'd certainly better find out."

"What're you talking about?" asked Dagmar.

"Things." Corinth explained while she finished eating. Lewis sat quietly back, blowing cigar fumes and withdrawn into himself.

"Hm." Dagmar tapped the table with a long, unpainted fingernail. "Sounds—interesting. Are all nerve cells, including those in our own brains, suddenly being speeded up?"

"It's more basic than that," said Corinth. "Something may have happened to—what? Electrochemical phenomena? How should I know? Let's not go off the deep end till we've investigated this."

"Yeah. I'll leave it to you." Dagmar took out a cigarette for herself and inhaled deeply. "I can think of a few obvious things to check up on—hm, never thought I'd think of them so easily, either. But it's your child." She turned to smile again at Corinth, the gentle smile she saved for a very few. "Apropos, how's Sheila?"

"Oh, fine, fine. How's yourself?"

"I'm okay." There was a listlessness in her answer.

"You must come over to our place sometime soon for dinner. We haven't seen you in quite awhile. Bring the new boy friend if you want, whoever he is."

"Jack? Oh, him. I gave him the sack last week. But I'll come over, sure." She got up. "Back to the oars, mates. See you."

Corinth regarded her as she strode toward the cashier's desk. "I wonder why she can't keep a man," he murmured. "She's good-looking and intelligent enough."

"She doesn't want to," said Lewis shortly.

"No, I suppose not. She's turned cold since I knew her in Minneapolis. Why?"

Lewis shrugged.

"I think you know," said Corinth. "You've always understood women better than you had any right to. And she likes you better than anyone else around here, I think."

"We both go for music," said Lewis. It was his opinion that none had been written since 1900. "And we both know how to keep our mouths shut."

"Okay, okay," laughed Corinth. He got up. "I'm for the lab again. Look, let's get some of the others on the phone and divide up the labor, huh? Everybody check something. It won't take long then."

Lewis nodded curtly and followed him out.

By evening the results were in, and Corinth felt a coldness as he looked at the figures.

Electromagnetic phenomena were changed.

It wasn't much, but the very fact that the supposedly eternal constants of nature had shifted was enough to crash a hundred philosophies into dust. The subtlety of the problem held something elemental. How do you re-measure the basic factors when your measuring devices have themselves changed?

Well, there were ways. There are no absolutes in this universe, everything exists in relation to everything else, and it was the fact that certain data had altered relatively to certain other phenomena which was significant.

Corinth had been working on the determination of electrical constants. For the metals they were still the same, or nearly the same, as before, but the resistivity and permittivity of insulators had changed measurably—they had become slightly better conductors. Another team had repeated Michelson's interferometric determination of the velocity of light in vacuo. And light was traveling a little faster.

That wrecked a whole cosmos!

Well, not necessarily. Could it be that the Earth had not been in a true vacuum since—well, since Römer's time, or at least since Michelson's? Maybe something, some local strain or force in this small corner of the universe, had hitherto slowed light down. And—hm. Could that account for the red shift of the remoter galaxies? Maybe they weren't receding at all; maybe their light simply decelerated, while keeping the same wavelength, as it entered this part of space, thus lowering its frequency and giving an illusory Doppler effect. In theory that was, of course, impossible, but theory seemed to be going by the board now. Note: have the observatories check on this.

Except in the precision apparatus, such as Gertie the computer, the change in electromagnetic characteristics was not enough to make any noticeable difference. But the most complex and delicately balanced mechanism known to man is the living cell; and the neurone is the most highly evolved and specialized of all cells—particularly that variety of neurones found in the human cerebral cortex. And here the change was felt. The minute electrical impulses which represented neural functioning—sense awareness, motor reaction, thought itself—were flowing more rapidly, more intensely.

And the change might just have begun.

Dagmar shivered. "I need a drink," she said. "Bad."

"I know a bar," said Lewis. "To hell with this noise here. Coming, Pete?"

"I'm going home," said the physicist. "Have fun."

He walked out, hardly aware of the darkened lobby and the late hour.

Well, they'd done all they could for now. They'd checked as many data as possible. Dagmar had gotten in touch with the Bureau of Standards in Washington and turned the whole problem over to them. She gathered, from what the man there said, that a few other laboratories, spotted throughout the country, had also reported anomalies. Tomorrow, thought Corinth, they'll really start hearing about it.

He bought a newspaper at the corner and glanced at it as he stood there. War, unrest, suspicion, fear and hate and greed, a sick world crumbling—the old story. No mention of the change, that was too big and too new yet.

He was suddenly aware that he had read through the Times' crowded front page in about five minutes. He shoved the newspaper into a pocket and strode on.

The city boiled around him, blinking signs, rumbling and hooting traffic, hurrying faceless crowds, buildings arrogant against a sky that was one haze of hectic light. It ground and grumbled in the city, teeth stamping together, lightning down in her iron guts, she was like an elemental force herself. Someone had raised storm and the jinn here, long ago, and left them whirling and shouting and grinding. He looked up and couldn't see the stars. He didn't know if he was glad of that or not, but he hastened toward the subway.

