it out. And not only would I need a way to talk to them, but some measure of assurance that they would listen to what I had to say." "I'll arrange," said Lewis, "for mobile short-wave equipment. I'll have it standing by." "And someone who will listen?" "That's right," said Lewis. "Anyone you say." "And one thing more." "Anything," said Lewis. "Forgetfulness," said Enoch. "Maybe I won't need any of these things. Not the truck or any of the rest of it. Maybe I'll have to let things go just as they're going now. And if that should be the case, could you and everyone else concerned forget I ever asked?" "I think we could," said Lewis. "But I would keep on watching." "I wish you would," said Enoch. "Later on I might need some help. But no further interference." "Are you sure," asked Lewis, "that there is nothing else?" Enoch shook his head. "Nothing else. All the rest of it I must do myself." Perhaps, he thought, he'd already talked too much. For how could he be sure that he could trust this man? How could he be sure he could trust anyone? And yet, if he decided to leave Galactic Central and cast his lot with Earth, he might need some help. There might be some objection by the aliens to his taking along his records and the alien gadgets. If he wanted to get away with them, he might have to make it fast. But did he want to leave Galactic Central? Could he give up the galaxy? Could he turn down the offer to become the keeper of another station on some other planet? When the time should come, could he cut his tie with all the other races and all the mysteries of the other stars? Already he had taken steps to do those very things. Here, in the last few moments, without too much thought about it, almost as if he already had reached his decision, he had arranged a setup that would turn him back to Earth. He stood there, thinking, puzzled at the steps he'd taken. "There'll be someone here," said Lewis. "Someone at this spring. If not myself, then someone else who can get in touch with me." Enoch noped absent-mindedly. "Someone will see you every morning when you take your walk," said Lewis. "Or you can reach us here any time you wish." Like a conspiracy, thought Enoch. Like a bunch of kids playing cops and robbers. "I have to be getting on," he said. "It's almost time for mail. Wins will be wondering what has happened to me." He started up the hill. "Be seeing you," said Lewis. "Yeah," said Enoch. "I'll be seeing you." He was surprised to find the warm glow spreading in him-as if there had been something wrong and now it was all right, as if there had been something lost that now had been recovered. 26 Enoch met the mailman halfway down the road that led into the station. The old jalopy was traveling fast, bumping over the grassy ruts, swishing through the overhanging bushes that grew along the track. Wins braked to a halt when he caught sight of Enoch and sat waiting for him. "You got on a detour," Enoch said, coming up to him. "Or have you changed your route?" "You weren't waiting at the box," said Wins, "and I had to see you." "Some important mail?" "Nope, it isn't mail. It's old Hank Fisher. He is down in Millville, setting up the drinks in Epie's tavern and shooting off his face." "It's not like Hank to be buying drinks." "He's telling everyone that you tried to kidnap Lucy." "I didn't kidnap her," Enoch said. "Hank had took a bull whip to her and I hid her out until he got cooled down." "You shouldn't have done that, Enoch." "Maybe. But Hank was set on giving her a beating. He already had hit her a lick or two." "Hank's out to make you trouble." "He told me that he would." "He says you kidnapped her, then got scared and brought her back. He says you had her bid out in the house and when he tried to break in and get her, he couldn't do it. He says you have a funny sort of house. He says he broke an ax blade on a window pane." "Nothing funny about it," Enoch said. "Hank just imagines things." "It's all right so far," said the mailman. "None of them, in broad daylight and their right senses, will do anything about it. But come night they'll be liquored up and won't have good sense. There are some of them might be coming up to see you." "I suppose he's telling them I've got the devil in me." "That and more," said Wins. "I listened for a while before I started out." He reached into the mail pouch and found the bundle of papers and handed them to Enoch. "Enoch, there's something that you have to know. Something you may not realize. It would be easy to get a lot of people stirred up against you-the way you live and all. You are strange. No, I don't mean there's anything wrong with you-I know you and I know there isn't-but it would be easy for people who didn't know you to get the wrong ideas. They've let you alone so far because you've given them no reason to do anything about you. But if they get stirred up by all that Hank is saying..." He did not finish what he was saying. He left it hanging in midair. "You're talking about a posse," Enoch said. Wins noped, saying nothing. "Thanks," said Enoch. "I appreciate your warning me." "Is it true," asked the mailman, "that no one can get inside your house9" "I guess it is," admitted Enoch. "They can't break into it and they can't burn it down. They can't do anything about it." "Then, if I were you, I'd stay close tonight. I'd stay inside. I'd not go venturing out." "Maybe I will. It sounds like a good idea." "Well," said Wins, "I guess that about covers it. I thought you'd ought to know. Guess I'll have to back