By CORDWAINER SMITH
To follow Elizabeth he went where no man
had ever gone before.
He left light itself behind like a shrivelled leaf.
Space itself curled up behind him.
Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space. It is true that no one else had ever done anything like it before, to travel at such a distance, and at such speeds, and by such means. The hero looked like such an ordinary man—when people looked at him for the first time. The second time, ah! that was different. And the heroine. Small she was, and ash-blonde, intelligent, perky, and hurt. Hurt—yes, that's the right word. She looked as though she needed comforting or helping, even when she was perfectly all right. Men felt more like men when she was near. Her name was Elizabeth.
Who would have thought that her name would ring loud and clear in the wild vomiting nothing which made up space3?
He took an old, old rocket, of an ancient design. With it he outflew, outfled, outjumped all the machines which had ever existed before. You might almost think that he went so fast that he shocked the great vaults of the sky, so that the ancient poem might have been written for him alone. "All the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears."
Go he did, so fast, so far that people simply did not believe it at first. They thought it was a joke told by men, a farce spun forth by rumor, a wild story to while away the summer afternoon.
We know his name now.
And our children and their children will know it for always.
Rambo. Artyr Rambo of Earth Four.
But he followed his Elizabeth where no space was. He went where men could not go, had not been, did not dare, would not think.
He did all this of his own free will.
Of course people thought it was a joke at first, and got to making up silly songs about the reported trip.
"Dig me a hole for that reeling feeling...!" sang one.
"Push me the call for the umber number...!" sang another.
"Where is the ship of the ochre joker...?" sang a third.
Then people everywhere found it was true. Some stood stock still and got gooseflesh. Others turned quickly to everyday things. Space3 had been found, and it had been pierced. Their world would never be the same again. The solid rock had become an open door.
Space itself, so clean, so empty, so tidy, now looked like a million million light-years of tapioca pudding—gummy, mushy, sticky, not fit to breathe, not fit to swim in.
How did it happen?
Everybody took the credit, each in his own different way.
"He came for me," said Elizabeth. "I died and he came for me because the machines were making a mess of my life when they tried to heal my terrible, useless death."
"I went myself," said Rambo. "They tricked me and lied to me and fooled me, but I took the boat and I became the boat and I got there. Nobody made me do it. I was angry, but I went. And I came back, didn't I?"
He too was right, even when he twisted and whined on the green grass of earth, his ship lost in a space so terribly far and strange that it might have been beneath his living hand, or might have been half a galaxy away.
How can anybody tell, with space-three?
It was Rambo who got back, looking for his Elizabeth. He loved her. So the trip was his, and the credit his.
But the Lord Crudelta said, many years later, when he spoke in a soft voice and talked confidentially among friends, "The experiment was mine. I designed it. I picked Rambo. I drove the selectors mad, trying to find a man who would meet those specifications. And I had that rocket built to the old, old plans. It was the sort of thing which human beings first used when they jumped out of the air a little bit, leaping like flying fish from one wave to the next and already thinking that they were eagles. If I had used one of the regular planoform ships, it would have disappeared with a sort of reverse gurgle, leaving space milky for a little bit while it faded into nastiness and obliteration. But I did not risk that. I put the rocket on a launching pad. And the launching pad itself was an interstellar ship! Since we were using an ancient rocket, we did it up right, with the old, old writing, mysterious letters printed all over the machine. We even had the name of our Organization—I and O and M—for 'the Instrumentality of Mankind' written on it good and sharp.
"How would I know," went on the Lord Crudelta, "that we would succeed more than we wanted to succeed, that Rambo would tear space itself loose from its hinges and leave that ship behind, just because he loved Elizabeth so sharply much, so fiercely much?"
Crudelta sighed.
"I know it and I don't know it. I'm like that ancient man who tried to take a water boat the wrong way around the planet Earth and found a new world instead. Columbus, he was called. And the land, that was Australia or America or something like that. That's what I did. I sent Rambo out in that ancient rocket and he found a way through space3. Now none of us will ever know who might come bulking through the floor or take shape out of the air in front of us."
Crudelta added, almost wistfully: "What's the use of telling the story? Everybody knows it, anyhow. My part in it isn't very glorious. Now the end of it, that's pretty. The bungalow by the waterfall and all the wonderful children that other people gave to them, you could write a poem about that. But the next to the end, how he showed up at the hospital helpless and insane, looking for his own Elizabeth. That was sad and eerie, that was frightening. I'm glad it all came to the happy ending with the bungalow by the waterfall, but it took a crashing long time to get there. And there are parts of it that we will never quite understand, the naked skin against naked space, the eyeballs riding something much faster than light ever was. Do you know what an aoudad is? It's an ancient sheep that used to live on Old Earth, and here we are, thousands of years later, with a children's nonsense rhyme about it. The animals are gone but the rhyme remains. It'll be like that with Rambo someday. Everybody will know his name and all about his drunkboat, but they will forget the scientific milestone that he crossed, hunting for Elizabeth in an ancient rocket that couldn't fly from peetle to pootle.... Oh, the rhyme? Don't you know that? It's a silly thing. It goes,
Point your gun at a murky lurky.
(Now you're talking ham or turkey!)
Shoot a shot at a dying aoudad.
(Don't ask the lady why or how, dad!)
Don't ask me what 'ham' and 'turkey' are. Probably parts of ancient animals, like beefsteak or sirloin. But the children still say the words. They'll do that with Rambo and his drunken boat some day. They may even tell the story of Elizabeth. But they will never tell the part about how he got to the hospital. That part is too terrible, too real, too sad and wonderful at the end. They found him on the grass. Mind you, naked on the grass, and nobody knew where he had come from!"
They found him naked on the grass and nobody knew where he had come from. They did not even know about the ancient rocket which the Lord Crudelta had sent beyond the end of nowhere with the letters I, O and M written on it. They did not know that this was Rambo, who had gone through space-three. The robots noticed him first and brought him in, photographing everything that they did. They had been programmed that way, to make sure that anything unusual was kept in the records.
Then the nurses found him in an outside room.
They assumed that he was alive, since he was not dead, but they could not prove that he was alive, either.
That heightened the puzzle.
The doctors were called in. Real doctors, not machines. They were very important men. Citizen Doctor Timofeyev, Citizen Doctor Grosbeck and the director himself, Sir and Doctor Vomact. They took the case.
