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Title: Think Blue, Count Two
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: February 1963
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Galaxy Magazine, February 1963
   [New York: Galaxy Publishing Corporation]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 12 April 2017
Date last updated: 12 April 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1423

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  _Think BLUE
  Count TWO_


  _Space was deadly.  Many who
  dared it died.  Others were
  less fortunate--they lived!_


  by CORDWAINER SMITH




I

Before the great ships whispered between the stars by means of
planoforming, people had to fly from star to star with immense
sails--huge films assorted in space on long, rigid, cold-proof rigging.
A small space-boat provided room for a sailor to handle the sails,
check the course and watch the passengers who were sealed, like knots
in immense threads, in their little adiabatic pods which trailed behind
the ship.  The passengers knew nothing, except for going to sleep on
earth and waking up on a strange new world forty, fifty or two hundred
years later.

This was a primitive way to do it.  But it worked.

On such a ship Helen America had followed Mr. Gray-no-more.  On such
ships the Scanners retained their ancient authority over space.  Two
hundred planets and more were settled in this fashion, including Old
North Australia, destined to be the treasure house of them all.

The Emigration Port was a series of low, square buildings--nothing like
Earthport, which towers above the clouds like a frozen nuclear
explosion.

Emigration Port is dour, drab, dreary and efficient.  The walls are
black-red like old blood merely because they are cheaper to heat that
way.  The rockets are ugly and simple; the rocket pits, as inglorious
as machine shops.  Earth has a few show places to tell visitors about.
Emigration Port is not one of them.  The people who work there get the
privilege of real work and secure professional honors.  The people who
go there become unconscious very soon.  What they remember about earth
is a little room like a hospital room, a little bed, some music, some
talk, the sleep and (perhaps) the cold.

From Emigration Port they go to their pods, sealed in.  The pods go to
the rockets and these to the sailing ship.  That's the old way of doing
it.

The new way is better.  All a person does now is visit a pleasant
lounge, or play a game of cards, or eat a meal or two.  All he needs is
half the wealth of a planet, or a couple hundred years' seniority
marked "excellent" without a single break.

The photonic sails were different.  Everyone took chances.

A young man, bright of skin and hair, merry at heart, set out for a new
world.  An older man, his hair touched with gray, went with him.  So,
too, did thirty thousand others.  And also, the most beautiful girl on
earth.

Earth could have kept her, but the new worlds needed her.

She had to go.

She went by light-sail ship.  And she had to cross space--space, where
the danger always waits.

Space sometimes commands strange tools to its uses--the screams of a
beautiful child, the laminated brain of a long-dead mouse, the
heartbroken weeping of a computer.  Most space offers no respite, no
relay, no rescue, no repair.  All dangers must be anticipated;
otherwise they become mortal.  And the greatest of all hazards is the
risk of man himself.



"She's beautiful," said the first technician.

"She's just a child," said the second.

"She won't look like much of a child when they're two hundred years
out," said the first.

"But she _is_ a child," said the second, smiling, "a beautiful doll
with blue eyes, just going tiptoe into the beginnings of grown-up
life."  He sighed.

"She'll be frozen," said the first.

"Not all the time," said the second.  "Sometimes they wake up.  They
have to wake up.  The machines de-freeze them.  You remember the crimes
on the _Old Twenty-two_.  Nice people, but the wrong combinations.  And
everything went wrong, dirtily, brutally wrong."

They both remembered _Old Twenty-two_.  The hell-ship had drifted
between the stars for a long time before its beacon brought rescue.
Rescue was much too late.

The ship was in immaculate condition.  The sails were set at a correct
angle.  The thousands of frozen sleepers, strung out behind the ship in
their one-body adiabatic pods, would have been in excellent condition,
but they had merely been left in open space too long and most of them
had spoiled.  The inside of the ship--there was the trouble.  The
sailor had failed or died.  The reserve passengers had been awakened.
They did not get on well with one another.  Or else they got on too
horribly well, in the wrong way.  Out between the stars, encased only
by a frail limited cabin, they had invented new crimes and committed
them upon each other--crimes which a million years of earth's old
wickedness had never brought to the surface of man before.

The investigators of _Old Twenty-two_ had become very sick,
reconstructing the events that followed the awakening of the reserve
crew.  Two of them had asked for blanking and had obviously retired
from service.

The two technicians knew all about _Old Twenty-two_ as they watched the
fifteen-year-old woman sleeping on the table.  Was she a woman?  Was
she a girl?  What would happen to her if she did wake up on the flight?

She breathed delicately.

The two technicians looked across her figure at one another and then
the first one said:

"We'd better call the psychological guard.  It's a job for him."

"He can try," said the second.



The psychological guard, a man whose number-name ended in the digits
Tiga-belas, came cheerfully into the room a half-hour later.  He was a
dreamy-looking old man, sharp and alert, probably in his fourth
rejuvenation.  He looked at the beautiful girl on the table and inhaled
sharply,

"What's this for--a ship?"

"No," said the first technician, "it's a beauty contest."

"Don't be a fool," said the psychological guard.  "You mean they are
really sending that beautiful child into the Up-and-Out?"

"It's stock," said the second technician.  "The people out on Wereld
Schemering are running dreadfully ugly, and they flashed a sign to the
Big Blink that they had to have better-looking people.  The
Instrumentality is doing right by them.  All the people on this ship
are handsome or beautiful."

"If she's that precious, why don't they freeze her and put her in a
pod?  That way she would either get there or she would not.  A face as
pretty as that," said Tiga-belas, "could start trouble anywhere.  Let
alone a ship.  What's her name-number?"

"On the board there," said the first technician.  "It's all on the
board there.  You'll want the others too.  They're listed, too, and
ready to go on the board."

"Veesey-koosey," read the psychological guard, saying the words aloud,
"or five-six.  That's a silly name, but it's rather cute."  With one
last look back at the sleeping girl, he bent to his work of reading the
case histories of the people added to the reserve crew.  Within ten
lines, he saw why the girl was being kept ready for emergencies,
instead of sleeping the whole trip through.  She had a Daughter
Potential of 999.999, meaning that any normal adult of either sex could
and would accept her as a daughter after a few minutes of relationship.
She had no skill in herself, no learning, no trained capacities.  But
she could re-motivate almost anyone older than herself, and she showed
a probability of making that re-motivated person put up a gigantic
fight for life.  For her sake.  And secondarily the adopter's.

That was all, but it was special enough to put her in the cabin.  She
had tested out into the literal truth of the ancient poetic scrap, "the
fairest of the daughters of old, old earth."

When Tiga-belas finished taking his notes from the records, the working
time was almost over.  The technicians had not interrupted him.  He
turned around to look one last time at the lovely girl.  She was gone.
The second technician had left and the first was cleaning his hands.

"You haven't frozen her?" cried Tiga-belas.  "I'll have to fix her too,
if the safeguard is to work."

