Chapter II: Part 2

The strange conveyance whisked them back to their bungalow. Lucifer soaked himself in a hot bath, and it was a long time before his trembling muscles relaxed. Dinner, via the tubicular, consisted of a meat dish, more strongly flavored than venison, two rather salty green vegetables and a flagon of warm, spicy amber liquid. They ate in silence.

Soon after dinner, Huth appeared on the visagraph screen, for what he called their second orientation session. This was largely a development of the first, and so were those that followed on succeeding days. Each left Lucifer feeling more unsure of himself, tense, mentally adrift. The distance between Melus and his safe, secure little laboratory at Western University was becoming greater than could be measured in light years.

Ranging from geology to biochemistry, from physio-psychical sources of neurosis to what he called the "molecular site of understanding", Huth hammered incessantly with semantics and logic against the carefully mortared bricks of Lucifer's own scientific cubicle. Sometimes he spoke with almost mystical fervor of a frontier beyond a frontier, a science beyond a science. One evening, during a visagraph session, Nina suddenly interrupted:

"Your words speak about the infinite," she murmured, "but your mind does not sing with the music of infinity."

Now, for the first time, Lucifer saw uncertainty on Huth's face.

Uncertainty, and a look of indescribable sadness.

Then the visagraphs screen went dark.

Nina was on the couch beside Lucifer. Her eyes were half-closed; her strong fingers were clasped around her knees and she rocked back and forth gently.

"What a strange man," she said. "What a strange and strong and lonely man. For a moment, I saw all the loneliness of the universe in his eyes...."

Lucifer regarded her uneasily. "You see many things, Miss Poteil."

"No, Lucifer, I see so very little. But what little I do see makes me feel like a blind person the rest of the time. Isn't it terrible to look at shadows?"

"Really, Miss Poteil--"

"Hush!"

She put her finger to his lips.

He started.

"Wha--?"

"Please, Lucifer--Oh, be quiet--Please!"

Her breasts rose and fell sharply beneath the thin tunic. He saw the tendons stand out in her throat. Finally she whispered: "I think someone is coming to see us! Tonight. I'm not sure.... Oh, this damned blindness!"

She beat her fists furiously on her knees.

Lucifer tried to speak casually: "If someone comes, we'll know about it soon enough. Meanwhile, I suggest we try to get some sleep."

There was a strange weariness in her as she got up from the couch and started toward the bedroom, which Lucifer had sternly assigned to her after the first morning of awakening. But after a few steps, she stopped and turned back to him.

"Lucifer, they say you are the father of my baby. If that is so, I am grateful."

It was the first time they had mentioned the child. Lucifer felt shocked, and very humble. This was another new feeling. He decided it would be wisest not to speak.

"You are a man, Lucifer," she went on, in her husky voice. "I knew it when you tried to take that test, knowing you would fail."

She brushed her lips across his forehead.

"Goodnight, Lucifer. I have known many males, but very few men. There is a great difference...."

He lay awake on the couch for a long time, his body aching for sleep, his mind spinning with strange thoughts, stranger concepts. He was just beginning to slip into the twilight zone between wakefulness and troubled sleep when a foreign sound in the room jarred him awake.

Forcing himself to lie completely still, to continue his even breathing, he strained to catch a repetition of the sound; his eyes turned toward the rear window. The latest rain squall had swept by, and the window was now a luminous rectangle against a brilliant, star-filled sky.

As his vision cleared and focused, he saw that the casement window was partly open. A fresh breeze, warm and fragrant with the odors of the rain forest, swept across the couch.

Lucifer heard a definite, sharp click from the visagraph. It was as though a switch had been snapped. But there was no shadow of a physical presence in the room.

The bedroom door opened suddenly. Nina stood there for an instant, silhouetted in her short, white nightgown. Then she moved quickly across the room, knelt beside his couch. Her lips, warm and dry, pressed close to his ear; her long hair tumbled over his cheek and throat. She whispered:

"Can I stay here a little while?"

He nodded, and felt her body crowd against him on the narrow couch.

They lay there together, breathing quietly, watching the open window.

And then there was a shadow there, a darker something against the darkness. Nina's body stiffened. With an unconscious gesture older than remembered time, Lucifer put his arm over her.

A voice spoke out quietly from the window.

"It's O.K. now, Dr. Brill."

* * * * *

A figure stepped through the window, stumbled over the hassock and sat on the edge of it.

"You both there?" a man's voice asked, then, without waiting for an answer, continued: "... Good!.... Fetzer's my name. Albert Fetzer. Remember me, Dr. Brill?"

"I regret to say--"

"That's O.K. It was a long time ago--when I was GI-ing my way through electrical engineering at Western. You gave me a lot of card tests. I did pretty well, too--damm-it!"

"I'm sorry."

"None of us blames you anymore. We were kind of bitter at first--now we're glad you're here."

"Glad?"

"Sure. We've got a lot of things figured out, but there's still a lot more we don't get. You could be a big help to us."

"I sincerely hope so, but--"

"But, nothing, Doc. It looks like they're really giving you the orientation business--like they need you and are going all the way this time!"

Lucifer's tongue felt dry, and difficult to maneuver. He was grateful that Fetzer didn't seem to expect an answer.

"They've been cozy with some of us before, but always cooled off. You just play it smart, learn all you can! But be careful, or you'll end up with the _Goolies_."

Fetzer listened intently, then chuckled.

"I guess they're still kind of fouled up! We had to warp the force field behind your place--shorted their magnetic track, too! But before they get here there's something else I've got to warn you about--'specially you, Mrs. Brill."