(Over on the other side of the hospital Elizabeth waited, unconscious, and nobody knew it at all. Elizabeth, for whom he had jumped space, and pierced the stars, but nobody knew it yet!)
The young man could not speak. When they ran eye-prints and fingerprints through the Population Machine, they found that he had been bred on earth itself, but had been shipped out as a frozen and unborn baby to Earth Four. At tremendous cost, they queried Earth Four with an "instant message," only to discover that the young man who lay before them in the hospital had been lost from an experimental ship on an intergalactic trip.
Lost.
No ship and no sign of ship.
And here he was.
They stood at the edge of space, and did not know what they were looking at. They were doctors and it was their business to repair or rebuild people, not to ship them around. How should such men know about space, when they did not even know about space, except for the fact that people got on the planoform ships and made trips through it? They were looking for sickness when their eyes saw engineering. They treated him when he was well.
All he needed was time, to get over the shock of the most tremendous trip ever made by a human being, but the doctors did not know that and they tried to rush his recovery.
When they put clothes on him, he moved from coma to a kind of mechanical spasm and tore the clothing off. Once again stripped, he lay himself roughly on the floor and refused food or speech.
They fed him with needles while the whole energy of space, had they only known it, was radiating out of his body in new forms.
They put him all by himself in a locked room and watched him through the peephole.
He was a nice-looking young man, even though his mind was blank and his body was rigid and unconscious. His hair was very fair and his eyes were light blue but his face showed character—a square chin; a handsome, resolute sullen mouth; old lines in the face which looked as though, when conscious, he must have lived many days or months on the edge of rage.
When they studied him the third day in the hospital, their patient had not changed at all.
He had torn off his pajamas again and lay naked, face down, on the floor.
His body was as immobile and tense as it had been on the day before.
(One year later, this room was going to be a museum with a bronze sign reading, "Here lay Rambo after he left the Old Rocket for Space Three," but the doctors still had no idea of what they were dealing with.)
His face was turned so sharply to the left that the neck muscles showed. His right arm stuck out straight from the body. The left arm formed an exact right angle from the body, with the left forearm and hand pointing rigidly upward at 90° from the upper arm. The legs were in the grotesque parody of a running position.
Doctor Grosbeck said, "It looks to me like he's swimming. Let's drop him in a tank of water and see if he moves." Grosbeck sometimes went in for drastic solutions to problems.
Timofeyev took his place at the peephole. "Spasm, still," he murmured. "I hope the poor fellow is not feeling pain when his cortical defenses are down. How can a man fight pain if he does not even know what he is experiencing?"
"And you, sir and doctor," said Grosbeck to Vomact, "what do you see?"
Vomact did not need to look. He had come early and had looked long and quietly at the patient through the peephole before the other doctors arrived. Vomact was a wise man, with good insight and rich intuitions. He could guess in an hour more than a machine could diagnose in a year; he was already beginning to understand that this was a sickness which no man had ever had before. Still, there were remedies waiting.
The three doctors tried them.
They tried hypnosis, electro-therapy, massage, subsonics, atropine, surgital, a whole family of the digitalinids, and some quasi-narcotic viruses which had been grown in orbit where they mutated fast. They got the beginning of a response when they tried gas hypnosis combined with an electronically amplified telepath; this showed that something still went on inside the patient's mind. Otherwise the brain might have seemed to be mere fatty tissue, without a nerve in it. The other attempts had shown nothing. The gas showed a faint stirring away from fear and pain. The telepath reported glimpses of unknown skies. (The doctors turned the telepath over to the Space Police promptly, so they could try to code the star patterns which he had seen in a patient's mind, but the patterns did not fit. The telepath, though a keen-witted man, could not remember them in enough detail for them to be scanned against the samples of piloting sheets.)
The doctors went back to their drugs and tried ancient, simple remedies—morphine and caffeine to counteract each other, and a rough massage to make him dream again, so that the telepath could pick it up.
There was no further result that day, or the next.
Meanwhile the Earth authorities were getting restless. They thought, quite rightly, that the hospital had done a good job of proving that the patient had not been on Earth until a few moments before the robots found him on the grass. How had he gotten on the grass?
The airspace of earth reported no intrusion at all, no vehicle marking a blazing arc of air incandescing against metal, no whisper of the great forces which drove a planoform ship through space3.
(Crudelta, using faster-than-light ships, was creeping slow as a snail back toward Earth, racing his best to see if Rambo had gotten there first.)
On the fifth day, there was the beginning of a breakthrough.
Elizabeth had passed.
This was found out only much later, by a careful check of the hospital records.
The doctors only knew this much:
Patients had been moved down the corridor, sheet-covered figures immobile on wheeled beds.
Suddenly the beds stopped rolling.
A nurse screamed.
The heavy steel-and-plastic wall was bending inward. Some slow, silent force was pushing the wall into the corridor itself.
The wall ripped.
A human hand emerged.
One of the quick-witted nurses screamed,
"Push those beds! Push them out of the way."
The nurses and robots obeyed.
The beds rocked like a group of boats crossing a wave when they came to the place where the floor, bonded to the wall, had bent upward to meet the wall as it tore inward. The peach-colored glow of the lights flicked. Robots appeared.
A second human hand came through the wall. Pushing in opposite directions, the hands tore the wall as though it had been wet paper.
The patient from the grass put his head through.
He looked blindly up and down the corridor, his eyes not quite focussing, his skin glowing a strange red-brown from the burns of open space.
"No," he said. Just that one word.
But that "No" was heard. Though the volume was not loud, it carried throughout the hospital. The internal telecommunications system relayed it. Every switch in the place went negative. Frantic nurses and robots, with even the doctors helping them, rushed to turn all the machines back on—the pumps, the ventilators, the artificial kidneys, the brain re-recorders, even the simple air engines which kept the atmosphere clean.
Far overhead an aircraft spun giddily. Its "off" switch, surrounded by triple safeguards, had suddenly been thrown into the negative position. Fortunately the robot-pilot got it going again before crashing into earth.
The patient did not seem to know that his word had this effect.
(Later the world knew that this was part of the "drunkboat effect." The man himself had developed the capacity for using his neurophysical system as a machine control.)
In the corridor, the machine robot who served as policeman arrived. He wore sterile, padded velvet gloves with a grip of sixty metric tons inside his hands. He approached the patient. The robot had been carefully training to recognize all kinds of danger from delirious or psychotic humans; later he reported that he had an input of "danger, extreme" on every band of sensation. He had been expecting to seize the prisoner with irreversible firmness and to return him to his bed, but with this kind of danger sizzling in the air, the robot took no chances. His wrist itself contained a hypodermic pistol which operated on compressed argon.
