In silence, Gail showed other sketches. A man and woman in costumes somehow related to those the children had worn at the beginning. There was a picture of a group of people.

"Odd," said Soames. "Everybody wears a belt like the children have on now. Everybody. As if it were official."

He glanced at Zani. She wore a belt over American-style young-girl's clothing today. The belt was neither leather nor plastic nor anything that could have a name put to it. It had two round and two square medallions placed two on each side of the fastening, which was not a buckle. The others wore the same. Soames puzzled over it for a moment.

Gail offered him another sheet of paper.

"I'm going to tear this up when you've seen it."

It was a landscape, sketched in with surprisingly bold strokes of the soft pencil. The time was night. Near the bottom of the picture there was a city of the strange, catenary-curve architecture. It was drawn so small, though, that most of the picture was black sky. But there was a blazing light upon the city, and it came from something monstrous and jagged and incandescent and vast, plunging upon the city from the sky, trailing flames behind it.

"And this," said Gail, very quietly.

It was a picture of a crater, a ring-mountain, the scene of the impact of something terrible and huge. It was a chasm with circular, broken rocky walls. There was a fallen tree in the foreground, near the spot from which the sketch seemed to have been made.

"You're right not to show anyone else those drawings," said Soames. "The kids are in a bad enough fix as visitors of a superior race. If it should be realized that they're not here by accident, but somehow to open a way for invasion by the population of a whole planet, well, you can just imagine ..."

* * * * *

Zani giggled suddenly, and he jumped. But her eyes were on the paper before her. Soames glanced out the window. Mal had toppled over, and one of the puppies had climbed valiantly on her back and was pulling with all his tiny might at a puppy-mouthful of her hair. His tail wagged vigorously the while. Hod laughed, and Mal giggled, and inside the cottage Zani—who could not see what had happened—giggled with them.

"She couldn't see it, but she knew what happened," said Soames. "I suspect this place is so top-secret that it's a breach of security to remember it outside. If anybody notices that little trick the kids can do, they'll be suspected of casually inspecting high-secrecy stuff while drawing pictures or playing with little dogs."

* * * * *

Soames returned to his quarters. He set to work upon the highly necessary task of pretending that he was a castaway from the children's civilization in order to improvise conveniences that as a castaway he'd consider crude, but as an aborigine amazing.

From time to time, though, he wondered sardonically about the public-relations program on the children. He'd prepared a complete report about the ship, telling in detail about its arrival and adding everything he could infer about the civilization that had made it, except its location on the Earth of aeons ago and its imminent doom. Gail had written what she considered the best human-interest story of her life about the children. Neither report was asked for. Nobody knew where either was to be sent. Soames guessed sardonically at a change of policy somewhere.

But the problem justified worry, the simple, relatively insignificant problem of the children here and now, with all thought of flaming skies and upheaved earth put firmly aside.

The children had to be revealed. But the world would automatically assume that the crew of an alien spaceship must be in some fashion monsters. But four nicely raised children? Space-travellers? Spaceships navigated by boys and girls who liked to play with puppies? Such innocuous persons to represent the most deadly danger the modern world had faced?

But they did represent it. There was no way out of the fact. And somehow the facts had to be put across. The public-relations counsellors who had interviewed the children pointed out the means. They got the job.

The advance publicity was thoroughly professional. The spaceship's company was to be revealed in the most stupendous broadcast of all time. For the second time in history, a trans-Atlantic relay patrol would form two relay-channels from North America to Europe. It would reach Japan via the Aleutians and a relay-ship, by wire from Japan to all Asia and—again relayed—to Australia. South Africa would get the coverage by land-wire down the continent from the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean basin, the Near East, Scandinavia, and even Iceland would see the spectacle. Detailed instructions were given to Gail to give to the children.

The very top feminine TV personality of America would serve as hostess, substituting for Gail, who must try to make the children understand. Miss Linda Beach could establish a personal contact with any audience. One had only to watch her to respond to her charm, her wholesomeness, her adroit sincerity. She had sold soap, automobiles, vitamin tablets and dessicated soup. Obviously, she was the perfect saleswoman for the children out of space.

"I hope the professionals know what they're doing," Soames had said to Gail. "I'm a simple soul who'd be inclined to tell the truth without trimmings. It might not be easy, and it might not be comfortable, but it would be fact."

* * * * *

A small fast transport came to get the children and Gail and Soames. It took off.

Soames took a seat beside Fran. He took out a pencil and a pad of paper. He drew a sketch of a boy flying a kite, and added a close-up drawing of the kite. He drew a boy walking on stilts, and a drawing of how stilts were made. Soames hadn't actually seen a boy walking on stilts for years, and it might now be a lost art, but Fran showed interest. Soames drew a bicycle with a boy on it, and then modified the bike into a motorcycle. He hoped his sketches would strike Fran as interesting, if primitive, things a boy might do for his own satisfaction.

Fran was intrigued. Presently he took the pencil and made sketches of his own. A boy with a belt like his rode something which vaguely resembled a sledge or a motorcycle. He made a detailed drawing of a runner. This was an air-sled, such as Zani had pictured in more elaborate form. Fran sketched the air-column generator, and it was utterly simple and a boy of fourteen could make it. After painful scrutiny Soames realized that it was a ram-jet engine which would start itself and operate in still air. In the modern world, it would make gas-turbine engines practical for locomotives and motorcars.

The transport landed. A motorcycle escort surrounded the car with drawn curtains which carried the children from Idlewild into New York. In time the car dived down into the freight entrance of the new Communications Building on 59th Street. Secret Service men had cleared all corridors so the children reached their dressing-rooms unseen.

Linda Beach appeared an hour later and began the rehearsal.

The children gathered the purpose of the thing by watching the monitors. They chattered together, and the girls went pleasantly through what was expected of them. Hod seemed quite numb, and Fran scowled. But he was more gracious when he saw Soames going through similar antics.

The rehearsal ended. There was another long wait. This was to introduce the children—from a totally unknown and superior civilization—to a world which considered them strangers from space, when they were actually from a much more improbable homeland. The world was waiting to see this. Time dragged.

All over the world people were waiting to get a first glimpse of creatures whose coming might mean the end of the world.

Presently it began.

The show, naturally, opened with a tremendous fanfare of trumpets, played from tape.

Then Linda Beach appeared. She introduced Gail and Soames and Captain Moggs.

This broadcast was supposed to be strictly informative. It was, however, produced with the attitude and the technique and the fine professionalism of specialists in the area of subconscious selling. So it put its audience—the vast majority of it—into the exact mood of people who surrender themselves to mildly lulling make-believe. When Captain Moggs told of the finding of the ship, her authoritative manner and self-importance made people feel, without regard to their thoughts, that she was an un-funny comedian. The audience remembered with decreasing concern that some interesting monsters were supposed to be in the show later and that they were waiting to see them.

The introduction of the children was a disappointment, but a mild one. When they were produced and identified, the television-watching syndrome was fully developed. There was a feeling, of course, that the show fell down in interest and that it did not live up to its advance publicity. But the television audience is used to that. Its members continued to watch with slightly dulled eyes, listening with partly attentive ears, automatically waiting for a commercial when it could get some beer or an equivalent without missing anything.

Even when tumult and confusion began; when Linda Beach tried to hold the show together in the teeth of uproar behind her, the tranquillized state of the audience continued. When Linda Beach's necklace was snatched from her neck it seemed intended to be funny.

It wasn't until the very end that anything occurred really to break the mood professionally produced shows are designed to achieve. That occurrence startled the viewers out of their semi-comatose state, just as blatant obscenity or intolerable profanity would have done. Linda Beach, in fine sincerity and in tribute to the children, made a statement which was utterly explosive. When the show ended, people all over the world were roused and horrified and enraged.

Only small children, waiting in space-helmets and with ray-guns ready, complained aggrievedly that there hadn't been any monsters. The adults felt that there had been. That there were.

They hated the children with a strictly personal hatred based on panic combined with shame.



CHAPTER 7

Soames' rehearsed part in the broadcast was finished after he and Gail and Captain Moggs had told the story of the finding of the ship. Their narratives were deftly guided by Linda Beach's questions.

Soames wanted to get out of sight. He was sunk in gloom. It was a show instead of what he would have considered a presentation of the facts, though nearly everything said had been factual. He left the studio.

In an uninhabited room he found himself staring out a window, down at the crowd before the Communications Building.

It was a restless crowd, now. The ground-floor plate-glass windows had been filled with television screens, and those near them could see the broadcast and hear it through out-door loud-speakers. But this crowd was a special one, in that it hadn't gathered to see the broadcast but extraterrestrial monsters, in the flesh or fur or scales or however they might appear. It now knew that the monsters had arrived and there was no chance of seeing them direct. It had been harangued by orators and people who already began to call themselves humanity-firsters. It felt cheated.

There were a large number of teen-agers in the crowd.

At the window, Soames recognized the oddity of the crowd below him. An ordinary, curiosity-seeking crowd would contain a considerable percentage of women. This did not. There were shouting voices which Soames heard faintly. They were orators declaiming assorted emotional opinions about monsters from space, obviously in the belief that they were beyond dispute and needed to be acted on at once. There was competition among these orators. Some had bands of supporters around them to aid their effectiveness by applause and loud agreement. Soames saw, too, at least one hilarious group of college-age boys who might have been organized by a college humor magazine. They waved cardboard signs. "Space-Monsters Go Home!"