He hesitated.

"What is it?" Nina prompted.

"Well, when you think you get a message from us don't bust out with it like you did a while ago. They pick up everything you say on that damn visagraph--I had to short the magnetic track in order to get at the control wire to block it off--"

"Just a moment, Albert," Lucifer interrupted. "How did you know what was said in this room?"

Fetzer sounded embarrassed:

"Well, it's a funny thing, Doc, but back on Earth we were all kind of ashamed of this psi thing. We tried to keep it hid from other people. Here, it's different. We're all the same way, more or less. So we try to use psi instead of hide it. Doesn't work on Huth's gang, though. They got minds like machines--It's like trying to psi into a quarter-horse motor!"

There was a pounding of footsteps outside the front door.

"Gotta go!" said Fetzer.

He twisted lithely through the window, closed it behind him and vanished into the sultry night.

Nina slipped from the couch and hurried into the bedroom.

The front door banged open. The room light flared on, blinding Lucifer.

Huth was there, with two of his men. The men ranged about the place with giant strides, going through the living room, the bedroom and out into the rear enclosure. One of the men worked on the visagraph, trying to light it up. He had no success.

Huth stood over Lucifer's couch. "Has anyone been here?" he demanded sternly.

"If there was, he was more quiet and courteous than you have been," snapped Lucifer. "Need I remind you that this has been a most exhausting day, and that to be awakened in this manner--"

"Mrs. Brill received a message, and informed you of it."

"Miss Poteil talks a great deal of nonsense, which you must also have overheard. However, I assure you, Sir, that I am not interested in her hallucinations, and if you are, I suggest you discuss them with her in the morning."

"What happened to the visagraph."

"If I knew, I wouldn't care. Your electronic gadgets impress me as being rather juvenile."

Huth bowed.

"Perhaps because you do not understand them, Dr. Brill."

The warning in his voice was clear. He turned sharply on his heel, motioned his men out of the room and left, shutting the door quietly.

* * * * *

With breakfast, the tubicular delivered a metal-backed manuscript that bore the scholarly title: "Genetics and Psi, with an Evaluation of Three Case Histories as Compiled from Earth Records."

Nina glanced at the title across the breakfast tray, then shifted her chair beside Lucifer's.

"I'd better read that, too," she said. "Maybe it will tell us something about our own genetics experiment."

Lucifer pursed his lips in disapproval at her frankness, but he held the manuscript so that both could study it. The introduction began:

"After studying the incidence of psi on Earth, we felt that the genetics approach should receive considerable concentration of effort. Our chemists, biochemists and physicists are naturally continuing their experimentation, but the geneticists seem to promise the maximum results in the minimum amount of time. If psi can be explained, understood and propagated through genetics, it can no longer be mis-nomered 'extra-sensory'. It will become no more 'extra-sensory' than sense of direction, sense of time and, in the case of musical aptitude, such component primary senses as sense of absolute pitch, sense of intensity, sense of harmony, sense of rhythm and sense of tonal memory. Thousands of tests have indicated that these musical senses may have an hereditary base."

"Physiologizers!" Lucifer exclaimed, contemptuously.

"Let's keep our windows clean," Nina murmured.

He stared at her in surprise.

"My father used to say that," she explained. "He told us to keep our windows clean--so truth can look in and out."

Lucifer turned back the manuscript. He felt somehow chastened.

After several paragraphs of further discussion on the hereditary aspects of the various senses, even including the inheritance through a dominant gene of the ability to taste, the manuscript went into a long analysis of the family trees of Arturo Toscanini, Kirsten Flagstad and the 19th century mystic, Daniel Dunglas Home.

"Please note," the manuscript emphasized, "that in all three family trees a favorable heredity and a favorable environment were perfectly blended."

Nina gasped excitedly.

"Oh, Lucifer--if this project can bring the right parents together...."

"Human beings are not white mice!" Lucifer snapped!

"They are on Mendel's Planet!"

Nina seized his hand.

"Think, Lucifer! Our child may be able to see things we have never dreamed of seeing! We will teach him to use his eyes from the very moment of birth--even before!"

Deep anger and resentment stirred within Lucifer, but before he could answer her, a click from the visagraph screen told them they were not alone.

Huth's usually calm voice betrayed his excitement. His dark eyes glowed.

"Mrs. Brill--how would you propose to train a child so early?"

"By encouraging him to use his own true senses rather than his superficial senses for his very first needs! My father raised all six of us and he used to say I was a good baby, because I never cried to be fed or changed. But maybe it was because he knew what I wanted and took care of me before I cried!"

Huth insisted on sending for them immediately. There was a three-day-old Earth child at Center. Huth had the baby's records before him when they arrived. Nina, flushed with eagerness, asked:

"How is the baby fed?"

Huth consulted a chart.

"Both formula and breast. But it doesn't appear that the mother will be able to nurse much longer."

"When is the next feeding time?"

"In approximately one hour."

Huth took them to the nursery. Through the window, they could see that the baby was still asleep.

The young mother was sitting up in her room. A tiny, thin-faced woman, she looked at them with alarm.

"Is something wrong with my baby?"

Nina knelt beside her chair.

"Don't you know your baby is all right?" she asked gently.

"I--I thought so. But when you all walked in like this, I wasn't sure."

Lucifer didn't recognize this young woman; nor did she appear to recognize him. Her eyes, still dilated, roved apprehensively from face to face.