III

There was trouble everywhere. An indignant yell in the morning brought Archie Brock running to the chickenhouse, where Stan Wilmer had set down a bucket of feed to shake his fist at the world.

"Look a' that!" he cried. "Just look!"

Brock craned his neck through the door and whistled. The place was a mess. A couple of bloody-feathered corpses were sprawled on the straw, a few other hens cackled nervously on the roosts, and that was all. The rest were gone.

"What happened?" asked Brock shyly. Wilmer was too angry to notice that his moronic underling had spoken; usually Brock just stood there.

"Oh, my God! The old man's prize Leghorns! They're scattered from here to hell now—all over the woods—"

"Looks like foxes got in when somebody left the door open," said Brock.

"Yeah." Wilmer swallowed his rage in a noisy gulp. "Some stinking lousy son-of-a—"

Brock remembered that Wilmer was in charge of the henhouse, but decided not to mention it. The other man recalled it for himself and paused, scowling.

"I don't know," he said then, slowly. "I checked the place last night as usual, before going to bed, and I'll swear the door was closed and hooked like it always is. Five years I been here and never had any trouble."

"So maybe somebody opened the door later on, after dark, huh?"

"Yeah. A chicken thief. Though it's funny the dogs didn't bark—I never heard of any human being coming here without them yapping." Wilmer shrugged bitterly. "Well, anyway, somebody did open the door."

"And then later on foxes got in." Brock turned one of the dead hens over with his toe. "And maybe had to run for it when one of the dogs came sniffing around, and left these."

"And most of the goddammed birds wandered out into the woods. It'll take a week to catch 'em—all that live. Oh, Judas!" Wilmer stormed out of the chickenhouse, forgetting to close the door. Brock did it for him, vaguely surprised that he had remembered to do so.

He sighed and resumed his morning chores. The animals all seemed fidgety today. And damn if his own head didn't feel funny. He remembered his own panic of two nights before, and the odd way he'd been thinking ever since. Maybe there was some kind of fever going around.

Well—he'd ask somebody about it later. There was work to do today, plowing in the north forty that had just been cleared. All the tractors were busy cultivating, so he'd have to take a team of horses.

That was all right. Brock liked animals, he had always understood them and got along with them better than with people. Not that the people had been mean to him, anyway for a long while now. The kids used to tease him, back when he was a kid too, and then later there'd been some trouble with cars, and a couple of girls had got scared also and he'd been beaten up by the brother of one of them. But that was years back. Mr. Rossman had told him carefully what he could and could not do, kind of taken him over, and things had been all right since then. Now he could walk into the tavern when he was in town and have a beer like anybody else, and the men said hello.

He stood for a minute, wondering why he should be thinking about this when he knew it all so well, and why it should hurt him the way it did. Hell, he thought, I'm all right. I'm not so smart, maybe, but I'm strong. Mr. Rossman says he ain't got a better farmhand nor me.

He shrugged and entered the barn to get out the horses. He was a young man, of medium height but heavy-set and muscular, with coarse strong features and a round, crew-cut, red-haired head. His blue denim clothes were shabby but clean; Mrs. Bergen, the wife of the general superintendent in whose cottage he had a room, looked after such details for him.

The barn was big and gloomy, full of the strong rich smells of hay and horses. The big Percherons stamped and snorted, restless as he harnessed them. Funny—they were always so calm before. "So, so, steady, boy. Steady, Tom. Whoa, there, Jerry. Easy, easy." They quieted a little and he led them out and hitched them to a post while he went into the shed after the plow.

His dog Joe came frisking around him, a tall Irish setter whose coat was like gold and copper in the sun. Joe was really Mr. Rossman's, of course, but Brock had taken care of him since he was a pup and it was always Brock whom he followed and loved. "Down, boy, down. What the hell's got into you, anyway? Take it easy, will ya?"

The estate lay green around him, the farm buildings on one side, the cottages of the help screened off by trees on another, the many acres of woods behind. There was a lot of lawn and garden and orchard between this farming part and the big white house of the owner, a house which had been mostly empty since Mr. Rossman's daughters had married and his wife had died. He was there now, though, spending a few weeks here in upper New York State with his flowers. Brock wondered why a millionaire like Mr. Rossman wanted to putter around growing roses, even if he was getting old.

The shed door creaked open and Brock went in and took the big plow and wheeled it out, grunting a little with the effort. Not many men could have dragged it out themselves, he thought with a flicker of pride. He chuckled as he saw how the horses stamped at the sight. Horses were lazy beasts, they'd never work if they could get out of it.

He shoved the plow around behind them, carried the tongue forward, and hitched it on. With a deft motion, he twirled the reins loose from the post, took his seat, and shook the lines across the broad rumps. "Gid-dup!"

They just stood, moving their feet.

Tom began backing. "Whoa! Whoa, you ugly devil!"

Jerry came along too. Archie took the loose end of the reins and snapped it with whistling force. Tom grunted and put one huge hoof on the tongue. It broke across.