The unattended monitor set, placed around some corner in a corridor, gave out an excellently modulated reproduction of the program going on the air. An Italian physicist asked questions about the qualifications of such young children as space navigators. Soames listened abstractedly. He knew unhappily that if the children weren't convincing as visitors from space, they'd be much less plausible in their true roles as fugitives out of time.

* * * * *

The collegians surged here and there, making a demonstration in favor of mirth. There were also youthful members of less innocuous groups, swaggering, consciously ominous members of organizations known as the Maharajas and the Comets and the Toppers. Members of these groups eyed members of other such groups with challenging, level gazes.

Voices harangued. Collegians attempted to sing what must have seemed to them a deliciously satirical song. But it did not please the non-collegian Maharajas or Comets or the Toppers.

A Russian scientist took over on the broadcast. He had been flown to the United States especially for the occasion. He asked elaborate and carefully loaded questions. They had been prepared as propaganda stumpers by people who in their way were as skilled in public relations as the producers of this show. Linda Beach applied the charm which had sold soap, vitamins, automobiles and dessicated soup. Soames heard the exchanges from the monitor set.

Outside, in the street, a brick suddenly fell among the collegians. More bricks fell among those engaged in an impromptu meeting of Humanity Firsters. Police whistles blew. A plate-glass window crashed. A collegian suddenly had a bloody face and a flying wedge of Maharajas scornfully cut through the formerly singing group, wielding belts and bludgeons for the honor of having started a riot on 57th Street. They fought past the college crowd and into a band of the Comets. There they found a rumble ready-made. Haranguing orators found themselves jostled. Fights broke out among members of groups which had come to stage demonstrations against extraterrestrials. The fighting spread to individuals.

Police-car sirens wailed. Squad-cars came careening out of uptown-traffic streets and converged on the tumult. The sirens produced violent surgings of the crowd. There was a wild rush in this direction as a siren sounded from that, and then an equally wild rush in another direction still as blazing headlights and a moving howl came from elsewhere. Rushing figures surged against the doors to the lobby of the Communications Building.

Members of the Toppers and the Comets and the Maharajas and other fanatics rushed up the stairs. There was a sign "On the Air" lighted from behind outside the studio in which the world-wide broadcast was in progress. There was a door. They opened it.

The watching world heard the racket as a former Nobel prize-winner's stilted questions about the children were drowned out. This was not a planned invasion. It was a totally chaotic rushing-about of people who'd been half hysterical to start with, who had been crushed in a senselessly swaying mob, had been pushed bodily into a building-lobby jammed past endurance, and escaped into a maze from which they'd blundered into a studio with a broadcast going on. Stagehands and necktie-less persons rushed to throw them out. But the noise grew greater while Linda Beach tried gamely to cover it up.

It was not easy. In fact, it was impossible. One of the Toppers found himself cornered by two stagehands and dashed triumphantly across that sacrosanct space, the area in a camera's field of vision. He raced behind Linda Beach, then smiling pleasantly and talking at the top of her voice to cover the noise behind her. The Topper snatched as he went by. Linda Beach staggered, and her necklace broke, and this particular juvenile delinquent plunged into the crowd by the doorway and wormed his way through to lose himself in the crush outside.

But now the cops from the squad-cars were at work.

* * * * *

The lobby began to be partially cleared. Fugitives from panic came down into the street where they were commanded to get moving and keep moving. They did.

And Soames arrived at the studio. He'd fought his way there with a sort of white-hot passion, because Gail was where this lunatic mob might trample her. He raged, and then he saw her standing with precarious composure out of the way of everything.

Fran dragged fiercely at his arm. His eyes burned. He thrust something upon Soames and frantically repeated the one word of his scanty English vocabulary which seemed to fit. The word was, "Try! Try! Try!" He reached around Soames' waist and linked a belt about him.

Soames had the abrupt conviction that he was going mad. He stood, himself, in the studio where the tumult was now almost ended. But he looked up at himself from the level of his own breast. Also he was down in the lobby of the Communications Building, mingling with the thinning mob there, allowing himself to be shepherded out into the street. There he was surrounded by people taller than himself. That part of his awareness reached the open air and moved swiftly westward. That part of him put his hand in his pocket—but Soames had nothing to do with the action—and felt things there. There was a chain with sharp-edged, faceted things on it. There was a belt with shaped metallic objects fastened to it....

"Try!" cried Fran desperately. "Try!"

And suddenly Soames realized. He heard the street-sounds through someone else's ears. He saw the street through someone else's eyes. Simultaneously he saw himself in the studio through someone else's eyes, Fran's. And this explained the behavior of the children with puppies and English lessons and items of information which all of them seemed to know when one knew. The children were not telepathic. They could not read each other's minds. But some one or all of the decorative squares and circles on their belts enabled them to share each other's sense-impressions. They were both broadcasters and receivers of sensory impressions. And therefore it was because Soames had Mal's belt about him that he could see what Fran saw, and hear what Fran heard, and also he saw and heard and felt what an oily-haired member of the Toppers saw and heard and felt with Hod's belt in his pocket beside Linda Beach's necklace, snatched from her neck even before the camera.

But there was no sign that the oily-haired person saw or heard or felt what Soames did. Perhaps because he was not wearing the belt, but only had it crumpled together in his pocket.

"Right!" said Soames harshly. "I'll get it back!"

He plunged toward the studio door. There had been Secret Service men assigned to guard the children. Soames caught one of them by the shoulder.

"The kids have been robbed," he snapped in the Secret Service man's ear. "Secret device! We've got to get it back! I can do it! Come along!"

* * * * *

The Secret Service man instantly followed him. And Soames tore through the scared people still aimlessly wandering about. He plunged down the stairs. A squad-car cop moved to check his rush, and the Secret Service man panted an identification and a need. The cop abandoned all other matters and followed, too.

Soames needed to close his eyes to see what the Topper saw. He blinked them shut while he ran three paces. The Topper walked, now. He'd been joined by two friends. Soames heard his voice, he even felt the motions of his lips and tongue in speech. He boasted that he'd snatched the beads off Linda Beach's neck, and got a fancy belt one of those funny-dressed kids was wearing.

Half a block. Two more of the Toppers joined the bragging snatcher. They also heard of his grand achievement. The Topper drew his loot partly from his pocket to prove his boast. They looked, and swaggered, and whooped to others of their fellowship.

Soames pelted around a corner, turning it without warning. The Secret Service man and the cop lost a dozen paces. Soames raced ahead. There was a cluster of late-teen-age boys on the sidewalk of Eighth Avenue. They wanted to see the loot.

Soames plunged into them. Without a word, he tackled and bore to the ground the one in whose pocket Hod's belt and Linda Beach's necklace still reposed.

Their reaction was instant. The Toppers were in a close group. Soames hit it and fell to the ground atop one of their number. The others instantly attacked him as if by reflex action. They stamped and kicked viciously.

But there was a cop and a Secret Service man on the way. They struck. The Toppers turned to fight and fled instead at the sight of two adults already administering punishment to those within reach and coming on to reach others.

The two officers pulled Soames to his feet. In seconds he'd been badly battered. He pulled Hod's belt out from the pocket of the snarling, now-pallid member of the Toppers, who was half-strangled and shaken. He got the necklace. Numbly, he felt again and found a stray stone or two.

"All right," he said thickly. "I got it. I'll get back to the kids with it."

* * * * *

The cop took the Topper. Soames and the Secret Service man got back to the studio. The show was still on. Soames exhaustedly handed Hod his belt, and stripped off the other belt that Fran had put on him. He gave it back to Fran. Fran's eyes still burned, but he regarded Soames with definite respect. Perhaps there was even liking. And Soames held up the recovered necklace for Linda Beach to see, though she was then still before the camera.

She was a seasoned performer. Without blinking an eye she changed what she was saying, called on Gail to have the children demonstrate the devices they'd brought from the wrecked ship, and came to Soames. She counted the stones swiftly, and asked questions.

He told her. It would come out, necessarily. The children had, built into their belts, devices which produced an effect on the order of telepathy. But it was not telepathy. Undoubtedly the devices could be turned on or off. Turned on, they linked together the senses of those who wore them, not the minds, but the senses. Each saw what the others saw, and heard what the others heard, and felt with the rest. But thoughts were not shared. Such a device would not be confusing if one were used to it, and two men working together could co-operate with a thousand times the effectiveness of men without them. Children playing together could have a degree of companionship otherwise impossible. And four children upon a desperate voyage, without adults to reassure them, would need this close linkage with their fellows. It would give them courage. They could be more resolute.

Linda Beach went back to camera-position and waited until the demonstration of the pocket metal-cutting device, by Fran, was ended. Then she signalled for her own camera and definitely put on the charm. She showed the necklace. She said it had been stolen. She said that the children were telepaths, and by the reading of the criminal's mind he had been tracked down through the crowded streets outside the studio, and her necklace recovered.

It is always better to say something that is not quite the truth but is perfectly understandable than something which is true but bewildering. This is a cardinal rule in television. Never bewilder your audience! So Linda Beach did not bewilder her audience by accurate statement. She told them something they would understand. It made the children convincingly more than merely ordinary children.

It shocked her world-wide audience out of that bemused condition the professionalism of the broadcast had produced. It lifted them out of their seats, those who were seated. It tended to lift the hair of the rest, those who realized that monsters from space who could read human minds were utterly invincible and infinitely to be dreaded. No matter what the children looked like, now, they had been declared on an official fact-revealing broadcast to be extraterrestrial monsters who could read human minds!

It raised hell.