"You're not going to do something to my baby?"

Lucifer felt a great pity for this young woman, snatched away from Earth to bear a child with an unknown mate on this strange planet.

"I wouldn't harm your child," Nina told her. "I'm from San Diego--how about you?"

"Masselon, Ohio."

"Now tell me," Nina asked, "is your baby awake yet?"

The dilated eyes stared at Nina.

"I'm ... I'm not sure, but I don't think so."

"That's fine. Now, please don't be scared. I want to help you and your baby. Do you trust me?"

The young mother studied Nina unblinkingly. After an instant of hesitation, she nodded.

"Thank you. Now, are you going to feed your baby yourself this next time?"

"I'll try again; but I haven't been doing so well."

"Can you tell when your baby is starting to wake up?"

"I thought I could the first day or so. But then I didn't try--I guess I got used to having my baby brought to me every four hours."

"Is the baby usually crying when it is brought into the room?"

The young mother smiled.

"Oh, yes! She's got a strong, healthy cry!"

"Will you try to feed her this time before she cries, when she first tells you that she is hungry?"

"What--what do you mean?"

Nina took the young mother's thin hand between her strong, brown fingers. "You know what I mean! Don't be afraid to use what God has given you! Let's stop talking now so you can keep your thoughts with your child!"

Under the dominance of Nina's personality, the woman settled back in her chair.

Outside, the first rain of the morning swept over the forest and steamed up the windows. Huth stood statuesquely by the door, arms folded. The tall nurse remained watchfully beside him.

Lucifer struggled with an unaccustomed inner turmoil. Dissecting the tangle of his emotions, he was astonished to realize that his pulse was thumping with excitement.

Abruptly, the young mother spoke up. "My baby is hungry. She wants to be fed."

"Go feed her then!" commanded Nina.

She helped the young woman from the chair. Together they led the way down the corridor. As they neared the nursery, Lucifer edged closer to them. He saw that the child was still asleep. The mother saw it, too.

"But she's still asleep!" she said, bewildered. "I thought--"

"Does a child have to be awake to tell of its hunger?" Nina asked gently.

The young mother went ahead of them into the nursery. She took the child from the crib and cradled it in her arms.

The baby stirred, grimaced. Its lips groped in small, sucking motions.

The young mother hesitated, then opened her robe and brought the baby's lips to her breast. The child began to feed contentedly.

At a gesture from Nina, the others left the mother and child alone in the nursery.

When they were well down the corridor, Nina burst out triumphantly,

"The first contact! Child has communicated to mother. Message received and answered. Child has used primary sense of communication, rather than learning to rely on secondary!" Nina squared her shoulders proudly. "My baby won't have to cry to tell me that it's hungry or cold or wet and miserable!"

Lucifer's New England conscience prodded him. If indeed there was anything to this psi heredity business, then he had again hurt someone else, unknowingly, but deeply. What would Nina say and feel when she learned that he had no psi talent to pass on to their child?

But this uneasy remorse conflicted with another emotion in Lucifer: The sense of excitement that he suddenly realized had been lost somewhere back in the early years of his psi testing. Somewhere, sometime along the way the sense of wonder had gone out of his work and his life. The constant repetition of the same basic testing technique had made a familiar backyard out of--what had Huth called it?--the very frontier of science.

Huth was speaking to him.

"What do you think now, Dr. Brill? Could it be possible after all that the unorthodoxy of Earth's parapsychology might have to be shaken from its own orthodoxy?"

Lucifer frowned. "I do not want to split definitions with you. But it should be obvious to any scientific mind that Miss Poteil's experiment, although interesting, was painfully inadequate in methodology. In the first place, can we determine whether the child was communicating a need, or whether a psi-positive mother had some precognition of her child's need? In the second place, would a large number of children born of psi-positive parents react with significant difference from a similar number of children born of psi negatives?"

"A flash of lightning can be duplicated in the laboratory," said Huth, "but it is still a flash of lightning. We recognize lightning, we admit its existence, but we do not wish to go on proving forever in the laboratory that lightning is in fact lightning. If some of your earlier scientists had been content to do that, your cities would still be illuminated by oil lamps."

"A fallacious comparison!"

"Not entirely so! I merely wished to make a point. It is all a matter of objective. You have seen how older children are developing their psi talents in our classes. Your wife may have shown us how to begin training at a much earlier age, when training is most important."

"Still, I should think you would require more substantiation, some further testing, to support Miss Poteil's little experiment."

"Of course. Do you have any suggestions, Dr. Brill?"

Once more Lucifer found himself backed toward a corner. Only this time he did not try to escape. The challenge intrigued him, in spite of his determination not to become involved with this nonsense. A controlled experiment was quite a different thing....

"I might have," he replied, with an effort to be casual. He plucked at his mustache. "But you must grant that a valid basis for experimentation cannot be improvised on the spur of the moment."

"Improvise at your leisure, Dr. Brill."

Nina was sent off to continue orientation work with Dr. Thame. Lucifer was given a small cubicle near Huth's office. It consisted of little more than a desk, a stool, three bare walls and a floor to ceiling window through which an orange rim of the planet's great sun was now shining mistily.

Lucifer scribbled notes, drew crude diagrams, tore them up and started all over again. Spots of color flushed his cheeks. Though he would not have made the admission, he hadn't enjoyed himself so much in fifteen years. He didn't even notice when a new squall rustled across the wet jungle, blotting out the sun and drumming against the window.

Huth came in with the attendant who brought lunch.