out to the road. No chance of turning around." "Drive up to the house. There's room there." "It's not far back to the road," said Wins. "I can make it easy." The car started backing slowly. Enoch stood watching. He lifted a hand in solemn salute as the car began rounding a bend that would take it out of sight. Wins waved back and then the car was swallowed by the scrub that grew close against both sides of the road. Slowly Enoch turned around and ploped back toward the station. A mob, he thought-good God, a mob! A mob howling about the station, hammering at the doors and windows, peppering it with bullets, would wipe out the last faint chance-if there still remained a chance-of Galactic Central standing off the move to close the station. Such a demonstration would ap one more powerful argument to the demand that the expansion into the spiral arm should be abandoned. Why was it, he wondered, that everything should happen all at once? For years nothing at all had happened and now everything was happening within a few hours' time. Everything, it seemed, was working out against him. If the mob showed up, not only would it mean that the fate of the station would be sealed, but it might mean, as well, that he would have no choice but to accept the offer to become the keeper of another station. It might make it impossible for him to remain on Earth, even if he wished. And he realized, with a start, that it might just possibly mean that the offer of another station for him might be withdrawn. For with the appearance of a mob howling for his blood, he, himself, would become involved in the charge of barbarism now leveled against the human race in general. Perhaps, he told himself, he should go down to the spring and see Lewis once again. Perhaps some measures could be taken to hold off the mob. But if he did, he knew, there'd be an explanation due and he might have to tell too much. And there might not be a mob. No one would place too much credence in what Hank Fisher said and the whole thing might peter out without any action being taken. He'd stay inside the station and hope for the best. Perhaps there'd be no traveler in the station at the time the mob arrived-if it did arrive-and the incident would pass with no galactic notice. If he were lucky it might work out that way. And by the law of averages, he was owed some luck. Certainly he'd had none in the last few days. He came to the broken gate that led into the yard and stopped to look up at the house, trying for some reason he could not understand, to see it as the house he had known in boyhood. It stood the same as it had always stood, unchanged, except that in the olden days there had been ruffled curtains at each window. The yard around it had changed with the slow growth of the years, with the clump of lilacs thicker and more rank and tangled with each passing spring, with the elms that his father had planted grown from six-foot whips into mighty trees, with the yellow rose bush at the kitchen corner gone, victim of a long-forgotten winter, with the flower beds vanished and the small herb garden, here beside the gate, overgrown and smothered out by grass. The old stone fence that had stood on each side of the gate was now little more than a humpbacked mound. The heaving of a hundred frosts, the creep of vines and grasses, the long years of neglect, had done their work and in another hundred years, he thought, it would be level, with no trace of it left. Down in the field, along the slope where erosion had been at work, there were long stretches where it had entirely disappeared. All of this had happened and until this moment he had scarcely noticed it. But now he noticed it and wondered why he did. Was it because he now might be returning to the Earth again-he who had never left its soil and sun and air, who had never left it physically, but who had, for a longer time than most men had allotted to them, walked not one, but many planets, far among the stars? He stood there, in the late summer sun, and shivered in the cold wind that seemed to be blowing out of some unknown dimension of unreality, wondering for the first time (for the first time he ever had been forced to wonder at it) what kind of man he was. A haunted man who must spend his days neither completely alien nor completely human, with divided loyalties, with old ghosts to tramp the years and miles with him no matter which life he might choose, the Earth life or the stars? A cultural half-breed, understanding neither Earth nor stars, owing a debt to each, but paying neither one? A homeless, footless, wandering creature who could recognize neither right nor wrong from having seen so many different (and logical) versions of the right and wrong? He had climbed the hill above the spring, filled with the rosy inner glow of a regained humanity, a member of the human race again, linked in a boy-like conspiracy with a human team. But could he qualify as human-and if he qualified as human, or tried to qualify, then what about the implied hundred years' allegiance to Galactic Central? Did he, he wondered, even want to qualify as human? He moved slowly through the gate, and the questions still kept hammering in his brain, that great, ceaseless flow of questions to which there were no answers. Although that was wrong, he thought. Not no answers, but too many answers. Perhaps Mary and David and the rest of them would come visiting tonight and they could talk it over-then he supenly remembered. They would not be coming. Not Mary, not David, nor