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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shock Treatment, by Stanley Mullen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Shock Treatment
+
+Author: Stanley Mullen
+
+Release Date: June 6, 2010 [EBook #32709]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHOCK TREATMENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           Shock Treatment
+
+                          By Stanley Mullen
+
+[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science
+Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
+that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: _"I'll give you the cure for the most horrible disease,"
+Songeen said. "The sickness of life itself." Newlin replied, "Fine. But
+first, give me a couple of minutes to kill your husband. Then we'll go
+on from there."_]
+
+
+In Venusport, on payday-night, it is difficult to tell for certain where
+the town leaves off and the pink elephants begin. It is difficult to
+tell about other things, too. Spud Newlin had heard that a man could
+sometimes get rich overnight just tending bar on such occasions, and he
+was putting the rumor to the test. Not many bartenders had lasted long
+enough to find out.
+
+The night had had a good start. Clock hands over the bar in the
+Spacebell registered 1:18 Venus-time, and considering, things were
+almost dull at the moment. The place had been jumping earlier, but
+hilarity had worn itself out, the dead had been removed and excitement
+dulled. No relatives or widows of the dead sportsmen had yet appeared;
+all corpses-elect had died clean, with the minimum of messy violence
+and, surprisingly, only three more or less innocent bystanders had been
+burned down in the proceedings. After shattering uproar, such calm was
+disturbing. Newlin was actually getting bored. Then _she_ came in--and
+he was no longer bored. But, perversely, he resented the surge of
+interest that ran through him at sight of this out-of-place girl.
+
+At a casual glance, she might seem ordinary, but Newlin was never
+superficial. Her kind of beauty was something to be sensed, not
+catalogued. It was part of the odd grace of movement, of the fine,
+angular features, of the curious emotion which dwelt upon them, sad and
+subdued. Even her costume was as out of place in the Spacebell as her
+mood; the dress was simply cut and expensive, but drab for the time and
+place. It clung about a slight, well-formed body in smoothly curved
+lines that seemed almost a part of her. Only her hands and eyes showed
+nervous tension.
+
+At first he thought her eyes were cold, but it was something racial
+rather than personal. He noticed that they were large and luminous--like
+moonstones--with a pearly opaque glimmer as if only upper layers colored
+and reflected light. In their depths was an odd effect, like metalflakes
+drifting through ribboned moonlight with abysses of deepest shadow
+beyond. There was pain, trouble, and sadness in them, and behind that,
+fear--a desperate fear. You thought of wailing, haunted moonlight, and
+of dreadful things fled from in dreams.
+
+Newlin's first thought was that she was one of the new-made widows, and
+was likely to be all too human about it. Later, when he had begun to
+doubt that she was all-human, her physical charms still went inside him
+and turned like a dull knife. He was no more immune to animal attraction
+than the next man, but in this particular woman there was something else
+even more intriguing and unpredictable. He felt a powerful impulse to do
+something to relieve her of that paralyzing supernatural dread.
+
+A situation pregnant with violence was working up at one of the gaming
+tables but Newlin wilfully tore his attention from the mounting tension
+between the fat Martian gambler and an ugly character from Ganymede.
+
+"Anything I can do for you, sister?"
+
+Her smile was strange, thoughtful, preoccupied. "Yes," she told him.
+"There is something you can do for me. Unless your question was purely
+professional. If so, forget it. I need something stronger than the--the
+liquors you serve here."
+
+Newlin grinned sourly. "You don't know our drinks. One sip and a mouse
+snarls at a snow-leopard. The question was not purely professional. Not
+my profession, anyhow. I don't know about yours. Or do I?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her head jerked on its slender stalk of neck. Pale eyes stared into his;
+her lips twisted in cold scorn.
+
+"I don't think you do. And I'll do without your help. Perhaps you'd
+better go back to polishing glassware."
+
+The rebuke failed to impress Newlin. He waited while her glance swung
+about the room, evaluating the place and its occupants in one quick
+sweep. Dissatisfied, she turned back to Newlin and again the moonstruck
+eyes probed and assessed him.
+
+"Take your pick," he said sharply. "But don't judge them by their
+clothes. On Venus, a man in ragged space-leather may have heavy pockets.
+Now, take me--"
+
+"I was told I could find Spud Newlin here. Point him out and I'll pay
+your fee--"
+
+Newlin was suddenly cautious. "Yes, he's here--but what would a woman
+like you want with such a notorious--"
+
+"I'm asking questions, not answering," she said calmly. "And I'm well
+aware of his failings. I selected him because of his ... his reputation.
+It's revolting, but even such a man may have uses. My requirements of
+him, and my reasons for the choice, I will discuss with him. No one
+else."
+
+"Free advice, sister. Forget it, and get out of here. He's no good.
+Particularly bad, for a choice morsel like you."
+
+"I'm used to making up my own mind. Where is he?"
+
+Newlin shrugged. "You win. I'm Newlin. You take it from there."
+
+Incredulity flooded her face and slowly drained away. "You! Yes, you
+could be Newlin. But you're working here. A famous man like you. Why?"
+
+Newlin laughed easily. "It's very simple. I need money. If I can last
+through till morning, I'll have it. Now I'll ask the questions. You
+answer them. What do you want? Why me?"
+
+A variety of expressions flowed over her mobile features.
+
+"But--you could leave?" she faltered.
+
+"I could, but I won't. This isn't charity night, kid. So go home and
+come back another time. Tomorrow."
+
+"Tomorrow won't do. Maybe I've chosen the wrong man, but there's no time
+for second chances. I wanted a man with courage, a man used to living
+dangerously and going his own way, a man who wouldn't ask questions and
+would do anything for money. You sounded like something out of the old
+books; a rogue; a rebel."
+
+Newlin sighed. Did it show so much? From the gutter that spawned him, he
+had fought and gouged and elbowed his way up. To him all men were
+enemies. As a spacebum, he had explored the raw, expanding frontiers as
+Man surged from planet to planet. As a hunted outlaw he had existed
+perilously on the twilight fringes of civilization. Ruthless and savage,
+a thief and despoiler, a criminal and adventurer, he had found his way
+back to Earth, Mars, Venus and wrested a niche of sorts within the
+citadels he had attempted to overthrow. Despite the brittle amnesty, he
+knew that authority awaited only a single slip to deal with him
+according to their views. But in the bitterness of ultimate
+disillusions, he had found the fountainhead as lacking in civilization
+and sanity as its furthest ripples. He longed, now, only for the final
+gesture of rejection. Escape....
+
+"I had expected more of Newlin," said the girl.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His reply was a short, bitter laugh. "So had I. My character is as
+corrupt as the rest of mankind. Poverty is undignified and degrading; it
+poisons virtue and debases the outlook. Without money a man cannot claim
+his birthright of freedom; getting money he loses his independence and
+his character."
+
+"You think money would make you free?" the girl asked.
+
+"Not of itself." Newlin scowled. "With money, a free man can be free; a
+slave with money is still a slave. Perhaps I want to learn for myself
+which I am. I want enough to pay for a spaceship, the best to be had. A
+one-man ship in which I can escape this madhouse and venture
+alone--beyond Pluto. Such a plan requires money, so I work in the
+Spacebell. Between wages, tips, graft and my winnings, I may have half
+enough, by dawn. If I live that long."
+
+The girl nodded, then spoke contemptuously, "I can pay very generously.
+You can set your own price. Enough even for your spaceship. But what do
+you expect to find--beyond Pluto?"
+
+"Myself, first. After that, who knows? This solar system is a vast
+pesthouse. I am contaminated by fools, moneygrubbers, sheep and the
+corrupt authorities that rule them. What else I find isn't important if
+I find myself. Even death."
+
+Newlin's eyes burned with a hot glare of fanaticism. Dread sprang into
+the girl's heart. Always with these people there was this fear, this
+panic-desire to escape, always an urge to destruction coupled with eery
+mysticism, compulsions, conflicts--and always the final delusion of
+personal sanity in the atmosphere of chaos. Some of Newlin's words found
+echo in herself, but she checked a momentary sympathy. The system was
+mad, true--but how sane was Newlin? How sane and trustworthy? He could
+be a dangerous tool in her unskilled, frightened hands.
+
+She had chosen him on the basis of his reputation. From his police
+record, and other documents. A capable man, courageous and self-reliant,
+ingenious, but a person of tensions and conflicts, a man of violence,
+unpredictable, torn by contradictory impulses, a savage but not without
+kindness and generosity. For her purposes, he might do as well as any
+other. At worst a man, cast in heroic mold. Quickly, but not without
+revulsions and reservations, she made her fateful decision.
+
+"For a man of your talents," she said, "the task should be simple. I
+want you to break into a building and bring me something. There is
+danger you would not understand. If you fail, death for both of us. For
+success, you set the price. Are you interested?"
+
+Newlin laughed cynically. "You promise the moon if I can steal it for
+you, nothing if I can't?"
+
+"No such shrewd bargaining," the girl murmured uneasily. "But name the
+amount you hoped to make here. I will match it now--and double it if you
+accomplish my errand."
+
+"Fair enough," said Newlin. "But keep your money. I'll case the job
+first. Pay me later--if I don't change my mind again."
+
+Ducking behind the bar, he shed his apron and buzzed for the stand-in
+bartender. Ed Careld forsook his interminable game of Martian chess and
+appeared to take over.
+
+"Seems quiet," he said. "What's up?"
+
+"Nothing," Newlin told him. "Private business. I may not be back. Keep
+an eye on Table Three."
+
+Careld nodded, eyed the gamblers at Table Three dubiously. He tied his
+apron carefully and sidled toward the table to oversee the situation and
+clamp down a lid if necessary. Table Three picked that moment to erupt
+in profane violence. Three languages splashed pungently in dispute which
+passed quickly to a climax of crisscrossed heat-beam brilliance.
+Marksmanship was poor; both the fat Martian and his adversary from
+Ganymede survived, and only two questionable kibitzers blazed into
+sudden oblivion. Careld swept up the corpses into neat piles of ash,
+then tried to warn the combatants against further displays of short
+temper.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He died in an outburst of majority resentment, punctuated by heat-beams.