"How many children are there here now?" Lucifer asked crisply.

"I believe we have about thirty under the age of nine months."

"Do you have another nursery room, like the one we visited this morning?"

"We have three more in the Maternity Division."

Lucifer explained his immediate needs. Huth issued orders that three more babies be brought to the Maternity Division. Each was installed alone in a nursery. Two were placed in cribs, and soon fell asleep. The third, a boy of about eight months, refused to nap. He wasn't happy until allowed to crawl around the floor, exploring the strange wonders of the nursery. Lucifer made a quick procedural adjustment, and hoped the youngster would stay awake until feeding time.

He tried to tell himself, whenever he thought about it, that he was doing all this only to point up the absurdity of Huth's theories.

As feeding time neared, three bottles of heated formula were brought in warmers and placed at Lucifer's direction in rooms immediately adjacent to each of the nurseries. Two of the children were still asleep; the third had discovered a pack of disposable diapers and was systematically tearing it apart. Dr. Thame joined them to watch the experiment, and he brought Nina along. Her eyes sparkled with interest and understanding as she watched Lucifer's preparations. After one quick nod, he did not look her way again, and he stifled the thought that Nina would be watching the experiment with their own child in mind.

One of the babies stirred in its sleep, and whimpered a little.

"Normally," explained Dr. Thame, "a child of this age would awaken shortly and begin to cry."

The baby squirmed again, then turned toward the room in which one of the bottles had been placed. Its tiny lips worked in a sucking motion.

"How wonderful!" whispered Nina.

Lucifer picked up the bottle, moved slowly into the corridor.

The child appeared confused. Its eyes screwed up tightly, and its face reddened. Then it jerked its head toward the new position of the bottle and repeated the sucking motion.

Nina, who had followed Lucifer, squeezed his arm in excitement. He gave her the bottle, and she hurried into the nursery to reward the child. Its lips groped eagerly for the nipple.

By this time, the second child was stirring. Its reactions were much slower, and more uncertain, than those of the first baby, but they followed the same pattern.

Nina went on to the third child, which had been left playing on the floor of the nursery.

"Lucifer! Come quickly!" she called.

The child had crept over to the wall nearest the room in which its bottle had been placed. It was pawing, bewildered, at the rough surface.

Ducking below the window edge, Lucifer picked up the bottle and moved it to the other side of the room.

For a moment the child looked like it was about to cry. But it hitched around on its knees, sprawled flat, raised up again and crawled across the floor. When it was midway to the other side of the nursery, Lucifer switched the bottle back to its original position.

The child continued its forward progress for a few feet, faltered and stopped. Its red button of a nose wrinkled, and two big tears squeezed down its round cheeks.

Nina rushed into the nursery, picked up the youngster, cooed over it and thrust the nipple of the bottle between its anxious lips.

"My compliments, Dr. Brill," said Huth. "Does this begin to satisfy your laws of probability?"

Lucifer was determined not to show his excitement. He shrugged. "Five thousand more tests might prove something--providing you counterposed 5,000 tests on children whose ancestry was psi negative."

"We're not interested in psi negative children, Dr. Brill."

Lucifer faced him squarely.

"Just what are you interested in? I think we are entitled to an explanation."

Huth hesitated, then nodded.

"Perhaps you are."

* * * * *

When they were settled in Huth's office, he stood by the window and folded his huge, bronzed arms.

"My home planet," he began, "is also in the system of Capella. We are an old race, but neither decadent nor degenerative. Our physical sciences--as you can judge from your presence here--are at least 500 orbits beyond the outermost probings of science on Earth."

He paced across to the door, and back to the window again.

"But in our obsession and fascination with the ever new horizons of physical science, we neglected that which was potentially of far greater significance. We ignored the possibilities of psionic evolution--we ignored them until it was almost too late!"

"Too late," breathed Nina. "Is that why your mind feels like a machine?"

Huth inclined his massive head in her direction.

"That could be why, Mrs. Brill. What society--or our bodies--neglect will eventually die. It is true even of psi, Dr. Brill."

"Can you be specific?" Lucifer challenged.

"I can. If you had taken your eyes out of the laboratory long enough to look at your world as it is and has been, you would have learned that psi manifestations were quite customary on Earth during the 13th and 14th centuries. But your industrial age did not have much room for psionics. With Daniel Dunglas Home went the last of your great psi talents!"

"Our card tests have discovered many psi positives," Lucifer interjected heatedly. "You ought to know--you have many of them here now!"

"Psi positives with thwarted, arrested or frustrated talents," replied Huth. "Psi positives who wanted to be 'normal', because that is what society demanded.... Psi positives who were ashamed of their talent and quite willing to have it overlooked! Yes, we have them here ... and, what is more important, we have their less inhibited children!"

"Your logic escapes me."

"It wouldn't if you had emerged from your cubicle and looked around you among the physical sciences. Some of your more venturesome geneticists believe that man will soon be the master of his heredity and that the next five million years of evolution on Earth will be the controlled evolution of the human mind. That could mean controlled evolution toward psi, Dr. Brill--if Earth science can ever escape the terrible drag of orthodoxy and if the unorthodox can ever learn to avoid the trap of its own dogma."

Nina had been watching Huth with the unblinking intensity that was so characteristic of her in moments of total concentration.

"So we are your nursery!" she exclaimed. "We produce the plants that will bring life back to your own soil!"

Huth came close to one of his rare smiles. "You have admirably reduced the milleniums and mathematics of evolution to a single sentence!" He turned to Lucifer. "Is this a laboratory big enough to challenge you?"