He reached out toward the unknown, naked man, who stood in the big torn gap of the wall. The wrist-weapon hissed and a sizeable injection of condamine, the most powerful narcotic in the known universe, spat its way through the skin of Rambo's neck. The patient collapsed.
The robot picked him up gently and tenderly, lifted him through the torn wall, pushed the door open with a kick which broke the lock and put the patient back on his bed. The robot could hear doctors coming, so he used his enormous hands to pat the steel wall back into its proper shape. Work-robots or underpeople could finish the job later, but meanwhile it looked better to have that part of the building set at right angles again.
Doctor Vomact arrived, followed closely by Grosbeck.
"What happened?" he yelled, shaken out of a life-long calm. The robot pointed at the ripped wall.
"He tore it open, I put it back," said the robot.
The doctors turned to look at the patient. He had crawled off his bed again and was on the floor, but his breathing was light and natural.
"What did you give him?" cried Vomact to the robot.
"Condamine," said the robot, "according to rule 47-B. The drug is not to be mentioned outside the hospital."
"I know that," said Vomact absent-mindedly and a little crossly. "You can go along now. Thank you."
"It is not usual to thank robots," said the robot, "but you can read a commendation into my record if you want to."
"Get the blazes out of here!" shouted Vomact at the officious robot.
The robot blinked. "There are no blazes but I have the impression you mean me. I shall leave, with your permission." He jumped with odd gracefulness around the two doctors, fingered the broken doorlock absentmindedly, as though he might have wished to repair it and then, seeing Vomact glare at him, left the room completely.
A moment later soft muted thuds began. Both doctors listened a moment and then gave up. The robot was out in the corridor, gently patting the steel floor back into shape. He was a tidy robot, probably animated by an amplified chicken-brain, and when he got tidy he became obstinate.
"Two questions, Grosbeck," said the sir and doctor Vomact.
"Your service, sir!"
"Where was the patient standing when he pushed the wall into the corridor, and how did he get the leverage to do it?"
Grosbeck narrowed his eyes in puzzlement. "Now that you mention it, I have no idea of how he did it. In fact, he could not have done it. But he has. And the other question?"
"What do you think of condamine?"
"Dangerous, of course, as always. Addiction can—"
"Can you have addiction with no cortical activity?" interrupted Vomact.
"Of course," said Grosbeck promptly. "Tissue addiction."
"Look for it, then," said Vomact.
Grosbeck knelt beside the patient and felt with his fingertips for the muscle endings. He felt where they knotted themselves into the base of the skull, the lips of the shoulders, the striped area of the back.
When he stood up there was a look of puzzlement on his face. "I never felt a human body like this one before. I am not even sure that it is human any longer."
Vomact said nothing. The two doctors confronted one another. Grosbeck fidgeted under the calm stare of the senior man. Finally he blurted out,
"Sir and Doctor, I know what we could do."
"And that," said Vomact levelly, without the faintest hint of encouragement or of warning, "is what?"
"It wouldn't be the first time that it's been done in a hospital."
"What?" said Vomact, his eyes—those dreaded eyes!—making Grosbeck say what he did not want to say.
Grosbeck flushed. He leaned toward Vomact so as to whisper, even though there was no one standing near them. His words, when they came, had the hasty indecency of a lover's improper suggestion,
"Kill the patient, Sir and Doctor. Kill him. We have plenty of records of him. We can get a cadaver out of the basement and make it into a good simulacrum. Who knows what we will turn loose among mankind if we let him get well?"
"Who knows?" said Vomact without tone or quality to his voice. "But citizen and doctor, what is the twelfth duty of a physician?"
"'Not to take the law into his own hands, keeping healing for the healers and giving to the state or the Instrumentality whatever properly belongs to the state or the Instrumentality.'" Grosbeck sighed as he retracted his own suggestion. "Sir and doctor, I take it back. It wasn't medicine which I was talking about. It was government and politics which were really in my mind."
"And now...?" asked Vomact.
"Heal him, or let him be until he heals himself."
"And which would you do?"
"I'd try to heal him."
"How?" said Vomact.
"Sir and doctor," cried Grosbeck, "do not ride my weaknesses in this case! I know that you like me because I am a bold, confident sort of man. Do not ask me to be myself when we do not even know where this body came from. If I were bold as usual, I would give him typhoid and condamine, stationing telepaths nearby. But this is something new in the history of man. We are people and perhaps he is not a person any more. Perhaps he represents the combination of people with some kind of a new force. How did he get here from the far side of nowhere? How many million times has he been enlarged or reduced? We do not know what he is or what has happened to him. How can we treat a man when we are treating the cold of space, the heat of suns, the frigidity of distance? We know what to do with flesh, but this is not quite flesh any more. Feel him yourself, sir and doctor! You will touch something which nobody has ever touched before."
"I have," Vomact declared, "already felt him. You are right. We will try typhoid and condamine for half a day. Twelve hours from now let us meet each other at this place. I will tell the nurses and the robots what to do in the interim."
They both gave the red-tanned spread-eagled figure on the floor a parting glance. Grosbeck looked at the body with something like distaste mingled with fear; Vomact was expressionless, save for a wry wan smile of pity.
At the door the head nurse awaited them. Grosbeck was surprised at his chief's orders.
"Ma'am and nurse, do you have a weapon-proof vault in this hospital?"
"Yes, sir," she said. "We used to keep our records in it until we telemetered all our records into Computer Orbit. Now it is dirty and empty."
"Clean it out. Run a ventilator tube into it. Who is your military protector?"
"My what?" she cried, in surprise.
"Everyone on Earth has military protection. Where are the forces, the soldiers, who protect this hospital of yours?"
"My sir and doctor!" she called out, "my sir and doctor! I'm an old woman and I have been allowed to work here for three hundred years. But I never thought of that idea before. Why would I need soldiers?"
"Find who they are and ask them to stand by. They are specialists too, with a different kind of art from ours. Let them stand by. They may be needed before this day is out. Give my name as authority to their lieutenant or sergeant. Now here is the medication which I want you to apply to this patient."
Her eyes widened as he went on talking, but she was a disciplined woman and she nodded as she heard him out, point by point. Her eyes looked very sad and weary at the end but she was a trained expert herself and she had enormous respect for the skill and wisdom of the Sir and Doctor Vomact. She also had a warm, feminine pity for the motionless young male figure on the floor, swimming forever on the heavy floor, swimming between archipelagoes which no man living had ever dreamed before.