+Newlin returned behind the counter and buzzed for Careld's stand-in.
+Then clutching the girl's arm, he left the place, dragging her along.
+
+The street was dim, silent, deserted. "Where to?" asked Newlin.
+
+Her quick nod indicated direction.
+
+"Walking distance?" he persisted. "Inside the city? If not, I'll have to
+get protection suits from a public locker."
+
+"Just inside. Monta Park."
+
+Newlin whistled. "Nice neighborhood. Do you live there?"
+
+"No," she faltered. "I'm just in from--Earth."
+
+Earth! It was a long time since Newlin had seen Earth. Few of his
+memories were pleasantly nostalgic. Born there, in the poorest quarter
+of the international spaceport of Sahara City, his early life had been
+hard. Both parents had died there, broken from strain and poverty, and
+Newlin escaped only by stowing away in the dangerous after-holds of a
+rocketship bound for Mars, risking the unpleasant death from leaking
+radioactives in preference to being poor on Earth.
+
+He had been poor since, in many places, but never with the grinding
+hopelessness of those early nightmare years. Their mark stayed with him
+and colored his life. He knew every rathole of the system, with the same
+intimacy the rats knew them. Once, on a non-stop express rocket from
+Mars to Pluto, he had lost a finger and all the toes from his left foot
+in ceaseless guerilla warfare with rats which had disputed possession of
+the hold in which he stowed away. More than once he had bummed passage
+near the atomic fuel vats of cranky old space-freighters that were mere
+tin cans caulked with chewing gum. As boy and man, he slept in jails
+from the dark, mad moons of Neptune to the fiery beach-head colonies of
+Mercury. And with fists, brain and nimble fingers he had written an epic
+biography in Security Police annals.
+
+Like other cities of the space frontier, Venusport was raw and crude,
+exotically beautiful and cruelly violent. To Newlin it was old stuff,
+picturesque, with the spicy flavor of a perilous vacation spot. After
+abrasive years on a dozen planets and habitable moons, the ugly
+savageries of Venus had only a quaint charm. Survival was always
+comparatively easy there, and a man shed normal fears with the
+shredding, blistered skin of spaceburns. He was surprised when the girl
+shuddered and drew close to him. Her instinctive trust amused him, and
+he laughed brutally. The sound slashed between them like a chilled
+blade.
+
+They went together, in silence. Faint, flat breeze from the city's
+air-conditioners fanned their faces. It was dark enough, and for Venus,
+reasonably cool. Buildings strewn like a careless giant's toys formed a
+vague and monstrous backdrop. Street-lighting was poor, for such
+luxuries are expensive and the city fathers cared little what happened
+to the poor, diseased, half-starved nonentities. All streets were
+crooked aimless alleys, all black and empty. Only near landing stages
+and space-freight elevators was there any activity. Darkness and the
+Cyclopean setting gave more menace than intimacy to the dim tangles of
+avenues and parkways.
+
+The girl stopped, panting for breath. Newlin waited for her.
+
+"You're a fool to trust yourself alone with me in a place like this," he
+told her grimly.
+
+She hugged the loose mantle tightly across her shoulders and tried
+vainly to read his face in the murk.
+
+"If you're trying to frighten me, you're wasting time," she said, "I
+have more important fears."
+
+Newlin chuckled. Skinny wench, but she had something. There was pride in
+her, and scorn, and a hot spark that burned through the tones of cold
+scorn. Something else, too. A hint of desperate courage that baffled
+him.
+
+"I still think you should have tried the panther sweat at the
+Spacebell," he suggested. "One sip and--"
+
+"I know," she snapped. "And I hope you've had yours for tonight. You'll
+need it. We're almost there."
+
+"In that case, we'd better talk," he said curtly. "I still know nothing
+about you. Who you are, what you want? I don't even know your name."
+
+She spoke in low, vibrant tones, but the language seemed unfamiliar to
+her. She groped for exact words, extracted subtle meanings. But there
+was a hesitance, an uneasiness, about speech itself, as if she found it
+a tedious and inflexible medium for thought expressions.
+
+"I told you. In a--building, there is a man I must see. He does not wish
+to see me, and there are barriers I cannot pass. The building is a
+combination workshop and living quarters, and something else you would
+not understand. You must go inside for me and induce him to come out to
+me. My name is Songeen. Tell him that. He will know me, and perhaps he
+will come. But it has been so long--"
+
+Newlin grunted. "That man I must see. One who wouldn't come when you
+whistled. However long it has been?"
+
+"He has changed--greatly. He may be insane. He may be dangerous. In
+self-defense, it may be necessary for you to kill him. For your
+protection, I have provided a weapon. Use all other means to persuade
+him first, but threaten if you have to. And be ready to kill if he
+attacks you. But dead or alive, bring him to me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Suddenly Newlin disliked his errand. Even more, he disliked himself. For
+a brittle moment, he was moved to turn back, refuse to carry out a
+bargain he now regretted. Killing for pay, at the whim of a jealous or
+scorned woman, was too ugly even for his calloused morality.
+
+"Preferably dead?" he asked thinly.
+
+"Preferably alive," Songeen murmured. "You would not understand, of
+course. It is because I love him. He will not come, but he must have the
+chance. And I must send a stranger to kill him, because he
+has--forgotten."
+
+Newlin stiffened angrily. He was on the point of rejecting the girl and
+her project when a battery of lights moved toward them from the winding
+lanes of the Park. Too well he knew what they meant.
+
+As the wealthiest district of Venusport, Monta Park was smug,
+respectable, luxurious--and protected. Roving radio-patrols of
+Protection Police--privately hired thugs--guarded its dwellers and their
+possessions. A prowling mono-car slowed and maneuvered to cast a
+revealing spotlight on the loitering pair. Newlin, had he been alone,
+might have dodged into the dense shrubbery, but the girl knew better.
+
+[Illustration: _The spotlight meant violence and sudden death._]
+
+Calmly she turned to face down the occupants of the PP car, and her
+haughty expression would have chilled the blood of any PP constable
+presumptuous enough to question her. Her attitude and the obvious
+richness of her clothing seemed to satisfy the patrol, for the beam
+swung briefly and hesitated on Newlin. He dropped behind her like a
+servant bodyguard and hoped his scuffed space-leather was not too
+noticeable. The beam held for seconds, then flicked out. Soundlessly the
+patrol car vanished.
+
+Neither spoke as the pair moved quickly into the precincts of the Park.
+As residence area, it was splashy; a series of interlocked estates
+rather than expensive mansions packed closely together. Each unit sat
+alone in sprawling, neatly sheared grounds, landscaped with flowering
+trees and set with the chill sophistication of statuary in gold, silver
+and platinum. Botanical splendors from exotic worlds rioted in orderly
+tangles of aromatic greenery, with sculpture of glass, marble and the
+noble metals glinting like pale ghosts against the darker masses.
+
+Shadows parted before them. Half-hidden among trees rose a slender
+spire, needle-shaped, tall as a tower, but unwindowed. For a dwelling,
+its design was curious, and the interior must consist of circular rooms
+one above the other. At the base, an arched, oval aperture should have
+been the door, but neither handle nor keyhole showed on the flat,
+polished plate.
+
+"Here we are," the girl said needlessly, her voice soft as a hint of
+pain trembled in it. A tremor ran through her body as she thrust out two
+objects toward him. A key and a gun.
+
+"You will need these," she went on. "He will be in one of the upper
+rooms. His name is Genarion. Perhaps he will talk with you, especially
+if you surprise him. But remember, he is deadly. His scientific
+knowledge is a more frightful weapon than this. So do not hesitate to
+use violence."
+
+Newlin fumbled the gun into a pocket, fingered the key. It was slim as a
+needle and as smooth. Without comment, he stared at her as weariness and
+disgust strangled him.
+
+"Tell me your price," she said quickly, as if in haste to get words out
+before either could think too much. "I will pay--now."
+
+Shabby bargaining, he thought. But he would call her bluff and force her
+to back down. "Not money," he said savagely. "I don't kill for money.
+For a woman, yes. I want you."
+
+He expected anger, scorn, even hatred. She gasped and her face went pale
+and hard. Wilting under his glare, she nodded.
+
+"Yes, even that--if you wish. I have no choice."
+
+Newlin felt sick, empty. He no longer desired her, even if she were
+willing. He despised her and himself. But a bargain was still a bargain.
+He shrugged.
+
+Like an outsize toy, a child's model of a spaceship, the oddly graceful
+structure towered upward into arching darkness. Like her, it was
+slender, radiant, beautiful. Bitterly, he caught the girl, dragged her
+to him, felt her flesh yielding to him. She leaned and met his lips with
+hers. The kiss was cold and ugly as writhing snakes. Cold. Ugly.
+_Alien...._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The key went in smoothly, did not turn. It must have been impregnated
+with magnetism. Somewhere electronic relays clicked switches faintly.
+The door was open, its movement indescribable in familiar terms. It
+neither slid, nor swung on hinges. There was no door, much as if a light
+had switched off.
+
+A rush of air came out. It had the high, sharp tang of ozone, and
+something unfamiliar.
+
+Newlin stood inside what was obviously an airlock valve. A door inside
+had opened soundlessly.
+
+He went on. Beyond the inner doorway was a large circular room. Its
+dimensions seemed far greater than Newlin would have guessed from the
+exterior of the building.
+
+This was no mere dwelling, no laboratory or workshop. It was a spaceship
+of radical design. Elfin stair-ladders spiralled up and down. The
+girders seemed impossibly delicate and fragile, as if their purpose was
+half-decoration, half-functional; and stresses involved were
+unimportant. Such support framework was insane--in any kind of
+spaceship. It had the quality of fairyland architecture, a dream ship
+woven from the filaments of spiderwebs.