Lucifer took refuge in a question of his own. "What about your _Goolies_?"

From the shadow on Huth's face, and the faint gasp from Nina's parted lips, Lucifer knew he had made a mistake.

"Where did you learn that name?" Huth asked him coldly.

Lucifer was not a good liar, but he tried. "I--I don't really know. Perhaps--from one of your nurses or drivers...."

"We will accept that explanation, for the moment. Later, I trust you will volunteer another."

Huth's emphasis on "volunteer" was almost imperceptible, yet it had the effect of two pieces of steel striking together.

"You have already met one of these--_Goolies_. Let us go and meet some more."

Nina put out her hand. "Is this necessary?"

Huth regarded her thoughtfully.

"Yes, I believe it is. If we are going to work together, you should know everything."

"And if we're not?" Lucifer snapped. Huth shrugged. "Then it won't make any difference, I assure you."

Outside, the wet moss of the courtyard was springy underfoot. Lucifer flinched with the remembered horror of trying to breath through that moss and water.

Nina took his hand. Her fingers were strong and warm.

A tall attendant let them into the building. Lucifer looked down a long, sterile-white corridor, flanked by small, seemingly transparent doors.

"The doors are transparent only from this side, and then only when subjected to the proper wave frequency to make them so," Huth explained.

"Like the rooms we live in!" Nina burst out.

Huth blinked, and assented, "Like the rooms you live in."

Before Lucifer could assimilate this bit of information, Huth had stopped before the first door.

Inside was a shrunken monstrosity of a creature. It had the torso of a grown woman, but its legs were bone thin, twisted and scarcely eighteen inches long. It was hairless; its face was one ovular blob of flesh, in which the eyes, mouth and nostrils were knife-edge slits. It seemed to be watching the rain-streaked window.

There were two beings in the next room, apparently male and female. Both were naked, and seated cross-legged on a thick mat. They were playing a complicated game with marked and colored blocks. The woman's body was covered with a fine, brown hair. Her breasts were tiny for the dimensions of her body. Her head was also small out of all proportion, as was the male's. Lucifer saw that though both were eyeless they were playing their game rapidly and skillfully. Their hands were lumps of flesh, with just rudimentary fingers.

"They are quite sentient," Huth observed. And he added with pride, "You would classify them as definite psi positives--altogether our most successful experiment of this type!"

As they neared the next door, it suddenly became opaque. Huth led them past it without comment. Nina winced, and her fingers tightened convulsively.

They were led quickly down the rest of the corridor. Some of the doors were opaque. Through others, they caught glimpses of more grotesquely distorted creatures, some asleep, some lurching or crawling about their rooms.

The corridor ended in a large multi-purpose type of room in which semi-human creatures of all shapes and sizes were milling about.

Huth opened the door. "Go on in," he said.

It took all of Lucifer's will to control his revulsion and trembling and step through that door. Nina followed. Her fingers rigid in his hand.

One of the creatures nearest them turned nimbly around on one leg and hopped closer. It reached out a long arm, touched Nina's forehead. A harsh, croaking sound came from its mouth. Nina's lips quivered, but she smiled and patted the leathery hand.

Others bounded and crept around them, jibbering, feeling their faces and hair, probing at their bodies with stumps of arms or with hands that seemed all fingers.

"All of these people show some traces of psi," Huth explained. Again there was quiet pride in his voice.

A wracking cry came from one corner of the room. A huge shape hurtled into the group around them, knocking others out of its way. Lucifer saw the wildly flopping head, then long arms reached for him and a crushing weight bore him to the floor. There was a choking odor of hot, oily flesh.

And then the weight was gone. Two attendants led the creature, still mouthing angry cries, out of the room.

Huth helped Lucifer to his feet. "You must forgive Tetla. He shows up well in some basic psi tests, but certain other faculties were lost in the manipulation of his chromosomes. We never quite know what he will do."

The other beings had fallen back in silence during the assault. Now they began to babble in wild disharmony, each gesticulating in its own way.

Lucifer's cheeks were grey, but his lips were compressed into a thin line under the stubble of his mustache. He took Nina's arm and strode out of the room. Huth followed, without comment.

Out in the corridor, Lucifer confronted him. A sweep of his arm encompassed the long corridor, the room they had just left.

"This--this is a monstrous inhumanity--a terrible perversion of science!"

His voice was flinty with rage. Deep within him, the conscience of his puritan ancestry was revolted.

Huth raised an admonishing hand. "Don't forget your scientific training, Dr. Brill. You can't impose the value judgements of one culture upon the framework of another."

"There must be certain principles basic to all cultures!"

"A true Aristotelian fallacy! Form is actual reality, matter is potential reality and the form is ever in the matter! Surely, Dr. Bill, you can rise above such ontology!"

"Can you justify what you have done to these people even from your own value judgement basis?"

"You treat justification as a valid entity, which leads you deeper into the morass of attempting to substantialize abstracta. We do not justify, we do! Let me clarify:

"With the future of our evolution in the balance, with the unbounded horizons of the universe that will be opened by psi, we have taken certain measures. Once we postulated the genetic characteristics of psi, there was no limit to possible methodology. You have seen only two of many methods we are exploring: One, of course, is the Earth project; the second is an attempt to induce psi mutations in the offspring of certain of our own people. Naturally, since the external results of such experiments are often unpleasant, we bring the newly born infants directly to our laboratory on Melus."

Nina's eyes were still wide with horror.