"Of course you do," said the first technician.  "We've left you two
minutes for it."

"You give me two minutes," said Tiga-belas, "to protect a trip of four
hundred and fifty years!"

"Do you need more," said the technician, and it was not even a
question, except in form.

"Do I?" said Tiga-belas.  He broke into a smile.  "No, I don't.  That
girl will be safe long after I am dead."

"When do you die?" said the technician, socially.

"Seventy-three years, two months, four days," said Tiga-belas
agreeably.  "I'm a fourth-and-last."

"I thought so," said the technician.  "You're smart.  Nobody starts off
that way.  We all learn.  I'm sure you'll take care of that girl."

They left the laboratory together and ascended to the surface and the
cool restful night of Earth.




II

Late the next day, Tiga-belas came in, very cheerful indeed.  In his
left hand he held a drama spool, full commercial size.  In his right
hand there was a black plastic cube with shimmering silver
contact-points gleaning on its sides.  The two technicians greeted him
politely.

The psychological guard could not hide his excitement and his pleasure.

"I've got that beautiful child taken care of.  The way she is going to
be fixed, she'll keep her Daughter Potential, but it's going to be a
lot closer to one thousand point double zero than it was with all those
nines.  I've used a mouse-brain."

"If it's frozen," said the first technician, "we won't be able to put
it in the computer.  It will have to go forward with the emergency
stores."

"This brain isn't frozen," said Tiga-belas indignantly.  "It's been
laminated.  We stiffened it with celluprime and then we veneered it
down, about seven thousand layers.  Each one has plastic of at least
two molecular thicknesses.  This mouse can't spoil.  As a matter of
fact, this mouse is going to go on thinking forever.  He won't think
much, unless we put the voltage on him, but he'll think.  And he can't
spoil.  This is ceramic plastic, and it would take a major weapon to
break it."

"The contacts...?" said the second technician.

"They don't go through," said Tigas-belas.  "This mouse is tuned into
that girl's personality, up to a thousand meters.  You can put him
anywhere in the ship.  The case has been hardened.  The contacts are
just attached on the outside.  They feed to nickel-steel counterpart
contacts on the inside.  I told you, this mouse is going to be thinking
when the last human being on the last known planet is dead.  And it's
going to be thinking about that girl.  Forever."

"Forever is an awfully long time," said the first technician, with a
shiver.  "We only need a safety period of two thousand years.  The girl
herself would spoil in less than a thousand years, if anything did go
wrong."

"Never you mind," said Tiga-belas, "that girl is going to be guarded
whether she is spoiled or not."  He spoke to the cube.  "You're going
along with Veesey, fellow, and if she is an _Old Twenty-two_ you'll
turn the whole thing into a toddle-garden frolic complete with ice
cream and hymns to the West Wind."  Tiga-belas looked up at the other
men and said, quite unnecessarily, "He can't hear me."

"Of course not," said the first technician, very dryly.

They all looked at the cube.  It was a beautiful piece of engineering.
The psychological guard had reason to be proud of it.

"Do you need the mouse any more?" said the first technician.

"Yes," said Tiga-belas.  "One-third of a millisecond at forty
megadynes.  I want him to get her whole life printed on his left
cortical lobe.  Particularly her screams.  She screamed badly at ten
months.  Something she got in her mouth.  She screamed at ten when she
thought the air had stopped in her drop-shaft.  It hadn't, or she
wouldn't be here.  They're in her record.  I want the mouse to have
those screams.  And she had a pair of red shoes for her fourth
birthday.  Give me the full two minutes with her.  I've printed the key
on the complete series of _Marcia and the Moon Men_--that was the best
box drama for teen-age girls that they ran last year.  Veesey saw it.
This time she'll see it again, but the mouse will be tied in.  She
won't have the chance of a snowball in hell of forgetting it."



Said the first technician, "What was that?"

"Huh?" said Tiga-belas.

"What was that you just said, that, at the end?"

"Are you deaf?"

"No," said the technician huffily.  "I just didn't understand what you
meant."

"I said that she would not have the chance of a snowball in hell of
forgetting it."

"That's what I thought you said," replied the technician.  "What is a
snowball?  What is hell?  What sort of chances do they make?"

The second technician interrupted eagerly.  "I know," he explained.
"Snowballs are ice formations on Neptune.  Hell is a planet out near
Khufu VII.  I don't know how anybody would get them together."

Tiga-belas looked at them with the weary amazement of the very old.  He
did not feel like explaining, so he said gently:

"Let's leave the literature till another time.  All I meant was, Veesey
will be safe when she's cued into this mouse.  The mouse will outlast
her and everybody else, and no teen-age girl is going to forget _Marcia
and the Moon Men_.  Not when she saw every single episode twice over.
This girl did."

"She's not going to render the other passengers ineffectual?  That
wouldn't help," said the first technician.

"Not a bit," said Tiga-belas.

"Give me those strengths again," said the first technician.

"Mouse--one-third millisecond at forty megadynes."

"They'll hear that way beyond the moon," said the technician.  "You
can't put that sort of stuff into people's heads without a permit.  Do
you want us to get a special permit from the Instrumentality?"

"For one-third of a millisecond?"

The two men faced each other for a moment; then the technician began
creasing his forehead, his mouth began to smile and they both laughed.
The second technician did not understand it and Tiga-belas said to him:

"I'm putting the girl's whole lifetime into one-third of a millisecond
at top power.  It will drain over into the mouse-brain inside this
cube.  What is the normal human reaction within one-third millisecond?"

"Fifteen milliseconds--"  The second technician started to speak and
stopped himself.

"That's right," said Tiga-belas.  "People don't get anything at all in
less than fifteen milliseconds.  This mouse isn't only veneered and
laminated; he's fast.  The lamination is faster than his own synapses
ever were.  Bring on the girl."

The first technician had already gone to get her.

The second technician turned back for one more question.  "Is the mouse
dead?"

"No.  Yes.  Of course not.  What do you mean?  Who knows?" said
Tiga-belas all in one breath.



The younger man stared but the couch with the beautiful girl had
already rolled into the room.  Her skin had chilled down from pink to
ivory and her respiration was no longer visible to the naked eye, but
she was still beautiful.  The deep freezing had not yet begun.

The first technician began to whistle.  "Mouse--forty megadynes,
one-third of a millisecond.  Girl, output maximum, same time.  Girl
input, two minutes, what volume?"

"Anything," said Tiga-belas.  "Anything.  Whatever you use for deep
personality engraving."

"Set," said the technician.

"Take the cube," said Tiga-belas.

The technician took it and fitted it into the coffin-like box near the
girl's head.

"Good-bye, immortal mouse," said Tiga-belas, "think about the beautiful
girl when I am dead and don't get too tired of _Marcia and the Moon
Men_ when you've seen it for a million years..."

