The Three Suns of Amara

themselves with scrupulous justice.

Ethically, that made sense. Physically, it was mad. Mathematicians, who had retained their sanity after years of grappling with the hoary Problem of the Three Bodies, would tend to sink into melancholy after attempting to produce on paper proof of what they indisputably saw in the vicinity of the Three Suns. And this despite the whole mountain range of data concerning the vagaries of gravitational fields which had grown into being since interstellar travel became commonplace.

Blue, Yellow, and Red were spaced on the corners of an invisible equilateral triangle. Amara circled each sun in turn, rotating on its own axis as it went, providing rainbow-colored days for the Amarans, but never black night. The nearest to night, probably, was when Amara entered upon the passage between Blue and Red. Then the clouds were empurpled and people’s faces seemed dark and strange. But soon Yellow’s contribution came to dispel the shadows, and when Amara swung around to the far side of Yellow the sky became bright indeed. Between Yellow and Blue, grass-green was the light. Between Red and Yellow, a warm orange.

The juxtapositions of suns and planets, vaporous clouds and dust-clouds, were infinite. The skies of Earth seemed in retrospect like faded window drapes to one who’d seen the glowing, kaleidoscopic heavens of Amara.

One like Alexander Sherret.

Sherret remembered Earth with no particular regret. It was a place which everyone pretended was highly significant, if only because it was the cradle of humanity. The significance evaded Sherret. Amara was preferable; plainly, starkly, it mirrored the universe as it really was.

It was the Grand Doodle.

The Grand Doodler’s conscious attention had been someplace else—someplace, maybe, that was significant —the while his subconscious idly sketched out the pointless pattern of the universe. An enormously intricate pattern, naturally, from the depths of an enormously intricate mind. But significance it had not. And men became clowns or bores when they assumed they knew, and dilated upon, the meaning of it all.

All men are Doodles. Why argue?

But when someone tries to thrust Hobson’s choice down your gullet, you find yourself arguing.

Captain Maxton was doing the thrusting, and for him it was out of character; usually he had to be pushed.

“Make up your mind, Sherret. Are you a Goffist or a Reparist?”

“I’m a Sherretist, sir.”

“Cut the whimsy. I’ve got to know where I stand.”

“You should stand on your own feet, sir.”

The Captain flushed. He said rapidly, to divert attention from this giveaway, “I take it, then, that you’re still a Reparist?”

“Oh, damn all ’isms,” said Sherret, impatiently. “Men are men. They’re not Goffists, Reparists, Papists, Royalists, Chartists, Communists, Fascists, Buddhists Methodists, Existentialists, or what you have.”

The Captain looked at him, or nearly. He said, “In any society everyone has to accept the rules, else that society collapses into anarchism.”

“I’m with you that far, sir.”

“Yes, but under Reparism the rules are too rigid. If you don’t like ’em, you can’t do much to change them. But a Goffist always gets his chance to change things, and change them as much as he likes. Remold them nearer to the heart’s desire kind of thing. For a time, anyhow. Your turn to be Captain will come.”

“And go, sir.”

“Naturally. It’s a law of life. Things come, things go. Else—stagnation. It’s like a symphony orchestra, see? One instrument takes over from another. You’ve got to know when to stop. You can’t blow your own trumpet all the time when the aim is harmony. Look, Sherret, I’m going to leave you alone for thirty minutes. Think it over. Then decide finally whether you’re with us or against us. If you’re against us, you don’t belong here. And you can get to hell out of it. Go over to Bagshaw and his crew—if they’ll have you. And if you get there. For if you go, you’re going to have to walk all of the way on your two flat feet. I’m not risking what little transport we have on a dissenter. That’s it. I’ll be back in a half-hour.”

Captain Maxton strode out decisively. He would have liked to have slammed the door to show just how decisive he could be. Spaceship doors weren’t free swinging, however. This one sighed benignly shut behind him.

Sherret echoed the sigh. He relaxed on the bunk by the porthole. He began chewing on a B-stick to help along the relaxation. Like all spacemen, he’d had to break the smoking habit when he left Earth. If pipes were substitutes for