"How do you do this thing?"

"Really, Mrs. Brill, it's nothing to be so shocked about. As a matter of fact, it's only a further step in what your own experimenters do by exposing Drosophilae to X-rays and plants to colchicine. We are endeavoring by many methods not only to mutate a gene by re-arranging the atoms in its molecules, but also to increase the quota of chromosomes in certain cells. The difficulty, as yet, is to single out the right string of chromosomes or to hit the right gene and influence it toward the desired psi mutation. We are still groping in the dark, simply increasing the chances that one or another gene, at random, will psi mutate."

As Huth spoke, he had been leading them toward a side exit. A vehicle was waiting. Huth put his hand on Lucifer's shoulder.

"We did not bring you to Melus, Dr. Brill, merely to reproduce your own psi characteristics. We feel that your background will enable you to make many notable contributions, once you become oriented. Already you have justified this feeling. Your people will do things for you and Mrs. Brill that they would not willingly do for us."

"I want nothing more to do with this project."

"I am sure you will recognize your present reaction as purely emotional, and come quickly to realize that here you have the answer to a true scientist's dream--a laboratory on the scale of life itself! For twenty years you have taken timid steps around the periphery of your science. Now you are at the heart of it!"

* * * * *

What should he think?

What should he believe?

What should he do?

Lucifer walked slowly around the small clearing behind their quarters. He stared, for the most part unseeingly, through the force field and into the shadows of the forest.

His shoulder brushed the invisible barricade, and the shock broke the rhythm of his stride.

What should he believe?

This question bubbled most frequently to the roiled surface of his thoughts. With belief would come the mental framework, the pattern for action. It was disturbing and confusing that credo should be so important to a scientific mind. Couldn't facts take form without credo? Did facts shape the framework, or were they molded to conform to it? Einstein made truth relative to its own framework, but which came first--the framework or the truth? And if the answer was framework, could there be truth? Perhaps the childhood riddle of the chicken and the egg could have cosmic implications. A vagrant phrase from a long-ago literature class came back to prod him now: To an egg the chicken is merely the means of producing another egg. Samuel Butler.

A shaft of sunlight speared down through the whispering canopy of branches high above him. It kindled to life a spot of riotous color in the perpetual shadow world at the base of the great trees. Blossoms of delicate blue, petals flecked with orange and gold. Leaves so green they brought an ache of loneliness for a forgotten spring morning of youth.

What should he believe?

With sudden percipience, Lucifer knew that he had moved in the shadows for a long time. The riotous dreams of youth, the exciting sense of being a pioneer among pioneers, had become like a bit of stop-motion film. It preserved the form, without the life or action. A dream cannot be framed and kept behind glass. It cannot be static. To remain, it must change.

Parapsychology had been the high road. The glorious adventure. It had made the son of a New England minister an explorer on a new frontier. But does a frontier of science have purpose other than to lead to an infinite succession of new frontiers? Had he remained too long on one frontier?

The unorthodox becomes the orthodox. The theory crustifies into the dogma. The method becomes methodology. Was this forever to be the entrapment of science? There were an infinite number of exploratory possibilities on this frontier of today; and, for all their challenge, they could be a soporific. The frontier itself was finite. But what about the next frontier? And the next? And the next?

Huth could be right, in this at least: Perhaps parapsychology had been too long exploring the unknown of its present frontier. Some must remain behind to develop and consolidate. But others must keep moving on!

To look forever beyond the next horizon! There was the challenge. There was the dream forever bright.

Lucifer thought of his crude experiment with the psi positive children, and he admitted now what he had denied at the time: Not for a decade had he been so excited by any experiment; it had brought back the wonder of the moment when an aimless undergraduate had first come upon the Rhine card tests. Lord, that was more than twenty years ago! For twenty years he had been walking in Rhine's shadow. And his personal, private dreams had never lived to see sunlight.

When would science learn to use genius without being smothered by it? Freud and Einstein had left a vision to their sciences, not a citadel. They had tried to cast a light, not a shadow. Rhine had brought psi into his laboratory to demonstrate its scientific validity. Now, the physicist, the biochemist, the mathematician and, yes, the geneticist--all of them, must take this validity into their own laboratories. The parapsychologist must become the physical scientist; the physical scientist must become the parapsychologist. Only from the total crucible of science could psi emerge in a useful form.

But what of Huth, and Mendel's Planet?

However it had been brought together, whatever one thought of it, this living laboratory was now a fact. Psi was being mated to psi; children were being born, children with a psi potential that could be trained into a power of unknown magnitude. Huth had described it well: A laboratory on the scale of life itself!

Huth knew his semantics, all right. The barbs of his words got under the skin, hooked and held fast. How pallid an Earth laboratory would seem after Mendel's Planet. The symbol cards seemed to have lost their meaning.

A dozen projects clamored to reach the surface of Lucifer's thinking. Each cried out its siren challenge; each demanded experimentation. How much there was to do here on Mendel's Planet!

Now, Nina was at his side, and she said gently, "It's raining again, Lucifer. Won't you come in?"

The rain had returned, and the big, splashing drops hadn't fallen into his thoughts. But they were coursing in streams down his cheeks, dripping from his eyebrows. He brushed them away, and stared at the forest. The shadows had merged. The flowering beauty was like a mirage that had never been, and never could be. There was only the wash of the rain on the forest roof, the drip-drop-drip on the molding carpet of dead leaves.

* * * * *

Albert Fetzer came back that night. The click in the visagraph, the deeper blackness of the walls, the silent opening of the casement window--these were the now recognizable signs of his coming.