"Record," said the second technician.  He took it from Tiga-belas and
put it into a standard drama-shower, but one with output cables heavier
than any home had ever installed.

"Do you have a code word?" said the first technician.

"It's a little poem," said Tiga-belas.  He reached in his pocket.
"Don't read it aloud.  If any of us misspoke a word, there is a chance
she might hear it and it would heterodyne the relationship between her
and the laminated mouse."

The two looked at a scrap of paper.  In clear, archaic writing there
appeared the lines:

  Lady if a man
  Tries to bother you, you can
        Think blue,
        Count two,
  And look for a red shoe.


The technicians laughed warmly.  "That'll do it," said the first
technician.

Tiga-belas gave them an embarrassed smile of thanks.

"Turn them both on," he said.  "Good-by, girl," he murmured to himself.
"Good-by, mouse.  Maybe I'll see you in seventy-four years."



The room flashed with a kind of invisible light inside their heads.

In moon orbit a navigator wondered about his mother's red shoes.

Two million people on earth started to count "one-two" and then
wondered why they had done so.

A bright young parakeet, in an orbital ship, began reciting the whole
verse and baffled the crew as to what the meaning might be.

Apart from this, there were no side effects.

The girl in the coffin arched her body with terrible strain.  The
electrodes had scorched the skin at her temples.  The scars stood
bright red against the chilled fresh skin of the girl.

The cube showed no sign from the dead-live live-dead mouse.

While the second technician put ointment on Veesey's scars, Tiga-belas
put on a headset and touched the terminals of the cube very gently
without moving it from the snap-in position it held in the
coffin-shaped box.

He nodded, satisfied.  He stepped back.

"You're sure the girl got it?"

"We'll read it back before she goes to deep-freeze."

"_Marcia and the Moon Men_, what?"

"Can't miss it," said the first technician.  "I'll let you know if
there's anything missing.  There won't be."

Tiga-belas took one last look at the lovely, lovely girl.
Seventy-three years, two months, three days, he thought to himself.
And she, beyond Earth rules, may be awarded a thousand years.  And the
mouse-brain has got a million years.

Veesey never knew any of them--neither the first technician, nor the
second technician, nor Tiga-belas, the psychological guard.

To the day of her death, she knew that _Marcia and the Moon Men_ had
included the most wonderful blue lights, the hypnotic count of
"one-two, one two" and the prettiest red shoes that any girl had seen
on or off earth.




III

Three hundred and twenty-six years later she had to wake up.

Her box had opened.

Her body ached in every muscle and nerve.

The ship was screaming emergency and she had to get up.

She wanted to sleep, to sleep, or to die.

The ship kept screaming.

She had to get up.

She lifted an arm to the edge of her coffin-bed.  She had practiced
getting in and out of the bed in the long training period, before they
sent her underground to be hypnotized and frozen.  She knew just what
to reach for, just what to expect.  She pulled herself over on her
side.  She opened her eyes.

The lights were yellow and strong.  She closed her eyes again.

This time a voice sounded from somewhere near her.  It seemed to be
saying, "Take the straw in your mouth."

Veesey groaned.

The voice kept on saying things.

Something scratchy pressed against her mouth.

She opened her eyes.

The outline of a human head had come between her and the light.

She squinted, trying to see if it might be one more of the doctors.
No, this was the ship.

The face came into focus.

It was the face of a very handsome and very young man.  His eyes looked
into hers.  She had never seen anyone who was both handsome and
sympathetic, quite the way that he was.  She tried to see him clearly,
and found herself beginning to smile.

The drinking-tube thrust past her lips and teeth.  Automatically she
sucked at it.  The fluid was something like soup, but it had a
medicinal taste too.

The face had a voice.  "Wake up," he said, "wake up.  It doesn't do any
good to hold back now.  You need some exercise as soon as you can
manage it."

She let the tube slip from her mouth and gasped, "Who are you?"

"Trece," he said, "and that's Talatashar over there.  We've been up for
two months, recueing the robots.  We need your help."

"Help," she murmured, "my help?"

Trece's face wrinkled and crinkled in a delightful grin.  "Well, we
sort of needed you.  We really do need a third mind to watch the robots
when we think we've fixed them.  And besides, we're lonely.  Talatashar
and I aren't much company to each other.  We looked over the list of
reserve crew and we decided to wake you."  He reached out a friendly
hand to her.

When she sat up she saw the other man, Talatashar.  She immediately
recoiled: she had never seen anyone so ugly.  His hair was gray and
cropped.  Piggy little eyes peered out of eye-sockets which looked
flooded with fat.  His cheeks hung down in monstrous jowls on either
side.  On top of all that, his face was lop-sided.  One side seemed
wide-awake but the other was twisted in an endless spasm which looked
like agony.  She could not help putting her hand to her mouth.  And it
was with the back of her hand against her lips that she spoke.

"I thought--I thought everybody on this ship was supposed to be
handsome."

One side of Talatashar's face smiled at her while the other half stayed
with its expression of frozen hurt.

"We were," his voice rumbled, and it was not of itself an unpleasant
voice, "we all were.  Some of us always get spoiled in the freezing.
It will take you a while to get used to me."  He laughed grimly.  "It
took me a while to get used to me.  In two months, I've managed.
Pleased to meet you.  Maybe you'll be pleased to meet me, after a
while.  What do you think of that, eh, Trece?"

"What?" said Trece, who had watched them both with friendly worry.

"The girl.  So tactful.  The direct diplomacy of the very young.  Was I
handsome, she said.  No, say I.  What is she, anyhow?"

Trece turned to her.  "Let me help you sit," he said.



She sat up on the edge of her box.

Wordlessly he passed the skin of fluid to her with its drinking tube,
and she went back to sucking her broth.  Her eyes peered up at the two
men like the eyes of a small child.  They were as innocent and troubled
as the eyes of a kitten which has met worry for the first time.

"What are you?" said Trece.

She took her lips away from the tube for a moment.  "A girl," she said.

Half of Talatashar's face smiled a sophisticated smile.  The other half
moved a little with muscular drag, but expressed nothing.  "We see
that," said he, grimly.

"He means," said Trece conciliatorily, "what have you been trained for?"

She took her mouth away again.  "Nothing," said she.

The men laughed--both of them.  First, Talatashar laughed with all the
evil in the world in his voice.  Then Trece laughed, and he was too
young to laugh his own way.  His laughter, too, was cruel.  There was
something masculine, mysterious, threatening and secret in it, as
though he knew all about things which girls could find out only at the
cost of pain and humiliation.  He was as alien, for the moment, as man
have always been from women: filled with secret motives and concealed
desires, driven by bright sharp thoughts which women neither had nor
wished to have.  Perhaps more than his body had spoiled.