Once said, it could not be withdrawn. It could be denied, but it would be believed. In higher echelons of government all over the world it produced such raging hatred of the children and the United States together as made all previous tensions seem love-feasts by comparison. In Russia it was instantly and bitterly believed that all Soviet military secrets were now in process of being plucked from Russian brains and given to the American military. Rage came from helplessness in the face of such an achievement. There could be no way to stop such espionage, and military action would be hopeless if the Americans knew all about it before it was tried. In more tranquil nations there was deep uneasiness, and in some there was terror. And everywhere that men hated or stole or schemed—which was everywhere—the belief that everybody's secrets were open to the children filled men with rage.

Of all public-relations enterprises in human history, the world-wide broadcast about the children was most disastrous.

Soames and Gail could realize the absurdity of the thing, without any hope of stopping or correcting it.

* * * * *

They went swiftly back to the hidden base in the Rockies. Soames stayed to have certain minor injuries attended to. Also he needed to get in touch with the two physicists who had seen the children and known despair, but who now played at being castaways with gratifying results. In part he was needed for endless, harassing consultations with people who wanted urgently to disbelieve everything he said, and managed to hold on to a great deal of doubt.

Meanwhile there came about a sullen and infuriated lessening of international tension. No nation would dare plan a sneak attack on America if it could be known in advance. And nobody dared make threats if the United States could know exactly how much of the threat was genuine.

Captain Moggs flew busily back and forth between the east and the hidden missile base to which the children had been returned. She informed Soames that the decorated belts had been taken away from the children. One of them had been opened up and the round and square medallions on it examined. One decoration was undoubtedly the case for the sensory-linkage apparatus. There was a way to turn it on and off. It contained a couple of eccentrically shaped bits of metal. That was all. Duplicated, the duplicates did nothing whatever. The other medallions seemed to contain apparatus for purposes yet unguessed-at. One actually had a minute moving part in it. But what it did was past imagining.

Captain Moggs said authoritatively:

"It will take time but we'll find out what it does. Of course right now all research is concentrated on the telepathic device. It will be developed and before long we will be thoroughly informed about the weapons and the councils of other nations. It will be magnificent! We'll no longer have reason to be apprehensive of attack, and we can evaluate every military situation with absolute precision!"

"Dammit!" snapped Soames. "The gadgets aren't telepathic! They don't transmit thoughts! They only exchange sensory information! And there's no danger of the children finding out anything by telepathy when they can only share the sensations of someone wearing a special device! What would they do with military information if they had it?"

Captain Moggs looked mysterious. She departed, and Soames again cursed bitterly the situation he'd happened to create. But still he did not see how he could have done otherwise than to destroy the children's high-power signalling device when they would have used it back on Antarctica. Yet he was not happy about the consequences of his act.

* * * * *

He found time to get in touch with the physicists who'd come out to the Rocky Mountain base. They'd found a few others who could put themselves into the mental state of castaways who knew that a given device could be made, and then tried to make something which wasn't it but had some of its properties. In a way it was deliberate self-deception, but it was deliberate to circumvent a natural habit of the educated mind. A trained man almost invariably tries to see what can be done with what he has and knows, instead of imagining what he wants and then trying to make something more or less like it, even if he has to look for the knowledge he will need. It took a particular type of mind to use Soames' trick. It was necessary, for example, to imagine limitations to the operation of a desired device, or one's starting-point became mere fantasy. And nothing could be made from fantasy.

But Soames found frustration rampant even among the men who were most successful with the fantasy-trick. There were new devices. They were triumphs. They were plainly the beginnings of progress of a brand-new kind, not derived wholly from the present, and certainly not imitative of the children's. But the devices couldn't be used. Their existence couldn't be revealed. Because anything of unprecedented design would seem to have been learned from the children, and the United States insisted—truthfully—that so far it had learned nothing from them. But nobody would believe it if a spate of astonishing technological improvements began to appear in the United States.

Dislike of America rose to new heights anyhow. But presently some trace of suspicion began to appear in the actions of the anti-American nations. Before the broadcast, a dirty trick had been prepared against America. It developed and succeeded. It was not discovered until too late. Somebody tried another one. It wasn't anticipated or stopped. A very lively and extremely tempting idea occurred in quarters where the United States was much disliked. But nobody dared quite believe it—yet.

Then Fran disappeared. He vanished as if into thin air. At one moment he was in the heavily guarded surface area over the hidden base in the Rockies. The next moment he was gone. Three separate lines of electrified fence protected the area from intrusion, with sentries and watching-posts besides. But Fran disappeared as if he'd never been. It was not easy to imagine that he'd run away. His English was still very limited. His ignorance of American ways was abysmal. He couldn't hope to hide and find food while accomplishing anything at all. On the other hand, for him to have been kidnapped out of the top-secret base was unthinkable. Yet if he had ...

Soames got transportation to the Rocky Mountain installation.

He was shocked when he saw Gail.



CHAPTER 8

She smiled faintly in the darkness after they'd paused on the way to the cottage, and after Soames had released her.

"When this is all over, we'll have our life together, you know that, don't you?"

"I'm glad," she said quietly, "that you feel the way you do. I'm thinner. I'm not very pretty just now. But it's because I'm worried, Brad."

He muttered angrily. He felt that infuriated rage which was appropriate because something worried Gail.

"I told the children you were coming," Gail added. "I think they'll be glad to see you. I've an idea Fran especially liked you, Brad."

"No word of him?"

"N-no," said Gail in an odd tone.

"Did he run away?" demanded Soames. They were walking through a soft-warm dusk toward the cottage where Gail stayed with the children.

Gail said in a low tone:

"Careful! The idea of telepathy is alarming. Everything's overheard, Brad. The children are watched every second. I even think there are microphones...."

Soames scowled.

"It's security," said Gail. "It would be taking too big a gamble to risk that the children can only receive sensory impressions and only through those little devices in their belts. Nobody's been able to make the belt-devices do more than that, but they can't be sure...."

"They took the belts away!" insisted Soames.

"Yes. But it doesn't seem enough. You destroyed their signalling device. But you don't feel safe. They've taken the devices, but they still don't feel sure that the children can't do more.

"And, I thought it was wise to tell Captain Moggs about us. To explain why you might want to come back here. They know I'm rather protective of the children. An explanation for you to come back seemed wise. The children aren't popular since they've been thought able to read minds. So I wanted you to be able to come back without anybody suspecting you of friendly feelings for them."

"I'd have come back on account of you," growled Soames. "So it mustn't appear that anybody wants to be decent to them, eh?" Then he said abruptly, "About Fran...."

"He ran away," said Gail with a hint of defiance. "I'll tell you more later, maybe."

They reached the cottage, and Soames reminded himself that anything he said would very probably be overheard and recorded on tape. They went inside. The boy Hod, and the younger girl Mal lay on their stomachs on the floor, doggedly working at what would be lessons. Zani sat in a chair with a book before her and her hand seemingly shielding her eyes. Her expression was abstracted.

As they entered, Hod made a clicking sound in his throat. Zani put one hand quickly in her pocket and opened her eyes. They had been closed. The book was a prop to hide something.

* * * * *

Soames had a flash of insight. He'd worn a belt with a built-in quasi-telepathic device just once and for the briefest of times. While he wore it, too, he'd been fiercely intent upon the use of it to recover another such device that had been looted in the broadcast studio during the most disastrous of all public-relations enterprises. He'd had no time for experiment; no time to accustom himself to the singular feeling of seeming to inhabit more than one body at a time. He'd had no opportunity to explore the possibilities of the device. But he'd worked out some angles since.

And because of it, he knew intuitively what Zani had been doing when he arrived. With closed eyes, hidden by her hand, she'd been receiving something that came from somewhere else. The two other children had kept silent. Hod clicked his tongue as a warning of Gail's and Soames' approach. And Zani put her hand in her pocket quickly and opened her eyes. She'd put something away. And Soames knew with certainty that she'd been receiving a message from Fran, in the teeth of merciless watching and probably microphonic eavesdropping on every word.

But the children's belt with the sensory-transmitters and receivers had been taken from them.

* * * * *

Little Mal said politely:

"Fran." A pause. "Where is?"

"I'd like to know," Soames told her.

"That's almost the only thing they're ever questioned about, nowadays," said Gail. "As a security measure only Captain Moggs and enlisted personnel without classified information, and the police who're hunting for Fran, are allowed to talk to them."

"Fran's been gone—how long? A week? Over?" Soames scowled. "How can he hide? He knows little English! He doesn't even know how to act so he won't be spotted if he walks down a street!"

Gail said with an odd intonation:

"I'm afraid he's in the wilds somewhere. He won't know how to get food. He'll be in danger from wild animals. I'm terribly afraid for him!"

Soames looked at her sharply.

"How'd he get away?"

"He roamed around, like boys do," said Gail. "He made friends, more or less, with the children of a staff sergeant's family. It was thought there could be no harm in that. And one morning he left here apparently to go and play with them, and they didn't see him, and he hasn't been seen since."

Hod was on his stomach again, doggedly working over a book, murmuring English words as he turned the pages from one picture to another. Mal and Zani looked from the face of Soames to that of Gail, and back again.

"They understand more than they can speak," said Gail.

Soames searched the walls of the room. Gail had said microphones were probable. He looked intently at Zani. He duplicated her position when he'd entered and her actions, the quick movement of her hand to her pocket and the opening of her eyes. She tensed, staring at him. He shook his head warningly and put his finger to his lips.