Crisis came that night.
The patient had worn hand-prints into the inner wall of the vault, but he had not escaped.
The soldiers, looking oddly alert with their weapons gleaming in the bright corridor of the hospital, were really very bored, as soldiers always become when they are on duty with no action.
Their lieutenant was keyed up. The wirepoint in his hand buzzed like a dangerous insect. Sir and Doctor Vomact, who knew more about weapons than the soldiers thought he knew, saw that the wirepoint was set to HIGH, with a capacity of paralyzing people five stories up, five stories down or a kilometer sideways. He said nothing. He merely thanked the lieutenant and entered the vault, closely followed by Grosbeck and Timofeyev.
The patient swam here too.
He had changed to an arm-over-arm motion, kicking his legs against the floor. It was as though he had swum on the other floor with the sole purpose of staying afloat, and had now discovered some direction in which to go, albeit very slowly. His motions were deliberate, tense, rigid, and so reduced in time that it seemed as though he hardly moved at all. The ripped pajamas lay on the floor beside him.
Vomact glanced around, wondering what forces the man could have used to make those hand-prints on the steel wall. He remembered Grosbeck's warning that the patient should die, rather than subject all mankind to new and unthought risks, but though he shared the feeling, he could not condone the recommendation.
Almost irritably, the great doctor thought to himself—where could the man be going?
(To Elizabeth, the truth was, to Elizabeth, now only sixty meters away. Not till much later did people understand what Rambo had been trying to do—crossing sixty mere meters to reach his Elizabeth when he had already jumped an un-count of light-years to return to her. To his own, his dear, his well-beloved who needed him!)
The condamine did not leave its characteristic mark of deep lassitude and glowing skin: perhaps the typhoid was successfully contradicting it. Rambo did seem more lively than before. The name had come through on the regular message system, but it still did not mean anything to the Sir and Doctor Vomact. It would. It would.
Meanwhile the other two doctors, briefed ahead of time, got busy with the apparatus which the robots and the nurses had installed.
Vomact murmured to the others, "I think he's better off. Looser all around. I'll try shouting."
So busy were they that they just nodded.
Vomact screamed at the patient, "Who are you? What are you? Where do you come from?"
The sad blue eyes of the man on the floor glanced at him with a surprisingly quick glance, but there was no other real sign of communication. The limbs kept up their swim against the rough concrete floor of the vault. Two of the bandages which the hospital staff had put on him had worn off again. The right knee, scraped and bruised, deposited a sixty-centimeter trail of blood—some old and black and coagulated, some fresh, new and liquid—on the floor as it moved back and forth.
Vomact stood up and spoke to Grosbeck and Timofeyev. "Now," he said, "let us see what happens when we apply the pain."
The two stepped back without being told to do so.
Timofeyev waved his hand at a small white-enamelled orderly-robot who stood in the doorway.
The pain net, a fragile cage of wires, dropped down from the ceiling.
It was Vomact's duty, as senior doctor, to take the greatest risk. The patient was wholly encased by the net of wires, but Vomact dropped to his hands and knees, lifted the net at one corner with his right hand, thrust his own head into it next to the head of the patient. Doctor Vomact's robe trailed on the clean concrete, touching the black old stains of blood left from the patient's "swim" throughout the night.
Now Vomact's mouth was centimeters from the patient's ear.
Said Vomact, "Oh."
The net hummed.
The patient stopped his slow motion, arched his back, looked steadfastly at the doctor.
Doctors Grosbeck and Timofeyev could see Vomact's face go white with the impact of the pain machine, but Vomact kept his voice under control and said evenly and loudly to the patient.
"Who—are—you?"
The patient said flatly, "Elizabeth."
The answer was foolish but the tone was rational.
Vomact pulled his head out from under the net, shouting again at the patient, "Who—are—you?"
The naked man replied, speaking very clearly:
"Chwinkle, chwinkle, little chweeble,
I am feeling very feeble!"
Vomact frowned and murmured to the robot, "More pain, Turn it up to pain ultimate."
The body threshed under the net, trying to resume its swim on the concrete.
A loud wild braying cry came from the victim under the net. It sounded like a screamed distortion of the name Elizabeth, echoing out from endless remoteness.
It did not make sense.
Vomact screamed back, "Who—are—you?"
With unexpected clarity and resonance, the voice came back to the three doctors from the twisting body under the net of pain:
"I'm the shipped man, the ripped man, the gypped man, the dipped man, the hipped man, the tripped man, the tipped man, the slipped man, the flipped man, the nipped man, the ripped man, the clipped man—aah!" His voice choked off with a cry and he went back to swimming on the floor, despite the intensity of the pain net immediately above him.
The doctor lifted his hand. The pain net stopped buzzing and lifted high into the air.
He felt the patient's pulse. It was quick. He lifted an eyelid. The reactions were much closer to normal.
"Stand back," he said to the others.
"Pain on both of us," he said to the robot.
The net came down on the two of them.
"Who are you?" shrieked Vomact, right into the patient's ear, holding the man halfway off the floor and not quite knowing whether the body which tore steel walls might not, somehow, tear both of them apart as they stood.
The man babbled back at him: "I'm the most man, the post man, the host man, the ghost man, the coast man, the boast man, the dosed man, the grossed man, the toast man, the roast man, no! no! no!"
He struggled in Vomact's arms. Grosbeck and Timofeyev stepped forward to rescue their chief when the patient added, very calmly and clearly,
"Your procedure is all right, doctor, whoever you are. More fever, please. More pain, please. Some of that dope to fight the pain. You're pulling me back. I know I am on Earth. Elizabeth is near. For the love of God, get me Elizabeth! But don't rush me. I need days and days to get well."
The rationality was so startling that Grosbeck, without waiting for orders from Vomact, as chief doctor, ordered the pain net lifted.
The patient began babbling again: "I'm the three man, the he man, the tree man, the me man, the three man, the three man...." His voice faded and he slumped unconscious.
Vomact walked out of the vault. He was a little unsteady.
His colleagues took him by the elbows.
He smiled wanly at them: "I wish it were lawful.... I could use some of that condamine myself. No wonder the pain nets wake the patients up and even make dead people do twitches! Get me some liquor. My heart is old."
Grosbeck sat him down while Timofeyev ran down the corridor in search of medicinal liquor.