There was nothing in Veesey's own life to make her fear that laugh, but
the instinctive reaction of a million years of womanhood behind her was
to disregard the evil, go on the alert for more trouble and hope for
the best at the moment.  She knew, from books and tapes, all about sex.
This laugh had nothing to do with babies or with love.  There was
contempt and power and cruelty in it--the cruelty of men who are cruel
merely because they are men.  For an instant she hated both of them,
but she was not alarmed enough to set off the trigger of the protective
devices which the psychological guard had built into her mind itself.
Instead, she looked down the cabin, ten meters long and four meters
wide.

This was home now, perhaps forever.  There were sleepers somewhere, but
she did not see their boxes.  All she had was this small space and the
two men--Trece with his warm smile, his nice voice, his interesting
gray-blue eyes; and Talatashar, with his ruined face.  And their
laughter.  That wretchedly mysterious masculine laughter, hostile and
laughing-at in its undertones.

"Life's life," she thought, "and I must live it.  Here."

Talatashar, who had finished laughing, now spoke in a very different
voice.

"There will be time for the fun and games later.  First, we have to get
the work done.  The photonic sails aren't picking up enough starlight
to get us anywhere.  The mainsail is ripped by a meteor.  We can't
repair it, not when it's twenty miles across.  So we have to jury-rig
the ship--that's the right old word."

"How does it work?" asked Veesey sadly, not much interested in her own
question.  The aches and pains of the long freeze were beginning to
bedevil her.

Talatashar said, "It's simple.  The sails are coated.  We were put into
orbit by rockets.  The pressure of light is bigger on one side than on
the other.  With some pressure on one side and virtually no pressure on
the other, the ship has to go somewhere.  Interstellar matter is very
fine and does not give us enough drag to slow us down.  The sails pull
away from the brightest source of light at any time.  For the first
eighty years it was the sun.  Then we began trying to get both the sun
and some bright patches of light behind it.  Now we have more light
coming at us than we want, and we will be pulled away from destination
if we do not point the blind side of the sails at the goal and the
pushing sides at the next best source.  The sailor died, for some
reason we can't figure out.  The ship's automatic mechanism woke us up
and the navigation board explained the situation to us.  Here we are.
We have to fix the robots."

"But what's the matter with them?  Why don't they do it themselves?
Why did they have to wake up people?  They're supposed to be so smart."
She particularly wondered, why did they have to wake up _me_?  But she
suspected the answer--that the men had done it, not the robots--and she
did not want to make them say it.  She still remembered how their
masculine laughter had turned ugly.

"The robots weren't programmed to tear up sails--only to fix them.
We've got to condition them to accept the damage that we want to leave,
and to go ahead with the new work which we are adding."

"Could I have something to eat?" asked Veesey.

"Let me get it!" cried Trece.

"Why not?" said Talatashar.

While she ate, they went over the proposed work in detail, the three of
them talking it out calmly.  Veesey felt more relaxed.  She had the
sensation that they were taking her in as a partner.

By the time they completed their work schedules, they were sure it
would take between thirty-five and forty-two normal days to get the
sails stiffened and re-hung.  The robots did the outside work, but the
sails were seventy thousand miles long by twenty thousand miles wide.

Forty-two days!



The work was not forty-two days at all.

It was one year and three days before they finished.

The relationships in the cabin had not changed much.  Talatashar left
her alone except to make ugly remarks.  Nothing he had found in the
medicine cabinet had made him look any better, but some of the things
drugged him so that he slept long and well.

Trece had long since become her sweetheart, but it was such an innocent
romance that it might have been conducted on grass, under elms, at the
edge of an Earth-side silky river.

Once she had found them fighting and had exclaimed:

"Stop it!  Stop it!  You can't!"

When they did stop hitting each other, she said wonderingly:

"I thought you _couldn't_.  Those boxes.  Those safeguards.  Those
things they put in with us."

And Talatashar said, in a voice of infinite ugliness and finality,
"That's what _they_ thought.  I threw those things out of the ship
months ago.  Don't want them around."

The effect on Trece was dramatic, as bad as if he had walked into one
of the Ancient Unselfing Grounds unaware.  He stood utterly still, his
eyes wide and his voice filled with fear when, at last, he did speak.

"So--that's--why--we--fought!"

"You mean the boxes?  They're gone, all right."

"But," gasped Trece, "each was protected by each one's box.  We were
all protected--from ourselves.  God help us all!"

"What is God?" said Talatashar.

"Never mind.  It's an old word.  I heard it from a robot.  But what are
we going to do?  What are _you_ going to do?" said he accusingly to
Talatashar.

"Me," said Talatashar, "I'm doing nothing.  Nothing has happened."  The
working side of his face twisted in a hideous smile.

Veesey watched both of them.

She did not understand it, but she feared it, that unspecific danger.

Talatashar gave them his ugly, masculine laugh, but this time Trece did
not join him.  He stared open-mouthed at the other man.

Talatashar put on a show of courage and indifference.  "Shift's up," he
said, "and I'm turning in." Veesey nodded and tried to say good night
but no words came.  She was frightened and inquisitive.  Of the two,
feeling inquisitive was worse.  There were thirty-odd thousand people
all around her, but only these two were alive and present.  They knew
something which she did not know.

Talatashar made a brave show of it by bidding her, "Mix up something
special for the big eating tomorrow.  Mind you do it, girl."

He climbed into the wall.



When Veesey turned toward Trece, it was he who fell into her arms.

"I'm frightened," he said.  "We can face anything in space, but we
can't face us.  I'm beginning to think that the sailor killed himself.
_His_ psychological guard broke down too.  And now we're all alone with
just us."

Veesey looked instinctively around the cabin.  "It's all the same as
before.  Just the three of us, and this little room, and the Up-and-Out
outside."

"Don't you see it, darling?"  He grabbed her by the shoulders.  "The
little boxes protected us from ourselves.  And now there aren't any.
We are helpless.  There isn't anything here to protect us from us.
What hurts man like man?  What kills people like people?  What danger
to us could be more terrible than ourselves?"

She tried to pull away: "It's not that bad."

Without answering he pulled her to him.  He began tearing at her
clothes.  The jacket and shorts, like his own, were omni-textile and
fitted tight.  She fought him off but she was not the least bit
frightened.  She was sorry for him, and at this moment the only thing
that worried her was that Talatashar might wake up and try to help her.
That would be too much.

Trece was not hard to stop.

She got him to sit down and they drifted into the big chair together.

His face was as tear-stained as her own.

That night, they did not make love.

In whispers, in gasps, he told her the story of _Old Twenty-two_.  He
told her that people poured out among the stars and that the ancient
things inside people woke up, so that the deeps of their minds were
more terrible that the blackest depth of space.  Space never committed
crimes.  It just killed.  Nature could transmit death, but only man
could carry crime from world to world.  Without the boxes, they looked
into the bottomless depths of their own unknown selves.

She did not really understand, but she tried as well as she possibly
could.