She caught her breath and looked at him strangely. He settled down to visit. Gail, with the air of someone doing something that did not matter, had the children display their English. Their accent was good. Their vocabularies were small. Soames guessed that Gail drilled them unceasingly in pronunciation so they wouldn't acquire so many words that they could be expected to answer involved questions. It was a way to postpone pressure upon them.

But it was not a good idea for Soames to have too parental or too solicitous an attitude. He said with inner irony:

"I'm disappointed in Fran. He shouldn't have run away. He made some sketches for me, of things boys his age make, at home. I wanted to get more such pictures from him. Hmmm.... Did he leave any sketches around when he disappeared?"

Gail shook her head.

"No. Every scrap of paper the children use is gathered up every night, for study. They don't like it. It disturbs them. Actually, I believe language experts are trying to find out something about their language, but they feel like it's enmity. They're jumpy."

"And with reason," said Soames. He stirred. "I'm disappointed. I'll go talk to the people who're hunting Fran. Walk back with me to the store, Gail?"

Gail rose. Zani stared at Soames. She was pale. He nodded to her again.

Gail and Soames went out into the now fully fallen night. Soames said gruffly:

"We'd better walk closer together.

"When we're married," he said abruptly, "I doubt we'll hide many things from each other. We'd better start being frank right now. The kids' belts may have been taken away, but they've got sensory-transmission gadgets just the same. Zani was using one when we went in the cottage."

Gail's footsteps faltered. "Wh-what are you going to do?"

"Give some good advice," said Soames. "Tell the kids you know about it. Point out that the Security people have three of the four belts, and they can wear them and pick up communications. Sooner or later they will and the kids will be caught. If Fran talks aloud they can pick up and identify his voice. If Zani writes, and looks at what she's written so he can read it through her eyes, her hand or her dress in what she sees could identify her. I'm telling you to remind Zani that communication by those sensory transmitters can be overheard. Sooner or later it will be. She must work out ways to avoid being identified. If they think more people of her race have landed, that's all right. But it may be bad if she's caught communicating with Fran."

* * * * *

Gail said nothing for a long time.

"That's—that's all?"

"Just about. I'm Fran's antagonist in one matter only. I'll do anything I can to keep him from calling all his race to come here. I hate it, but I'll do it. Outside of that, I feel that he's here through my fault. I do not want him to be psychologically vivisected by people who want everything he knows, and won't believe there are limits to it. So long as he's at large, there probably won't be frenzied questioning of the others."

"The—things in the belt are very simple," said Gail unsteadily, "and the children were scared and jumpy when they were taken away. So Fran told me, and he'd picked up some scraps of metal. Copper, it was. And I watched for him."

Soames said nothing.

"He took a straw," said Gail, "and used it as a sort of blowpipe. He could direct the flame of a candle I made for him. It would be heat-treatment?"

Soames nodded, in the darkness.

"It would. A pattern of heat-treatment might give a metal all sorts of properties we haven't guessed at." He added sardonically, "And it could be so simple that a boy could remember and do it!"

"He made six communicators," said Gail. "I insisted on six. And then I chose two at random for safety's sake, I suppose. And he and the other children hid theirs. I tried these two. They work. One is for you. Of course."

She fumbled something into his hand. It was tiny; hardly larger than a match.

"You push in the end. It works as long as you push it."

Soames pressed on one end where there was something that felt like the head of a pin. It probably was. It gave a little, and instantly he saw what Gail saw and felt what she felt, his hand clasping hers. He released the tiny object and again was only himself.

"Turn yours off," he said harshly. "Remind the kids that this sort of thing can be intercepted."

"I'll tell them," said Gail.

"They're much worse off than they were," he told her. "A little while ago all the world wanted to learn from the kids. Now it's afraid they'll learn from it, about the people in it. I think everybody'd be quite willing to forego all possible benefits from their coming, if only something would happen to them."

"But they can't pry into secrets!" protested Gail. "You know they can't read minds! They can't!"

"But they have the reputation and have to suffer for it," said Soames.

They were then very close to the pseudo general store. Gail put her hand lightly on Soames' arm. "Brad, please be careful."

* * * * *

He went into the store. He went through to the stock-room behind, pressed a button, and an elevator door opened in a rather surprising manner. He stepped inside and the elevator lowered him three hundred feet into the earth.

On the way out from the East he'd sunk into gloomy meditation about the situation of the children and for that matter of the world, since their arrival. Fran had an urgent mission he felt he must perform at any risk. He couldn't do it on the missile base.

Fran felt the hatred surrounding all of them from the conclusion of the broadcast. He knew that nobody, anywhere, would help him do something he had to do. So he fled in order to try somehow to send the signal Soames had prevented from beside the wrecked spaceship.

But why must Fran send it? Why hadn't an automatic device been used? Something which could be so ruggedly built that it could not possibly smash....

And suddenly there was an explanation.

Up to this moment Soames had doggedly accepted the idea that the children came out of a past so remote that numbers of years simply had no meaning. The evidence was overwhelming even though the law of the conservation of mass and energy denied the possibility of time-travel. Now, abruptly, Soames saw the infinitely simple answer. Time-travel was possible, provided certain conditions were met. Those conditions would at first instance inevitably produce a monstrous burst of static and an implosion to cause an earth-shock and a concussion wave audible at eighty miles distance. Once communication between time-frames had been established, however ...

The flight of Fran instantly became something so much more alarming than mere danger to Fran, that there was only one thing Soames could possibly do. He'd said he was not Fran's enemy. But he must do anything to keep Fran from carrying out the mission he'd been sent to accomplish.

So when Soames got out of the elevator from the village store, he went directly to a security officer.

"I'm worried about the boy Fran, who ran away," he observed. "Can you tell me what happened?"

"I'd like somebody to tell me!" said the security officer morbidly. "If he ran, he had wings on his shoes. And now he's out he's got me scared! You know those telepathic gadgets in the belts the children wore? We took 'em away. We opened one of 'em up, but we left the others in working order. We tried them. When two men wear them, with both turned on, they sort of half-way read each other's minds. Each man knows what the other is doing and seeing. But one man by himself can't do a thing. Two men can do a lot. It's been suggested that if they knew the trick of it, three men could do all the telepathy they wanted, read minds and all that. We haven't found out the trick, though."

* * * * *

Soames nodded, marvelling at the ability of the human race to find reasons to believe anything it wanted to, whether for sweet vanity's sake or for the sake of scaring itself to death.

"When we first got the belts from the kids," pursued the security officer, "we figured there might be some other folks of the kids' race on Earth, figuring on ways to get 'em loose. We had a belt worn night and day. Nothing. So we stopped monitoring. Then this Fran got away and we started monitoring all over again, trying to pick up any working of belts like these that we didn't know about. And we started picking up stuff right away!"

* * * * *

Soames stared. Zani'd been using one such instrument.

"A man's got one of those belts on," said the security man, frowning, "and it's like he didn't. Nothing happens at all. But after maybe hours, maybe a day or two, suddenly, with his eyes closed, he sees a page of outlandish writing. The kind of writing those kids do. It can't be photographed, because it's only inside your head that you see it. You can't make sense of it. The alphabet isn't ours. The words are the language they talk among themselves. I figure there's a ship somewhere, broadcasting a call to the kids. The call's printed. If the kids had their belts on, and turned on, they could read it. But we got their belts. So this Fran, he broke away to try to make some kind of way to answer that call!"

Soames said nothing. But he was unhappily amused, at himself as well as the security officer. He'd gone to some pains to tell Gail how the children might communicate with Fran without being caught at it. But they knew. They'd produced this theory of a hovering ship of space, broadcasting to Earth to four children hidden somewhere on it. There was no ship. There was only Fran, desperate to perform the task he'd been sent here to do, keeping in touch with the other three children by a tiny unit he'd made out of scrap copper and a straw and a candle-flame. And it was so natural that the fact wasn't guessed!

"How's he managing to eat?" asked Soames. "He's no money and next to no English, and he doesn't know how to act...."

"He's smart!" said the security officer grimly. "He's hiding by day. At night.... People don't usually tell the cops about a bottle of milk missing from their doorsteps. A grocer doesn't report one loaf of bread missing from the package left in front of his store before daybreak. He'd pick a loaf of bread today, and a bottle of milk tomorrow. Sometimes he'd skip. But we figured it out. We got every town in five hundred miles to check up. Bread-truck drivers asked grocery stores. Any bread missing? Milk-men asked their customers. Has anybody been pinching your milk? We found where he was, in Bluevale, close to the Navajo Dam, you know. We set cops to watch. Almost got him yesterday morning. He was after a loaf of bread. A cop fired five shots at him, but he got away. Dropped the loaf of bread, too."

Soames wanted to be sick. Fran was possibly fourteen years old and desperate because his whole civilization depended on him to save them from the destruction falling out of the sky. He was a fugitive on a strange world.

* * * * *

Then Soames' mouth went dry as he realized. Fran had been shot at in Bluevale, which was near the Navajo Dam. The Navajo Dam generated almost as much electric power as Niagara.

"I had a hunch," said the security officer with some grimness, "the kid got past three electric fences, and we don't know how. He must know plenty about electricity. So I began to wonder if he might be hoping to answer that broadcast signal with a signal of his own. He was in Bluevale. We checked up. A roofer lost some sheet copper a couple of days ago. Somebody broke in a storehouse and got away with forty or fifty feet of heavy-gauge copper wire. A man'd have stolen the whole roll. It would be only a kid that'd break off as much as he could carry. See?

