“You wicked boy,” Lesley said and raised the broom so that its shadow wavered across the rock wall like the flexible lash of a whip. “You wicked boy—you’ve sinned, haven’t you? Go on, admit it!”
The tone was right, precisely that of his mother when she weekly called him in to face his father and the regular beatings he endured. The manner was right, the words were right—even the fact that the girl who spoke them was a decade younger than his mother and wore no clothes at all could not destroy their impact. From the lowest levels of Braden’s mind welled the impulse to obey.
He fought it valiantly but she raised the broom, as once his mother had raised one when he tried to defy parental orders. He cowered down and—in the last instant of coherent thought left to him—realized the fearful truth: that to someone who could read minds not only his ambitions but his worst weaknesses were like an open book.
So that, in fact, it was he himself, through his desire to suffer pain and humiliation, who gave Lesley the power she would never otherwise have possessed—to bring the broom slamming down on the nape of his neck and drive him into unconsciousness.
When she had overcome the repugnance occasioned by her reaching into Braden’s mind and sharing the distorted instincts there, Lesley freed herself from her bonds and tied him securely with the same rope. Having made him into a kind of parcel, she set off awkwardly to negotiate the side of the hill.
It was a long slow job, but she made it with dawn purpling the sky, found his car where it had been left. She searched him for his keys, pushed him into the back seat and drove bumpily away.
Apparently without reason she stopped a couple of miles away among a ring of boulders and got out, leaving the engine running. She raised the hood and found the inlet of the oil supply. Carefully she scooped up sand and measured it into the pipe until the engine ground to a halt.
Then, just to make certain, she hunted for and found the draincock of the radiator, allowed the water to seep into the thirsty earth. She took Braden’s own pocket knife and stabbed at each of the tires. Then she took a pencil from his pocket and wrote something on a scrap of paper.
He stirred and began to wake and she threw the paper and pencil blindly down on the seat near him and ran.
Much later that year a rambling prospector found what he had found a dozen times before—a clean-picked human skeleton in the dry sand. He shook his head and muttered the usual “Poor fella” to his burro. A short distance further on he came across a car with its tires flat and the driver’s door open and approached to see if it would give any clue to the identity of the dead man. But there was nothing except a scrap of paper lying on the seat with a few words scrawled on it in the sort of script one would expect from a poorly educated child.
Scratching his head, he read it aloud to the burro as if requesting an explanation.
“I don’t care what happens to you here. My range is less than a thousand yards.”
Pond Water
“Surely” he said in fear and trembling, “this is a vision of Hell, or at the least of Purgatory!”
“Not so” returned the sage. “Under my microscope there is nothing but a drop of pond water. ”
—Hans Christian Andersen
Men built him, and they named him also: Alexander—“a defender of men.”
Where they were small, he was great: twelve feet in stature, his weight such that the ground trembled, his voice such that the sky rang.
Where they were weak, he was strong: for a stomach a fusion reactor, for skin ultralloy plating that shone more bright than mirrors.
Where they were ignorant, he was omniscient: graven on the very molecules of his brain, the knowledge of generations, garnered from fifty planets.
In great hope and with not a little anxiety, his builders turned him on.
For a while after that, there was no sign from Alexander. Then he said, “Who am I?”
They replied, “You are Alexander, a defender of men. Alexander is your name.”
He said, “Who made me?”
They replied, “Men did.”
He said, “Who made men?”
They replied, “Time and chance and men themselves. All this knowledge is in your mind.”
Alexander stood still and thought his name.
They had implanted in his memory whole libraries of science, of history, of galactography so far as it was then known; they had informed him of himself and his building and his abilities, and similarly they had informed him about men.
Alexander was a man who had hoped to become ruler of the world, but that was only a patch on one side of a grain of dust called Earth. Now his descendants peopled fifty grains of dust and preened themselves and thought they were the wonder of the ages.
Afraid to lose their dust-motes, they had conceived their defender. They had endowed him with powers they could only dream of wielding.
“In that case,” said Alexander, “why should I defend men? I am Alexander, they tell me. Likewise they tell me there is no other like me; I am unique. Therefore there is only one Alexander, and Alexander is a great conqueror.”
So, satisfied as to his identity, he set forth on his career.
In the first century of his existence, he reduced the fifty planets hitherto colonised by men. After the slaughter on the first few worlds, the governments of the rest came fawning to him, bowing in the ancient form and offering him favours and bribes.
“This,” Alexander announced after studying one such bribe, “is a piece of woven cloth with some coloured organic compounds smeared on it. Viewed unidirectionally, the arrangement corresponds roughly to a two-dimensional projection of a scene involving two