Vomact murmured, "How are we going to find his Elizabeth? There must be millions of them. And he's from Earth Four too."
"Sir and doctor, you have worked wonders," said Grosbeck. "To go under the net. To take those chances. To bring him to speech. I will never see anything like it again. It's enough for any one lifetime, to have seen this day."
"But what do we do next?" asked Vomact wearily, almost in confusion.
That particular question needed no answer.
The Lord Crudelta had reached Earth.
His pilot landed the craft and fainted at the controls with sheer exhaustion.
Of the escort cats, who had ridden alongside the space craft in the miniature space-ships, three were dead, one was comatose and the fourth was spitting and raving.
When the port authorities tried to slow the Lord Crudelta down to ascertain his authority, he invoked Top Emergency, took over the command of troops in the name of the Instrumentality, arrested everyone in sight but the troop commander, and requisitioned the troop commander to take him to the hospital. The computers at the port had told him that one Rambo, "sans origine," had arrived mysteriously on the grass of a designated hospital.
Outside the hospital, the Lord Crudelta invoked Top Emergency again, placed all armed men under his own command, ordered a recording monitor to cover all his actions if he should later be channeled into a court-martial, and arrested everyone in sight.
The tramp of heavily armed men, marching in combat order, overtook Timofeyev as he hurried back to Vomact with a drink. The men were jogging along on the double. All of them had live helmets and their wirepoints were buzzing.
Nurses ran forward to drive the intruders out, ran backward when the sting of the stun-rays brushed cruelly over them. The whole hospital was in an uproar.
The Lord Crudelta later admitted that he had made a serious mistake.
The Two Minutes' War broke out immediately.
You have to understand the pattern of the Instrumentality to see how it happened. The Instrumentality was a self-perpetuating body of men with enormous powers and a strict code. Each was a plenum of the low, the middle and the high justice. Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the Instrumentality and to keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a mistake or committed a wrong—ah, then, it was suddenly different. Any Lord could put another Lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace himself if he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove) were listed on a very honorable list, but still killed.
With three Lords, the situation was different. Three lords made an emergency court; if they acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the Intrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to citizen status. Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove them wrong.
This was all the business of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan: "Watch, but do not govern; stop war but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!"
The Lord Crudelta had seized the troops—not his troops, but the light regular troops of Manhome Government—because he feared that the greatest danger in the history of man might come from the person whom he himself had sent through Space.
He never expected that the troops would be plucked out from his command—an overriding power reinforced by robotic telepathy and the incomparable communications net, both open and secret, reinforced by thousands of years in trickery, defeat, secrecy, victory, and sheer experience, which the Instrumentality had perfected since it emerged from the Ancient Wars.
Overriding, overridden!
These were the commands which the Instrumentality had used before recorded time began. Sometimes they suspended their antagonists on points of law, sometimes by the deft and deadly insertion of weapons, most often by cutting in on other peoples' mechanical and social controls and doing their will, only to drop the controls as suddenly as they had taken them.
But not Crudelta's hastily-called troops.
The war broke out with a change of pace.
Two squads of men were moving into that part of the hospital where Elizabeth lay, waiting the endless returns to the jelly-baths which would rebuild her poor ruined body.
The squads changed pace.
The survivors could not account for what happened.
They all admitted to great mental confusion—afterward.
At the time it seemed that they had received a clear, logical command to turn and to defend the women's section by counterattacking their own main battalion right in their rear.
The hospital was a very strong building. Otherwise it would have melted to the ground or shot up in flame.
The leading soldiers suddenly turned around, dropped for cover and blazed their wirepoints at the comrades who followed them. The wirepoints were cued to organic material, though fairly harmless to inorganic. They were powered by the power relays which every soldier wore on his back.
In the first ten seconds of the turnaround, twenty-seven soldiers, two nurses, three patients and one orderly were killed. One hundred and nine other people were wounded in that first exchange of fire.
The troop commander had never seen battle, but he had been well trained. He immediately deployed his reserves around the external exits of the building and sent his favorite squad, commanded by a Sergeant Lansdale whom he trusted well, down into the basement, so that it could rise vertically from the basement into the women's quarters and find out who the enemy was.
As yet, he had no idea that it was his own leading troops turning and fighting their comrades.
He testified later, at the trial, that he personally had no sensations of eerie interference with his own mind. He merely knew that his men had unexpectedly come upon armed resistance from antagonists—identity unknown!—who had weapons identical with theirs. Since the Lord Crudelta had brought them along in case there might be a fight with unspecified antagonists, he felt right in assuming that a Lord of the Instrumentality knew what he was doing. This was the enemy all right.
In less than a minute, the two sides had balanced out. The line of fire had moved right into his own force. The lead men, some of whom were wounded, simply turned around and began defending themselves against the men immediately behind them. It was as though an invisible line, moving rapidly, had parted the two sections of the military force.
The oily black smoke of dissolving bodies began to glut the ventilators.
Patients were screaming, doctors cursing, robots stamping around and nurses trying to call each other.
The war ended when the troop commander saw Sergeant Lansdale, whom he himself had sent upstairs, leading a charge out of the women's quarters—directly at his own commander!
The officer kept his head.
He dropped to the floor and rolled sidewise as the air chittered at him, the emanations of Lansdale's wirepoint killing all the tiny bacteria in the air. On his helmet phone he pushed the manual controls to TOP VOLUME and to NONCOMS ONLY and he commanded, with a sudden flash of brilliant mother-wit,
"Good job, Landsdale!"
Lansdale's voice came back as weak as if it had been off-planet, "We'll keep them out of this section yet, sir!"
The troop commander called back very loudly but calmly, not letting on that he thought his sergeant was psychotic.
"Easy now. Hold on. I'll be with you."
He changed to the other channel and said to his nearby men, "Cease fire. Take cover and wait."
A wild scream came to him from the phones.
It was Lansdale. "Sir! Sir! I'm fighting you, sir. I just caught on. It's getting me again. Watch out."
The buzz and burr of the weapons suddenly stopped.
The wild human uproar of the hospital continued.
A tall doctor, with the insignia of high seniority, came gently to the troop commander and said,
"You can stand up and take your soldiers out now, young fellow. The fight was a mistake."
"I'm not under your orders," snapped the young officer. "I'm under the Lord Crudelta. He requisitioned this force from the Manhome Government. Who are you?"