"He's getting set to make something, and we know he's near Bluevale. He'll need tools. I've got Bluevale crammed with cops and plainclothesmen. That whole town is one big trap for that kid right now. And the cops will shoot! Because we don't know what that kid will make. If those kids had something that'll read your mind, made by grownups, maybe he'll make something that'll burn it out! He looks human, but he came out of space from Godknowswhere. Maybe he'll make deathrays!"

Soames swallowed. He knew what Fran would want to make. A mere local projector of deathrays would be trivial beside the consequences of what Fran was desperately resolved to do for his own people.

He heard himself say something relatively soothing.

"Maybe," he observed, "he's not that dangerous. You're worried about how he passed those electrified fences. He used stilts. He knew about them. They interested him. So he must have made a pair some seven or eight feet high, and learned to walk on them. And then he simply went to a tree near the fence, climbed up it and mounted the stilts, and then walked to the fence and stepped over it. At his age he wouldn't realize the danger. He'd do it and worm his way past watchers.... He could have done that!"

The security officer swore.

"Yes! Dammit, yes! We should've watched him closer."

"I want to get back East," said Soames.

"When do you want to head East?" asked the officer.

"Now," said Soames. "We've got a project started that's more or less linked to the kids' gadgets, even though we don't understand them. The sooner I can get back, the better."

The security officer used the telephone. He found there was a plane due to take off shortly. Soames could get passage on that plane, not to the East, but to a military airfield outside Denver where a cab could be had to take him to the commercial airport to make connections East.

Before starting on this trip he'd suspected that he might need to take part in the search for Fran. He'd cleaned out his bank account and had the cash in his pocket. In half an hour he was on board the outbound plane.

In two hours Soames was in Denver. In three he was lost beyond all discovery. He'd taken an inter-urban bus instead of a plane out of Denver, and gotten off at a tiny town whose name he did not even notice. During the night, with closed eyes and in a silent hotel room in the little town, he pressed one end of the miniature device that Fran had made and Gail had given him.

He felt a queer sensation. He inhabited two bodies at once. It was eerie. The other body did nothing. It only breathed and waited. Someone at the hidden base from which he had come wore one of the children's belts and patiently waited to eavesdrop on any communication that might be made by similar devices.

* * * * *

Soames waited for morning. Very early, again with closed eyes and with his body made comfortable so that he felt no distinct sensation from it, he pressed the end of the miniature instrument. He saw writing of the kind the children used for memoranda about their English lessons. He released the turn-on switch, which was probably the head of a pin. He turned on a light. He opened a notebook. Its first page showed two sketches. One was of the runner of a boy-made air-sled. Fran had sketched it for Soames on the plane headed for New York and the disastrous broadcast. The other was a sketch of a boy on stilts. Soames had drawn that for Fran. Nobody but Soames would have looked at such drawings for Fran to see through his eyes. They were at once a call and an identification of Soames as a person using a device like a tiny copper firecracker, with the head of a pin where a fuse would belong.

He turned on the device again while looking at the sketches. He felt that he shared the physical sensations of two other bodies, no, three. He was momentarily convinced of a third. All three now kept their eyes tightly closed. All three saw only through his eyes, saw rough sketches which would have meaning only to two. Soames felt that he heard a smothered noise which only he would have known was a suppressed giggle.

Then he felt one of the other bodies shaking hands with itself. That would be Fran, acknowledging the message of the drawings that only Soames would know about. He shook hands with himself for Soames to experience. Then he patted his knee as one would pat a dog, and scratched his knee as one scratches a dog, as he did with Rex on Antarctica. He had identified himself. There was the stirring of another of the bodies with which Soames was linked. That would be the security officer, wearing a belt which brought him these sensations. He could have no idea, however, who was communicating with whom, and pattings and scratchings would have no meaning at all. He could only know that the weird experience stopped when someone shook hands with himself and that was all.

But Soames rose and dressed with many forebodings. Fran would not meet him. Soames had given warning of traps and close hunting. But Fran would not meet him. It looked bad.

He bought a second-hand motorcycle at ten o'clock in the morning. He knew motorcycles. By three in the afternoon he threaded through the traffic of Bluevale. To him, on the watch for such matters, there seemed an unusual preponderance of men on the streets of that small town. Fran wouldn't notice it. Soames did. But he wasn't noticed. He'd bought a leather jacket and a cap. He rode a battered motorbike. He didn't even faintly resemble Fran.

He rode casually through Bluevale and along the wide, smooth highway to the much smaller village of Navajo Dam—at the edge of the big lake the dam had backed up behind it—and then at a leisurely pace along the same highway as it went over the crest of that massive structure. The lake to his right rose within feet of the highway. To the left there was a chasm, with a winding truck-road going down to the generator buildings at the dam's foot.

Soames jittered. He went two miles on and into forest, dragging the motorcycle out of sight from the road. He made himself as comfortable as possible, to avoid transmitting any information about his whereabouts. He stuffed his ears to mute the sounds of open country. From four o'clock to eight, at irregular intervals, he turned on the sensory-linkage device for a second or two at a time. He came to recognize the physical sensations of the man who, back in the hidden missile base, wore a child's belt and monitored for sensory communications. Between seven and eight the identity of that man changed. Someone else took the place of the first.

At ten o'clock there was the briefest possible sensation of a third body. Soames knew it was Fran. He shook hands with himself, quickly. Fran would recognize it as a greeting. Soames had contrived a way to offer argument, but he only felt a boy's small, smooth hands shaking each other in reply, and Fran was gone out of communication.

He did not come back.

* * * * *

At midnight Soames got his motorcycle out of the woods and onto the highway. He rode slowly back toward Bluevale. He stopped at a hot-dog stand outside the town and waited there for another signal.

At one, nothing had happened. Soames was close enough to the town to have heard any tumult, certainly any shots.

At two and three—nothing.

At four o'clock, without warning, there was a flash of intolerably vivid blue-green light. It came from the chasm below the Navajo Dam. The lights across the dam's curving crest went out. The street-lights of Bluevale and the little village of Navajo Dam went out. The world went dark, while a mountainous blue-green flame shed intolerably bright light toward the stars.

It went out, too.

Soames, cold with fear, pressed the end of the sensory device. He felt pain, lancing, excruciating pain. He heard Fran's voice gasping hopelessly:

"Try! Try! Try!"

He felt Fran's body turn in pain, and he saw that Fran's eyes looked up at stars, and the stars were cut off at one side by the curving bulk of the monstrous concrete dam.

Soames shook hands with himself. He let go the button. He started the motorcycle. He raced toward the dam. He did not again press on the sensory device until he'd gone frantically through the village and hair-raisingly down the truck-road to the generator buildings. There he cut off the motor, and he heard men's voices, profane and agitated and alarmed. He saw the small flickerings of flashlights.

He found Fran, crumpled on the ground and trying desperately not to make sounds of pain. Soames knew where the hurt was. He'd experienced it as Fran did. He'd guessed its cause and seriousness. He knew he had to move quickly.

He put Fran swiftly on the saddle behind his own on the motorcycle. He gave the motorcycle all the gas it would take and went racketing up the truck-road from the chasm below the dam.

He made it. The motorcycle, its lights turned off, was across the dam and streaking for the first curve beyond before the flickerings of car headlights began to show on the road from Bluevale.

Fran held on fiercely. But presently Soames felt the quiverings behind him. He stopped the motorcycle where the road was empty. Fran ground his teeth and stared at him defiantly in the reflected light of the now functioning single headlight.

"If I were you," said Soames, not expecting to be understood, but speaking as one man to another, "If I were you I wouldn't be ashamed of crying. I feel pretty much like it myself, from relief that your signalling device blew out."



CHAPTER 9

The color of the blue-green flame which had flared so fiercely outside the generator-buildings was no mystery at all. It was the color of vaporized copper, the same coloring found in burning driftwood in which copper nails have rusted. Its cause was no mystery, either. There'd been a gigantic short-circuit where the main power-leads left the dynamo-rooms to connect with cross-country power lines.

Soames and Fran knew directly, and some few security officers guessed, that Fran had caused the short. There was melted-down, cryptic metal below the place where the short appeared. Fran had undoubtedly placed it. How he escaped electrocution the security officers did not try to figure out. But they knew he'd tried to do something with apparatus that burned itself out without operating, and that he'd tumbled down a ten-foot drop while fleeing from the searing green arc, and even that he'd appealed for help with the words, "Try! Try! Try!" And they knew that somebody had helped him get away from the scene of his exploit and injury. But they didn't know how, nor that it was Soames.

Soames was assumed to be on his way East to confer with a group of scientists who now had added certain skilled instrument-makers to their number and triumphantly worked themselves to twitching exhaustion.

Fran's part in the affair was naturally a secret. Lights and power in five Colorado counties went off and stayed off. Local newspapers printed indignant editorials.

Theirs was a strictly local view. In high official quarters the feeling was quite different. The reaction there was more like paralyzed horror. Fran was known to be behind the breakdown of the plant. He'd caused it by trying to tap its lines for a monstrous amount of power. He'd been trying to signal to so great a distance that tens of thousands of kilowatts were required. He'd failed, but the high brass knew with absolute certainty that he'd tried to signal to his own race. And to the high brass this meant that he'd tried to summon a space-fleet with invincible weapons to the conquest of Earth.

So there were two directives from the highest possible policy-making levels. First, Fran must be caught at any cost in effort, time, money, and man-power. Second, the rest of the world must not know that one of the four spaceship's crew members was at large.

So the hunt for Fran intensified to a merciless degree.