+
+But there was hidden strength, and truly functional design, as may be
+found in spiderwebs. Newlin was no engineer, but he sensed solidity and
+sound mathematics behind the toy structure's delicacy.
+
+The stair ladder supported him without vibration, without give or any
+feeling of insecurity. He climbed.
+
+Walls and the floor and ceiling bulkheads were rigid to his touch,
+supported his weight firmly, despite their eggshell-thin appearance of
+fragility. There were no corners; everything fused together seamlessly
+in smooth curves. Walls were self-luminous and oddly cool.
+
+The lower chambers were bare of all furnishing. Higher levels contained
+a hodge-podge of implements, all in the same light, strong formula of
+design. But none familiar, either as to material or their possible
+function. There were machines, but all too simple. Neither the bulk of
+atomic engines nor the intricate complexities inseparable from electric
+or combustion motors.
+
+Newlin was puzzled.
+
+He stopped to listen, feeling like an intruder into a strange world. The
+building, or spaceship, ached with silence.
+
+Another stairwell beckoned. He climbed, slowly, with increased caution.
+It would do no harm to have the gun in hand, ready. Where was the man
+who lived in such a place? And what sort of man could he be? What would
+he have in common with the frightened, haughty girl outside? The obvious
+explanation no longer satisfied.
+
+As Newlin ascended, another floor opened and widened to his vision. The
+stair-ladder ended here. It was the top floor. But this chamber seemed
+infinitely larger than the others. At first there was no sight of the
+man. Newlin stood alone in the center of a vast area. He did not seem
+indoors at all.
+
+Endless vistas extended to infinity in all directions. In all directions
+save one, in which stood a tall shadow. Newlin gasped. It was his
+shadow, detached, seemingly solid.
+
+Three-dimensional, it stood stock still. It moved when he moved. He
+gasped, then found the answer. By the shadow's echo of his movements, he
+could trace a vague outline of encirclement.
+
+The walls were a screen, a circle about the room upon which were cast
+pictures so perfect that the beholder had illusion of being surrounded
+by eery, exotic landscapes. The scenes were panoramic, all taken at the
+same angle, by the same camera, and so cunningly fused into a whole that
+the effect was beyond mere artifice. For a moment, Newlin had stood
+within the strange world, its crystalline forms and strange jeweled life
+as tri-dimensional and real as himself.
+
+It was a large screen, alive with light, alive with dancing, flickering
+figures. There was no visible projector, and the images were
+disturbingly solid and real. There was depth, without any perception of
+perspective. It was a reflection of reality, cast upon the plane of
+circling walls.
+
+Then a man stepped from the screen. He had been invisible, because the
+projected images had flowed and accommodated themselves to his
+metal-cloth smock. For the moment, he had been part of the screen.
+
+Newlin could not tear his eyes from that glaring plane of illusion.
+Something about the glare played havoc with nerves, and a faint hint of
+diabolical sound tortured his brain. No such world could exist in a sane
+universe. Not even with its terrible and heartbreakingly poignant
+beauty. It was a vision of Hell, bright with impossible octaves of
+light, splendid with raging infernos of blinding color, some of it
+beyond the visible range of human sight. And there was sound, pouring in
+maddening floods, sound in nerve-shattering symphonies like the tinkling
+clatter of many Chinese windbells of glass, all pouring out cascades of
+brittle, crystalline uproar.
+
+Sound and light rose in storming crescendos, beyond sight and beyond
+hearing. They ranged into madness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newlin screamed, tried to cover eyes and ears at once. He tried to run,
+but nerve-agony paralyzed movement. He was chained to the spot.
+
+Sound and color descended simultaneously into bearable range.
+
+He stared at the man he had come to see. He stared and the man stared
+back.
+
+"Genarion?" Newlin asked, his voice thin and vague among the tumultuous
+harmonies bursting from the screen.
+
+"Who are you that calls me by _that_ name?" cried Genarion. He spoke in
+the same curious manner as the girl. He showed amazement, mixed with an
+ugly kind of terror. "You're not one of _them_!"
+
+"Them?" Newlin said, striving for sanity as sound and light swelled
+again. His brain reeled. "Songeen sent me--!"
+
+Speech itself was a supreme effort.
+
+Genarion was beyond speech. Tigerishly, he moved. He leaped upon Newlin
+and thrust him back. Newlin sprawled painfully, his back arched and
+twisted by invisible machinery.
+
+Genarion stood with a gun in his hand. Aiming hastily, he pressed
+trigger. The beam flashed and licked charred cloth and smoking leather
+from Newlin's sleeve. There was an odd jangle from the invisible
+machinery which gouged so tangibly into Newlin's body.
+
+Instinctively, Newlin fired. He did not bother to aim. For him, such a
+shot was point blank, impossible to miss.
+
+Genarion staggered. Part of his body vaporized and hung in dazzling mist
+as the projected images of light played over it.
+
+Dazed, Newlin scrambled to his feet. He was sick. But the screen held
+him. He stared, hypnotized. Images jigged and flowed in constant, eery
+rhythms. They moved and melted and rearranged themselves in altered
+patterns, without ever losing their identities or the illusion of
+solidity. The scene was not part of Venus, or of any world Newlin had
+seen. He had seen every planet or moon in the Solar system. But this was
+different, alien, frightening.
+
+And the screen was not really a screen at all, for the body of Genarion,
+hideous in the distortion of death, lay halfway through its plane. And
+it was changing, subtly, as he watched. It was no longer even a man,
+totally unhuman, as alien as the world it lay partway in. The body
+flowed, molten, hideous.
+
+The screen was a surrealist painting, come alive, solid and real. And
+the solid, physical body of Genarion was part of it. He was dead, but
+real. His alien form was a bridge between two worlds, and now dead,
+Genarion was alien to both of them.
+
+It was madness. The madness of the screen communicated itself to Newlin.
+Before his shocked eyes, Genarion's body began to steam and rise in a
+cloud of vaporous, glittering crystals. Swiftly the haze dissipated. It
+was gone, gone invisibly into the alien world. Whatever Newlin had
+killed, it was not human, not a man.
+
+Newlin turned and fled down the fairy stair-ladder.
+
+He went through the still-open airlock doors and out into the screaming
+night. Behind him alarms were ringing frantically. Now they would be
+ringing in the stations of the Protection Police and call orders would
+go out to the radio-equipped prowl cars. Police would converge swiftly.
+
+Sound shattered the night stillness. From far away, coming closer, was
+the shrill wail of a siren. Other sirens.
+
+There was a harsh bleat of police whistles, near at hand. Newlin's
+imagination quivered with the possibility of blaster beams thrusting at
+his back. He fled.
+
+The alarms had burst into sound too quickly. Had the girl set the police
+on him, waiting only long enough to make sure he would accomplish his
+mission?
+
+Whatever he had been set to kill, had not been human. Not a man.
+Intuitively, Newlin realized that the girl had anticipated everything.
+She knew what would happen, he reflected bitterly. She had promised
+payment only on delivery of a corpse, when there could be no corpse.
+
+Spud Newlin, Sucker No. 1.
+
+Conscience did not trouble him. After all, the man--or the thing--had
+fired first, without warning, without waiting to hear him out. Without
+waiting for details like identity, or even asking to hear the message he
+brought. It was self-defense, in a peculiar way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newlin ran and tried to lose himself in the shadowy fastness of Monta
+Park. He was not surprised that the girl had not troubled to wait and
+meet him.
+
+He was not even angry. It was part of the game.
+
+The Protection Police radios were carrying the alarm. Soon the Security
+Police would take up the hunt. If the girl had turned him in, she would
+be able to give a detailed and accurate description. Newlin guessed that
+he would be lucky to last even the few hours till daylight--or what
+passes for daylight on cloud-shrouded Venus.
+
+Long before then, his career might end suddenly in a wild network of
+blaster or heat beams. By dawn he would very likely be crumpled among
+the ashcans and refuse in any dark alley.
+
+But still the city would be his best bet. No use beating his way to the
+spaceport landing stages. Space Patrol units must have been notified,
+and would already be searching all outgoing units.
+
+For the moment, he had a brief interval of grace in which to think
+things over and try, if only for his own satisfaction, to figure out
+what had happened. It--whatever it was--had writhed hideously when the
+blaster beam drove home. Part of it vaporized instantly, and the organs
+revealed did not even look animal. Eery, geometric, but not the naked
+electronic symmetries of a mechanical robot. Not metal. But what?
+Collapsed like wet sacking, it had lain half-inside and half-outside the
+screen. He could not recall clearly its rapid mutations of form after
+that.
+
+Did it matter? The alarms were out. Blaring metallic clangor, and the
+uncanny banshee wailing of the hunting sirens. Police care little who is
+murdered in the nameless dives of Venusport, but let one of the lordly
+rich men die, and all Hell is loosed on the killer.
+
+If the girl had turned in the alarm, it was only a matter of time. They
+would have his name and number; his ident-card would be listed and
+reproduced, sent everywhere. They would probably have the robot trackers
+out, those hideous electronic bloodhounds which can unerringly sort out
+a man's trail from the infinity of other scents and markings, following
+not smell, but a curious tangle of electrical impulses left by his body
+like static electricity or intangible magnetism. No layman could even
+guess how such a robot worked, but fugitives had learned to dread its
+infallible tracking ability.
+
+Newlin fled, and as he went, he cursed himself for getting involved in
+such a nightmare.
+
+Figures moved and blundered about him in the darkness of the park, but
+none got in his way. None seemed to notice him. Since it was not a man
+he had killed, perhaps others hunted him; other remote, alien beings he
+could not see, or sense.
+
+The girl would know, of course. If he could find her. But she had
+vanished before he ever issued from the strange tower, and it was highly
+unlikely that he would ever see her again.
+
+Chance, and a sudden rush of blue-clad figures across a street ahead of
+him, turned Newlin back toward his own, familiar part of town. The scant
+shelter of shadows in deserted alleyways was a comfort, but little real
+protection. He had friends, of a peculiar sort, in the old native
+quarter, and the Spacebell lay just outside the fringe of the mutants'
+district, where the half-human natives laired up. These friends might
+hide him, for a while, although such refuge was of little use against
+the robot-trackers.
