little. She’s smarter than the others.”
He pushed himself up on the pillow, his eyes glaring at the little radio beside him.
“Even that!” he whispered. “Is that an ordinary, regular radio? Or is it one of their masquerading gadgets, spying on us?”
He fell back.
“I began to understand quite a while ago,” the man continued weakly. “She put the ideas in my head. More than once she pulled me out of a jam. Not now, though. She won’t forgive me. Oh, she’s feminine, all right. When I got on her bad side, I was sunk. She’s smart, for a jukebox. A mechanical brain? Or—I don’t know.
“I’ll never know, now. I’ll be dead pretty soon. And that’ll be all right with me.”
The nurse came in then. …
Jerry Foster was coldly frightened. And he was drunk. Main Street was bright and roaring as he walked back, but by the time he had made up his mind, it was after closing hour and a chill silence went hand in hand with the darkness. The street lights didn’t help much.
“If I were sober I wouldn’t believe this,” he mused, listening to his hollow footfalls on the pavement. “But I do believe it. I’ve got to fix things up with that—jukebox!”
Part of his mind guided him into an alley. Part of his mind told him to break a window, muffling the clash with his coat, and the same urgent, sober part of his mind guided him through a dark kitchen and a swinging door.
Then he was in the bar. The booths were vacant. A faint, filtered light crept through the Venetian blinds shielding the street windows. Against a wall stood the black, silent bulk of the jukebox.
Silent and unresponsive. Even when Foster inserted a nickel, nothing happened. The electric cord was plugged in the socket, and he threw the activating switch, but that made no difference.
“Look,” he said. “I was drunk. Oh, this is crazy. It can’t be happening. You’re not alive—Are you alive? Did you put the finger on that guy I just saw in the hospital? Listen!”
It was dark and cold. Bottles glimmered against the mirror behind the bar. Foster went over and opened one. He poured the whisky down his throat.
After a while, it didn’t seem so fantastic for him to be standing there arguing with a jukebox.
“So you’re feminine,” he said. “I’ll bring you flowers tomorrow. I’m really beginning to believe! Of course I believe! I can’t write songs. Not by myself. You’ve got to help me. I’ll never look at a—another girl.”
He tilted the bottle again.
“You’re just in the sulks,” he said. “You’ll come out of it. You love me. You know you do. This is crazy!”
The bottle had mysteriously vanished. He went behind the bar to find another. Then, with a conviction that made him freeze motionless, he knew that there was someone else in the room.
He was hidden in the shadows where he stood. Only his eyes moved as he looked toward the newcomers. There were two of them, and they were not human.
They—moved—toward the jukebox, in a rather indescribable fashion. One of them pulled out a small, shining cylinder from the jukebox’s interior.
Foster, sweat drying on his cheeks, could hear them thinking.
“Current report for the last twenty-four hours, Earth time. Put in a fresh recording cylinder. Change the records, too.”
Foster watched them change the records. Austin had said that the disks were replaced daily. And the blond man, dying in the hospital, had said other things. It couldn’t be real. The creatures he stared at could not exist. They blurred before his eyes.
“A human is here,” one of them thought. “He has seen us. We had better eliminate him.”
The blurry, inhuman figures came toward him. Foster, trying to scream, dodged around the end of the bar and ran toward the jukebox. He threw his arms around its unresponsive sides and gasped:
“Stop them! Don’t let them kill me!”
He couldn’t see the creatures now but he knew that they were immediately behind him. The clarity of panic sharpened his vision. One title on the jukebox’s list of records stood out vividly. He thrust his forefinger against the black button beside the title “Love Me Forever.”
Something touched his shoulder and tightened, drawing him back.
Lights flickered within the jukebox. A record swung out. The needle lowered into its black groove.
The jukebox started to play “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.”
Way of the Gods
I
New Worlds
He looked at the October morning all about him as if he had never seen October before. That was not true, of course. But he knew that he would never see it again. Unless they had mornings, and Octobers—where he was going. It did not seem likely, though the old man had talked a great deal about key-patterns and the selectivity of the machine, and the multiple universes spinning like motes in a snowstorm through infinity.
“But I’m human!” he said aloud, sitting cross-legged on the warm brown earth and feeling the breeze which gave the lie instantly to his thought. He felt the gentle pull at his shoulder-blades which meant that his wings were fluttered a little by the breeze, and instinctively he flexed the heavy bands of muscle across his chest to control the wing-surfaces.
He was not human. That was the trouble. And this world, this bright October world that stretched to the horizon around him was made to shelter the race that had become dominant, and was jealous of its dominion. Humanity, that had no place for strangers among its ranks.
The others did not seem to care very much. They had been reared in the creche almost from birth, under a special regime that isolated them from the humans. The old man had been responsible for that. He had built the huge house on the hillside, swooping curves of warmly-colored plastic that blended into the brown and green of the land—an asylum that had finally failed. The walls were breached.
“Kern,” someone behind him said.
The