Soames headed north. He wore a leather jacket, and he rode a battered, second-hand motorcycle, and on the saddle behind him an obvious kid brother rode, leather-jacketed as Soames was, capped as he was, scowling as Soames did, and in all ways imitating his elder. Which was so familiar a sight that nobody noticed Fran at all. He was visibly a tough younger brother of the kind of young man who goes in for battered motorcycles because he can't afford anything better. Naturally no one suspected him of being a telepathic monster, a creature of space, or the object of a desperate search.

* * * * *

It was helpful that Soames was not missed at first and was not searched for. It was a full day after the Navajo Dam breakdown before anybody thought to have him check on the melted-down apparatus. It was two days before anybody was concerned about him, and three before flights out of Denver had been checked futilely for his name.

But on the fourth day after a green flame reached up toward the sky, Soames and a silent, scowling, supposed younger brother occupied a fishing-shack on the shores of Calumet Lake. They were seven hundred miles from Denver, and the way they'd come was much longer than that. They were far removed from the tumult of the world. They'd made bivouacs in the open on the journey, and this would be the first time they'd settled anywhere long enough to take stock.

"Now," said Soames, as sunset-colorings filled the sky beyond the lake's farther edge, "now we figure out what we're going to do. We ought to be able to do something, though I don't yet know what. And first we act the parts we're playing. We came here to catch some fish. You shouldn't be able to wait. So we go out and catch fish for our dinner."

He led the way to a tiny wharf where a small boat lay tied. He carried fishing-rods and bait.

He untied the boat and rowed out to the middle of the lake. He surveyed his surroundings and dropped anchor. He baited a hook, with Fran watching intently.

Soames handed him the rod. Fran waited. He imitated Soames' actions when Soames began to fish. He watched his line as closely as the deepening dusk permitted.

"Hmmm," said Soames. "Your ankle's doing all right. Lucky it was a wrench instead of a break or a sprain. Four days of riding and no walking have fixed it pretty well. It's fairly certain nobody knows where you are, too. But where do we go from here?"

Fran listened.

"You came out of time," said Soames vexedly. "But time-travel can't be done. The natural law of the conservation of matter and energy requires that the total of substance and force in the cosmos, taken together, be the same at each instant that it was in the instant before and the one after. It's self-evident. That rules out travelling in time."

* * * * *

He jerked at his fishing-rod. He did not hook his fish.

"I don't think you understand me," he observed.

"No," said Fran matter of factly.

"It doesn't matter," Soames told him. "I'm saying that you can't put a gallon of water in a full keg of wine. And you can't, unless you draw off wine as fast as you add water. Unless you exchange. So you can't shift an object from time-frame A to time-frame B without shifting a corresponding amount of matter and energy from time-frame B to time-frame A. Unless you keep the amount of matter and energy unchanged in each. Unless you exchange. So you came to here and now from there and then—your home time-frame, let's say—by a process of swapping. By transposition. By replacement. Transposition's the best word. The effect was time-travel but the process wasn't, like a telephone has the effect of talking at a distance but the method is distinctly something else."

Fran jerked his fishing-rod. A nine-inch lake-trout flapped in the boat's bottom.

"I'm supposed to be teaching you how to fish!" said Soames.

He watched as Fran rather gingerly extracted the hook and rebaited as he'd seen Soames do.

Soames continued, "Your ship was transposed from your time into mine. Simultaneously, gram molecular weight for gram molecular weight, something had to be transposed into yours. Since you were to come into my time twenty thousand feet high and there was nothing else handy to be transposed into your time—why—air had to leave here and turn up there. To make up the mass and energy of your ship and you and the other children."

As if to indicate that he listened, Fran said:

"Zani, Mal and Hod."

"Right!" Soames jerked his rod and brought up a fingerling which he silently unhooked and threw back overboard. "Considering the thinness of the air where you came out, maybe half a cubic mile of it had to transpose into your time to let your ship come into this."

He dropped the line overboard again.

"Which means that there was an implosion of anywhere from a quarter to half a cubic mile of vacuum. It made an earth-shock and a concussion wave, and it battered your ship until it went out of control. It would seem to make sense that the tumult and the shouting would appear here, where plain force was operating without much guidance, but not in your time where the machinery and the controls were operating. Your people had to handle more energy there—and consequently acted upon more energy here—than my people could produce with all the engines now on Earth hooked together."

He fished, frowning thoughtfully.

"I suspect," said Soames, after a long interval, "that with machinery and controls at this end as well as the other, instead of at one end only, that time-transposition would be a fairly tranquil process. It would be under accurate control. It'd probably need infinitely less power. A ship would vanish from your time and simultaneously a mass-and-energy equivalent would take its place. And a ship would appear in this time and simultaneously a mass-and-energy equivalent would vanish to appear in your time. But I think it must have been because the whole business was done from one end that the business was so spectacular, with lightning, earthquake, and all the rest. With equipment at both ends, there should be no static, no earth-shock, no concussion, nothing but a very peaceful transfer."

Soames' expression became sardonic.

"Which I am prepared to prevent at any cost," he added. "Yet I've some responsibility to you, Fran. I think I'm getting an idea of a kind of bluff that we might pull off, if we could get the other kids safe away. It would be a bluff, and the biggest in history. But we might just get away with it...."

Fran caught a three-quarter-pound lake-trout. Soames caught one weighing half a pound. They caught two smaller ones before full darkness fell. Then Soames put up his fishing-rod and picked up the oars. He began to row toward the shore.

"I'll show you how to clean and cook the fish," he observed. "I think you'll like the flavor."

He pulled hard on one oar, and swung the boat around, and caught one of the small piles of the wharf. Fran climbed up and Soames handed him the fish.

He followed Fran shoreward toward the rickety little week-end cottage he'd rented. There he showed Fran how fish with scales are cleaned, and then how they can be cooked over an open fire.

* * * * *

After Fran had gone to bed, it occurred to Soames that he hadn't heard the news of the world for four days. On the run, as he and Fran had been, they hadn't seen a newspaper or heard a news broadcast. Now Soames turned on the small radio that went with the fishing cottage, to give advance information on the weather.

News came on immediately. It was all bad.

The United States had shown no signs of having profited by the telepathic powers of Fran and his companions. No spies were seized. A submarine installation that could lob missiles into New York from the edge of the hundred-fathom line was not depth-bombed. There were other failures to act on information obtained through the children. No nation could imagine another allowing spies to operate if it could detect them.

So a raging guess began to spread among the anti-American peoples of the world. The guess was that the broadcast was a lie. Nobody doubted the landing of a spaceship, of course. The static and the earth-shock were evidence, and the Russians had photographs. But the children were too suspiciously like human children. They could be child actors, coached to impersonate aliens who could not be produced. And there was an easy answer to the question of why the true aliens weren't revealed. They could be dead. Earth's atmosphere might be fatal to them. They could have died of some infection against which they had no defense.

The politicians and the rulers of the world suspected the United States of bad faith and trickery. They were not certain. But there were ways of making sure.

When Soames tuned in to the news at Calumet Lake, the United States had been forced to use a veto in the United Nations for the first time. A resolution passed, calling on the United States to turn over "the crew of an extraterrestrial space vessel" to a committee to be appointed by the UN assembly. The United States vetoed it. Ironically, with Fran run away and not found again, the United States could not have complied with the resolution in any case.

But the veto lent plausibility to suspicions. There was intensified distrust. The Nato countries asked to share in technical information obtained from outer space. There wasn't any. They asked to study the devices salvaged by the children. This could have been done, but recent political developments inside Nato made it certain that anything one particular nation learned would immediately be known to Russia. This was to be avoided if possible.

* * * * *

The mess went farther. South America was so deeply suspicious of the colossus of the north that various Latin nations sought engagements by European countries to defend them against aggression by the United States. There had been two great concentrations of military power on Earth. Russia headed one group of nations, and the United States the other. Now it looked like there would soon be three. Russia would head one. A second would be a group detached from the United States. The third would be the United States standing alone.

It was an absolutely perfect set-up for flaming total war to be begun at any instant.

The news Soames picked up on a cheap radio on a Calumet Lake fishing shack was enough to make any man heartsick.

When Fran waked in the morning, an unsmiling Soames greeted him.

"We're going to ride again, Fran. I'm going to make a long-distance call."

* * * * *

They rode two hundred miles before noon, and Soames got silver from a filling-station where he bought gas. At one of the out-of-door phone-booths lately a part of the American scene, he put through a call to New York. He got the tall physicist who'd come West to the hidden missile base.

"This is Soames," he said very distinctly. "I've got a tip for you. Pretend that you want to make something like the gadget that stops winds and warms places. You know the thing."

The tall physicist's voice babbled.

"I know!" said Soames bitterly, "I'm supposed to be dead or a traitor or something. But listen to me! You're a castaway and savages snipe at you. You want to make something like the thing that stops wind, but you want it to stop arrows instead. It's quite a job. Perhaps the only useful thing you've got on this savage world is a way to make magnetic fields with minus self-induction. That's got to stop the arrows. You can assume the arrowheads are metal. Do you follow me?"

A pause. Then a tinny voice, singularly calm and astonished at the same time:

"Why—yes! A very interesting approach! In fact, we've got some very surprising results lately. One of them will fit in beautifully! Yes! Beautifully!"

"If you make it designed for large enough areas," said Soames, "you'll know where to use it, and how. And—" Soames' voice was sardonic indeed, "If you do get it, this is one thing that shouldn't be kept secret! Get it broadcast! Get it everywhere! Give it to the Russians and the Greeks and the Chinese and the French and everybody else! Understand? The more who know about it the better."