any of the others. They had come for years to see him, but they would come no longer, for the magic had been dimmed and the illusion shattered and he was alone. As he had always been alone, he told himself, with a bitter taste inside his brain. It all had been illusion; it never had been real. For years he'd fooled himself-most eagerly and willingly he had fooled himself into peopling the little corner by the fireplace with these creatures of his imagination. Aided by an alien technique, driven by his loneliness for the sight and sound of humankind, he had brought them into a being that defied every sense except the solid sense of touch. And defied as well every sense of decency. Half-creatures, he thought. Poor pitiful half-creatures, neither of the shadow or the world. Too human for the shadows, too shadowy for Earth. Mary, if I had only known - if I had known, I never would have started. I'd have stayed with loneliness. And he could not mend it now. There was nothing that would help. What is the matter with me? he asked himself. What has happened to me? What is going on? He couldn't even think in a straight line any more. He'd told himself that he'd stay inside the station to escape the mob that might be showing up-and he couldn't stay inside the station, for Lewis, sometime shortly after dark, would be bringing back the Hazer's body. And if the mob showed up at the same time Lewis should appear, bringing back the body, there'd be unsheeted hell to pay. Stricken by the thought, he stood undecided. If he alerted Lewis to the danger, then he might not bring the body. And he had to bring the body. Before the night was over the Hazer must be secure within the grave. He decided that he would have to take a chance. The mob might not show up. Even if it did, there had to be a way that he could handle it. He'd think of something, he told himself. He'd have to think of something. 27 The station was as silent as it had been when he'd left it. There had been no messages and the machinery was quiet, not even muttering to itself, as it sometimes did. Enoch laid the rifle across the desk top and dropped the bundle of papers beside it. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. There were still the papers to be read, not only today's, but yesterday's as well, and the journal to be gotten up, and the journal, he reminded himself, would take a lot of time. There would be several pages of it, even if he wrote it close, and he must write it logically and chronologically, so that it would appear he had written the happenings of yesterday yesterday and not a full day late. He must include each event and every facet of each happening and his own reactions to it and his thoughts about it. For that was the way he'd always done and that was the way he must do it now. He'd always been able to do it that way because he had created for himself a little special niche, not of the Earth, nor of the galaxy, but in that vague condition which one might call existence, and he had worked inside the framework of that special niche as a medieval monk had worked inside his cell. He had been an observer only, an intensely interested observer who had not been content with observance only, but who had made an effort to dig into what he had observed, but still basically and essentially an observer who was not vitally nor personally involved in what had gone on about him. But in the last two days, he realized, he had lost that observer status. The Earth and the galaxy had both intruded on him, and his special niche was gone and he was personally involved. He had lost his objective viewpoint and no longer could command that correct and coldly factual approach which had given him a solid basis upon which to do his writing. He walked over to the shelf of journals and pulled out the current volume, fluttering its pages to find where he had stopped. He found the place and it was very near the end. There were only a few blank pages left, perhaps not enough of them to cover the events of which he'd have to write. More than likely, he thought, he'd come to an end of the journal before he had finished with it and would have to start a new one. He stood with the journal in his hand and stared at the page where the writing ended, the writing that he'd done the day before yesterday. Just the day before yesterday and it now was ancient writing; it even had a faded look about it. And well it might, he thought, for it had been writing done in another age. It had been the last entry he had made before his world had come crashing down about him. And what, he asked himself, was the use of writing further? The writing now was done, all the writing that would matter. The station would be closed and his own planet would be lost-no matter whether he stayed on or went to another station on another planet, the Earth would now be lost. Angrily he slammed shut the book and put it back into its place upon the shelf. He walked back to the desk. The Earth was lost, he thought, and he was lost as well, lost and angry and confused. Angry at fate (if there were such a thing as fate) and at stupidity. Not only the intellectual stupidity of the Earth, but at the intellectual stupidity of the galaxy as well, at the petty bickering which could still the march of the brotherhood of peoples that finally had extended into this galactic sector. As on Earth, so in the galaxy, the number and complexity of the gadget, the noble thought, the wisdom and erudition might make for a culture, but not for a civilization. To