+
+By daylight, he could be smuggled outside the domed city, and once into
+the wastelands, there was a chance. Not a good one; but there, even the
+robot-tracker could hardly come upon him without his knowledge. A lucky
+blaster shot would leave a blank trail and a shattered robot for his
+pursuers to follow. He wondered if they would risk another such
+expensive machine merely to hunt down a murderer in the wastelands.
+Scarcely, when the wastelands would kill the fugitive sooner or later
+anyhow.
+
+His first task was to reach the Spacebell and collect his pay. Then to
+get protection-armor, against the peril of sandstorms and the
+radioactive sinks that spot the old sea-beds outside Venusport. After
+that, the native quarter, if he lived to reach it.
+
+Shortly before daylight, he turned the last alley-corner and came in
+sight of the Spacebell.
+
+A shadow stirred with movement. A lithe, loosely draped figure hurried
+to meet him. It was the girl--Songeen.
+
+"Don't go in there," she said. "They know who you are, and the police
+are waiting for you."
+
+Newlin felt numb all over. "How did they know? Did you tell them?" he
+snapped.
+
+"Of course not. Don't be a fool. Would I inform, then wait to warn you?
+I did not know he had automatic alarms, and automatic cameras to make
+records of anyone who came into the--the place. It was the pictures.
+They were identified with your ident-card at the Central Police Bureau.
+And the robot-trackers are out."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newlin and Songeen studied each other for a long moment of silence.
+
+"I guess it doesn't matter now," Newlin said finally, "but I'm glad you
+didn't turn me in. I might almost as well give up and get the thing over
+with. There's no place to run. Not without money."
+
+Songeen produced a small sack of platinum coins which jingled as she
+offered it.
+
+"That's one reason I tried to find you. After the alarms, I knew I would
+only handicap your flight. I hid. Then I came here, because I thought
+you might come back. I'm sorry I have no more money, but the rest is all
+in credits. It would be no help to you in the wastelands."
+
+"I see," muttered Newlin. "Why did you care? Were you afraid I'd talk if
+the Police caught me?"
+
+Songeen shrugged coldly. "No, I hadn't thought of that. But I think I
+owe you something. Murderer's wages. I knew you couldn't fulfil your
+bargain when you made it. But, in a way, I am responsible for you."
+
+"In a way," agreed Newlin bitterly. He snatched at the bag of coins.
+"This will do. Thanks for nothing."
+
+"Don't blame me too much. I had no choice, and I did not know it would
+work out like this."
+
+"Perhaps not, but next time do your own killing. It's rough on both your
+victims."
+
+Songeen was crying, tearless wracking sobs that shook her frail body.
+
+"I'm sorry," she moaned. "But I couldn't even get in to see him. He knew
+the exact vibration level of my body, and had set supersonic traps to
+kill me if I tried to enter. Even my bones would have shattered. I would
+have died painfully and horribly. I would rather have died myself than
+cause his death. Believe that. There is always a third victim. He was my
+husband, and I loved him. You can't understand, of course--"
+
+"I understand less than ever now." Newlin knew that it was madness to
+remain so close to the Spacebell. But he could not force himself to
+leave Songeen. She seemed near collapse.
+
+A thought struck him. "Say, is there anything there to tie you up with
+this business?"
+
+Songeen gave a wry thrust of her thin shoulders. "Much--but does it
+matter? It was my--our home. Before he tricked me outside and would not
+let me return. They don't know what happened--yet. But there will be
+enough evidence against both of us. Part of what you saw was illusion.
+His body is still there. Changed--but the trackers can identify it. The
+charge is murder, and they will want both of us. Not just you."
+
+"Come with me." Newlin spoke harshly--sharply.
+
+The girl's eyes flickered. "Are you threatening me?"
+
+"No. It's just that I've led them to you. We're in the same boat now.
+With the mechanical hounds on our heels. They will connect you through
+me, now that our trails have crossed. And they'll follow both of us. How
+will you manage?"
+
+Songeen smiled wearily. "One always takes risks. I came here prepared
+for--anything."
+
+"Don't be a fool! Protection Police don't stop to ask questions. They're
+hired Killers."
+
+"I suppose not. What do you suggest?"
+
+"Run and hide. Come with me, if you like. But suit yourself. I'm getting
+out of here. Out into the wastelands. It's almost dawn now. In the city,
+we're lost. Outside, there's a chance. A poor one, but--"
+
+Light was that gray ugliness that precedes the smeary glare of dawn on
+Venus. The girl seemed very slight and young and helpless. Again, Newlin
+felt that impulse to save and protect her. He could see no details of
+feature, even her face was shadowed, and not quite human; but her body
+was beautiful, and trembling.
+
+"Are you coming?" he asked, savagely.
+
+"I'll go with you," she said. "You're kind. Perhaps I can _help_ you. If
+they corner us, please kill me. I don't like--being hurt."
+
+Newlin laughed grimly. "It's a promise. But I'll kill some of them
+first."
+
+"Please," she begged. "No killing--not for me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ten hours later, far out in the wastelands, Spud Newlin called a halt.
+The girl had trudged wearily behind him, uncomplaining and with patient
+determination. They wasted no precious breath in words, and walking had
+been doubly difficult for her. The protection armor was twice too large,
+and very cumbersome for such a slight figure; but such garments never
+come in half-size. Children and women are forbidden to venture into the
+wastelands, except in special vehicles.
+
+Actually they had started out by vehicle. But it was old, cranky and
+ready for the junkyard. In the first flurry of sandstorm, it had
+clogged, burned out and died. Nothing very reliable was available in the
+black market without more notice.
+
+Newlin accepted the inevitable and proceeded on foot. Perhaps they could
+reach the Archaeological Station at Sansurra. He was not certain if it
+would be inhabited at the Sandstorm season, but there was a good chance
+of stored food and water. Turning back to Venusport was impossible. So
+they went on.
+
+Now he was confused. Directions are difficult at best on Venus, and his
+radio-compass proved faulty. He had only the vaguest idea where they
+were, and none at all where they were headed. But if he stopped too
+long, the shifting dunes would cover them. And if they tried to go too
+fast, it would be fatally easy to blunder into one of the open
+sink-holes of molten, radioactive metal.
+
+He stopped and motioned the girl to rest.
+
+She sank down, exhausted.
+
+Newlin adjusted the throat microphones and headsets in their plastic
+helmets to make for easier conversation. But for a while, neither could
+talk. They sat and gasped, yearning for a breath of fresh, unreclaimed
+air. Water supplies were low, and already Newlin had established iron
+rations. Drinking by tubes was difficult in the helmets and the water
+was warm and foul.
+
+"You're lost?" Songeen asked at last.
+
+Newlin nodded. He produced a wrinkled, battered map. "I can't even trust
+the compass. I don't know where we are."
+
+The girl took the map in her gloved hands and peered intently through
+her face-mask. One finger traced a tiny circle in the film of dust.
+
+"I know," she said. "We are somewhere about here. And over there--" she
+indicated a direction behind Newlin--"is the city from which my people
+came."
+
+Newlin was startled. The directional instinct with which all Venusians
+are endowed was familiar enough, yet he would have sworn the girl was
+not from the enfeebled and mutant races of the veiled planet. She was,
+at once, more human--and more remote. Songeen guessed his doubt. Through
+the fused quartz faceplate, her angular features wore a curious, faint
+smile.
+
+"No, not Venusian. This was an--an outpost. A colony and a quarantine
+station. The city was abandoned long ago. Long before the atomic
+holocaust my people fled. Eons have passed. Everything is now in
+ruins--if even ruins remain. See, it is not marked on the map. Not even
+as ruins. But we have unusual race-memory. I can see the fabulous towers
+and arsenals, the terraced gardens and the palaces--as if they still
+stood today as they were in that vanished yesterday. And we have the
+homing instinct. It was my people who gave it to the Venusians. The one
+thing of value that still remains to them."
+
+Newlin was still dubious. "Unless you're dreaming."
+
+Her finger jabbed at the map. "We are here," she insisted. "And if you
+care to search and dig, the city is probably still there, as it was a
+million years ago."
+
+"Would there be water in your ruined city?" Newlin asked.
+
+"Who knows? The wells are probably all filled with sand now. Or gone
+dry, or become contaminated. There is always much radioactivity near the
+ruined cities. They were primary targets when the peoples of Venus
+destroyed themselves. Even this desert is mute evidence of the
+holocaust; if one needs evidence. My people fled before that madness,
+because they anticipated it."
+
+Newlin snorted. The pre-holocaust Venusians were purely legendary. No
+written records could exist, amid such conditions as must have followed
+the ancient wars. Science knew that at least half a million years had
+passed since Venus was a fair green planet peopled with hearty,
+beautiful, ease-loving races. Half a million years since the surface
+people had even looked upon the sun.
+
+"If you're right about where we are," Newlin growled, "I'm still
+interested in that city. We can never make Sansurra with the water we
+have. Ruined or not, there may be wells. Is there a chance?"
+
+"Not a good one," Songeen replied. "But better than none."
+
+"Whenever you're ready," Newlin said. "You lead."
+
+Wearily, man and girl struck off across the seas of shifting sand. Great
+dunes blocked their way. Some they circled, others must be climbed
+laboriously.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the top of a huge, wind-ribbed billow, Newlin stared at a pale
+flickering in the dust ahead. In all other directions stretched endless
+humps and hollows. But before him lay a great wind-scoured hollow of
+bare rock. Beyond that, crowning a series of low hills, which must have
+thrust above water line in this shallow part of the ancient, vanished
+sea, were ruins.
+
+Even as ruins, the city was spectacular. Massive columns had eroded
+slowly into stone toothpicks. Walls crumbled into formless heaps
+resembling the dunes. A few outlines of smoothed blocks and shattered
+lintels huddled the ground, half hidden by the encroaching sand. Details
+had vanished eons ago, but something still remained to tantalize
+imagination. The few buildings that still stood, and the soaring,
+fragile towers evidenced an engineering civilization of staggering
+proportions. Surface dimensions were still tremendous, and the city
+itself must have been of first importance, covering hundreds of square
+miles.