He went to sleep--it was long after his shift should have
ended--murmuring over and over again:

"Veesey, Veesey, protect me from me!  What can I do now, now, now, so
that I won't do something terrible later on?  What can I do?  _Now_ I'm
afraid of me, Veesey, and afraid of _Old Twenty-two_.  Veesey, Veesey,
you've got to save me from me.  What can I do now, now, now...?"

She had no answer and after he slept, she slept.  The yellow lights
burned brightly on them both.  The robot-board, reading that no human
being was in the "on" position, assumed complete control of the ship
and sails.

Talatashar woke them in the morning.

No one that day, nor any of the succeeding days, said anything about
the boxes.  There was nothing to say.

But the two men watched each other like unrelated beasts and Veesey
herself began watching them in turn.  Something wrong and vital had
come into the room, some exuberance of life which she had never known
existed.  It did not smell; she could not see it; she could not reach
it with her fingers.  It was something real, nevertheless.  Perhaps it
was what people once called _danger_.

She tried to be particularly friendly to both the men.  It made the
feeling diminish within her.  But Trece became surly and jealous and
Talatashar smiled his untruthful lopsided smile.




IV

Danger came to them by surprise.

Talatashar's hands were on her, pulling her out of her own sleeping-box.

She tried to fight but he was as remorseless as an engine.

He pulled her free, turned her around and let her float in the air.
She would not touch the floor for a minute or two, and he obviously
counted on getting control of her again.  As she twisted in the air,
wondering what had happened, she saw Trece's eyes rolling as they
followed her movement.  Only a fraction of a second later did she
realize that she saw Trece too.  He was tied up with emergency wire,
and the wire which bound him was tied to one of the stanchions in the
wall.  He was more helpless than she.

A cold deep fear came upon her.

"Is this a crime?" she whispered to the empty air.  "Is this what crime
is, what you are doing to me?"

Talatashar did not answer her, but his hands took a firm terrible grip
on her shoulders.  He turned her around.  She slapped at him.  He
slapped her back, hitting so hard that her jaw felt like a wound.

She had hurt herself accidentally a few times; the doctor-robots had
always hurried to her aid.  But no other human being had ever hurt her.
Hurting people--why, that wasn't done, except for the games of men!  It
wasn't done.  It couldn't happen.  It did.

All in a rush she remembered what Trece had told her about _Old
Twenty-two_, and about what happened to people when they lost their own
outsides in space and began making up evil from the people-insides
which, after a million and more years of becoming human, still followed
them everywhere--even into space itself.

This was crime come back to man.

She managed to say it to Talatashar, "You are going to commit crimes?
On this ship?  With me?"

His expression was hard to read, with half of his face frozen in a
perpetual rictus of unfulfilled laughter.  They were facing each other
now.  Her face was feverish from the pain of his slap, but the good
side of his face showed no corresponding imprint of pain from having
been struck by her.  It showed nothing but strength, alertness and a
kind of attunement which was utterly and unimaginably wrong.

At last he answered her, and it was as if he wandered among the wonders
of his own soul.

"I'm going to do what I please.  What _I_ please.  Do you understand?"

"Why don't you just ask us?" she managed to say.  "Trece and I will do
anything you want.  We're all alone in this little ship, millions of
miles from nowhere.  Why shouldn't we do what you want?  Let him go.
And talk to me.  We'll do what you want.  Anything.  You have rights
too."

His laugh was close to a crazy scream.

He put his face close to her and hissed at her so sharply that droplets
of his spittle sprayed against her cheek and ear.

"I don't want rights!" he shouted at her.  "I don't want what's mine.
I don't want to do right.  Do you think I haven't heard the two of you,
night after night, making soft loving sounds when the cabin has gone
dark.  Why do you think I threw the cubes out of the ship?  Why do you
think I needed power?"

"I don't know," she said, sadly and meekly.  She had not given up hope.
As long as he was talking he might talk himself out and become
reasonable again.  She had heard of robots blowing their circuits, so
that they had to be hunted down by other robots.  But she had never
thought that it might happen to people too.

Talatashar groaned.  The history of man was in his groan--the anger at
life, which promises so much and gives so little, and despair about
time, which tricks man while it shapes him.  He sat back on the air and
let himself drift toward the floor of the cabin, where the magnetic
carpeting drew the silky iron filaments in their clothing.

"You're thinking he'll get over this, aren't you?" said he, speaking of
himself.

She nodded.

"You're thinking he'll get reasonable and let both of us alone, aren't
you?"

She nodded again.

"You're thinking--Talatashar, he'll get well when we arrive at Wereld
Schemering, and the doctors will fix his face, and then we'll all be
happy again.  That's what you're thinking, isn't it?"

She still nodded.  Behind her she heard Trece give a loud groan against
his gag, but she did not dare take her eyes off Talatashar and his
spoiled, horrible face.



"Well, it won't be that way, Veesey," he said.  The finality in his
voice was almost calm.

"Veesey, you're not going to get there.  I'm going to do what I have to
do.  I'm going to do things to you that no one ever did in space
before, and then I'm going to throw your body out the disposal door.
But I'll let Trece watch it all before I kill him too.  And then, do
you know what I'll do?"

Some strange emotion--it was probably fear--began tightening the
muscles in her throat.  Her mouth had become dry.  She barely managed
to croak, "No, I don't know what you'll do then..."

Talatashar looked as though he were staring inward.

"I don't either," said he, "except that it's not something I want to
do.  I don't want to do it at all.  It's cruel and messy and when I get
through I won't have you and him to talk to.  But this is something I
have to do.  It's justice, in a strange way.  You've got to die because
you're bad.  And I'm bad too; but if you die, I won't be so bad."

He looked up at her brightly, almost as though he were normal.  "Do you
know what I'm talking about?  Do you understand any of it?"

"No.  No.  No."  Veesey stammered, but she could not help it.

Talatashar stared not at her but at the invisible face of his
crime-to-come and said, almost cheerfully:

"You might as well understand.  It's you who will die for it, and then
him.  Long ago you did me a wrong, a dirty, intolerable wrong.  It
wasn't the you who's sitting here.  You're not big enough or smart
enough to do anything as awful as the things that were done to me.  It
wasn't this you who did it, it was the real, true you instead.  And now
you are going to be cut and burned and choked and brought back with
medicines and cut and choked and hurt again, as long as your body can
stand it.  And when your body stops, I'm going to put on an emergency
suit and shove your dead body out into space with him.  He can go out
alive, for all I care.  Without a suit, he'll last two gasps.  And then
part of my justice will be done.  That's what people have called crime.
It's just justice, private justice that comes out of the deep insides
of man.  Do you understand, Veesey?"

She nodded.  She shook her head.  She nodded again.  She didn't know
how to respond.

"And then there are more things which I'll have to do," he went on,
with a sort of purr.  "Do you know what there is outside this ship,
waiting for my crime?"