"You may salute me, captain," said the doctor, "I am Colonel General Vomact of the Earth Medical Reserve. But you had better not wait for the Lord Crudelta."
"But where is he?"
"In my bed," said Vomact.
"Your bed?" cried the young officer in complete amazement.
"In bed. Doped to the teeth. I fixed him up. He was excited. Take your men out. We'll treat the wounded on the lawn. You can see the dead in the refrigerators downstairs in a few minutes, except for the ones that went smoky from direct hits."
"But the fight...?"
"A mistake, young man, or else—"
"Or else what?" shouted the young officer, horrified at the utter mess of his own combat experience.
"Or else a weapon no man has ever seen before. Your troops fought each other. Your command was intercepted."
"I could see that," snapped the officer, "as soon as I saw Lansdale coming at me."
"But do you know what took him over?" said Vomact gently, while taking the officer by the arm and beginning to lead him out of the hospital. The captain went willingly, not noticing where he was going, so eagerly did he watch for the other man's words.
"I think I know," said Vomact. "Another man's dreams. Dreams which have learned how to turn themselves into electricity or plastic or stone. Or anything else. Dreams coming to us out of space three."
The young officer nodded dumbly. This was too much.
"Space three?" he murmured. It was like being told that the really alien invaders, whom men had been expecting for thirteen thousand years and had never met, were waiting for him on the grass. Until now space three had been a mathematical idea, a romancer's day-dream, but not a fact.
The sir and doctor Vomact did not even ask the young officer. He brushed the young man gently at the nape of the neck and shot him through with tranquilizer. Vomact then led him out to the grass. The young captain stood alone and whistled happily at the stars in the sky. Behind him, his sergeants and corporals were sorting out the survivors and getting treatment for the wounded.
The two minutes' war was over.
Rambo had stopped dreaming that his Elizabeth was in danger. He had recognized, even in his deep sick sleep, that the tramping in the corridor was the movement of armed men. His mind had set up defenses to protect Elizabeth. He took over command of the forward troops and set them to stopping the main body. The powers which space3 had worked into him made this easy for him to do, even though he did not know that he was doing it.
"How many dead?" said Vomact to Grosbeck and Timofeyev.
"About two hundred."
"And how many irrecoverable dead?"
"The ones that got turned into smoke. A dozen, maybe fourteen. The other dead can be fixed up, but most of them will have to get new personality prints."
"Do you know what happened?" asked Vomact.
"No, Sir and Doctor," they both chorused.
"I do. I think I do. No, I know I do. It's the wildest story in the history of man. Our patient did it—Rambo. He took over the troops and set them against each other. That Lord of the Instrumentality who came charging in—Crudelta. I've known him for a long long time. He's behind this case. He thought that troops would help, not sensing that troops would invite attack upon themselves. And there is something else."
"Yes?" they said, in unison.
"Rambo's woman—the one he's looking for. She must be here."
"Why?" said Timofeyev.
"Because he's here."
"You're assuming that he came here because of his own will, Sir and Doctor."
Vomact smiled the wise crafty smile of his family; it was almost a trademark of the Vomact house.
"I am assuming all the things which I cannot otherwise prove.
"First, I assume that he came here naked out of space itself, driven by some kind of force which we cannot even guess.
"Second, I assume he came here because he wanted something. A woman named Elizabeth, who must already be here. In a moment we can go inventory all our Elizabeths.
"Third, I assume that the Lord Crudelta knew something about it. He has led troops into the building. He began raving when he saw me. I know hysterical fatigue, as do you, my brothers, so I condamined him for a night's sleep.
"Fourth, let's leave our man alone. There'll be hearings and trials enough, Space knows, when all these events get scrambled out."
Vomact was right.
He was usually was.
Trials did follow.
It was lucky that Old Earth no longer permitted newspapers or television news. The population would have been frothed up to riot and terror if they had ever found out what happened at the Old Main Hospital just to the West of Meeya Meefla.
Twenty-one days later, Vomact, Timofeyev and Grosbeck were summoned to the trial of the Lord Crudelta. A full panel of seven Lords of the Instrumentality were there to give Crudelta an ample hearing and, if required, a sudden death. The doctors were present both as doctors for Elizabeth and Rambo and as witnesses for the Investigating Lord.
Elizabeth, fresh up from being dead, was as beautiful as a new-born baby in exquisite, adult feminine form. Rambo could not take his eyes off her, but a look of bewilderment went over his face every time she gave him a friendly, calm remote little smile. (She had been told that she was his girl, and she was prepared to believe it, but she had no memory of him or of anything else more than sixty hours back, when speech had been reinstalled in her mind; and he, for his part, was still thick of speech and subject to strains which the doctors could not quite figure out.)
The Investigating Lord was a man named Starmount.
He asked the panel to rise.
They did so.
He faced the Lord Crudelta with great solemnity, "You are obliged, my Lord Crudelta, to speak quickly and clearly to this court."
"Yes, my Lord," he answered.
"We have the summary power."
"You have the summary power. I recognize it."
"You will tell the truth or else you will lie."
"I shall tell the truth or I will lie."
"You may lie, if you wish, about matters of fact and opinion, but you will in no case lie about human relationships. If you do lie, nevertheless, you will ask that your name be entered in the Roster of Dishonor."
"I understand the panel and the rights of this panel. I will lie if I wish—though I don't think I will need to do so—" and here Crudelta flashed a weary intelligent smile at all of them—"but I will not lie about matters of relationship. If I do, I will ask for dishonor."
"You have yourself been well trained as a Lord of the Instrumentality?"
"I have been so trained and I love the Instrumentality well. In fact, I am myself the Instrumentality, as are you, and as are the honorable Lords beside you. I shall behave well, for as long as I live this afternoon."
"Do you credit him, my Lords?" asked Starmount.
The members of the panel nodded their mitred heads. They had dressed ceremonially for the occasion.
"Do you have a relationship to the woman Elizabeth?"
The members of the trial panel caught their breath as they saw Crudelta turn white: "My Lords!" he cried, and answered no further.
"It is the custom," said Starmount firmly, "that you answer promptly or that you die."
The Lord Crudelta got control of himself. "I am answering. I did not know who she was, except for the fact that Rambo loved her. I sent her to Earth from Earth Four, where I then was. Then I told Rambo that she had been murdered and hung desperately at the edge of death, wanting only his help to return to the green fields of life."
Said Starmount: "Was that the truth?"
"My Lord and Lords, it was a lie."
"Why did you tell it?"
