stared at him without understanding.
“Here, hold Peony while I call the police,” he said.
“Police? What’s happened?”
He dialed quickly. “Chief Miler? This is Norris. Get over here quick. My gas chamber exploded—killed Chief Agent Franklin. Man, it’s awful! Hurry.”
He hung up and went back to the kennels. He selected a normal Bermuda-K-99 and coldly killed it with a wrench. “You’ll serve for a deviant,” he said, and left it lying in the middle of the floor.
Then he went back to the house, mixed a sleeping capsule in a glass of water, and forced Peony to drink it.
“So she’ll be out when the cops come,” he explained to Anne.
She stamped her foot. “Will you tell me what’s happened?”
“You heard me on the phone. Franklin accidentally died. That’s all you have to know.”
He carried Peony out and locked her in a cage. She was too sleepy to protest, and she was dozing when the police came.
Chief Miler strode about the three rooms like a man looking for a burglar at midnight. He nudged the body of the neutroid with his foot. “What’s this, Norris?”
“The deviant we were about to destroy. I finished her with a wrench.”
“I thought you said there weren’t any deviants.”
“As far as the public’s concerned, there aren’t. I couldn’t see that it was any of your business. It still isn’t.”
“I see. It may become my business, though. How’d the blast happen?”
Norris told him the story up to the point of the detonation. “The light over the door was loose. Kept flickering on and off. Franklin reached up to tighten it. Must have been a little gas in the socket. Soon as he touched it—wham!”
“Why was the door open with the gas on?”
“I told you—we were checking the intakes. If you close the door, it starts the automatics. Then you can’t get it open till the cycle’s finished.”
“Where were you?”
“I’d gone to cut off the gas again.”
“Okay, stay in the house until we’re finished out here.”
When Norris went back in the house, his wife’s white face turned slowly toward him.
She sat stiffly by the living room window, looking sick. Her voice was quietly frightened.
“Terry, I’m sorry about everything.”
“Skip it.”
“What did you do?”
He grinned sourly. “I adapted to an era. Did you find the instruments?”
She nodded. “What are they for?”
“To cut off a tail and skin a tattooed foot. Go to the store and buy some brown hair-dye and a pair of boy’s trousers, age two. Peony’s going to get a crew-cut. From now on, she’s Mike.”
“We’re class-C, Terry! We can’t pass her off as our own.”
“We’re class-A, honey. I’m going to forge a heredity certificate.”
Anne put her face in her hands and rocked slowly to and fro.
“Don’t feel bad, baby. It was Franklin or a little girl. And from now on, it’s society or the Norrises.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Go to Atlanta and work for Anthropos. I’ll take up where Delmont left off.”
“Terry!”
“Peony will need a husband. They may find all of Delmont’s males. I’ll make her one. Then we’ll see if a pair of chimp-Ks can do better than their makers.”
Wearily, he stretched out on the sofa.
“What about that priest? Suppose he tells about Peony. Suppose he guesses about Franklin and tells the police?”
“The police,” he said, “would then smell a motive. They’d figure it out and I’d be finished. We’ll wait and see. Let’s don’t talk; I’m tired. We’ll just wait for Miler to come in.”
She began rubbing his temples gently, and he smiled.
“So we wait,” she said. “Shall I read to you, Terry?”
“That would be pleasant,” he murmured, closing his eyes.
She slipped away, but returned quickly. He heard the rustle of dry pages and smelled musty leather. Then her voice came, speaking old words softly. And he thought of the small child-thing lying peacefully in her cage while angry men stalked about her. A small life with a mind; she came into the world as quietly as a thief, a burglar in the crowded house of Man.
“I will send my fear before thee, and I will destroy the peoples before whom thou shalt come, sending hornets to drive out the Hevite and the Canaanite and the Hethite before thou enterest the land. Little by little I will drive them out before thee, till thou be increased, and dost possess the land. Then shalt thou be to me a new people, and I to thee a God. …
”
And on the quiet afternoon in May, while he waited for the police to finish puzzling in the kennels, it seemed to Terrell Norris that an end to scheming and pushing and arrogance was not too far ahead. It should be a pretty good world then.
He hoped Man could fit into it somehow.
It Takes a Thief
The ancient gods, our Fathers, rode down from the heavens in the Firebirds of the Sun. Coming into the world, they found no air for the breath of their souls. “How shall we breathe?” they asked of the Sun. And Sun gave them of His fire and beneath the earth they kindled the Blaze of the Great Wind. Good air roared from the womb of Mars our Mother, the ice burned with a great thunder, and there was air for the breath of Man.
From an old Martian legend
A thief, he was about to die like a thief.
He hung from the post by his wrists. The wan sunlight glistened faintly on his naked back as he waited, eyes tightly closed, lips moving slowly as he pressed his face against the rough wood and stood on tiptoe to relieve the growing ache in his shoulders. When his ankles ached, he hung by the nails that pierced his forearms just above the wrists.
He was young, perhaps in his tenth Marsyear, and his crisp black hair was close-cropped in the fashion of the bachelor who had not yet sired a pup, or not yet admitted that he had. Lithe and sleek, with the quick knotty muscles and slender rawhide limbs of a wild thing, half-fed and hungry with