be truly civilized, there must be something far more subtle than the gadget or the thought. He felt the tension in him, the tension to be doing something - to prowl about the station like a caged and pacing beast, to run outside and shout incoherently until his lungs were empty, to smash and break, to work off, somehow, his rage and disappointment. He reached out a hand and snatched the rifle off the desk. He pulled out a desk drawer where he kept the ammunition, and took out a box of it, tearing it apart, emptying the cartridges in his pocket. He stood there for a moment, with the rifle in his hand, and the silence of the room seemed to thunder at him and he caught the bleakness and the coldness of it and he laid the rifle back on the desk again. With childishness, he thought, to take out his resentment and his rage on an unreality. And' when there was no real reason for resentment or for rage. For the pattern of events was one that should be recognized and thus accepted. It was the kind of thing to which a human being should long since have become accustomed. He looked around the station and the quietness and the waiting still was there, as if the very structure might be marking time for an event to come along on the natural flow of time. He laughed softly and reached for the rifle once again. Unreality or not, it would be something to occupy his mind, to 'snatch him for a while from this sea of problems which was swirling all about him. And he needed the target practice. It had been ten days or more since he'd been on the rifle range. 28 The basement was huge. It stretched out into a dim haze beyond the lights which he had turned on, a place of tunnels and rooms, carved deep into the rock that folded up to underlie the ridge. Here were the massive tanks filled with the various solutions for the tank travelers; here the pumps and the generators, which operated on a principle alien to the human manner of generating electric power, and far beneath the floor of the basement itself those great storage tanks which held the acids and the soupy matter which once had been the bodies of those creatures which came traveling to the station, leaving behind them, as they went on to some other place, the useless bodies which then must be disposed of. Enoch moved across the floor, past the tanks and generators, until he came to a gallery that stretched out into the darkness. He found the panel and pressed it to bring on the lights, then walked down the gallery. On either side were metal shelves which had been installed to accommodate the overflow of gadgets, of artifacts, of all sorts of gifts which had been brought him by the travelers. From floor to ceiling the shelves were jammed with a junkyard accumulation from all the corners of the galaxy. And yet, thought Enoch, perhaps not actually a junkyard, for there would be very little of this stuff that would be actual junk. All of it was serviceable and had some purpose, either practical or aesthetic, if only that purpose could be learned. Although perhaps not in every instance a purpose that would be applicable to humans. Down at the end of the shelves was one section of shelving into which the articles were packed more systematically and with greater care, each one tagged and numbered, with cross-filing to a card catalogue and certain journal dates. These were the articles of which he knew the purpose and, in certain instances, something of the principles involved. There were some that were innocent enough and others that held great potential value and still others that had, at the moment, no connection whatsoever with the human way of life-and there were, as well, those few, tagged in red, that made one shuper to even think upon. He went down the gallery, his footsteps echoing loudly as he trod through this place of alien ghosts. Finally the gallery widened into an oval room and the walls here were paped with a thick gray substance that would entrap a bullet and prevent a ricochet. Enoch walked over to a panel set inside a deep recess sunk into the wall. He reached in and thumbed up a tumbler, then stepped quickly out into the center of the room. Slowly the room began to darken, then supenly it seemed to flare and he was in the room no longer, but in another place, a place he had never seen before. He stood on a little hillock and in front of him the land sloped down to a sluggish river bordered by a width of marsh. Between the beginning of the marsh and the foot of the hillock stretched a sea of rough, tall grass. There was no wind, but the grass was rippling and he knew that the rippling motion of the grass was caused by many moving bodies, foraging in the grass. Out of it came a savage grunting, as if a thousand angry hogs were fighting for choice morsels in a hundred swill troughs. And from somewhere farther off, perhaps from the river, came a deep, monotonous bellowing that sounded hoarse and tired. Enoch felt the hair crawling on his scalp and he thrust the rifle out and ready. It was puzzling. He felt and knew the danger and as yet there was no danger. Still, the very air of this place-wherever it might be-seemed to crawl with danger. He spun around and saw that close behind him the thick, dark woods climbed down the range of river hills, stopping at the sea of grass which flowed around, the hillock on which he found himself. Off beyond the hills, dark purple in the air, loomed a range of mighty mountains that seemed to fade into the sky, but purple to their peaks, with no sign of snow upon