"To induce rage in Rambo and to give him an overriding reason for wanting to come to Earth faster than any man has ever come before."
"A-a-ah! A-a-ah!" Two wild cries came from Rambo, more like the call of an animal than like the sound of a man.
Vomact looked at his patient, felt himself beginning to growl with a deep internal rage. Rambo's powers, generated in the depths of space3, had begun to operate again. Vomact made a sign. The robot behind Rambo had been coded to keep Rambo calm. Though the robot had been enamelled to look like a white gleaming hospital orderly, he was actually a police-robot of high powers, built up with an electronic cortex based on the frozen midbrain of an old wolf. (A wolf was a rare animal, something like a dog.) The robot touched Rambo, who dropped off to sleep. Doctor Vomact felt the anger in his own mind fade away. He lifted his hand gently; the robot caught the signal and stopped applying the narcoleptic radiation. Rambo slept normally; Elizabeth looked worriedly at the man whom she had been told was her own.
The Lords turned back from the glances at Rambo.
Said Starmount, icily: "And why did you do that?"
"Because I wanted him to travel through space-three."
"Why?"
"To show it could be done."
"And do you, my Lord Crudelta, affirm that this man has in fact travelled through space-three?"
"I do."
"Are you lying?"
"I have the right to lie, but I have no wish to do so. In the name of the Instrumentality itself, I tell you that this is the truth."
The panel members gasped. Now there was no way out. Either the Lord Crudelta was telling the truth, which meant that all former times had come to an end and that a new age had begun for all the kinds of mankind, or else he was lying in the face of the most powerful form of affirmation which any of them knew.
Even Starmount himself took a different tone. His teasing, restless, intelligent voice took on a new timbre of kindness.
"You do therefore assert that this man has come back from outside our galaxy with nothing more than his own natural skin to cover him? No instruments? No power?"
"I did not say that," said Crudelta. "Other people have begun to pretend I used such words. I tell you, my Lords that I planoformed for twelve consecutive Earth Days and nights. Some of you may remember where Outpost Baiter Gator is. Well, I had a good Go-captain, and he took me four long jumps beyond there, out into intergalactic space. I left this man there. When I reached Earth, he had been here twelve days, more or less. I have assumed, therefore, that his trip was more or less instantaneous. I was on my way back to Baiter Gator, counting by Earth time, when the doctor here found this man on the grass outside the hospital."
Vomact raised his hand. The Lord Starmount gave him the right to speak, "My sirs and Lords, we did not find this man on the grass. The robots did, and made a record. But even the robots did not see or photograph his arrival."
"We know that," said Starmount angrily, "and we know that we have been told that nothing came to Earth by any means whatever, in that particular quarter hour. Go on, my Lord Crudelta. What relation are you to Rambo?"
"He is my victim."
"Explain yourself!"
"I computered him out. I asked the machines where I would be most apt to find a man with a tremendous lot of rage in him, and was informed that on Earth Four the rage level had been left high because that particular planet had a considerable need for explorers and adventurers, in whom rage was a strong survival trait. When I got to Earth Four, I commanded the authorities to find out which border cases had exceeded the limits of allowable rage. They gave me four men. One was much too large. Two were old. This man was the only candidate for my excitement. I chose him."
"What did you tell him?"
"Tell him? I told him his sweetheart was dead or dying."
"No, no," said Starmount. "Not at the moment of crisis. What did you tell him to make him cooperate in the first place?"
"I told him," said the Lord Crudelta evenly, "that I was myself a Lord of the Instrumentality and that I would kill him myself if he did not obey, and obey promptly."
"And under what custom or law did you act?"
"Reserved material," said the Lord Crudelta promptly. "There are telepaths here who are not a part of the Instrumentality. I beg leave to defer until we have a shielded place."
Several members of the panel nodded and Starmount agreed with them. He changed the line of questioning.
"You forced this man, therefore, to do something which he did not wish to do?"
"That is right," said the Lord Crudelta.
"Why didn't you go yourself, if it is that dangerous?"
"My Lords and honorables, it was the nature of the experiment that the experimenter himself should not be expended in the first try. Artyr Rambo has indeed travelled through space-three. I shall follow him myself, in due course." (How the Lord Crudelta did do so is another tale, told about another time.) "If I had gone and if I had been lost, that would have been the end of the space-three trials. At least for our time."
"Tell us the exact circumstances under which you last saw Artyr Rambo before you met after the battle in the old Main Hospital."
"We had put him in a rocket of the most ancient style. We also wrote writing on the outside of it, just the way the Ancients did when they first ventured into space. Ah, that was a beautiful piece of engineering and archeology! We copied everything right down to the correct models of fourteen thousand years ago, when the Paroskii and Murkins were racing each other into space. The rocket was white, with a red and white gantry beside it. The letters IOM were on the rocket, not that the words mattered. The rocket has gone into nowhere, but the passenger sits here. It rose on a stool of fire. The stool became a column. Then the landing field disappeared."
"And the landing field," said Starmount quietly, "what was that?"
"A modified planoform ship. We have had ships go milky in space because they faded molecule by molecule. We have had others disappear utterly. The engineers had changed this around. We took out all the machinery needed for circumnavigation, for survival or for comfort. The landing field was to last three or four seconds, no more. Instead, we put in fourteen planoform devices, all operating in tandem, so that the ship would do what other ships do when they planoform—namely, drop one of our familiar dimensions and pick up a new dimension from some unknown category of space—but do it with such force as to get out of what people call space-two and move over into space-three."
"And space-three, what did you expect of that?"
"I thought that it was universal and instantaneous, in relation to our universe. That everything was equally distant from everything else. That Rambo, wanting to see his girl again, would move in a thousandth of a second from the empty space beyond Outpost Baiter Gator into the hospital where she was."
"And, my Lord Crudelta, what made you think so?"
"A hunch, my Lord, for which you are welcome to kill me."
Starmount turned to the panel. "I suspect, my Lords, that you are more likely to doom him to long life, great responsibility, immense rewards, and the fatigue of being his own difficult and complicated self."
The mitres moved gently and the members of the panel rose.
"You, my Lord Crudelta, will sleep till the trial is finished."
A robot stroked him and he fell asleep.
"Next witness," said the Lord Starmount, "in five minutes."
Vomact tried to keep Rambo from being heard as a witness. He argued fiercely with the Lord Starmount in the intermission. "You Lords have shot up my hospital, abducted two of my patients and now you are going to torment both Rambo and Elizabeth. Can't you leave them alone? Rambo is in no condition to give coherent answers and Elizabeth may be damaged if she sees him suffer."