The tinny voice said:

"We just developed a thing to refine metals in situ.... An induction furnace that sets up the heating field at almost any distance from the elements that handle the power. It will fit in perfectly! Of course! Certainly! This is magnificent, Soames!"

"If you can get it working and in production before hell breaks loose," said Soames, "you may deserve well of the republic."

"Where are you, Soames? We need you on several matters—"

Soames hung up. His call, of course, could be traced. He'd travelled two hundred miles so that tracing it would do no good. He returned to where Fran dangled his legs from the back saddle of the motorbike, and they headed back to Calumet Lake for a few more days of peace and quiet.



CHAPTER 10

Soames made his long-distance call on a Monday, when war seemed likely to come perhaps within hours. All day Monday the tension continued. Traffic jams became the normal thing outside the larger cities, which would be logical targets for long-range missiles. Every means of travel away from the great population centers was loaded far beyond capacity.

On Tuesday afternoon national guard troops had been called out in ten states to keep traffic moving.

At Calumet Lake, however, there was no notable change. Soames and Fran still went fishing. In the boat Fran sometimes shut his eyes and pressed the end of one of the tiny sensory-perception communicators he had made. He turned it on for no longer than a second at a time. If he made contact with one of the other children he was prepared to speak swiftly—so they could hear his voice as he did—to assure them that he was safe and to ask for news of Zani and Mal and Hod, and Gail. He could do it very quickly indeed. Soames had insisted on only instants of communicator-use.

"Maybe those gadgets can be directionally spotted," he said. "Security wants you, Fran. If there's a way to get a directional fix on you, they'll find it! So, make it short!"

On Thursday morning all broadcasts broke off to report that the DEW line of radars across Canada had reported objects in the air moving across the North Pole toward the United States. America clenched its fists and waited for missiles to strike or be blasted by counter-missiles, as fate or chance might determine. Twenty minutes later a correction came. The radar-detected objects had not been missiles, but aircraft flying in formation. They'd changed course and returned to their bases. They were probably foreign fighter-planes patrolling far beyond their usual range.

Soames had held his breath with the rest of the country. He was just beginning to breathe freely again when Fran came running from the week-end-shack. His eyes shone.

"I got—" he swallowed—"Zani. I said"—he swallowed again, "we will come." He added: "Our language."

Soames looked at him sharply.

"Maybe you do read minds. Was anybody listening in? Anybody else beside Zani?"

"Two men," said Fran. "Two. They talked. Fast. English."

"One man would be a monitor," said Soames grimly. "Two means a directional fix. Let's go!"

By that night they were hundreds of miles from Calumet Lake.

The highways were crowded with the people who'd evacuated the cities. The high population of remote places was a protection for Soames and Fran. He worried, though, about Gail, her situation, and that of the three other children, was far from enviable. In the present increasing confusion and tension they were hardly likely to have any improvement in their state.

"I think," Soames told Fran reflectively, "that at night, and with the kind of disorganization that seems to be increasing, you can get away with talking to the kids again. Nobody'll try a parachute drop in these mountains in the darkness." They were then a hundred miles south of Denver. "They couldn't get organized before daybreak, and I doubt that they could block the highways. See if you can make contact, eh? And find out how they're getting along?"

Fran nodded. He moved so that the heat of their fire would not fall on him, to tell that he camped out-of-doors. He found a place to lie down in comfort, so that there would be no distracting sensation. He closed his eyes. Soames saw him press the end of his tiny communicator and release it quickly. After an instant's pause he pressed it again. He held the communicator on for several seconds, half a minute. He released it and sat up.

"You try," he said in a puzzled fashion. "You try!"

Soames closed his eyes. He pressed the little pin-head button at the end of the instrument which was hardly larger than a match-stick. He felt the sensations of another body. That other body opened its eyes. Soames saw who it was, Gail's face was reflected in a mirror. She was pale. Her expression was drawn and harried. But she smiled at her reflection, because she knew Soames would see what she saw.

He spoke, so she'd hear his voice as he did.

"Gail!"

He felt a hand—which was her hand—spill something on a levelled surface before her. It smoothed the spilled stuff. It was face-powder, spread on a dressing-table top. A finger wrote. She looked down at what was written there.

"Help Fran," he read. "You Must!"

* * * * *

He felt her hand swiftly smoothing the message away. Rage swept over him. Instantly he knew what had happened. Fran's escape from Calumet Lake had proved that he knew that his communications were intercepted and directionally analyzed. Therefore the other children were no longer a means by which he might be trapped. So their communicators had been taken away from them for the second time, and now they were watched with an unceasing closeness. Every glance, every word, every gesture was noted.

"This has to be quick," said Soames coldly, for her to hear. "I would help him, but he'd want to get in touch with his people."

Gail opened her eyes again. Her image in the mirror nodded.

"And if he did," said Soames as coldly as before, "they'd come here and conquer us. And I'd rather that we killed each other off than that the most kindly-disposed of conquerors enslaved us."

He felt her hand again smoothing the spilled face-powder. She wrote in it. He knew what she had written before she dropped her eyes to it. He couldn't believe it. She'd written three words, no, two words and a numeral. Soames felt an almost physical shock. He was incredulous. If this was true ...

Then he felt a hand closed firmly on Gail's shoulder. Captain Moggs spoke, authoritative and stern and reproachful:

"Gail! How could you! You have one of those horrible telepathic things too! This is a very grave matter, Gail!"

Then the contact was broken. Captain Moggs had snatched away Gail's communicator.

Raging, Soames took Fran and left that spot which was undoubtedly pin-pointed by now. As they sped away he tried to consider the meaning of the two words and the numeral which was completely unbelievable at first thought.

* * * * *

Shortly after sunrise he bought a two-day-old newspaper. It was the latest he could find for sale. He rode a certain distance and stopped where the highway made an especially dramatic turn and there was a turn-out for tourists to park in while they admired the view. He stopped there and deliberately read the news affecting war and peace and the children and therefore Gail. At the end he folded the newspaper painstakingly and with careful self-control tore it to bits. Then he said angrily:

"Fran, a question it never occurred to me to ask you before."

He posed the question. Fran could have answered it with two English words and a numeral, and the same words and numeral that Gail had used. But he didn't have the words. Especially, he did not have the number. Fran's way of writing numbers was as complex as the system used in ancient Rome, and Soames had no key. It took a long time to grasp the quantity Fran had in mind. Then Soames had to make sure he had it right.

Then, abruptly, he knew that it was true. He knew why it was true. It increased his anger over the situation and the treatment of Gail and the children.

"According to this paper," he said icily, "my fellow-countrymen have decided to pay a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, and to sell you down the river. They suggest an international UN committee to receive custody of you children. That committee could then set to work on you to find out where you came from, why, and when you are likely to be searched for. Now, you know and so do I that part of what they found out they wouldn't accept. Time-travel is impossible. So when you children told them where you come from they wouldn't believe it. They'd try to pry back behind what they'd consider a lie. They'd use different techniques of inquiry. They'd use inhibition-releasing drugs. They'd ..."

* * * * *

Fran's expression did not change. Yet it was not passive.

"Which will not happen," said Soames in sudden fury, "except over my dead body! Gail feels the same way. So let's go! We've got to plan a really king-size monkey-wrench to throw into these works!"

He stepped on the motorbike pedal. He swung on down the winding mountain road for the lowlands. He went into a relatively small town. He bought a pup-tent, pliers, a small camp-stove; a camp-lantern; food; blankets; matches.

They went back into the foothills and settled down to the strangest scientific conference in history. The scene of the conference was a remote and strictly improvised encampment by the side of a briskly-flowing trout-stream. They fished. They talked. They drew diagrams at each other.

Fran's English had improved remarkably, but this was a highly technical discussion. It was two days before Soames had the information he needed firmly in his mind. He made a working drawing of what had to be built. He realized that the drawing itself was a simplification of a much more sophisticated original device. It was adapted to be made out of locally available materials. It was what Fran had made and tried at Navajo Dam.

"Which," said Soames, frowning, "proved not to work. You didn't realize the local resources. This thing works, obviously, because a terrifically strong electric field is cut off abruptly and collapses instantly. The original apparatus—the one I burnt—no doubt had a very fine gimmick to break a heavy current flow without making an arc. The trouble at Navajo Dam was that it did arc—and how! That was a mess!"

He paused, considering. Since Soames was not looking at him, Fran regarded him with infinite respect.

"The problem," said Soames, thinking hard, "is a glorified job of turning off an electric light without making a spark at the switch. That's all. It doesn't matter how long the current flows. The thing is that it must stop instantly. So we turn the whole business inside out.

"Instead of making a terrific steady current and cutting it off, I'm going to start with it not flowing and use a strobe-light pack. Every amateur photographer has one. They give a current of eight hundred amperes and twenty-five hundred volts for the forty-thousandth of a second. The juice doesn't flow long enough to burn anything out. It cuts itself off. There's nothing to maintain an arc.

"The really tricky part," he said uncomfortably, "may be the stealing of a helicopter. But I guess I can manage it."

* * * * *

He left Fran fishing and went down to the nearest town again to buy eccentric items of equipment. Copper foil. Strobe-light packs, two of them. He could use foil instead of large-area heat-dissipating units, because the current would flow so briefly. He would get a terrific current, of course. Two strobe-light packs in series would give him four million watts of power for part of the wink of an eyelid.

When he got back to the camp, Soames called to Fran. "We've got to get to work. I don't think we've got much time. I had hopes of a castaway-gadget coming up, but it hasn't."