them. Two things came trotting from the woods and stopped at the edge of it. They sat down and grinned at him, with their tails wrapped neatly round their feet. They might have been wolves or dogs, but they were neither one. They were nothing he had ever seen or heard of. Their pelts glistened in the weak sunshine, as if they had been greased, but the pelts stopped at their necks, with their skulls and faces bare. Like evil old men, off on a masquerade, with their bodies draped in the hides of wolves. But the disguise was spoiled by the lolling tongues which spilled out of their mouths, glistening scarlet against the bone-white of their faces. The woods was still. There were only the two gaunt beasts sitting on their haunches. They sat and grinned at him, a strangely toothless grin. The woods was dark and tangled, the foliage so dark green that it was almost black. All the leaves had a shine to them, as if they had been polished to a special sheen. Enoch spun around again, to look back towards the river, and crouched at the edge of the grass was a line of toadlike monstrosities, six feet long and standing three feet high, their bodies the color of a dead fish belly, and each with a single eye, or what seemed to be an eye, which covered a great part of the area just above the snout. The eyes were faceted and glowed in the dim sunlight, as the eyes of a hunting cat will glow when caught in a beam of light. The hoarse bellowing still came from the river and in between the bellowing there was a faint, thin buzzing, an angry and malicious buzzing, as if a mosquito might be hovering for attack, although there was a sharper tone in it than in the noise of a mosquito. Enoch jerked up his head to look into the sky and far in the depths of it he saw a string of dots, so high that there was no way of knowing what kind of things they were. He lowered his head to look back at the line of squatting, toadlike things, but from the corner of his eye he caught the sense of flowing motion and swung back toward the woods. The wolf-like bodies with the skull-like heads were coming up the hill in a silent rush. They did not seem to run. There was no motion of their running. Rather they were moving as if they had been squirted from a tube. Enoch jerked up his rifle and it came into his shoulder, fitting there, as if it were a part of him. The bead settled in the rear-sight notch and blotted out the skull-like face of the leading beast. The gun bucked as he squeezed the trigger and, without waiting to see if the shot had downed the beast, the rifle barrel was swinging toward the second as his right fist worked the bolt. The rifle bucked again and the second wolf-like being somersaulted and slid forward for an instant, then began rolling down the hill, flopping as it rolled. Enoch worked the bolt again and the spent brass case glittered in the sun as he turned swiftly to face the other slope. The toadlike things were closer now. They had been creeping in, but as he turned they stopped and squatted, staring at him. He reached a hand into his pocket and took out two cartridges, cramming them into the magazine to replace the shells he'd fired. The bellowing down by the river had stopped, but now there was a honking sound that he could not place. Turning cautiously, he tried to locate what might be making it, but there was nothing to be seen. The honking sound seemed to be coming from the forest, but there was nothing moving. In between the honking, he still could hear the buzzing and it seemed louder now. He glanced into the sky and the dots were larger and no longer in a line. They had formed into a circle and seemed to be spiraling downward, but they were still so high that he could not make out what kinds of things they were. He glanced back toward the toadlike monsters and they were closer than they had been before. They had crept up again. Enoch lifted the rifle and, before it reached his shoulder, pressed the trigger, shooting from the hip. The eye of one of the foremost of them exploded, like the splash a stone would make if thrown into water. The creature did not jump or flop. It simply settled down, flat upon the ground, as if someone had put his foot upon it and had exerted exactly force enough to squash it flat. It lay there, flat, and there was a big round hole where the eye had been and the hole was filling with a thick and ropy yellow fluid that may have been the creature's blood. The others backed away, slowly, watchfully. They backed all the way off the hillock and only stopped when they reached the grass edge. The honking was closer and the buzzing louder and there could be no doubt that the honking was coming from the hills. Enoch swung about and saw it, striding through the sky, coming down the ridge, stepping through the trees and honking dolefully. It was a round and black balloon that swelled and deflated with its honking, and jerked and swayed as it walked along, hung from the center of four stiff and spindly legs that arched above it to the joint that connected this upper portion of the leg arrangement with the downward-sprapling legs that raised it high above the forest. It was walking jerkily, lifting its legs high to clear the massive treetops before putting them down again. Each time it put down a foot, Enoch could hear the crunching of the branches and the crashing of the trees that it broke or brushed aside. Enoch felt the skin along his spine trying to roll up his back like a window shade, and the bristling of the hair along the base of his