+
+"Our city," said Songeen.
+
+Newlin glanced quickly behind. Still distant, but moving very rapidly
+was the string of dark objects that could only be sandsleds of the
+pursuit. One tiny figure, scarcely visible, was far in advance of the
+others. The robot tracker.
+
+He gestured. "They're covering three miles to our one," he told her
+grimly. "We'll try to reach the city before they catch up with us.
+Perhaps we can hide out among the ruins, and--with luck, booby-trap the
+tracker. If there's water, we can hold out for quite a while."
+
+Songeen nodded crisply. Her voice was strained with emotion and fatigue.
+"As fugitives my people abandoned this city. Now, as a fugitive, I
+return."
+
+Then she was off, running awkwardly, the cumbersome suiting of her
+protection armor giving her bounding strides the laughable appearance of
+a lumbering teddy-bear.
+
+Descent into the hollow was riding a series of miniature sand
+avalanches. Each step buried the foot deep, but the sand gave way and
+slipped in loose spills. His boots struck hard on rough, bare rock. He
+grunted, fought for balance, then sprawled heavily. She helped him up,
+then took off again. Newlin followed.
+
+Over the wind-carved rock, they made good time. Ascent of the long,
+jagged slopes to the city was heart-killing work, delicate and
+treacherous. The surface was like sponge-glass, brittle and deadly with
+knife-edges when broken.
+
+Sheltering from wind-driven sand under the cover of a great monolith,
+Newlin and Songeen watched the racing figures of pursuit top the crest
+of the opposite ridge and start down. Man and girl were too winded and
+weak even to get up. They dared rest only a moment, then plunged on into
+the maze of tumbled ruins. Ultimate exertion had taken toll of their
+energies and rapidly burned up air reserves. Both were cruelly thirsty.
+The heat, even inside their insulated suits, was stifling.
+
+There was no time to take stock of manifold discomforts.
+
+The race was neck and neck. Death sniffed at their heels in the guise of
+mechanical trackers. On Venus, life is to the swift and cunning. To
+Newlin, life was perilous, but sweet.
+
+Their helmet microphones picked up and amplified a curious droning buzz.
+It was the deathsong of the electronic tracker and it seemed closer than
+it was.
+
+Slowly, inexorably, it grew louder. Sound swelled steadily, and it was a
+whiplash to their flagging energies. They fled in panic through the
+streets of the dead city.
+
+It was no real refuge to them, but its megalithic precincts gave some
+lying illusion of safety. They chose a twisting, tangled route into the
+very heart of the ruined city, with the instinct of a hunted animal to
+confuse its trail. They doubled back to cross their own trail twice, in
+the vain hope of baffling the electronic enemy.
+
+Newlin had been hunted before, on Mars, but by live bloodhounds. Pepper,
+oil of mustard, and perfumes had saved him then. But this hound followed
+not scent, but something intangible, electrical, and as mysterious as
+the soul-aura itself. It sorted two life-complexes from all other
+impulses and followed its own prime-directive--hunt down and kill.
+
+The end was inevitable as death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newlin laid ambush for the mechanical monster. Crouched in a nest of
+rubble, he waited for it, blaster gun ready. Around a corner of
+shattered stones, it appeared. It moved like a whipping shadow, like
+part of the gathering twilight.
+
+Silent, save for the high, nerve-tearing drone, it came warily across
+the courtyard paved with eroded stone. It was low, not animal in
+appearance, with the form of a fat, ugly snake. Fading light of the
+Venusian day cast a glint of metallic gray from its scaling of
+interlocked rings.
+
+Newlin waited for a close shot. How vulnerable was such a soul-less,
+mechanical monster to even the shattering-heat-forces of a blaster gun?
+
+Songeen lay quietly beside him, her body quivering as much from strained
+muscles as from fear. Behind the face-mask, her thin features were pale,
+ghostlike.
+
+With elaborate caution, the tracker circled their hiding place. Its
+froglike head, with a ruff of exposed filaments lifted, like an animal
+scenting blood. It edged slowly closer, its movement a glide, sinuous,
+crafty, with no suggestion of mechanical action.
+
+Newlin pushed the girl's form roughly away, lest her trembling foul his
+aim. Sighting, he pressed trigger. Bright flame leaped from the weapon,
+crackling.
+
+The beam lashed at the tracker, which stopped suddenly, threw back its
+monstrous head, and burst into hideous uproar of sparking, electrical
+discharge. Like a live thing, it twitched, jerked, and flung itself in
+mad spasms. Convulsions stopped as short-circuits flared in both head
+and body. Molten, flowing, its metallic carcass glowed eerily in the
+dimness. Dying, it blazed up in a fireworks display spectacular enough
+to attract half of Venus to the terrified fugitives.
+
+But the drone continued.
+
+From behind the same corner came a duplicate of the first metal monster.
+Another tracker.
+
+Its drone rose into shrill crescendo. Like a dog, it approached the
+wreckage of its fellow. And like a dog, it summoned help. Then, without
+pausing to examine the mechanical casualty, it turned its electronic
+attentions back to the hunted.
+
+Hopelessly, Newlin urged Songeen to her feet. They fled, and the game
+began all over again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a madman's dream. Desperate flight, the haunted ruins of an
+unknown city, deadly pursuit closing in, slowly, patiently inevitably.
+The familiar hare and hounds pattern of nightmare.
+
+They fled through vague, littered streets, treacherous with the rubble
+of lost centuries. Buildings were lighter patterns upon the gathering
+darkness. Stone flagging underfoot was rough, eroded, rotten.
+
+A pinnacled precipice rose suddenly to bar their way. Immense, sheer,
+buttressed by spills of loose rock, it towered above them and lost its
+heights in gloom.
+
+Within a massive, deep-carved archway of stone, set an oval of polished
+red granite. A doorway, barren of carving save for one, scrawled and
+monstrous hieroglyph. Uneasiness stirred in Newlin, for something in his
+buried race-memories recalled that symbol with supernal dread. Ice
+formed about his spine and melted in trickling terror-drops. Instinct
+cringed, but his conscious mind rebelled at even the effort of memory.
+
+Songeen stopped and stared at the hideously marked doorway, as if
+tranced.
+
+"I _remember_ this place," she said in swift excitement. "But I had
+thought it vanished--eons ago."
+
+Newlin swerved on her angrily. "This is no time for experiments with
+your subconscious," he growled, savage with strain.
+
+"It is--sanctuary," she replied softly. "Come!"
+
+Boldly she stood before the oval door. Her finger traced its complex
+symbol, and the symbol responded with a glow like moonfire.
+
+Again, as it had been with that oval door in Monta Park, there was
+baffling suggestion of unmechanical movement.
+
+The stone block did not slide, roll, or swing open. It gave a slight
+quiver and dissolved.
+
+Songeen stepped through its aperture and the inner darkness of the
+building claimed her. Reluctantly, Newlin followed--caught as much by
+curiosity as driven by the yelping spectres of pursuit.
+
+No light entered the building from any source. It was dark as the pits
+of Ganymede or the under-surface laboratories of Pluto. It was dense and
+tangible as a block of black crystal. Newlin could see nothing, not even
+Songeen. And there was an alien _feel_ to the interior.
+
+He was aware that Songeen operated some hidden mechanism, and that the
+door, though he could not see it, was replaced.
+
+"Now, for the moment, we are safe," she said slowly. "They cannot enter
+here."
+
+Newlin shrugged bitterly. "It's all one. They can't enter and we don't
+dare go out. So we stay here and die of thirst. If you were really a
+top-rung witch, you'd think of details like air, food and water."
+
+Songeen's laugh was a ripple of eery crystal in the darkness.
+
+"How did you guess I was a witch?" she asked whimsically. "But we need
+not die here. Not unless you prefer to die among surroundings familiar
+to you. There is another way out. If we dare take it. For me, it will be
+simple. For you--"
+
+"Not so simple, eh? You paint an interesting picture. Like one I once
+saw on Mars, in the Gneiss Gallery. 'Nocturne--Venusport,' it was
+titled. Beautiful. Dark purple background, the city seemed like
+fountains of flowering stars. It's not like that, not from the places
+I've seen it. Filth and dirt, people dying from poverty, disease or
+violence. Just a comparison. How close does your picture match the
+reality?"
+
+"Close enough. You're a strange man, full of contradictions. I think
+you're only slightly mad. But for anyone, the way I could take you would
+be difficult. The pathway leads to my own world. To you--or anyone, not
+native--it will seem madness. Something of it you saw in the tower."
+
+Around him in the darkness, he was conscious of her swift movements. She
+seemed untroubled by the lack of light. Neither by vision or hearing
+could he distinguish anything, but he sensed activity.
+
+Then, suddenly, as if she had uncovered a cache of implements and struck
+a fire, radiance spread around her. Its source was not definite, and it
+spread slowly, like a stain through water. But something illuminated a
+vast, vaulted interior, Gothic in a sense, with a church-like air of
+gloom and mystery. It was Gothic, but of spiderweb delicacy, soaring
+arches, vague fretted ceilings, walls intricately carved into lacework
+of stone. Everywhere were echoes of that same eery symbolism in the door
+hieroglyph, and Newlin's folk-memories were oddly disturbed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He could not place the feeling. Certainly none of the symbols bore even
+slight resemblance to any written language known to him.
+
+Something about their intricacy clouded even clear perception, and the
+emotional effect was not religious in any sense--it was stark, abysmal
+fear, as if the mysteries behind such symbols were too great for
+humanity to bear.
+
+Ignoring him, Songeen persisted at her curious tasks. Newlin went and
+stood beside her, watching.
+
+With gloved hand, she appeared to be tracing out some maze of deep cut
+markings that figured what must have been an altar-fane.