Lucifer hadn't been able to sleep. Nina had already gone to bed, after pressing her lips to his cheek in a swift gesture that left him more unsettled than ever.

When he realized that Fetzer was coming, Lucifer sat up on the couch and drew the sheet around his shoulders. In a moment the stocky figure squeezed through the window.

"Hi, there," Fetzer called softly. "You awake, Dr. Brill?"

"I haven't slept."

"How'd things go today?"

How had things gone?

"I'm not sure," Lucifer evaded.

"You got it all figured out?"

"Well--not exactly."

Lucifer was stunned at his own reluctance to discuss matters with Fetzer. Anything less than total frankness was a new facet of himself. It was one he didn't like. But how could he share his indecision?

"We had an organization meeting after I left here last night," Fetzer said. "All the section leaders made it this time. We're set to pull the plug any time you say?"

"Pull.... Oh, I hadn't realized.... What do you think you can do?"

"Plenty. We've learned to short-circuit the force fields in a hurry, and we can spring over a thousand men inside of two minutes. Within five minutes more, we'd be able to hit Center and the landing field."

Lucifer felt himself withdrawing even more. He could see the whole psi project swept away in turmoil. Then he thought of Huth's men, so towering in their stature, so well organized, so completely equipped by a fantastically advanced technology. The revolt would be brutally crushed.

"You can't do it!" he told Fetzer.

"Huh?" The stocky figure tensed. "Spell it out, Doc."

"You wouldn't have a chance!"

"We've got a few tricks. There's a lot of vets in this bunch."

"It would be suicide."

Fetzer hunched closer to the couch.

"Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. But a man can't always stop to think of things like that. You do what you got to do."

The words triggered a release, and Lucifer started to talk.

With an eloquence that would have astounded his graduate students at Western University, Lucifer drew a word picture of the psi project and the theory behind it. As he talked, Nina came in quietly and sat on the couch beside him, drawing up her knees inside her short gown.

Lucifer spoke of their own experiments with the babies, and of the sweep of five million years of evolution foreshortened through understanding and application of Hardy's Law. Only when he came to the radiation and chemical phases of the psi project, to the pitiable _Goolies_, did his flow of words falter. He tried to pick up quickly with analysis of what training would do for their own children. But the nagging awareness of this second dishonesty, the knowledge that Nina knew what he had done and was watching him in the darkness, broke the flow of thought and his explanation trailed off into awkward silence.

Albert Fetzer didn't say anything. He squatted on his heels, a humped blur in the darkness of the room. Lucifer could feel the probe of his eyes and darting mind.

"So that's it," Fetzer said at last. "We guessed some of it, but we couldn't fill in the missing pieces. You learned a lot, Doc."

"There's so much I haven't yet learned."

"You learned enough."

"Enough for what?"

"We're going to pull that plug, remember?"

"No!" Lucifer stood up in his agitation. "There must be another way--a better way."

"You name it."

"Well--naturally I'd have to think more about it. Everything here is so new to me."

Fetzer stepped closer to him. His shadow was shorter even than Lucifer's, but it bulked with unseen strength.

"Anything else, Doc?"

"I don't understand."

"You've gone for this stuff, haven't you."

Lucifer recoiled from the bluntness of the question.

"I am a scientist," he replied. "Or at least I have always assumed that. These ideas are as strange to me as they are to you, but I'm trying to understand and evaluate them. Isn't that important?"

"Not to me it isn't--not right now. I think the other boys will feel the same."

"You don't care what all this may mean?"

"Nope. Not yet, anyway. I'm not a scientist, Dr. Brill. Maybe I'm not even a very smart guy and maybe I'm just as glad of it, because my feet are on the ground and I know where I want them to go. Sure, this psi stuff could be big, mighty big. Our kids could go a long way with it. I can see that. But I'm a man, not a guinea pig. I happen to go for the woman they teamed me up with, and she feels the same way about me. That's true of most of the folks here. But we're not breeding kids for someone else. We'd rather run our own show. Guess you professors have been away from ordinary people too long to realize that. You should listen to some of our boys who fought with the underground in the last war. Makes you feel kind of good about people."

"Don't you realize that Huth can destroy all of you?"

"I'm not the hero type, Dr. Brill. In the war, I always kept my head down and squeezed as deep in the mud as I could. But there's some things you have to do, no matter how cold your stomach feels about it."

"When do you plan to do this?"

From the forest came a wild, plaintive cry. Fetzer took a quick step toward the window, then paused.

"You better come with me--both of you."

Lucifer drew back.

"Where? Why?"

"I don't like to do this, Doc. But I don't like the way you sound, either. We can't take any chances."

"You don't think ..."

"I don't know. I'm sorry, but I don't know enough about your kind. Hurry up, now."

Lucifer still held back, but Nina stood up and moved wordlessly toward the window. Fetzer's voice toughened.

"Make it easy on yourself, Doc. You're coming along, one way or the other."

His legs shaking, Lucifer followed Nina through the window.

* * * * *

The warp in the force field was at the far corner of the enclosure. At a command from Fetzer, they dropped to their knees and crawled through. A voice whispered a challenge. Fetzer answered, and they proceeded, single file, deeper into the forest. The leader guided them with a pinpoint of light escaping from his cupped hand.

They followed a winding course around the root structures of the trees. Lucifer tripped once and fell sprawling into the wet, leathery leaves. As he got up, the spider loop of a vine caught him around the throat and flipped him again.