For a long moment, Brock sat there, finding no words. Then he shook his red head, giving up the problem, and fastened the horses to the post again and unhitched the plow. "It's a ac-ci-dent," he said aloud. The morning seemed very quiet all of a sudden. "It's a ac-ci-dent."

There was a spare tongue in the shed. He fetched it and some tools, and began doggedly removing the broken one.

"Hi, there! Stop! Stop, I say!"

Brock looked up. The squealing and grunting were like a blow. He saw a black streak go by, and then another and another—The pigs were loose!

"Joe!" he yelled, even then wondering a little at how quickly he reacted. "Go get 'em, Joe! Round 'em up, boy!"

The dog was off like burnished lightning. He got ahead of the lead sow and snapped at her. She grunted, turning aside, and he darted after the next. Stan Wilmer came running from the direction of the pen. His face was white.

Brock ran to intercept another pig, turning it, but a fourth one slipped aside and was lost in the woods. It took several confused minutes to chase the majority back into the pen; a number were gone.

Wilmer stood gasping. His voice was raw. "I saw it," he groaned. "Oh, my God, I saw it. It ain't possible."

Brock blew out his cheeks and wiped his face.

"You hear me?" Wilmer grasped his arm. "I saw it, I tell you, saw it with my own eyes. Those pigs opened the gate themselves."

"Naw!" Brock felt his mouth falling open.

"I tell you, I saw it! One of 'em stood up on her hind legs and nosed the latch up. She did it all by herself. And the others were crowding right behind her. Oh, no, no, no!"

Joe came out of the woods, driving a pig before him with sardonic barks. She seemed to give up after a minute and trotted quietly toward the pen. Wilmer turned like a machine and opened the gate again and let her go in.

"Good boy!" Brock patted the silken head that nuzzled against him. "Smart dog!"

"Too damned smart." Wilmer narrowed his eyes. "Did a dog ever make like that before?"

"Sure," said Brock uncertainly.

Joe got off his haunches and went back into the woods.

"I'll bet he's going after another pig." There was a kind of horror in Wilmer's voice.

"Sure. He's a smart dog, he is."

"I'm going to see Bill Bergen about this." Wilmer turned on his heel. Brock looked after him, shrugged heavy shoulders, and went back to his own task. By the time he finished it, Joe had rounded up two more pigs and brought them back.

"Good fellow," said Brock. "I'll see yuh get a bone for this." He hitched Tom and Jerry, who had been standing at their ease. "All right, yuh bums, let's go. Gid-dup!"

Slowly, the horses backed. "Hey!" screamed Brock.

This time they didn't stop with the tongue. Very carefully, they walked on to the plow itself and bent its iron frame with their weight and broke off the coulter. Brock felt his throat dry.

"No," he mumbled.

The horses stood placidly in their tangled harness, watching him. His hands shook, and he had to bite his lip as he approached them. "Take it easy," he said. "Just take it easy. I ain't gonna hurt yuh."

Joe barked and dashed off. Brock's eyes followed him, to see him turn a pig back. So they'd opened the gate again.

"Keep an eye on 'em. Stay there, Joe." Very slowly and carefully, Brock unhitched the horses. They followed him meekly back into the barn, where he put them in their stalls and took off their harness.

They's no harm in 'em, he thought insanely. They're just lazy. They won't hurt me, because I feed 'em.

He went out and sat down on the ground and held his head between his hands.

Wilmer nearly had a fit when he learned about the horses. Bergen only stood there, shaking his head and whistling tunelessly. "I'll bet it wasn't any man opened that henhouse last night," said Wilmer in a voice that trembled. "I'll bet it was the foxes."

"The hook on the door's too high up for that," said Bergen.

"Not if two or three foxes stood on top of each other. God in heaven, what's happening?"

"I don't know." Bergen scratched his sandy head. "Tell you what. We'll call off all work having to do with animals, except feeding and milking, of course. Padlock every gate and have somebody check all our fence lines. I'll see the old man about this."

"Me, I'm gonna carry a gun," said Wilmer.

"Well, it might not be a bad idea," said Bergen.

Archie Brock was assigned to look at one section, a two-mile line enclosing the woods. He took Joe, who gambolled merrily in his wake, and went off glad to be alone for a change.

How still the forest was! Sunlight slanted down through green unstirring leaves, throwing a dapple on the warm brown shadows. The sky was utterly blue overhead, no clouds, no wind. His feet scrunched dully on an occasional clod or stone, he brushed against a twig and it scratched very faintly along his clothes, otherwise the land was altogether silent. The birds seemed to have quieted down all at once, no squirrels were in sight, even the sheep had withdrawn into the inner woods. He thought uneasily that the whole green world had a somehow waiting feel to it.

He could see how people would be scared if the animals started getting smarter. If they were really smart, would they keep on letting humans lock them up and work them and emasculate them and kill and skin and eat them? Suppose Tom and Jerry, now—But they were so gentle!

And—wait—weren't the people getting smarter too? It seemed like in the last couple of days they'd been talking more, and it wasn't all about the weather and the neighbors either, it was about things like who was going to win the next election and why a rear-engine drive was better in a car. They'd always talked like that now and then, sure, but not so much, and they hadn't had so much to say either. Even Mrs. Bergen, he'd seen her reading a magazine, and all she ever did before in her spare time was watch TV.