She shook her head, and so he answered himself.

"There are thirty thousand people following in their pods behind this
ship.  I'll pull them in by two and two and I will get young girls.
The others I'll throw loose in space.  And with the girls I'll find out
what it is--what it is I've always had to do, and never knew.  Never
knew, Veesey, till I found myself out in space with you."

His voice almost went dreamy as he lost himself in his own thoughts.
The twisted side of his face showed its endless laugh, but the mobile
side looked thoughtful and melancholy, so that she felt there was
something inside him which might be understood, if only she had the
quickness and the imagination to think of it.



Her throat still dry, she managed to half-whisper at him:

"Do you hate me?  Why do you want to hurt me?  Do you hate girls?"

"I don't hate girls," he blazed, "I hate me.  Out here in space I found
it out.  You're not a person.  Girls aren't people.  They are soft and
pretty and cute and cuddly and warm, but they have no feelings.  I was
handsome before my face spoiled, but that didn't matter.  I always knew
that girls weren't people.  They're something like robots.  They have
all the power in the world and none of the worry.  Men have to obey,
men have to beg, men have to suffer, because they are built to suffer
and to be sorry and to obey.  All a girl has to do is to smile her
pretty smile or to cross her pretty legs, and the man gives up
everything he has ever wanted and fought for, just to be her slave.
And then the girl--" and at this point he got to screaming again, in a
high shrill shout--"and then the girl gets to be a woman and she has
children, more girls to pester men, more men to be the victims of
girls, more cruelty and more slaves.  You're so cruel to me, Veesey!
You're so cruel that you don't even know you're cruel.  If you'd known
how I wanted you, you'd have suffered like a person.  But you didn't
suffer.  You're a girl.  Well, you're going to find out now.  You will
suffer and then you will die.  But you won't die until you know how men
feel about women."

"Tala," she said, using the nickname they had so rarely used to him,
"Tala, that's not so.  I never meant you to suffer."

"Of course you didn't," he snapped.  "Girls don't know what they do.
That's what makes them girls.  They're worse than snakes, worse than
machines."  He was mad, crazy-mad, in the outer deep of space.  He
stood up so suddenly that he shot through the air and had to catch
himself on the ceiling.

A noise in the side of the cabin made them both turn for a moment.
Trece was trying to break loose from his bonds.  It did no good.
Veesey flung herself toward Trece, but Talatashar caught her by the
shoulder.  He twisted her around.  His eyes blazed at her out of his
poor, misshapen face.

Veesey had sometimes wondered what death would be like.  She thought:

_This is it_.

Her body still fought Talatashar, there in the spaceboat cabin.  Trece
groaned behind his shackles and his gag.  She tried to scratch at
Talatashar's eyes, but the thought of death made her seem far away.
Far away, inside herself.

Inside herself, where other people could not reach, ever--no matter
what happened.

Out of that deep nearby remoteness, words came into her head:

  Lady if a man
  Tries to bother you, you can
      Think blue,
      Count two,
  And look for a red shoe...


Thinking blue was not hard.  She just imagined the yellow cabin lights
turning blue.  Counting "one-two" was the simplest thing in the world.
And even with Talatashar straining to catch her free hand, she managed
to remember the beautiful, beautiful red shoes which she had seen in
_Marcia and the Moon Men_.

The lights dimmed momentarily and a huge voice roared at them from the
control board.

"Emergency, top emergency!  People!  People out of repair!"

Talatashar was so astonished that he let her go.

The board whined at them like a siren.  It sounded as though the
computer had become flooded with weeping.

In an utterly different voice from his impassioned talkative rage,
Talatashar looked directly at her and asked, very soberly, "Your cube.
Didn't I get your cube too?"

There was a knocking on the wall.  A knocking from the millions of
miles of emptiness outside.  A knocking out of nowhere.

A person they had never seen before stepped into the ship, walking
through the double wall as though it had been nothing more than a
streamer of mist.

It was a man.  A middle-aged man, sharp of face, strong in torso and
limbs, clad in very old-style clothes.  In his belt he had a whole
collection of weapons, and in his hand a whip.

"You there," said the stranger to Talatashar, "untie that man."

He gestured with the whip-butt toward Trece, still bound and gagged.

Talatashar got over his surprise.

"You're a cube-ghost.  You're not real!"

The whip hissed in the air and a long red welt appeared on Talatashar's
wrist.  The drops of blood began to float beside him in the air before
he could speak again.

Veesey could say nothing; her mind and body seemed to be blanking out.

As she sank to the floor, she saw Talatashar shake himself, walk over
to Trece and begin untying the knots.

When Talatashar got the gag out of Trece's mouth, Trece spoke--not to
him, but to the stranger:

"Who are you?"

"I do not exist," said the stranger, "but I can kill you, any of you,
if I wish.  You had better do as I say.  Listen carefully.  You too,"
he added, turning half-way around and looking at Veesey, "you listen
too, because it's you who called me."



All three listened.  The fight was gone out of them.  Trece rubbed his
wrists and shook his hands to get the circulation going in them again.

The stranger turned, in courtly and elegant fashion, so that he spoke
most directly to Talatashar.

"I derive from the young lady's cube.  Did you notice the lights dim?
Tiga-belas left a false cube in her freezebox but he hid me in the
ship.  When she thought the key notions at me, there was a fraction of
a microvolt which called for more power at my terminals.  I am made
from the brain of some small animal, but I bear the personality and the
strength of Tiga-belas.  I shall last a billion years.  When the
current came on full power, I became operative as a distortion in your
minds.  I do not exist," said he, specifically addressing himself to
Talatashar, "but if I needed to take out my imaginary pistol and to
shoot you in the head with it, my control is so strong that your bone
would comply with my command.  The hole would appear in your head and
your blood and your brains would pour out, just as much as blood is
pouring from your hand just now.  Look at your hand and believe me, if
you wish."

Talatashar refused to look.

The stranger went on in a very deliberate tone.  "No bullet would come
from my pistol, no ray, no blast, nothing.  Nothing at all.  But your
flesh would believe me, even if your thoughts did not.  Your bone
structure would believe me, whether you thought so or not.  I am
communicating to every separate single cell in your body, to everything
which I feel to be alive.  If I think _bullet_ at you, your bone will
pull aside for the imaginary wound.  Your skin will part, your blood
will pour out, your brains will splash.  They will not do it by
physical force but by communication from me.  Communication direct, you
fool.  That may not be real violence, but it serves my purpose just as
well.  Now do you understand me?  Look at your wrist."

Talatashar did not avert his eyes from the stranger.  In an odd cold
voice he said, "I believe you.  I guess I am crazy.  Are you going to
kill me?"

"I don't know," said the stranger.

Trece said, "Please, are you a person or a machine?"

"I don't know," said the stranger to him too.

"What's your name?" asked Veesey.  "Did you get a name when they made
you and sent you with us?"