"Pick up your feet and keep your head down," Fetzer warned impatiently.

Their direction took them to a shallow stream, and they splashed up the middle of it for a hundred yards. The cacophony of night sounds retreated before them, closed in behind them. The rooftop of intermeshed branches and leaves dripped endlessly. Some alien creature followed them through the branches, yapping in a strident monotone.

They emerged from the stream to crawl into a semi-cave formed by the enjoining roots of two great trees. Vegetation had webbed over the roots until even the dropping of water was cut off.

The light of a guttering torch showed several men waiting for them. A few carried strange weapons stolen from Huth's men. Others were armed with vicious looking clubs, and long, needle-pointed stakes.

It's fantastic, thought Lucifer. Cavemen prepared to challenge a mechanized force. Cavemen forty light years from home.

When they saw Nina, the men stood up, surprised, uneasy. Fetzer went into some detail on what Lucifer had told him. One of the men swore, and smashed the head of his club on the sodden floor of the cave.

A balding man seated Nina on a hummock in one corner of the cave. Ignoring Lucifer, they plunged into discussion of their plans. None could see any reason for further delay. The supply ship had been gone for some time, and might return soon. Its crew would add strength to Huth's base force, which numbered around eight hundred, including nurses, doctors and various technical personnel.

To Lucifer, the plan sounded bold. Pathetically bold. A sizeable group would break out of their quarters and flee into the forest, drawing a portion of Huth's men in pursuit. Another group would attack Center, making it appear that this was the chief point of concentration. After delaying as long as possible, the main force would hit the landing field and try to capture the auxiliary spaceship. The men knew they couldn't handle the ship, but their work around the field had taught them enough about it to know that its armament could give them control of the base.

As Lucifer listened, a sense of familiarity kept tugging at him. It was a strange sensation that he had been through something like this before. But that was ridiculous. He'd never been any closer to military action than rejection by his draftboard, which had stupidly considered parapsychology non-essential.

The feeling persisted, and suddenly he identified it: Hempstead House, New London, Conn. The stories he had been told in childhood about the underground railroad and the abolitionist meetings held by the few who believed men should be free and were willing to do something about it!

The memory came to him across thirty-five years of his life, and half the span of the galaxy. It came with an impact that snapped something inside him, to bring the entity, the changing personality that was himself, into focus again. But it wasn't the same focus as before. It would never be. Yet he felt more a whole person than ever before, and within him there was a surging current that could not be held back.

Hempstead House had been a verity that could not be fitted into any neat cubicle of orthodoxy. New England ministers and spinsters, businessmen and farmers--all of them motivated by a life force that couldn't be duplicated in any laboratory. The same life force was in this tree cave tonight, far away from Earth. It would go with men forever, through all space and time.

It would go with Lucifer Brill, too--to the end of this experience, to whatever new frontiers of science he might live to reach. It would prevent the vision from becoming the still-life picture, the theory from crystalizing into dogma. As long as the force lived in any man, it had the potential of leading all men to freedom. Psi was an unknown part of that life force. It could not always remain in the laboratory. It must bring freedom from blindness, freedom from the cubicles that restricted each man, each science. It was a weapon ...

A weapon!

Good Lord, why not?

Lucifer stepped into the center of the group before he knew what he was going to say. But the words came: "Wait ... there may be a better way--if you have the courage to try it!"

Fetzer eyed him sceptically.

"We don't have much time, Doc."

"Then you must make time! It's your only chance--our only chance!"

The men were silent, uncertain.

"Go ahead," Fetzer said. "But make it fast."

"Would you fight with a knife if you had a machine gun? Would you attack on horseback if you had a jet loaded with atom bombs?"

"Keep talking," said Fetzer.

"The answer is obvious. You would use the best weapon available. Yet here you sit with clubs and wooden spears, ignoring a weapon so potentially powerful that it makes our H-Bomb, or some undoubtedly greater weapon of Huth's, seem like an old crossbow!"

He had their attention now. He felt the force of concentration on his words. He sensed the awareness in Nina, though her eyes were hidden in the shadows beyond the wavering circle of torchlight.

"Think of what I learned from Huth--what Albert Fetzer has told you. Every person was brought here because they were psi positives, because they possessed some individual psi talent. Some of you have been ashamed of that talent. Perhaps you tried to hide it back on Earth--because it made you different from other people. But you know something about it. You may have learned more about it--even experimented with it--during your months and years on this planet. You may know what even limited talents have done in perception, clairvoyance and the moving of objects through telekinesis.

"These things were done by individual people, operating, as we might say, on single generators.

"But now for the first time in history we have more than three thousand psi talents grouped together in one small area.

"What if all the psi power here could be focused on one objective? All the men and women of Mendel's Planet--all the children--especially the children! ... focusing their combined power!

"Wouldn't that give us the force of three thousand generators--fused into one unit? Instead of moving a chair across the room, making a table jump, levitating a person--why couldn't a building be moved? A spaceship crushed? An attacking force cut down like grass under an invisible mower?

"Gentlemen, is there any limit to the power of a psi focus?

"If a psi focus is possible, we have our own world to win--the frontiers of infinity to explore....

"Are you willing to try?"

* * * * *

The silence within the tree-cave lasted for an eternity.

Even the breathing of the men was hushed as each struggled with this new concept.

His emotional fire spent in the greatest effort of his life, Lucifer stood limp and awkward in the center of the circle, looking around at the set faces. Their eyes were fixed on the humus beneath their crossed legs.