I'm getting smarter too!

The knowledge was like a thunderclap. He stood there for a long while, not moving, and Joe came up and sniffed his hand in a puzzled way.

I'm getting smarter.

Sure—it had to be. The way he'd been wondering lately, and remembering things, and speaking out when he'd never said anything much before—what else could it be? All the world was getting smart.

He leaned his head against the cool trunk of a tree, listening to the blood roar in his ears. Please, God, let it be real. Please make me like other people.

After awhile he went on, checking the fence as he had been told. There was a boiling in him, though, and he had to fight it down.

I can read, he told himself. Not very good, but they did teach me the al-pha-bet, and I can read a comic book. Maybe I can read a real book now.

Books had the answers to what he wondered about, things like the sun and moon and stars, why there was winter and summer, why they had wars and Presidents and who lived on the other side of the world and—

He shook his head, unable to grasp the wilderness that rose up inside him and spread till it covered creation further than he could see. He'd never wondered before. Things just happened and were forgotten again. But—He looked at his hands, marveling. Who am I? What am I doing here?

In the evening, after chores, he put on a clean suit and went up to the big house. Mr. Rossman was sitting on the porch, smoking a pipe and turning the pages of a book over in his thin fingers, not really seeing it. Brock paused timidly, cap in hand, till the owner looked up and spied him.

"Oh, hello, Archie," he said in his soft voice. "How are you tonight?"

"I'm all right, thank you." Brock twisted the cap between his stumpy fingers and shifted from one foot to another. "Please, can I see you for a minute?"

"Why, of course. Come on in." Mr. Rossman laid his book aside and sat smoking while Brock opened the screen door and walked over to him. "Here, take a chair."

"That's all right, thanks. I—" Brock ran his tongue across dry lips. "I'd just like to ask you 'bout something."

"Ask away, Archie." Mr. Rossman leaned back. He was a tall spare man, his face thinly carved, proud under its kindness of the moment, his hair white. Brock's parents had been tenants of his, and when it became plain that their son would never amount to anything, Rossman had taken charge of the boy. "Everything okay?"

"Well, it's about, uh, about this change here."

"Eh?" Rossman's gaze sharpened. "What change?"

"You know. The animals getting smart and uppity."

"Oh, yes. That." Rossman blew a cloud of smoke. "Tell me, Archie, have you noticed any change in yourself?"

"Yes, I, uh, well, I think maybe I have."

Rossman nodded slowly. "You wouldn't have come here if you hadn't changed."

"What's happening, Mr. Rossman? What's gone wrong?"

"I don't know, Archie. Nobody knows." The old man looked out into a gathering blue twilight. "Are you so sure it's wrong, though? Maybe something is finally going right."

"You don't know—"

"No. Nobody knows." Rossman's thin blue-veined hand slapped the newspaper on the table beside him. "There are hints here. The knowledge is creeping out. I'm sure much more is known, but the government has suppressed the information for fear of a panic." He grinned with a certain viciousness. "As if a world-wide phenomenon could be kept secret! They'll hang on to their stupidity to the very end, though, in Washington."

"But, Mr. Rossman—" Brock lifted his hands and let them fall again.

"What can we do?"

"Wait. I'm going to the city soon, to find out for myself—those pet brains of mine at the Institute should—"

"Not leaving?"

Rossman shook his head, smiling. "Poor Archie. There's a horror in being helpless, isn't there? I sometimes think that's why men fear death—not because of oblivion, but because it's foredoomed, there's nothing they can do to stop it. Even fatalism is a refuge from that, in a way… . But I digress, don't I?"

He sat smoking for a long while. The summer dusk chirred and murmured around them. "Yes," he said at last, "I feel it in myself too. And it's not altogether pleasant. I've always imagined myself as a quick, capable, logical thinker. Now something is coming to life within me that I don't understand at all. Sometimes my whole life seems to have been a petty and meaningless scramble. And yet I thought I'd served my dependents and my country well." He smiled once more. "I do hope I'll see the end of this, though. It should be interesting!"

Tears stung Brock's eyes. "What can I do?"

"Do? Live. Live from day to day. What else can a man do?" Rossman got up and put his hand on Brock's shoulder. "But keep on thinking. Keep your thinking close to the ground, where it belongs. Don't take off—just think about real things, daily life, until you get more used to it. Or until—well, no matter." He grimaced. "Our younger security-hungry generation talks about 'new freedom.' It's just trading one set of masters for another. There was a New Deal in Egypt when the Old Kingdom fell, a New Deal in Rome under the Gracchi, and what did it get them? Don't ever trade your liberty for another man's offer to do your thinking for you. I had to play the feudal lord with you, Archie, but it may be that that's no longer necessary."

Brock didn't understand most of it. But it seemed Mr. Rossman was telling him to be cheerful, that this wasn't such a bad thing after all. "I thought maybe I could borrow some books," he said humbly. "I'd like to see if I can read them now."