skull, obeying some primordial instinct in its striving to raise itself erect into a fighting ruff. But even as he stood there, almost stiff with fright, some part of his brain remembered that one shot he had fired and his fingers dug into his pocket for another cartridge to fill the magazine. The buzzing was much louder and the pitch had changed. The buzzing was now approaching at tremendous speed. Enoch jerked up his head and the dots no longer were circling in the sky, but were plunging down toward him, one behind the other. He flicked a glance toward the balloon, honking and jerking on its stilt-like legs. It still was coming on, but the plunging dots were faster and would reach the hillock first. He shifted the rifle forward, outstretched and ready to slap against his shoulder, and watched the falling dots, which were dots no longer, but hideous streamlined bodies, each carrying a rapier that projected from its head. A bill of sorts, thought Enoch, for these things might be birds, but a longer, thinner, larger, more deadly bird than any earthly bird. The buzzing changed into a scream and the scream kept mounting up the scale until it set the teeth on edge and through it, like a metronome measuring off a beat, came the hooting of the black balloon that strode across the hills. Without knowing that he had moved his arms, Enoch had the rifle at his shoulder, waiting for that instant when the first of the plunging monsters was close enough to fire. They dropped like stones out of the sky and they were bigger than he had thought they were-big and coming like so many arrows aimed directly at him. The rifle thuped against his shoulder and the first one crumpled, lost its arrow shape, folding up and falling, no longer on its course. He worked the bolt and fired again and the second one in line lost its balance and began to tumble-and the bolt was worked once more and the trigger pressed. The third skiped in the air and went off at a slant, limp and ragged, fluttering in the wind, falling toward the river. The rest broke off their dive. They made a shallow turn and beat their way up into the sky, great wings that were more like windmill vanes than wings thrashing desperately. A shadow fell across the hillock and a mighty pillar came down from somewhere overhead, driving down to strike to one side of the hillock. The ground trembled at the tread and the water that lay hipen by the grass squirted high into the air. The honking was an engulfing sound that blotted out all else and the great balloon was zooming down, cradled on its legs. Enoch saw the face, if anything so grotesque and so obscene could be called a face. There was a beak and beneath it a sucking mouth and a dozen or so other organs that might have been the eyes. The legs were like inverted V's, with the inner stroke somewhat shorter than the outer and in the center of these inner joints hung the great balloon that was the body of the creature, with its face on the underside so that it could see all the hunting territory that might lie beneath it. But now auxiliary joints in the outer span of legs were bending to let the body of the creature down so it could seize its prey. Enoch was not conscious of putting up the rifle or of operating it, but it was hammering at his shoulder and it seemed to him that a second part of him stood off, apart, and watched the firing of the rifle-as if the figure that held and fired the weapon might be a second man. Great gouts of flesh flew out of the black balloon and jagged rents supenly tore across it and from these rents poured out a cloud of liquid that turned into a mist, with black droplets raining from it. The firing pin clicked on an empty breech and the gun was empty, but there was no need of another shot. The great legs were folding, and trembling as they folded, and the shrunken body shivered convulsively in the heavy mist that was pouring out of it. There was no hooting now, and Enoch could hear the patter of the black drops falling from that cloud as they struck the short grass on the bill. There was a sickening odor and the drops, where they fell on him, were sticky, running like cold oil, and above him the great structure that had been the stilt-like creature was toppling to the ground. Then the world faded swiftly and was no longer there. Enoch stood in the oval room in the faint glow of the bulbs. There was the heavy smell of powder and all about his feet, glinting in the light, lay the spent and shining cases that had been kicked out of the gun. He was back in the basement once again. The target shoot was over. 29 Enoch lowered the rifle and drew in a slow and careful breath. It always was like this, he thought. As if it were necessary for him to ease himself, by slow degrees, back to this world of his after the season of unreality. One knew that it would be illusion when he kicked on the switch that set into motion whatever was to happen and one knew it had been illusion when it all had ended, but during the time that it was happening it was not illusion. It was as real and substantial as if it all were true. They had asked him, he remembered, when the station had been built, if he had a hobby-if there was any sort of recreational facility they could build into the station for him. And he had said that he would like a rifle range, expecting no more than a shooting gallery with ducks moving on a chain or clay pipes rotating on a wheel. But that, of course, would have been too simple for the screwball architects, who had designed, and the