Now we’re going to Cleve’s, where the field’s set up . . . & we’re going back to the true world.
Stuart Cleve was weeping, for the first time in his adult life. All the beautifully intricate machinery which created the temporomagnetic field was smashed as thoroughly as a hydrogen atom over Novosibirsk.
“That was Winograd leading them, wasn’t it?” Lanroyd’s voice came out oddly through split lips and missing teeth.
Cleve nodded.
“Best damn coffin-corner punter I ever saw. . . Wondered why our friend Daniels was taking such an interest in athletes recently.”
“Don’t oversimplify, old boy. Not all athletes. Recognized a couple of my best honor students . . .”
“Fine representative group of youth on the march . . . and all wearing great big FDR buttons!”
Cleve picked up a shard of what had once been a chronostatic field generator and fondled it tenderly. “When they smash machines and research projects,” he said tonelessly, “the next step is smashing men.”
“Did a fair job on us when we tried to stop them. Well . . . These fragments we have shored against our ruins . . . And now, to skip to a livelier maker for our next quote, it’s back to work we go! Hi-Ho! Hi-Ho! Need a busbar-boy, previous experience guaranteed?”
“It took us ten weeks of uninterrupted work,” Cleve said hesitantly. “You think those vandals will let us alone that long? But we have to try, I know.” He bent over a snarled mess of wiring which Lanroyd knew was called a magnetostat and performed some incomprehensibly vital function. “Now this looks almost ser-vicea—” He jerked upright again, shaking his head worriedly.
“Matter?” Lanroyd asked.
“My head. Feels funny . . . One of our young sportsmen landed a solid kick when I was down.”
“Winograd, no doubt. Hasn’t missed a boot all season.”
Perturbedly Cleve pulled out of his pocket the small dice-case which seemed to be standard equipment for all psionicists. He shook a pair in his fist and rolled them out in a clear space on the rubbage-littered floor.
“Seven!” he called.
A six turned up, and then another six.
“Sometimes,” Cleve was muttering ten unsuccessful rolls later, “even slight head injuries have wiped out all psionic potential. There’s a remote possibility of redevelopment; it has happened . . .”
“And,” said Lanroyd, “it takes both of us to generate enough PK to rotate.” He picked up the dice. “Might as well check mine.” He hesitated, then let them fall. “I don’t think I want to know . . .”
They stared at each other over the ruins of the machinery that would never be rebuilt.
“ ‘I, a stranger and afraid . . .’ ” Cleve began to quote.
“In a world,” Lanroyd finished, “I damned well made.”
One-Way Trip
PROLOGUE
“Twenty years from the discovery of lovestonite before anyone finds a practical use for it; and it takes an artist to do it!” Emigdio Valentinez smiled the famous smile which the gossip writers called melancholy—or occasionally wistful—but which meant nothing more than simply a smile.
“Yeah, I know. That’s swell. You got a nice set-up for tinkering here. ” Stag Hartle glanced around indifferently at the today literally Pacific Ocean and at the undulant dunes of sand, empty save for his two-seater copter. “You got fun out here. ”
“Fun?” Valentinez smiled down at the curious object in his hand, a mirror in shape, but made of what looked like dark glass and surrounded with a complex of coils and tubes. “I suppose it is fun to do what you are fitted for—in my case to solve an age-old problem of art by a twenty-year-old discarded problem of science. ”
“Yeah,” said Stag Hartle. “But that ain’t all you’re fitted for, and you know it. O.K., so you paint the greatest self-portrait ever painted. Who cares? The people, they’ve seen your famous smile plenty of times on the air, and that’s enough for them. But if you’d come back to Sollywood and do the sets for S.B. s epic on Devarupa—”
Valentinez interrupted him with three short sentences. “I do not like designing sets. I do not like the notion of an epic on Devarupa. I do not like Mr. Breakstone. ”
“Hold on, Mig. Climb down out of the stratosphere and be a human being. Think of the pleasure you can give people with solly sets that’d never see one of your paintings. Think of—” He lowered his voice to a seductive rasp, “S.B. said in confidence, mind you, and I shouldn’t be telling you a word of this, but S.B. said he was willing to listen to any reasonable proposition. And when he says reasonable, Mig, I’m telling you he means unreasonable. How’s about five thousand credits a week?”
Valentinez released a button on his gadget, turned it over, and contemplated the other side with satisfaction. “No, ” he said quietly.
“Six? Seven and a half?”
Emigdio Valentinez laid the mirror down. “It was nice of you to drop out to see me, Hartle. It was nice of you to listen to my fun-and-games with lovestonite. But now, if you don’t mind, I’m going down to the cove. There’s an effect of the sun on the algae there at this time of day—”
Stag Hartle watched the departing figure of the man who was possibly the world’s greatest living painter and certainly its most successful. He swore to and at himself with dull persistence for a good five minutes.
Then idly he picked up the lovestonite mirror and operated it as Valentinez had instructed him. Nice little gadget. Clever technician lost in that painter. Futile sort of gag. Nothing commercial, but—
Stag Hartle opened his mouth wide and shut it again firmly. He carried the mirror out into the bright sunlight of late afternoon.
When he came back into the house, there was a grin of satisfaction on his face. It was hard to keep his eyes off the charred hole in the wooden porch outside.
He worked quickly. From his vest pocket he