+
+"Do you expect any results from this ritual mumbo-jumbo?" he questioned
+irritably.
+
+Songeen looked up, startled. "Not more ritual than any other
+mathematics," she chided. "This is no temple, as you seem to imagine. It
+is the old quarantine station. I seek a doorway, but not into a hidden
+passage. There are other doorways. This one leads between dimensions. My
+world exists in a different plane. At least, our pathway to it follows
+strange ways, that you could never understand. You are no scientist or
+scholar. How could you grasp such unknown and forgotten matters? How
+could anyone in your world?"
+
+Newlin stared at her, seeing things he had only guessed before.
+
+"You are--_alien_," he said.
+
+"You can't guess how alien," she answered. "I said I was not of Venusian
+stock. My people came from outside. Our world exists in the same plane
+as yours, a planet circling one of the nearer stars. This place was
+never our home, but we had colonies on Venus, Earth, Mars and one of
+Jupiter's moons. Other colonies--like this one--and observatories and
+quarantine stations. Our scientific observers and the medical staff
+stayed here. They studied and recorded and treated.
+
+"We were not gods nor demons nor anything else supernatural. Just a
+people not human, but not too remote from humanity. Just emissaries and
+workers, students and doctors. You might call us elder brothers to the
+human race. We came not to conquer, enslave and exploit, but to help.
+Sometimes the Masters came with us, since they were interested in our
+work.
+
+"Many times, by our guidance, human beings reached high levels of
+development in the arts and sciences. We taught them and guided their
+stumbling steps, and released to them such knowledge as we dared trust
+to them. Time and again, we raised them from the slime, only to have
+them fall back. There is fatal disease in the race, a disease of
+instability and cruelty and violence. Call it madness--insanity--in the
+technical sense. It is pathological, and the disease is common to the
+human race, in all its ramifications. The Solar System is mad, and all
+who dwell in it are lunatics. Dangerous and homicidal lunatics. Sol's
+system is the asylum and pesthouse of our galaxy. We--my people--are its
+keepers and doctors.
+
+"We are charged with the care and treatment of an ailing form of life.
+Because of our near likeness, in form and thought, it was hoped that we
+could understand and help them; in time, perhaps, find a cure. There are
+other races inhabiting the galaxy--many of them, civilized, intelligent,
+living, and sometimes even of matter similar to ours. Their minds and
+bodies are too different. We are nearest, both in form and feeling.
+
+"We have tried, patiently and hopefully. For the most part, it is a long
+history of frustration and failure. The corruption is too deep, too
+basic. It is part of the life-pattern of the race. Some individuals may
+rise above it, but its taint lies dormant even in them. At best, they
+are carriers. And there seems little future for such a race.
+
+"Your galactic neighbors have been patient. But now a time of decision
+is near. Your ships explore, exploit at will within your system. You
+have pushed your limits to the furthest expansion of that system.
+Colonized and despoiled. Now, you stand at the expanding horizon of
+stellar flight. Other star-systems tempt your imaginations, and
+technology batters at the problems involved.
+
+"Your neighbors are watching, and afraid. If your people burst outside
+the limits of Sol's system, the contagion of your madness will spread
+and engulf the galaxy. At our request, they have given time, granting
+extensions freely. For countless centuries we have tried, and our
+effort, all our work and thought, has led only to failure. Now, the
+others have set a time limit, and the deadline is very close. Very
+close. You are all living on borrowed time; and but for our pleadings,
+it would be still less.
+
+"The masters often send emissaries to us, as we send ours to the planets
+of Sol. They help and advise us--not as superior beings or as gods,
+commanding--but as elder brothers, trying to share their wisdom, trying
+to help and guide us. They only help and advise, never intervene unless
+asked. Their advice is wisdom--sometimes terrible, difficult to
+understand, painful to accept. Recently, they brought a message from the
+other peoples--a message and ultimatum. And the Masters advised us to
+accept failure, to let them destroy humanity as a blot on the galaxy. We
+begged one more chance, a last, desperate gamble, probably foredoomed to
+failure. But they granted us the painful right of the doctor. We can
+operate, but if the patient dies, so do we. That was our choice."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As she talked, Songeen had engaged herself busily with the queerly
+formal operations of tracing the intricate diagrams.
+
+"Do you believe me?" she asked, looking up.
+
+"I'm not sure," Newlin replied frankly. "Are these Masters your gods?"
+
+"Not gods. Living, intelligent beings, civilized, but not like us. Not
+material. I cannot explain. Even they are but advisers and messengers.
+Not all-wise, nor all-powerful. I wish they were; for they are kind."
+
+"You sound like nice people," Newlin admitted. "I wish I could believe
+you. Off-hand, I think you're crazy. You say we're all off the beam.
+Then you talk like delusions of grandeur, and I have reason to know you
+can be homicidal. One of us is nuts. It's a toss-up."
+
+Songeen smiled wearily. "It is possible that I am infected. I am
+inoculated against it, but so was Genarion. Will you believe that I
+loved him? He was my husband. We were children together, like brother
+and sister. Later, we were schooled together, were married, and asked to
+be assigned our task together. I did not sentence him, and I would have
+died myself first. But he had been here too long. If he had gone back,
+the contagion would have gone with him. It was fated. You and I were
+mere tools. Weapons."
+
+"I'm sorry, Songeen. I do believe you loved him."
+
+She shook her head in curious ruffle of emotion. "He was not the first.
+Many of our kind have renounced their birthright to go among your
+people, become like you and share your hideous lives. They are part of
+your great religions, part of the legendary history of your races."
+
+Silence fell between them. Newlin thought of dying Mars, the burnt-out
+husk of Venus, the political and economic pesthole of Earth--even the
+grim, gray, terrible frontiers on the further planets and moons. His
+recollections were a dreadful pageant of spectres, of an ugly,
+terror-haunted childhood, of the bleak years of his barren, lonely
+wanderings--the memory kitbag of a homeless, and often hunted, spacebum.
+
+"I can believe you," Newlin admitted slowly. "Most of the truly
+worthwhile leaders of mankind stand so far above the mob that they seem
+cast in a different mold. The real leaders--not politicians, nor
+military brass. The thinkers and scientists, even the prophets. Every
+great religion sprang from the vision or inspiration of a single leader.
+Beyond the chaff, the fragments of his actual thoughts and words--always
+sound good. But their followers don't follow them."
+
+Songeen's face twisted in bitter wrath. "How terribly true! Can blind
+men follow the sun? They feel its warmth and reach out to it, but they
+stumble and fall on their own clay feet. Blind eyes and hands can never
+reach the light. Most of our emissaries, of that kind, die horribly, and
+their message is distorted to serve the ends of madness and corruption."
+
+"Is there no hope for us?"
+
+She stared at him. The pale glow of her moonbright eyes softened and
+intensified.
+
+"One hope, and only in yourselves. We have tried and failed. If you feel
+so strongly, why have you done nothing?"
+
+Bitter hatred snagged in Newlin's throat, making his laugh a sound of
+horror. "Not me. I can pity the masses of poor and down-trodden, but
+only as masses. As abstractions. Individually, I loathe them. Cornered
+rats will fight back--but men lick the boots of their tormentors. I
+learned only hate and defiance. I'm a cornered rat, not a man."
+
+There was sound now, outside the door they had entered. Low at first, a
+mere scrabbling, as if the trackers had located their refuge. In moments
+only, there came a heavy pounding, followed by the skirl of atomic
+drills. Newlin tensed, his hand itching at the butt of his blaster.
+
+"I'm a rat," he went on. "Cornered, like any other rat. And the terriers
+are out there scratching at my hole. If you'll open that non-squeak
+door, I'll talk to them. Maybe even kill a few."
+
+"No," said Songeen positively. "No killing."
+
+"But I'm a killer," Newlin insisted. "I've killed men before for a lot
+less reason. They're mining the door. How long do you think that will
+last against explosives?"
+
+"Not long," the girl admitted. "But long enough. I have the key at last.
+Stand back."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Something formless and faintly radiant hovered indescribably in space.
+Suspended above the worn flooring, without visible support or tangible
+outline--it existed. Something like weird emptiness, a void appearing in
+the air itself.
+
+"This is the portal," Songeen told him calmly. "Choose now. I will take
+you with me if I can without permission. But do not come with me,
+unwarned. There is grave peril, beyond anything I can describe to you.
+Beyond your experience or imagination. I will try to get you safely
+back, somehow. But I can promise nothing. And if you stay too long,
+there is no coming back. You must remain there; even if the terror of
+your surroundings kills you."
+
+She stood beside the mysterious doorway, waiting. Newlin made a start to
+follow her, then balked.
+
+"Wait!" he ordered roughly, as she was about to lead the way. "I can't
+go with you--not like this."
+
+"Afraid?"
+
+"Yes, but not of you or your world. I trust you. But you say everyone
+here is crazy. That it's infectious. Won't I carry the contagion into
+your world?"
+
+Songeen hesitated. Shadows deepened inside her eyes. "You would, yes.
+But you will have contact with no one but me. Perhaps with the
+Masters--if I can take you to them. They may help us, but they are
+strange, unpredictable. Remember, I promise nothing and you come at your
+own risk. But your disease will harm no one--I'm inoculated, and the
+Masters are immune. If you overstay the limit and cannot return, you
+will be decontaminated just as we must be when we return to our own
+people.
+
+"Here, in this room, is the place where the people of our colony on
+Venus were decontaminated before they could be allowed to enter the
+place of refuge the Masters had prepared for them. It is a cruel and
+harrowing experience. I know. There may be a way to get you safely back,
+without that. But your mind could never stand the shock. Understand
+that, before you choose."
+
+"If it won't harm you, I'll go along," Newlin decided. "Almost any world
+would be an improvement on this."
+
+"Don't be too sure," she warned. "At worst, the terror here is familiar.
+Come, then. Hold my hand, stay close, and try not to be frightened. It
+will be bad enough. And try not to change too much, or I will have
+difficulty returning you alive."