He began to assemble the device which would substitute for the larger, heavier, much more massive apparatus he'd destroyed on the Antarctic ice-sheet. The work went swiftly. Soames had re-designed the outfit, and a man can always build a thing of his own design more easily than something from another man's drawings.

Before sunset the thing was done. Fran was very respectful. This apparatus was less than a quarter the size of the one his own people had prepared for the same purpose. And it was self-powered, too; it was independent of outside power-supply.

"I'd like to talk to your people about this," said Soames grimly. "I do think things can be transposed in space, and this should work that way as well as in time. But starting at one end has me stymied."

He abandoned the pup-tent and equipment.

"Either we won't need them," he said, "or we won't be able to use them."

The battered, ancient motorcycle took them into the night. Soames had studied road-maps and he and Fran had discussed in detail the route to Navajo Dam—using stilts to cross electrified fences—from the hidden missile base. Soames was sure that with Fran's help he could find the pseudo-village where Gail and the children remained. It would call for a helicopter. But before that there was a highly necessary operation which would also go best with a helicopter to help. So when they left that pup-tent camp they headed toward a very minor, local airfield where Soames had once landed. It had hangars for half a dozen cheap private planes and for two helicopters used mostly for crop-dusting.

* * * * *

At the airfield Soames laid the motorcycle beside the edge of the clear area, and left Fran with it, to wait. He moved quietly through the darkness toward close-up buildings with no lights anywhere except in one room reserved for a watchman.

Fran waited, breathing fast. He heard night-insects and nothing else. It seemed a horribly long time—before he heard the grinding noise of a motor being cranked. It caught immediately. There was a terrific roaring tumult inside a building. The large door of a hangar tilted and went upward, and a door opened from the watchman's lighted room and he came shouting outside.

The roaring of motors changed. The door of the hangar was quite open. A bellowing thing came moving out, whirling huge black vanes against the sky. It boomed more loudly still, and lifted, and then drifted with seeming clumsiness across the level airfield while the night watchman shouted after it.

* * * * *

Fran turned on the motorcycle headlight as he'd been told, and picked up the apparatus Soames had made to use strobe-light packs in. The 'copter swept toward him, six feet above-ground. It came down and Fran swarmed up into its cabin. Then the motors really thundered and the 'copter climbed for the sky.

Soames drove without lights and headed southward.

A transcontinental highway appeared below. It was plainly marked by the headlights of more than usually heavy traffic on it. He followed that highway.

Fran rode in a sort of stilly rapture. Soames said:

"Not worried, Fran?"

Fran shook his head. Then, boy-like, he turned on the transistor radio to show his nonchalance. A voice spoke. He'd have shifted to music but Soames caught a word or two.

"Hold it!" he commanded. "Put it so I can hear!"

Fran raised the volume and held the small radio so Soames could hear it above the motor-noise.

What he heard, at this moment, was the official United States broadcast announcing the ending of all real menace of atomic attack. By a fortunate freak of fate, somebody in authority realized that it was more important to get the news out than to make a professionalized production of it. So a tired but confident voice said very simply that American technicians seemed to have solved the problem of defense attack by atomic bombs and guided missiles. There had been, the voice said steadily, recent marked improvements in electric induction furnaces. The basic principle of an induction furnace was the evolution of heat in the material it was desired to melt, instead of merely in a container for the stuff that was to be melted. Within the past four days induction furnaces of a new type had proved able to induce heat in chosen objects up to miles. It had been expected to smelt metal ore in the veins in which it was found, and to make mines yield their product as metal without digging up and puttering with useless rock. But now this apparatus had been combined with radar.

When a radar detected a missile or an enemy plane, the broadcast said carefully, an induction furnace of the new type was turned upon the plane or missile. The effect was exactly that of enclosing the missile in a burning blast-furnace. It melted. The most careful tests assured America, then, that any city protected by radar-controlled remote-induction furnaces was safe against atomic attack and its dread destruction.

And at the time of this broadcast, every major center of population in the United States was already protected by the new defense-system. The cities which had been most vulnerable were now the safest places in the nation. And it was found, added the contented voice, that atomic bombs were not detonated by the induction fields. The induced currents seemed to freeze firing mechanisms. It appeared impossible to design a detonating device which would blow up a bomb before it melted.

The broadcast ended in a matter-of-fact statement that plans for the defense-system had been given to all the allies of the United States, that London was already protected and Paris would be within hours, and that within days the nations which were not allies would be assisted to establish defenses, so that atomic war need not be feared in the future.

Soames listened with an odd expression on his face.

"That," he said, "started out as a gadget for a castaway to stop arrows that savages were sniping at him with. I'm very pleased."

There was no more for him to say. The pleasure he felt, of course, would be the only reward he was likely to get. At the moment he was bent upon an enterprise his fellow-Americans would have regarded with horror.

* * * * *

Far, far below and surrounded by the blackness of tree-covered ground in starlight, there was an irregular shape of brightness. It was miles long. It reflected the stars. It was the flood-control reservoir behind the Polder Dam. There was no power-plant here. This reservoir merely took the place of some hundreds of thousands of acres of timbered-off forest which once had controlled floods more effectively.

Without a word, Soames slanted the 'copter down. Presently it hovered delicately over the dam's crest and at its very center. It touched. The rotor ceased to whirl. The motor stopped. There was a great silence.

Fran scrambled down. Soames swung after him. Together, they set up the device which was a time-transposition unit, with its complicated small antenna aimed out at the waters of the reservoir.

"I've gambled," said Soames, "that we understand each other. Now you pull the string."

There was a cord which would discharge the strobe-packs through the apparatus itself. The discharge would cease with absolute abruptness. The packs would then recharge themselves from the special batteries included in the device.

Fran pulled the cord.

There was no noise except a small and inadequate "snap." It seemed that nothing happened. But there was suddenly a hole in the surface of the reservoir. It was a large hole.

Something came up out of it. It glittered in ghostly fashion in the starlight. It rose up and up and up. It was a cylinder with a rounded top and a diameter of fifty feet or so. It rose and rose, very deliberately. Then a rounded lower end appeared. It floated in the air.

Fran jerked the cord again. Another hole in the lake. Another round metal thing rising slowly, one would even say peacefully into the starlight. Fran, grinning happily, jerked the cord again and yet again....

There were eight gigantic shining cylinders in the air when he stopped and stood back, his eyes shining. A vast metal thing floated ponderously near. A port opened and a voice called down in the language the children used among themselves. Fran spoke back, remembering to turn on his sensory communicator.

Fran talked briskly as if to himself. But it was standard sensory-communication practice. After a long time he turned to Soames.

"My people say—" a pause—"thank you—" another pause, "and ask for Zani and Mal and Hod."

"Tell them to make a column of themselves and float right here, going up to ten thousand feet or so. Radars will pick them out. Planes will come in the night to see what they are. They'll guess. I doubt very much that they'll attack. Tell your people simply to keep them worried until we come back."

Fran zestfully swarmed back into the helicopter. Soames told him:

"Turn off your communicator. You'll be listened in on. But maybe the monitoring men are having their hair stand on end from the welter of communications from the ships!"

Fran wriggled with excitement as the 'copter rose once more.

* * * * *

Soames had an odd feeling that all this could not be true. But it was, down to the last least detail which had made it thinkable for him to defy all his fellow-men to keep faith with four children whose lives and errand he'd interfered with. The matter had been a very natural oversight, at first.

Of course Soames had assumed that the children's civilization had been one of very millions of people. A small city cannot establish or maintain a great technological civilization. He had been right. He'd assumed, even, that Fran's people were able to travel between planets. Again he'd been right. But the thing he hadn't thought of was that the development of transposition in time—and transposition in space would come later—wouldn't occur to anybody unless there was absolutely no other possible solution to the problem the Old Race faced. They wouldn't have tried to solve it until the Fifth Planet burst and the doom of the world they lived on was self-evident. They wouldn't have worked at it until they realized that Venus and Mercury were due to be shattered after Earth, just as Mars was bombarded before it.

So the struggle to escape through time was begun in the fifty-ninth minute of the last hour. Cities struggled to build time-ships and get a pioneer vessel through to future time. Asteroids plunged down upon them, wiping them out. Cities struggled on, passing to each other—to the thinning number of those who remained—such solutions to such problems as they developed. But there were fewer and fewer.... The city from which the children came had fallen in ruins from earth-shocks, and only a fraction of its population continued frantically to labor on....

But Soames hadn't thought of this. It was Gail who found it out from the children with her. And she'd told Soames that he must help Fran at any cost, and told the reason in two words and a number. Speaking of Fran's people, she'd told Soames,

"Only 2,000 left."

It was true. It checked with the number of ships that came through to modernity. Only two thousand people remained of Fran's race. They could not conquer two billions of humankind. They could not rule them. They could only take refuge among them, and share what knowledge they could with them.

Fran leaned happily against Soames' shoulder. The 'copter swung away from a broad wide valley.

Fran pointed. Two valleys came together here. He, who had come away from the missile base on foot, was an authority on how to get back to it in a helicopter.

The 'copter flew on.

* * * * *

Fran said:

"There!"

And there were small lights, the color of kerosene lamps. But they were not lamps, but electric lights. Soames sent the 'copter sweeping toward the remarkably convincing Rocky Mountain village. The ship barely cleared an electrified fence, the last of three. But if there were sentries who might have fired on it, they had already heard of the arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships. Nothing so human as a helicopter could be an enemy when an invading fleet from who-knows-where was just reported....

THE END