"My name," said the stranger, with a bow to her, "is Sh'san."

"Glad to meet you, Sh'san," said Trece, holding out his own hand.

They shook hands.

"I felt your hand," said Trece.  He looked at the other two in
amazement.  "I felt his hand, I really did.  What were you doing out in
space all this time?"

The stranger smiled, "I have work to do, not talk to make."

"What do you want us to do," said Talatashar, "now that you've taken
over?"

"I haven't taken over," said Sh'san, "and you will do what you have to
do.  Isn't that the nature of people?"

"But, please--" said Veesey.

The stranger had vanished and the three of them were alone in the
spaceboat cabin again.  Trece's gag and bindings had finally drifted
down to the carpet but Tala's blood hung gently in the air beside him.

Very heavily, Talatashar spoke, "Well, we're through that.  Would you
say I was crazy?"

"Crazy?" said Veesey.  "I don't know the word."

"Damaged in the thinking," explained Trece to her.  Turning to
Talatashar he began to speak seriously, "I think that--"  He was
interrupted by the control board.  Little bells rang and a sign lighted
up.  They all saw it.  _Visitors expected_, said the glowing sign.

The storage door opened and a beautiful woman came into the cabin with
them.  She looked at them as though she knew them all.  Veesey and
Trece were inquisitive and startled, but Talatashar turned white, dead
white.




V

Veesey saw that the woman wore a dress of the style which had vanished
a generation ago--a style now seen only in the story-boxes.  There was
no back to it.  The lady had a bold cosmetic design fanning out from
her spinal column.  In front, the dress hung from the usual magnet tabs
which had been inserted into the shallow fatty area of the chest, but
in her case the tabs were above the clavicles, so that the dress rose
high, with an air of old-fashioned prudishness.  Magnet tabs were at
the usual place just below the rib-cage, holding the half-skirt, which
was very full, in a wide sweep of unpressed pleats.  The lady wore a
necklace and matching bracelet of off-world coral.  The lady did not
even look at Veesey.  She went straight to Talatashar and spoke to him
with peremptory love:

"Tal, be a good boy.  You've been bad."

"Mama," gasped Talatashar.  "Mama, you're dead!"

"Don't argue with me," she snapped.  "Be a good boy.  Take care of the
little girl.  Where is the little girl?"  She looked around and saw
Veesey.  "That little girl," she added, "be a good boy to _that_ little
girl.  If you don't, you will break your mother's heart, you will ruin
your mother's life, you will break your mother's heart, just like your
father did.  Don't make me tell you twice."

She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, and it seemed to Veesey
that both sides of the man's face were equally twisted, for that moment.

She stood up, looked around, nodded politely at Trece and Veesey, and
walked back into the storage room, closing the door after her.

Talatashar plunged after her, opening the door with a bang and shutting
it with a slam.  Trece called after him:

"Don't stay in there too long.  You'll freeze."

Trece added, speaking to Veesey, "This is something your cube is doing.
That Sh'san, he's the most powerful warden I ever saw.  Your
psychological guard must have been a genius.  And you know what's the
matter with him?"  He nodded at the closed door.  "He told me once,
just in general.  His own mother raised him.  He was born in the
asteroid belt and she didn't turn him in."

"You mean, his very own mother?" said Veesey.

"Yes, his genealogical mother," said Trece.

"How _dirty_!" said Veesey.  "I never heard of anything like it."

Talatashar came back into the room and said nothing to either of them.

The mother did not reappear.

But Sh'san, the eidetic man imprinted in the cube, continued to assert
his authority over all three of them.



Three days later Marcia herself appeared, talked to Veesey for half an
hour about her adventures with the Moon Men, and then disappeared
again.  Marcia never pretended that she was real.  She was too pretty
to be real.  A thick cascade of yellow hair crowned a well-formed head;
dark eyebrows arched over vivid brown eyes, and an enchantingly
mischievous smile pleased Veesey, Trece, and Talatashar.  Marcia
admitted that she was the imaginary heroine of a dramatic series from
the story-boxes.  Talatashar had calmed down completely after the
apparition of Sh'san followed by that of his mother.  He seemed anxious
to get to the bottom of the phenomena.  He tried to do it by asking
Marcia.

She answered his questions willingly.

"What are you?" he demanded.  The friendly smile on the good side of
his face was more frightening than a scowl would have been.

"I'm a little girl, silly," said Marcia.

"But you're not real," he insisted.

"No," she admitted, "but are you?"  She laughed a happy girlish
laugh--the teen-ager tying up the bewildered adult in his own paradox.

"Look," he persisted, "you know what I mean.  You're just something
that Veesey saw in the story-boxes and you've come to give her
imaginary red shoes."

"You can feel the shoes after I've left," said Marcia.

"That means the cube has made them out of something on this ship," said
Talatashar, very triumphantly.

"Why not?" said Marcia.  "I don't know about ships.  I guess he does."

"But even if the shoes are real, you're not," said Talatashar.  "Where
do you go when you 'leave' us?"

"I don't know," said Marcia.  "I came here to visit Veesey.  When I go
away I suppose that I will be where I was before I came."

"And where was that?"

"Nowhere," said Marcia, looking solid and real.

"Nowhere?  So you admit you're nothing?"

"I will if you want me to," said Marcia, "but this conversation doesn't
make much sense to me.  Where were you before you were here?"

"Here?  You mean in this boat?  I was on earth," said Talatashar.

"Before you were in this universe, where were you?"

"I wasn't born, so I didn't exist."

"Well," said Marcia, "it's the same with me, only a little bit
different.  Before I existed I didn't exist.  When I exist, I'm here.
I'm an echo out of Veesey's personality and I'm helping her to remember
that she is a pretty young girl.  I feel as real as you feel.  So
there!"

Marcia went back to talking about her adventures with the Moon Men and
Veesey was fascinated to hear all the things they had had to leave out
of the story-box version.  When Marcia was through, she shook hands
with the two men, gave Veesey a little peck of a kiss on her left cheek
and walked through the hull into the gnawing emptiness of space, marked
only by the starless rhomboids of the sails which cut off part of the
heavens from view.

Talatashar pounded his fist in his other, open hand.  "Science has gone
too far.  They will kill us with their precautions."

Trece said, deadly calm: "And what might you have done?"

Talatashar fell into a gloomy silence.

And on the tenth day after the apparitions began, they ended.  The
power of the cube drew itself into a whole thunderbolt of decision.
Apparently the cube and the ship's computers had somehow filled in each
other's data.



The person who came in this time was a space captain, gray, wrinkled,
erect, tanned by the radiation of a thousand worlds.

"You know who I am," he said.

"Yes, sir, a captain," said Veesey.

"I don't know you," said Talatashar, "and I'm not sure I believe in
you."

"Has your hand healed?" asked the captain, grimly.