slap-happy crew of workmen who had built the station. At first they had not been certain what he meant by a rifle range and he'd had to tell them what a rifle was and how it operated and for what it might be used. He had told them about hunting squirrels on sunny autumn mornings and shaking rabbits out of brush piles with the first coming of the snow (although one did not use a rifle, but a shotgun, on the rabbits), about hunting coons of an autumn night, and waiting for the deer along the run that went down to the river. But he was dishonest and he did not tell them about that other use to which he'd put a rifle during four long years. He'd told them (since they were easy folks to talk with) about his youthful dream of some day going on a hunt in Africa, although even as he told them he was well aware of how unattainable it was. But since that day he'd hunted (and been hunted by) beasts far stranger than anything that Africa could boast. From what these beasts might have been patterned, if indeed they came from anywhere other than the imagination of those aliens who had set up the tapes which produced the target scene, he had no idea. There had not, so far in the thousands of times that he had used the range, been a duplication either in the scene nor in the beasts which rampaged about the scene. Although, perhaps, he thought, there might be somewhere an end of them, and then the whole sequence might start over and run its course once more. But it would make little difference now, for if the tapes should start rerunning there'd be but little chance of his recalling in any considerable detail those adventures he had lived so many years ago. He did not understand the techniques nor the principle which made possible this fantastic rifle range. Like many other things, he accepted it without the need of understanding. Although, some day, he thought, he might find the clue which in time would turn blind acceptance into understanding-not only of the range, but of many other things. He had often wondered what the aliens might think about his fascination with the rifle range, with that primal force that drove a man to kill, not for the joy of killing so much as to negate a danger, to meet force with a greater and more skillful force, cunning with more cunning. Had he, he wondered, given his alien friends concern in their assessment of the human character by his preoccupation with the rifle? For the understanding of an alien, how could one draw a line between the killing of other forms of life and the killing of one's own? Was there actually a differential that would stand up under logical examination between the sport of hunting and the sport of war? To an alien, perhaps, such a differentiation would be rather difficult, for in many cases the hunted animal would be more closely allied to the human hunter in its form and characteristics than would many of the aliens. Was war an instinctive thing, for which each ordinary man was as much responsible as the policy makers and the so-called statesmen? It seemed impossible, and yet, deep in every man was the combative instinct, the aggressive urge, the strange sense of competition-all of which spelled conflict of one kind or another if carried to conclusion. He put the rifle underneath his arm and walked over to the panel. Sticking from a slot in the bottom of it was a piece of tape. He pulled it out and puzzled out the symbols. They were not reassuring. He had not done so well. He had missed that first shot he had fired at the charging wolf-thing with the old man's face, and back there somewhere, in that dimension of unreality, it and its companion were snarling over the tangled, torn mass of ribboned flesh and broken bone that had been Enoch Wallace. 30 He went back through the gallery, with its gifts stacked there as other gifts, in regular human establishments, might be stacked away in dry and dusty attics. The tape nagged at him, the little piece of tape which said that while he had made all his other shots, he had missed that first one back there on the hillock. It was not often that he missed. And his training had been for that very type of shooting-the you-never-know-what-will-happen-next, the totally unexpected, the kill-or-be-killed kind of shooting that thousands of expeditions into the target area had taught him. Perhaps, he consoled himself, he had not been as faithful in his practice lately as he should have been. Although there actually was no reason that he should be faithful, for the shooting was for recreation only and his carrying of the rifle on his daily walks was from force of habit only and for no other reason. He carried the rifle as another man might take along a cane or walking stick. At the time he had first done it, of course, it had been a different kind of rifle and a different day. It then was no unusual thing for a man to carry a gun while out on a walk. But today was different and he wondered, with an inner grin, how much talk his carrying a gun might have furnished the people who had seen him with it. Near the end of the gallery he saw the black bulk of a trunk projecting from beneath the lower shelf, too big to fit comfortably beneath it, jammed against the wall, but with a foot or two of it still projecting out beyond the shelf. He went on walking past it, then supenly turned around. That trunk, he thought-that was the trunk which had belonged to the Hazer who had died upstairs. It was his legacy from that being whose stolen body would be brought back to its grave this eveni