"Why, of course, Archie. Come on into the library. I'll see if I can find something suitable for you to begin on—"

IV

Conference.

Everybody was working late, and it was ten o'clock before the meeting which Corinth had invited to his place was ready. Sheila had insisted on putting out her usual buffet of sandwiches and coffee; afterward she sat in a corner, talking quietly with Sarah Mandelbaum. Their eyes strayed occasionally to their husbands, who were playing chess, and there was a creeping fear in the gaze.

Corinth was playing better than he had ever done before. Usually he and Mandelbaum were pretty evenly matched, the physicist's slow careful strategy offsetting the unionist's nerve-wracking bravura. But tonight the younger man was too distracted. He made schemes that would have delighted Capablanca, but Mandelbaum saw through them and slashed barbarically past his defenses. Corinth sighed at last and leaned back.

"I concede," he said. "It'd be mate in, uh, seven moves."

"Not so." Mandelbaum pointed a gnarled finger at king's bishop. "If you moved him over here, and then—"

"Oh, yes, you're right. No matter. I'm just not in the mood. What's keeping Nat?"

"He'll be along. Take it easy." Mandelbaum removed himself to an armchair and began stuffing a big-bowled pipe.

"I don't see how you can sit there like that when—"

"When a world's falling to pieces around my ears? Look, Pete, it's been falling apart as long as I can remember. So far, in this particular episode, no guns have come out."

"They may do so yet." Corinth got up and stood looking out the window, hands crossed behind his back and shoulders slumped. The restless glimmer of city light etched him against darkness. "Don't you see, Felix, this new factor—if we survive it at all—changes the whole basis of human life? Our society was built by and for one sort of man. Now man himself is becoming something else."

"I doubt it." The noise of a match, struck against Mandelbaum's shoe, was startlingly loud. "We're still the same old animal."

"What was your I.Q. before the change?"

"I don't know."

"Never took a test?"

"Oh, sure, they made me take one now and then, to get this or that job, but I never asked for the result. What's I.Q. except the score on an I.Q. test?"

"It's more than that. It measures the ability to handle data, grasp and create abstractions—"

"If you're a Caucasian of West European-American cultural background. That's who the test was designed for, Pete. A Kalahari bushman would laugh if he knew it omitted water-finding ability. That's more important to him than the ability to juggle numbers. Me, I don't underrate the logic and visualization aspect of personality, but I don't have your touching faith in it either. There's more to a man than that, and a garage mechanic may be a better survivor type than a mathematician."

"Survivor—under what conditions?"

"Any conditions. Adaptability, toughness, quickness—those are the things that count most."

"I think kindness means a lot," said Sheila timidly.

"It's a luxury, I'm afraid, though of course it's such luxuries that make us human," said Mandelbaum. "Kindness to whom? When I stumped for intervention, back in Hitler's time, and when I joined O.S.S. to help liquidate the ba—bum, was that kind? It meant that a lot of people would get hurt. Only in the long run, it would have been harder on the world to let the Nazis live."

Bitterness edged his voice. "You scientists always oversimplify. That's how physics has achieved so much, I guess: by working with a distorted fraction of the real world, and ignoring everything else. I'll give you a for instance, even if it is rather personal. One of my sons is in Chicago now. He changed his name and had his nose bobbed. He's not ashamed of his parents, no, but he's saved himself and his family a lot of trouble and humiliation. And—well—I honestly don't know whether to admire him for tough-minded adaptability, or call him a spineless whelp. Is there any simple yes-or-no answer to that question?"

"We're getting rather far from the point," said Corinth, embarrassed. "It's a matter of estimating what we, the world, are in for."

He shook his head. "It feels strange. My I.Q. has gone from its former 160 to about 200 in a week. I'm thinking things that never occurred to me before. My former professional problems are becoming ridiculously easy. My mind keeps wandering off into the most fantastic trains of thought, some of them pretty wild and morbid. I'm nervous as a kitten, jump at shadows, afraid for no good reason at all. Now and then I get flashes where everything seems grotesque—like in a nightmare."

"You're not adjusted to your new brain power yet, that's all," said Sarah.

"I feel the way Pete does," said Sheila. "It isn't worth it."

The other woman shrugged, spreading her hands. "Me, I think it's kind of fun."

"Matter of basic personality, which has not changed," said Mandelbaum. "Sarah's always been a pretty down-to-earth sort. You just don't take your new mind seriously, Liebchen. To you, the power of abstract thought is a toy. It's got little to do with the serious matters of housework." He puffed, meshing his face into wrinkles as he squinted through the smoke. "And me, I feel the sort of things you do, Pete, but I don't let it bother me. Haven't time for such fumblydiddles, not the way things are now. Everybody in the union seems to have come up with some crank notion of how we—and that could be anybody from the local office to the Almighty—ought to run things."

"Sure," said Corinth. "The average man—" He stopped as the doorbell rang. "That must be them now. Come in."

Dagmar Arnulfsen entered, her slim height briefly concealing Nathan Lewis' bulk. She looked as cool and smooth and hard as before, but there were shadows under her eyes. "Hullo," she said tonelessly.

"No fun, huh?" asked Sheila with sympathy.