+
+The portal swallowed her, and Newlin felt himself drawn into the
+force-vortex, still clinging to her hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transition was mild enough, less shock than he had expected.
+
+A moment of chill detachment, as if something indescribably cold
+shattered his body into component atoms and readjusted them to new
+patterns. He gasped, his body making the same thermal changes as if he
+stood under a cold shower. He shivered.
+
+Then it was like coming out of the blanketing fog of horror into the
+sunlight of sanity; like rebirth, painlessly, into an eery
+other-dimension.
+
+There was light and sound about him, a stir of cool air. Songeen had
+become separated from him in that moment of strange passage. She stood
+apart, watching him with laughter in her eyes. Laughter as cool and calm
+and soothing as the soft wind that riffled her hair. She had stripped
+off the bulky armor, shed her plastic helmet. Now she was all woman
+again, and somehow, oddly, a symbol of all women.
+
+Other senses than his five sprang into life within him. Weird
+_awareness_ through new perceptions which were nameless to his mind or
+to his memory.
+
+At first there was no terror, no surprise. Merely an overwhelming
+_difference_.
+
+Overhead was starless night, but not darkness. It was a vaulted,
+infinite sky, like an inverted ocean of tinted crystal, transparent, but
+softly colored, deepening imperceptibly to a heart of emerald, a-glow
+with faintest witchlights. All around him was a maze of shimmering
+crystal in odd forms, grotesque, clear but echoing the witchlights of
+that haunted sky.
+
+Wind-borne, came the faint, sweet chiming of distinct porcelain bells.
+The place was alive with movement, sensed but incompletely seen. Even
+the wind flowed in almost visible currents, thickened as if the air had
+become dense, molten glass. All forms in the maze of crystal varied
+constantly. Light flared and died in odd rhythms, and the almost visible
+winds played icy arpeggios upon strings of spun glass, like Aeolian
+harps. Showering notes like those of Chinese windbells hung in clusters
+in the eddies of great wind rivers, and both sound and light flowed
+together and wove strange patterns and infinite variations.
+
+It was not quite pleasant, vaguely nerve-tightening, but highly
+stimulating. Sound was muted at first, as was the light. Images blurred
+and outlines were unsteady, baffling. Everything fused and flowed
+together like half molten shards of broken glass. Wavelengths of
+troubled sound formed trembling notes that hung in the air, almost
+visible, crystalline and somehow painfully dissonant.
+
+Like Songeen, her world or the pathway to it was strange, alien, but
+poignantly beautiful.
+
+It was stranger than he thought.
+
+He realized almost at once that his mind was making adjustments. It was
+lying to him, translating unfamiliar concepts into terms known to
+memory. It was diluting and enfeebling his sensations. But dread grew in
+him.
+
+When his mind tired, stopped lying to him, what would it really be like?
+Could he stand the factual perception?
+
+They trod the forest aisles of crystalline forms. There was light, of
+odd, gray, glary kind. A twilight, silvery, unreal as the trans-Lunar
+dreams of drugged poets. Songeen moved ahead slowly, making no effort to
+regain her clasp of his hand. Almost she seemed to avoid him, waiting
+until he almost overtook her, then skimming lightly away from him. Her
+slim, pale witchery was both taunt and challenge. She appeared to float
+rather than walk.
+
+One by one she dropped her clinging robes. She became part of the mad
+forest, part of its dreamy gray enchantments.
+
+Light grew steadily, and with it came more color, more magic, and more
+confusion of senses. The forest-forms assumed strange geometries. They
+stretched about him in endless vistas, blurring and transmuting as he
+watched. The dream-like cloudiness was fading from his perceptions. He
+caught dreadful hints now and then of new, unheard-of forms and colors,
+of unstable geometries as far beyond Einstein's as his were beyond
+Euclid's. Nothing was tangible or definite, and perhaps that was the
+secret. Nothing ever is. Fear wove a crystalline web about Newlin's
+throat, strangling.
+
+He halted and took stock. Ahead, Songeen waited, watching him, her
+figure a pale, elfin flame form against the shadowy mass of colored
+crystals. It was a forest of gemfires, and she was the purest jewel of
+the forest. Naked, alien, but--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why had he come here? His mind balked at backtracking. There was no
+going back. Perhaps he had already come too far. Was Songeen a vampire
+luring him into the hideous depths of this unknown place? He had been
+here before. It was like that awful illusion in the tower, but muted.
+How much did he perceive? How much was sheerest self-deception? Was he
+mad in the midst of awful sanity, or sane in the ultimate horror of
+lunacy?
+
+Her voice floated back to him, its sound the chiming crash of
+splintering glass.
+
+"Try not to change too much," she warned.
+
+"Change?" Even the word sounded strange to him, as she said it. He felt
+a swift surge of anger. There was no change in him--_none_!
+
+The tinkling bell-tones matched the swirl of his emotion and rose to
+jangling, tormented heights. It was shrill, maniacal tumult, that ranged
+upward and upward into octaves beyond sound. It was a rollicking,
+tortured insanity. Windbells chiming, jangled; tinkling, shimmering,
+exploding inside his brain. Windbells shattering in a hurricane of sound
+and ecstasy.
+
+With his fists, Newlin pounded at his bursting skull. Pain deadened
+perception, gave him a moment's relief.
+
+He was not changing, he shouted in loud defense. He was not!
+
+Songeen poised, watching. Her body-outlines swirled and altered in swift
+mutations before his eyes. She was not woman now. Not even human. She
+danced and flickered and gibbered at him. She was jeweled movement.
+Change. She was as crystalline as the forest, as molten emerald as the
+sky. Points of fire inside her caught and flared and burned inside his
+eyes. She was not Songeen!
+
+Newlin screamed. He looked down at his hands. He screamed again, louder.
+His hands were transparent as glass, and as fluid as water. Outlines
+wavered, changed.
+
+"Try not to change too much," Songeen pleaded. But her voice joined the
+clattering crystalline tumult which raged about him. He was cracking. He
+could feel the seams in his mind giving way.
+
+Like a great, floundering beast, he charged toward her. Forms of brittle
+crystal shattered at his touch. Shattered into sound and pain. The
+forest-forms changed color, echoing his violence. New vortices of
+movement converged upon him. Perceptions expanded and radiance showered
+about him, through him.
+
+The hovering, dancing crystal notes were now visible. Beads of light,
+dripping from a sky of light. They were sound a color, bright, bursting
+bubbles of sound. Their rhythmic tempos increased, murmur swelled into
+insistent roaring and the jangling of insane dissonance. Vitreous
+grotesques shimmered like a forest of aspens quivering in wind and
+sunlight. Glassy fragments of splintered sound poured in floods from sky
+and ground. Trampled grass gave way under his feet in brittle crunching,
+and the brush shivered at his touch, dissolving into chill slivers of
+slashing sound.
+
+Blood was dripping. The forest changed color, as if crimson stain spread
+through it. Hellish glare was a roaring torrent of musical color. Red
+stains spread swiftly, dying the crystal columns, the glassy sward,
+seeping into the reeling brain.
+
+There was blood. The taste of it in his mouth, the hot, salt smell, the
+sound of its dripping. He swam in seas of ruby light, crashing and
+plunging wildly, sinking into its crimson depths. Red light thickened
+around him, deepened, smothering.
+
+The darkness was red, fire-shot, roaring....
+
+Then pain and timeless darkness.
+
+Newlin awakened slowly, to ugly tension in his mind. Shadows like
+beating wings disturbed his memory.
+
+The churning light and sound were gone. He drifted idly, body and mind
+coming softly to rest upon a bank of soft grass.
+
+Someone knelt beside him. Someone cried softly, to the same murmurous
+rhythms of the crystalline forest. Without opening his eyes he sensed
+this, and knew also that he was still within the eery precincts of the
+maze. He opened his eyes, painfully.
+
+This time, there were tears, glistening and falling slowly, glistening
+like crystal dewdrops in sunlight, and falling in softly tinkling shower
+like spilled jewels.
+
+"Songeen!" he cried.
+
+"Yes," murmured a tympany of glass bells, "I am here."
+
+It was Songeen--almost, again, as he remembered her, almost human. It
+was Songeen, small, delicate, unreal, but sweetly feminine--almost
+human. It was Songeen, but with something added, changed, oddly blended
+into both form and personality.
+
+"I tried to save you," she murmured. "I tried, but could not reach you.
+My knowledge is incomplete. I thought you were weak, confused, too
+frightened and disturbed to be changed easily. But you were strong, and
+your violence was a challenge to it. Only the Masters could understand.
+They saved you--not I. They intervened in time."
+
+"The Masters!" Newlin glanced round, quickly, warily. "They are here?"
+
+"Not here--now. But they saved you. I did not know all the dangers.
+They--not I--"
+
+"Saved me from what--death?"
+
+"No--worse. And now they say you must go back. At once. The Masters urge
+haste."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newlin tasted bitterness on his lips. "Orders from headquarters. Well,
+I've been kicked out of better places--but few more interesting. Too bad
+I forgot my brass knuckles."
+
+Physically, he tried to rise. Every bone and muscle ached. But it could
+have been worse. He seemed intact. Hints of vagrant color rippled over
+his visible skin, but he sensed neither pain nor menace from them.
+
+Songeen bent over him. Her arm supported him in sitting position. It was
+unnecessary, but the sensation of contact was pleasant. He yielded to
+her ministrations and looked about. It was still the forest,
+crystalline, murmurous--but now muted. The same glary, unpleasant light
+beat down from the same impossible sky. Storming, eery colors flowed
+infinite mutations of form through the crystal spectres of the maze. And
+the tinkle of myriad glass wind bells held a maddening overtone.
+
+He had thought, somehow, that it would be different. That it would have
+changed, subtly, as had Songeen. But from a brief survey, nothing had
+changed. The tumult had faded, become bearable--but identity remained.
+
+Disappointed, he rose slowly, and felt her strong arm clasp about him.
+He felt clumsy, off-balance, but not weak. If anything, he was stronger.