The Lord Starmount said to him, "You have your rules, doctor, and we have ours. This trial is being recorded, inch by inch and moment by moment. Nothing is going to be done to Rambo unless we find that he has planet-killing powers. If that is true, of course, we will ask you to take him back to the hospital and to put him to death very pleasantly. But I don't think it will happen. We want his story so that we can judge my colleague Crudelta. Do you think that the Instrumentality would survive if it did not have fierce internal discipline?"
Vomact nodded sadly; he went back to Grosbeck and Timofeyev, murmuring sadly to them, "Rambo's in for it. There's nothing we could do."
The panel reassembled. They put on their judicial mitres. The lights of the room darkened and the weird blue light of justice was turned on.
The robot orderly helped Rambo to the witness chair.
"You are obliged," said Starmount, "to speak quickly and clearly to this court."
"You're not Elizabeth," said Rambo.
"I am the Lord Starmount," said the investigating lord, quickly deciding to dispense with the formalities. "Do you know me?"
"No," said Rambo.
"Do you know where you are?"
"Earth," said Rambo.
"Do you wish to lie or to tell the truth?"
"A lie," said Rambo, "is the only truth which men can share with each other, so I will tell you lies, the way we always do."
"Can you report your trip?"
"No."
"Why not, citizen Rambo?"
"Words won't describe it."
"Do you remember your trip?"
"Do you remember your pulse of two minutes ago?" countered Rambo.
"I am not playing with you," said Starmount. "We think you have been in space-three and we want you to testify about the Lord Crudelta?"
"Oh!" said Rambo. "I don't like him. I never did like him."
"Will you nevertheless try to tell us what happened to you?"
"Should I, Elizabeth?" asked Rambo of the girl, who sat in the audience.
She did not stammer. "Yes," she said, in a clear voice which rang through the big room. "Tell them, so that we can find our lives again."
"I will tell you," said Rambo.
"When did you last see the Lord Crudelta?"
"When I was stripped and fitted to the rocket, four jumps out beyond Outpost Baiter Gator. He was on the ground. He waved goodbye to me."
"And then what happened?"
"The rocket rose. It felt very strange, like no craft I had ever been in before. I weighed many, many gravities."
"And then?"
"The engines went on. I was thrown out of space itself."
"What did it seem like?"
"Behind me I left the working ships, the cloth and the food which goes through space. I went down rivers which did not exist. I felt people around me though I could not see them, red people shooting arrows at live bodies."
"Where were you?" asked a panel member.
"In the winter time where there is no summer. In an emptiness like a child's mind. In peninsulas which had torn loose from the land. And I was the ship."
"You were what?" asked the same panel member.
"The rocket nose. The cone. The boat. I was drunk. It was drunk. I was the drunkboat myself," said Rambo.
"And where did you go?" resumed Starmount.
"Where crazy lanterns stared with idiot eyes. Where the waves washed back and forth with the dead of all the ages. Where the stars became a pool, and I swam in it. Where blue turns to liquor, stronger than alcohol, wilder than music, fermented with the red red reds of love. I saw all the things that men have ever thought they saw, but it was me who really saw them. I've heard phosphorescence singing and tides that seemed like crazy cattle clawing their way out of the ocean, their hooves beating the reefs. You will not believe me, but I found Floridas wilder than this, where the flowers had human skins and eyes like big cats."
"What are you talking about?" asked the Lord Starmount.
"What I found in space3," snapped Artyr Rambo. "Believe it or not. This is what I now remember. Maybe it's a dream, but it's all I have. It was years and years and it was the blink of an eye. I dreamed green nights. I felt places where the whole horizon became one big waterfall. The boat that was me met children and I showed them El Dorado, where the gold men live. The people drowned in space washed gently past me. I was a boat where all the lost space ships lay drowned and still. Sea-horses which were not real ran beside me. The summer month came and hammered down the sun. I went past archipelagoes of stars, where the delirious skies opened up for wanderers. I cried for me. I wept for man. I wanted to be the drunkboat sinking. I sank. I fell. It seemed to me that the grass was a lake, where a sad child, on hands and knees, sailed a toy boat as fragile as a butterfly in spring. I can't forget the pride of unremembered flags, the arrogance of prisons which I suspected, the swimming of the businessmen! Then I was on the grass."
"This may have scientific value," said the Lord Starmount, "but it is not of judicial importance. Do you have any comment on what you did during the battle in the hospital?"
Rambo was quick and looked sane: "What I did, I did not do. What I did not do, I cannot tell. Let me go, because I am tired of you and space, big men and big things. Let me sleep and let me get well."
Starmount lifted his hand for silence.
The panel members stared at him.
Only the few telepaths present knew that they had all said, "Aye. Let the man go. Let the girl go. Let the doctors go. But bring back the Lord Crudelta later on. He has many troubles ahead of him, and we wish to add to them."
Between the Instrumentality, the Manhome Government and the authorities at the Old Main Hospital, everyone wished to give Rambo and Elizabeth happiness.
As Rambo got well, much of his Earth Four memory returned. The trip faded from his mind.
When he came to know Elizabeth, he hated the girl.
This was not his girl—his bold, saucy, Elizabeth of the markets and the valleys, of the snowy hills and the long boat rides. This was somebody meek, sweet, sad and hopelessly loving.
Vomact cured that.
He sent Rambo to the Pleasure City of the Herperides, where bold and talkative women pursued him because he was rich and famous.
In a few weeks—a very few indeed—he wanted his Elizabeth, this strange shy girl who had been cooked back from the dead while he rode space with his own fragile bones.
"Tell the truth, darling." He spoke to her once gravely and seriously. "The Lord Crudelta did not arrange the accident which killed you?"
"They say he wasn't there," said Elizabeth. "They say it was an actual accident. I don't know. I will never know."
"It doesn't matter now," said Rambo. "Crudelta's off among the stars, looking for trouble and finding it. We have our bungalow, and our waterfall, and each other."
"Yes, my darling," she said, "each other. And no fantastic Floridas for us."
He blinked at this reference to the past, but he said nothing. A man who has been through space3 needs very little in life, outside of not going back to space3. Sometimes he dreamed he was the rocket again, the old rocket taking off on an impossible trip. Let other men follow! he thought, let other men go! I have Elizabeth and I am here.
THE END