Dagmar grimaced. "Dreams."

"Me too." A shudder ran along Sheila's small form.

"How about the psych man you were going to bring, Nat?" asked Corinth.

"He refused at the last minute," said Lewis. "Had some kind of idea for a new intelligence test. And his partner was too busy putting rats through mazes. Never mind, I think we can dispense with them." He wandered over to the buffet and picked up a sandwich and bit into it. "Mmmmm—delikat. Sheila, why don't you ditch this long drink of water and marry me?"

"Trade him for a long drink of beer?" she smiled.

"Touché! You've changed too, haven't you? But really, you might have done better by me. A long drink of Scotch, at the very least. King's Ransom or Ambassador by choice."

"After all," said Corinth gloomily, "it's not as if we were here for any special purpose. I just thought a general discussion would clarify the matter in all our minds and maybe give us some ideas."

"What's the world news?" asked Lewis, settling himself near the table. "I've been too busy to keep up."

"Not much different yet," said Dagmar. "These things take time to generate their effects. There was a rather sensible proposal for settling international tension made in the U.N. the other day; riots in Calcutta, questions asked in the House of Commons, a new chiliastic prophet out in Los Angeles. And oh, yes, the stock market tumbling in Wall Street. And the papers are full of this and that story about clever things done by animals." She lit a cigarette, sucking in her cheeks and half closing her eyes. "That seems to be about all so far which could be attributed to this—intelligence phenomenon."

"Censorship on the facts, eh?"

"Apparently." She shrugged flawlessly tailored shoulders. "There have been a few stories, of course, mostly of the Sunday-supplement type, but American papers, at least, are sitting pretty tight on the big news."

"The lid's going to blow off soon," said Corinth. "They're just stalling for time, hoping something can be done. You can't suppress something that every man on Earth is noticing in his neighbors and himself."

"There was a clever piece of misdirection in one paper today," ventured Sheila. "About—what's his name?—Huntington's theory that ozone may make people smarter. Also a lot about sunspots. The whole thing gave the impression that this is just temporary and unimportant."

"John Rossman's in Washington now," said Dagmar. She added to the Mandelbaums: "He came to the Institute a few days back, asked our bright boys to investigate this business but keep their findings confidential, and flew to the capital. With his pull, he'll get the whole story if anyone can."

"I don't think there is much of a story, to tell the truth," said Mandelbaum. "Not yet."

"Just you wait," said Lewis cheerfully. He took another sandwich and a cup of coffee. "I predict that within about one week, things are going to start going to hell in a handbasket."

"The fact is—" Corinth got out of the chair into which he had flopped and began pacing the room. "The fact is, that the change isn't over. It's still going on. As far as our best measurements can tell—though they're not too exact, what with our instruments being affected themselves—the change is even accelerating."

"Within the limits of error, I think I see a more or less hyperbolic advance," said Lewis. "We've just begun, brethren. The way we're going, we'll all have I.Q.'s in the neighborhood of 400 within another week."

They sat for a long while, not speaking. Corinth stood with his fists clenched, hanging loose at his sides, and Sheila gave a little wordless cry and ran over to him and hung on his arm. Mandelbaum blew clouds of smoke, scowling as he digested the information; one hand stole out to caress Sarah's, and she squeezed it gratefully. Lewis grinned around his sandwich and went on eating. Dagmar sat without motion, the long clean curves of her face gone utterly expressionless. The city banged faintly below them, around them.

"What's going to happen?" breathed Sheila at last. She trembled so they could see it. "What's going to happen to us?"

"God alone knows," said Lewis, not without gentleness.

"Will it go on building up forever?" asked Sarah.

"Nope," said Lewis. "Can't. It's a matter of neurone chains increasing their speed of reaction and the intensity of the signals they carry. The physical structure of the cell can take only so much. If they're stimulated too far—insanity, followed by idiocy, followed by death."

"How high can we go?" asked Mandelbaum practically.

"Can't say. For one thing, normal nervous processes are too little understood, and for another, nothing at all, really, is known about this new phenomenon. What brought it on? I can't tell you. How does it work? I can't tell you that either. And anyway—" Lewis took out a cigar and bit off the end. "Anyway, my friends, the I.Q. is a limited and comparative measurement which becomes quite meaningless when it gets outside the range for which the tests were designed. To speak of an I.Q. of 400 just doesn't make sense. Intelligence of that speed and scope may not be intelligence at all as we know it; it may become something entirely different."

"Good God!" Corinth had had an idea that the change was on the increase, but had been too busy with his own work of physical measurements to know what Lewis' department had found out. The appalling realization was only beginning to grow on him. "Oh, my Lord!"

Dagmar grinned without much humor. "You know what a lot of people are going to say," she put in. "Them scientists should'a left well enough alone. They shouldn't'a started monkeying around, with that there atomic bomb. Let's lynch 'em."

"It's not of human origin, this," said Lewis seriously. "It's cosmic."

"I know. But does the much-touted Common Man?"