Talatashar fell silent.

The captain called them to attention.  "Listen.  You are not going to
live long enough to get to the stars on your present course.  I want
Trece to set the macro-chronography for intervals of ninety-five years,
and then I want to watch while he gives two of you at a time five years
on watch.  That will do to set the sails, check the tangling of the pod
lines, and send out report beacons.  This ship should have a sailor,
but there is not enough equipment to turn one of you into a sailor, so
we'll have to take a chance on the robot controls while all three of
you sleep in your freezebeds.  Your sailor died of a blood clot and the
robots pushed him out of the cabin before they woke you--"

Trece winced.  "I thought he had committed suicide."

"Not a bit," said the captain.  "Now listen.  You'll get through in
about three sleeps if you obey orders.  If you don't, you'll never get
there."

"It doesn't matter about me," said Talatashar, "but this little girl
has got to get to Wereld Schemering while she still has some life.  One
of your blasted apparitions told me to take care of her, but the idea
is a good one, anyhow."

"Me too," said Trece.  "I didn't realize that she was just a kid until
I saw her talking to that other kid Marcia.  Maybe I'll have a daughter
like her some day."

The captain said nothing to these comments but gave them the full,
happy smile of an old, wise man.

An hour later they were through with the check-up of the boat.  The
three were ready to go to their separate freezebeds.  The captain was
getting ready to make his farewell.

Talatashar spoke up, "Sir, I can't help asking it, but who are you?"

"A captain," said the captain promptly.

"You know what I mean," said Tala wearily.

The captain seemed to be looking inside himself.  "I am a temporary,
artificial personality created out of your minds by the personality
which you call Sh'san.  Sh'san is on the ship, but hidden from you, so
that you will do him no harm.  Sh'san was imprinted with the
personality of a man, a real man, by the name of Tiga-belas.  Sh'san
was also imprinted with the personalities of five or six good space
officers, just in case those skills might be needed.  A small amount of
static electricity keeps Sh'san on the alert, and when he is in the
right position, he has a triggering mechanism which can call for more
current from the ship's supply."

"But what _is_ he?  What _are_ you?" Talatashar kept on, almost
pleading.  "I was about to commit a terrible crime and you ghosts came
in and saved me.  Are you imaginary?  Are you real?"

"That's philosophy.  I'm made by science.  I wouldn't know," said the
captain.

"Please," said Veesey, "could you tell us what it seems like to you?
Not what it is.  What it seems like."

The captain sagged, as though the discipline had gone out of him--as
though he suddenly felt terribly old.  "When I'm talking and doing
things, I suppose that I feel about like any other space captain.  If I
stop to think about it, I find myself pretty upsetting.  I know that
I'm just an echo in your minds, combined with the experience and wisdom
which has gone into the cube.  So I guess that I do what real people
do.  I just don't think about it very much.  I mind my business."  He
stiffened and straightened and was himself again.  "My own business,"
he repeated.

"And Sh'san," said Trece, "how do you feel about him?"

A look of awe--almost a look of terror--came upon the captain's face.
"He?  Oh, him."  The tone of wonder enriched his voice and made it echo
in the small cabin of the spaceboat: "Sh'san.  He is the thinker of all
thinking, the 'to be' of being, the doer of doings.  He is powerful
beyond your strongest imagination.  He makes me come living out of your
living minds.  In fact," said the captain with a final snarl, "he is a
dead mouse-brain laminated with plastic and I have no idea at all of
who _I_ am.  Good night to you all!"

The captain set his cap on his head and walked straight through the
hull.  Veesey ran to a viewport but there was nothing outside the ship.
Nothing.  Certainly no captain.

"What can we do," said Talatashar, "but obey?"

They obeyed.  They climbed into their freezebeds.  Talatashar attached
the correct electrodes to Veesey and to Trece before he went to his bed
and attached his own.  They called to each other pleasantly as the lids
came down.

They slept.




VI

At destination, the people of Wereld Schemering did the ingathering of
pods, sails and ship themselves.  They did not wake the sleepers till
they had them all assured of safety on the ground.

They woke the three cabin mates together.  Veesey, Trece, and
Talatashar were so busy answering questions about the dead sailor,
about the repaired sails and about their problems on the trip that they
did not have time to talk to each other.  Veesey saw that Talatashar
seemed to be very handsome.  The port doctors had done something to
restore his face, so that he seemed a strangely dignified young-old
man.  At last Trece had a chance to talk to her.

"Good-by, kid," he said.  "Go to school for a while here and then find
yourself a good man.  I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?" she said, a terrible fear rising within her.

"For smooching around with you before that trouble came.  You're just a
kid.  But you're a good kid."  He ran his fingers through her hair,
turned on his heel and was gone.

She stood, utterly forlorn, in the middle of the room.  She wished that
she could weep.  What use had she been on the trip?

Talatashar had come up to her unnoticed.

He held out his hand.  She took it.

"Give it time, child," said he.

Is it _child_ again? she thought to herself.  To him she said,
politely, "Maybe we'll see each other again.  This is a pretty small
world."

His face lit up in an oddly agreeable smile.  It made such a wonderful
difference for the paralysis to be gone from one side.  He did not look
old at all, not really old.

His voice took on urgency.  "Veesey, remember that I remember.  I
remember what almost happened.  I remember what we thought we saw.
Maybe we did see all those things.  We won't see them on the ground.
But I want you to remember this.  You saved us all.  Me too.  And
Trece, and the thirty thousand out behind."

"Me?" she said.  "What did I do?"

"You tuned in help.  You let Sh'san work.  It all came through you.  If
you hadn't been honest and kind and friendly, if you hadn't been
terribly intelligent, no cube could have worked.  That wasn't any dead
mouse working miracles on us.  It was your mind and your own goodness
that saved us.  The cube just added the sound effects.  I tell you, if
you hadn't been along, two dead men would be sailing off into the Big
Nothing with thirty thousand spoiling bodies trailing along behind.
You saved us all.  You may not know how you did it, but you did."

An official tapped him on the arm; Tala said, firmly but politely, to
him: "Just a moment.

"That's it, I guess," he said to her.

A contrary spirit seized her; she had to speak, though she risked
unhappiness by talking.  "And what you said about girls ... then ...
that time?"

"I remember it."  His face twisted almost back to its old ugliness for
a moment.  "I remember it.  But I was wrong.  Wrong."

She looked at him and she thought in her own mind about the _blue_ sky,
about the _two_ doors behind them, and about the _red shoes_ in her
luggage.  Nothing miraculous happened.  No Sh'san, no voices, no magic
cubes.



Except that he turned around, came back to her and said, "Look.  Let's
make sure that we see each other next week.  These people at the desk
can tell us where we are going to be, so that we'll find each other.
Let's pester them."

Together they went to the immigration desk.






[End of Think Blue, Count Two, by Cordwainer Smith]