+Stronger, and more cleanly, clearly alive than he had felt before.
+
+"Come," urged Songeen. "I will take you back to the portal."
+
+"Back--to that?"
+
+Newlin struggled with the futility of words. He was not sure what he
+wanted, let alone what he wanted to say. That insinuating crystalline
+clatter got inside his brain, scattered thought.
+
+Songeen caught a stirring of rebellion in him and sensed his mental
+confusion.
+
+"Don't fear the hunters," she said. "There are other doorways, and you
+can issue onto some other planet, if you wish. Try not to think, or even
+feel."
+
+Her voice penetrated the uproar of his mind, stilling troubled waters,
+blanketing other sounds. For seconds, it seemed to elevate him to some
+remote, lofty plane where life was serene, uncomplicated. Detached, he
+drifted with his own alien thoughts. Through senses other than visual,
+he watched his stumbling progress at her side as the girl threaded a
+pathway through the maze. Through senses not normally his own, he was
+aware of the utter strangeness behind this forest and its crystalline
+mysteries. He recognized the girl as part of the strangeness.
+
+Dimly, he sensed some cosmic reluctance in himself, and was disturbed by
+his trend of thought. Faintly, he was aware of bodily movement and the
+crowding feel of shadowy aisles about him. But he was more aware of the
+girl, of her physical presence, and of the unrest she inspired in him.
+
+Songeen! He had known many women on many, strange worlds. But none like
+this, none ever so strange, so wonderful, so terrifying. He had wanted
+her, yes. But only for an hour of passion, at first. An hour of the
+blinding futility of trying, in her arms, to forget the crowding
+ugliness of life. He had not cared if the women he knew had souls, or if
+he had. Souls were unfamiliar, vague, and he would not have known one if
+he encountered it. Soft, white bodies, glowing like pale witchlights in
+the darkness. Yes, he had known many such. He had known many women,
+loved none.
+
+Newlin had not spoken, not in words. But Songeen heard, by some subtle
+sense that was part of this abnormal forest.
+
+Her laugh was a soft tinkle of breaking glass. She did not speak aloud,
+but word-symbols of thought poured from her mind. Newlin was aware of
+them, springing suddenly into his own brain, but he knew they came from
+her.
+
+"Many women, yes. But none like me. If you loved me, it would not be for
+this body. It is not what you think. I hold this substance, this form,
+only by power of will. It is mine only for a short while more. My flesh
+is not like yours, subject to different laws of form and movement."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newlin answered her, but now in words. His voice sounded like a note of
+strained sanity in such a place of nightmare.
+
+"I never learned love in the sense you mean," he said. "Nor had I
+thought of you again, in that way--after Monta Park. You were too alien
+for me. I understood that. Too alien for any kind of love I knew. You
+were--repulsive."
+
+In silence, then, thoughts blocked out, Songeen guided Newlin. She
+seemed aloof, withdrawn. They filed slowly amid towering masses of smoky
+crystal. She led, drifting like a smoke wraith, before him. Newlin
+picked a cautious pathway over treacherous, unstable footing. He
+followed, bemused, and reluctance grew into agony of mind.
+
+What was wrong with him? He grappled with himself, and strains grew into
+open rebellion. What did he want?
+
+Near the portal, sensing it or another like it, he balked.
+
+"Songeen!"
+
+At his call, she glided back, phantomlike. "Yes?"
+
+"You're in trouble here, aren't you? Because of bringing me?"
+
+Shoulders as translucent as thin ivory shrugged. "No matter."
+
+"But you are?" Newlin insisted, as if it mattered suddenly to him.
+
+"Yes," she granted softly. "But do not alarm yourself. Only
+misunderstanding. I will explain my motives. They will point out my
+error. There is no punishment here."
+
+"You're not telling everything. What is wrong?"
+
+Her moonfire eyes were troubled. "Nothing you can help."
+
+Newlin probed mercilessly. "Tell me. Why did you bring me here? It was
+not only to save me from the hunters. Even I guessed that. Why?"
+
+Poised, slender, defiant as a sword, Songeen met and parried his attack.
+"I cannot tell you that."
+
+Newlin took her rebuff gracelessly. He was a son of Chaos, a man of the
+brawling, violent Solar breeds. His temper was short, his words and
+actions direct. He saw challenge and answered in kind.
+
+"Then take me to the Masters."
+
+Fear and fury blazed in her eyes. "They have not sent for you. I cannot
+take you to them like this. You are mad. You will live to regret this.
+Why, why?"
+
+"I'll tell you. You said I could be decontaminated. You said I could be
+cured, that I could stay here--afterwards. I want to stay now. Is there
+a way. Can I be cured?"
+
+"Of the madness, yes. But it is a fearful way. Do you know how all
+lunatics are treated? How they are cured, if at all? In your own
+asylums, do you know how madness is treated?"
+
+"Yes, I know," Newlin answered roughly. "By shock treatment. I suspected
+something of the sort, all the time. Am I right? Is your treatment
+similar?"
+
+Songeen nodded, her movement a shimmering echo of the forest's mirrored
+quivering.
+
+"Similar--but not the same. The shock used is different. More intense
+and terrible than insulin or electrical shock. Could you survive such
+treatment?"
+
+Newlin snorted. "I don't know. I'm just crazy enough to try. I won't say
+I like this place--your world or the nuthouse entrance to it. But with
+you, I like it better than any other place without you. I think I'm in
+love with you."
+
+Worms of pale light flared and writhed in her eyes. Something shifted,
+the oddments of woman-flesh shredded from her. Like a transparent
+mannequin of glass, she stood. Inside her, luminous organs squirmed
+visibly. Like a dream-woman, she stood just outside the boundaries of
+sanity. But like a dream-woman, she was beautiful, immortal, desirable.
+
+"You've said it," she murmured. "Now that you see me as I am, do you
+still want me? Say it again, now, Spud Newlin, say it in your new
+knowledge of the things as they really are."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newlin hesitated, made his choice. Wandering, ill and alone, terrified,
+in the forests of nightmare--he chose. Madman's choice.
+
+"I love you, Songeen. Take me to the Masters."
+
+Nightmare wavered. A hand, oddly shaped, sought his as the witchfires
+burned low and faded from the sky.
+
+"I can take you now. It is not far, and the Masters are waiting. I have
+warned you. If, after that warning, you still ask to stay, they will
+grant your wish. It needed only your free choice. I am glad you have
+chosen, but shock treatment is a dangerous chance. Are you sure you love
+me--enough?"
+
+"Songeen!" his mind pleaded. "Wait!"
+
+She heard his wordless cry, and waited, opening the glowing, pure
+citadel of her thoughts to him. She gave no answer in words or glowing
+thought symbols. She waited.
+
+"No, I haven't changed my mind. I want to stay. Maybe I can learn to
+like your world. I want the decontamination--the shock treatment. I'm
+scared, but I want it, no matter how it hurts. I want to stay here--but
+not if you're not here. I want to be with you--Hell, Venus, or even
+Callisto--I want to go with you. I love you. If my love is part of my
+madness, don't cure me. I haven't asked you, but I'd like to know. Do
+you love me?"
+
+Songeen was silent. In the glittering forest of crystalline tree forms,
+jeweled birds sang wild riots of bubbling, bursting notes. Darkness
+gathered swiftly in the dense air.
+
+"Didn't you know?" Songeen chimed, matching the bird-notes. "Our names
+are already enrolled in the Great Book. It was custom here, our mating
+rite. It was the only way I could bring you. I did not tell you,
+because--"
+
+She stopped, then continued. "Because I had to be sure of you. Because I
+wanted you to have free choice. Now you must share all my tasks, my
+responsibilities. Before, the task was mine alone. Now we must share it.
+You and I are selected--"
+
+"Selected for what?" Newlin broke in.
+
+He could not see her for thick darkness. But he sensed eery tension of
+movement, and emotion flowed to him from her mind.
+
+"For the great task, the last and greatest of all. We must go back
+together. To Hell. To the system you sprang from. It is for us to
+release to them the ultimate weapon. The deadline is close, as I told
+you. Other races grow desperate, now that your system's isolation is
+breaking down. Pressure for interstellar expansion is extreme on all of
+Sol's planets. The technicians work full time at the problems, and they
+will solve it, soon. We have until then, to kill or cure the patient.
+
+"Other powers and weapons have been released to them in the hope that
+mounting responsibility would bring sanity. Atomic power was turned into
+dangerous toys, implements of murder. We gave them knowledge of atomic
+fission and fusion, and they use the knowledge to butcher and destroy
+each other. We tried all the minor shock treatments. They have failed.
+The time has come for the final treatment. The major shock. We--you and
+I--must give them the ultimate weapon."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newlin knew his humanity. He protested. "But why? If they have misused
+everything else. Why give them something still more hideous? Why give
+them means for further destruction?"
+
+Her answer pulsed through darkness which glittered like black crystal.
+
+"Because it is the final experiment. The last hope for your people, your
+system. We cannot help them beyond that. They must choose for
+themselves, as you did. We must go back to Earth, this time. And it is
+our task to give them the final treatment and test. The ultimate weapon.
+Gravity displacement. Once used, it is the end. Planets will be wrenched
+from the Sun, electrons from their parent nuclei within the very atoms.
+It is the same force. The choice is theirs--kill or cure. Sanity or
+destruction. You and I will stay, try to guide and help, advise, but not
+interfere. Like you, your people must have free choice.
+
+"We must stay with them, and share whatever happens. This is their shock
+treatment--and yours. We will share it together. But come, the Masters
+are waiting. I will take you to them."
+
+"Together!" said Newlin, awed. "You will stay with me and share my--our
+shock treatment!"
+
+"Together, always--now. It is a small price to pay, whatever happens,"
+murmured Songeen.
+
+Her hand drew him close, and she led him outside the zone of crystalline
+murmurs. Darkness leaned closer, solid, tangible. Ahead, was a great and
+terrible light.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Shock Treatment, by Stanley Mullen
+
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