"He's got more sense than you think," said Mandelbaum evenly. "You theorists who make the average man—a non-existent invention in the first place—either a hero or a lout, should get out and meet some workers sometime. If the human race is biologically able to survive this, the plain man will come through."

"I wonder," said Corinth. "Sheer social inertia has carried us along so far. People continue in their daily rounds because there's nothing else available. But when things really start changing—"

"Oh, sure, Pete, it won't be an easy time," said Mandelbaum. "I agree we're in for a rough transition. But that's no excuse for sitting down and bewailing something we can't change. What counts is a sensible program of action."

He knocked out his pipe and went over to get some coffee. "What we need is an interim organization which can see us through the next few months. It'll probably have to be on a local level. I do agree that human society as it is can't survive a change in the nature of humanity, and it's quite possible that the national government will break down."

"The janitor and the elevator man at the Institute quit yesterday," said Dagmar. "Said the work was too monotonous. What happens when all the janitors and garbage men and ditch-diggers and assembly-line workers decide to quit?"

"That's part of it," nodded Mandelbaum. "Though they won't all do it. Some will be afraid, some will have the sense to see that we've got to keep going, some—well, there's no simple answer to this."

"Too many unknowns for a prediction," assented Lewis.

"You haven't any idea as to the cause of the change?" asked Dagmar.

"Oh, yes," said Lewis. "Any number of ideas, and no way of choosing between them. We'll just have to study and think some more, that's all."

"It's a physical phenomenon embracing at least the whole Solar System," declared Corinth. "The observatories have established that much. It may be that the sun, in its orbit around the center of the galaxy, has entered some kind of force-field. But on theoretical grounds—dammit, I won't scrap general relativity till I have to!—on theoretical grounds, I'm inclined to think it's likely a matter of our having left a force-field which slows down light and otherwise affects electromagnetic and electrochemical processes."

"In other words," said Mandelbaum slowly, "we're actually entering a normal state of affairs? All our past has been spent under abnormal conditions?"

"Maybe. Only, of course, those conditions are normal for us. We've evolved under them. We may be like deep-sea fish, which explode when they're brought up to ordinary pressures."

"Heh! Pleasant thought."

"I don't think I'm afraid to die," said Sheila in a small voice, "but being changed like this—"

"Keep a tight rein on yourself," said Lewis sharply. "I suspect this unbalance is going to drive a lot of people insane. Don't be one of them."

He knocked the ash off his cigar. "We have found out some things at the lab," he went on in a dispassionate tone. "As Pete says, it's a physical thing, either a force-field or the lack of one, affecting electronic interactions. The effect is actually rather small, quantitatively. Ordinary chemical reactions go on pretty much as before, in fact I don't think any significant change in the speed of organic reactions has been detected. But the more complex and delicate a structure is, the more it feels that slight effect.

"You must have noticed that you're more energetic lately. We've tested basal metabolism rates, and they have increased, not much but some. Your motor reactions are faster too, though you may not have noticed that because your subjective time sense is also speeded up. In other words, not much change in muscular, glandular, vascular, and the other somatic functions, just enough to make you feel nervous; and you'll adjust to that pretty quick.

"On the other hand, the most highly organized cells—neurones, and above all the neurones of the cerebral cortex—are very much affected. Perception speeds are way up; they measured that over in psych. You've noticed, I'm sure, how much faster you read than before. Reaction time to all stimuli is less."

"I heard that from Jones," nodded Dagmar coolly, "and checked up on traffic accident statistics for the past week. They're significantly lower. If people react faster, naturally they're better drivers."

"Uh-huh," said Lewis. "Till they start getting tired of poking along at sixty miles an hour and drive at a hundred. Then you may not have any more crackups, but those you do have—wham!"

"But if people are smarter," began Sheila, "they'll know enough to—"

"Sorry, no." Mandelbaum shook his head. "Basic personality does not change, right? And intelligent people have always done some pretty stupid or evil things from time to time, just like everybody else. A man might be a brilliant scientist, let's say; but that doesn't stop him from neglecting his health or driving recklessly for a thrill or—"

"Or voting Democrat," nodded Lewis, grinning. "That's correct, Felix. Eventually, no doubt, increased intelligence would react on the whole personality, but right now you're not changing anyone's weaknesses, ignorances, prejudices, blind spots, or ambitions; you're just giving him more power, of energy and intelligence, to indulge them."

His voice became dry and didactic: "Getting back to where we were, the most highly organized tissue in the world is, of course, the human cerebrum, the gray matter or seat of consciousness if you like. It feels the stimulus—or the lack of inhibition, if Pete's theory is right—more than anything else on Earth. Its functioning increases out of all proportion to every other part of the organism. Maybe you don't know how complex a structure the human brain is. Believe me, it makes the sidereal universe look like a child's building set. There are many times more possible interneuronic connections than there are atoms in the entire cosmos—the factor is something like ten to the power of several million. It's not surprising that a slight change in electrochemistry—too slight to make any important difference to the rest of the organism—will change the whole nature of the mind. Look what a little dope or alcohol will do, and then remember that this new factor works on the very basis of the cell's existence. The really interesting question is whether so finely balanced a function can survive such a change at all."

"Well," said Corinth grayly, "we'll know pretty soon."

"How can you just sit there and talk about it that way?" cried Sheila. There was horror in her tone.

"My dear girl," said Dagmar coolly, "do you imagine we can, at this stage, do anything else?"

V

Selections from the

New York Times

June 23:

PRESIDENT DENIES DANGER IN BRAIN SPEEDUP

'Keep Cool, Stay on Job,' Advises White House—No Harm to Humans in Change U.S. Scientists Working on Problem—Expect Answer Soon

FALLING STOCK MARKET WORRIES WALL STREET

Declining Sales Bring Down Stock Market and Prices U.S. in Danger of Recession, Says Economist

CHINESE TROOPS MUTINY IN INDO-CHINA

Communist Government Declares Emergency

PALACE REVOLUTION IN SPAIN

Moorish Guard Ousts Government—Proclaims Spain a Caliphate Under Sidi Hassan Call on Moslem World to Unite

NEW THEORY OF RELATIVITY ANNOUNCED

Rhayader Revises Einstein's Work—Believes Interstellar Travel a Theoretical Possibility

NEW RELIGION FOUNDED IN LOS ANGELES

Sawyer Proclaims Self 'The Third Ba'al'—Thousands Attend Mass Meeting

FESSENDEN CALLS FOR WORLD GOVERNMENT

Iowa Isolationist Reverses Stand in Senate Speech

JOHNSON SAYS WORLD GOVERNMENT IMPRACTICAL AT PRESENT TIME

Oregon Senator Reverses Former Stand

REBELLION IN UPSTATE HOME FOR FEEBLE-MINDED

REVOLUTION IN NICARAGUA

CHILD STARTS FIRE DEVASTATING WISCONSIN TOWN

It was one of their last issues.

Brock thought it was strange to be left in charge of the estate. But a lot of funny things had been happening lately.

First Mr. Rossman had gone. That was not unusual, though the reason this time was certainly new. Then, the very next day, Stan Wilmer had been attacked by the pigs when he went in to feed them. They charged him, grunting and squealing, stamping him down under their heavy bodies, and several had to be shot before they left him. Most had rushed the fence then, hitting it together and breaking through and disappearing into the woods. Wilmer was pretty badly hurt and had to be taken to the hospital; he swore he'd never come back.

Brock was in too much of a daze, too full of the change within himself, to care. He didn't have much to do, anyway, now that all work except the most essential was suspended. He looked after the, animals, careful to treat them well and to wear a gun at his hip, and had little trouble. Joe was always beside him. The rest of the time he sat around reading, or just with his chin in his hand to think.

Bill Bergen called him in a couple of days after the pig episode. The overseer didn't seem to have changed much, not outwardly. He was still tall and sandy and slow-spoken, with the same toothpick worried between his lips, the same squinted pale eyes. But he spoke even more slowly and cautiously than he had done before to Brock—or did it only seem that way?

"Well, Archie," he said, "Rogers just quit."

Brock shifted from one foot to another, looking at the floor.

"Said he wanted to go to college. I couldn't talk him out of it." Bergen's voice held a faintly amused contempt. "The idiot. There won'tbe any more colleges in another month. That leaves just you and my wife and Voss and me."

"Kind of short-handed," mumbled Brock, feeling he ought to say something.

"One man can do the bare essentials if he must," said Bergen. "Lucky it's summer. The horses and cows can stay outdoors, which saves barn cleaning."

"How about the crops?"

"Not much to do there yet. To hell with them, anyway."

Brock stared upward. In all his years on the place, Bergen had been the steadiest and hardest worker they had.

"You've gotten smart like the rest of us, haven't you, Archie?" asked Bergen. "I daresay you're about up to normal now—pre-change normal, I mean."

Brock's face grew hot.

"Sorry, I didn't mean anything personal. You're a good man." Bergen's voice was growing dreamy now, he spoke as if from very far away. "Let me ask you a question. Little brain teaser. You got an island four feet on a side in the middle of a square lake twenty feet on a side. You want to get over to the island without swimming, and you've got two boards, each six feet long. It's eight feet from the lakeshore to the island, remember. How do you get across?"

"Why, uh, nail the boards together—"

"No nails."

"Well, uh, let's see—" Brock scratched his head, squinting with concentration. "I, gee, I dunno—Oh, yes. I got it. Lay one board across a corner of the lake. Lay the other one from the middle of the first one to the corner of the island. That's it, I think."

"You'll do," said Bergen. He sat for a moment fiddling with the papers on his desk. Then: "Okay, Archie, you're in charge here now."

"Huh?"

"I'm leaving too."

"But, Bill—you can't—"

"Can and will, Archie." Bergen stood up. "You know, my wife always wanted to travel, and I have some things to think out. Never mind what they are, it's something I've puzzled over for many years and now I believe I see an answer. We're taking our car and heading west."

"But—but—Mr. Rossman—he's de-pen-ding on you, Bill—"

"I'm afraid that there are more important things in life than Mr. Rossman's country retreat," said Bergen evenly. "You can handle the place all right, even if Voss leaves too."